Vittorio De Sica | Umberto D / 1952

closed out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cesare Zavattini (story and screenplay), Vittorio De Sica (director) Umberto D / 1952, USA 1955

 

Many critics agree with Vittorio De Sica’s own assessment of his film, Umberto D, that is his finest achievement; De Sica simply described it as his favorite of his works.

      Indeed, who could not like this touching film about outsiders of post-World War II culture, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), the maid of the house in which he rents a room, Maria (Maria Pia Casilio), and Umberto’s pet dog, Flike. De Sica begins his film by showing us that these characters are not the only ones suffering in Italian post-war culture. Almost all the old, in a culture that wants to forget their past, are not receiving enough through pensions in order to survive, and they are gathered for a march to protest the issue, which is quickly put down, at first by somewhat gentle police proddings that quickly turn more violent, as the old men are forced to go on the run and hide out on side-streets before returning home. For many of them it’s clear, home is on the streets.

     Umberto still has a room, but with a large amount of back payment due he knows that his time there is limited. His landlady is already renting his room out for sexual rendezvouses by the hour when he goes out, and she threatens that she will soon throw him out. Both he and the young maid working in the house look time again out of the bedroom windows, Umberto revealing an entire world of light and comfort not currently available to him, and Maria seeking to see the soldiers with whom she is in love.

 

     At first, given the almost cartoon-like nature of this woman (Ileana Simova) who clearly aspires to become a great singer—for which she has little talent—and a wealthy married woman—a role she will surely achieve—we can hardly take these threats seriously.

      If she is mean to the nearly starving Umberto and his dog, the maid, Maria, is a gentle and kind friend, although worn out by all her duties and, particularly, by the swarms of ants invading her kitchen domain. Stealing bits of leftover food, she tries to get the elderly tenant to eat, providing him also, upon his request, a purloined thermometer so that he might check if he is coming down with an illness.

       And why shouldn’t he be? Having tried to sell his watch, he gets only a few dollars, the daily take by a local beggar. His prized books fetch a few lire at best. But even the meager amount he has raised as a down-payment on his room is rejected by the landlady: for her it is all or nothing. Depression, if not a more illness, is a surety.

     After calling for the medics, Umberto is allowed entry to a local hospital, where for a day or two he is well-fed and looked after. But his illness, so he is told, is only tonsillitis, and he must vacate his bed. His neighbor in the hospital attempts to show him how to play upon the sympathies of the nurses, but Umberto is too much a gentleman and far too honest to accomplish the task, just, as later, he simply cannot bring himself to beg for much-needed money.

      When he returns to his room, he finds workmen pounding a huge hole in its wall; the landlady is planning to expand her living room for after her marriage. And, even worse in his absence, his beloved pet Flike has escaped through an open door. Umberto checks out the local pound, finally to find his dog just before he is about to be put to death.

      Maria, moreover, as she has previously confided, has her own problems. She is pregnant, and she has no idea whether the father was the tall soldier from Naples or the short one from Florence, or whether either of these men will accept their paternity if she tells them about her condition. Most certainly her employer, once she learns of Maria’s condition, will kick her out of this unlivable paradise, where long into every night the landlady sings to her invited guests. What began as a kind of satire about a striving bourgeois woman has suddenly turned into a kind of nightmare for those who live near her. And the next morning, of his own accord, Umberto, packing up the few pieces of clothing he still owns, slinks off into the streets.

    Umberto cannot even feed himself, let alone his dog, so he seeks someone to adopt the cute pet, but encounters few who seem appropriate. He does interest a  young schoolgirl, but her Nanny quickly intervenes and refuses to accept Umberto’s loving gift. He finally attempts to leave the dog in the park where several playing children might discover him, but Flike, soon after, reappears to be lovingly greeted by his sad friend. Having failed to arrange for even Flike’s survival, Umberto takes up his friend into his arms and waits upon a railroad track for an approaching train.

      As the train comes nearer, the dog becomes aware of what will soon happen, and struggles to escape Umberto’s embrace, running off with the old man in the chase. It takes some time for the chastised human to draw Flike to him again. But, at least, both have been spared—if just for a while.

      De Sica ends his sad tale with the two of them, doomed by the society in which they exist, walking down the lane of the park while children play around them. Even if they do not survive, the new world will go on.

      I see this film, despite most critical conclusions, less as a neo-realist drama, than as a somewhat sentimental sad-sack comedy in the manner of Chaplin and Clair—two of De Sica’s favorite directors.

     The actors are amateurs who the director has molded into convincing performers, and the camera follows mostly everyday events, many of them on the neo-realists’ favorite set: the Italian streets. But the entire situation of the film is a kind of prop to capture our emotions within its “inside/outside” structure. The three holy saints of this story, all of whom are destined to be destroyed in one way or another, are symbols more than real human beings, despite their players’ credible naturalistic acting.

     We can almost imagine that, like Chaplin’s tramp, Umberto might be the subject of a sequel, co-featuring the now even grander landlady, and the destitute Maria, with whom Umberto will again meet up for further comic and semi-tragic circumstances. De Sica, to my way of thinking, is not truly a “realist” or even a new realist (as I have argued, for other reasons, neither was Rossellini), but a director with more links to another generation who found some of the neo-realist values useful to his filmmaking.

     I say this not to devalue De Sica’s achievement, but simply to more firmly link his art to the more romantic and melodramatic theatrical conventions before him. And it helps to explain, I would argue, the increasing lack of interest of audiences for the films that followed the moving Umberto, and reiterates his final redemption in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a work very much about nostalgia for a lost world before the wars.

       

Los Angeles, June 4, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

Luis Buñuel | La mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden) / 1956, USA 1977

two moved on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Buñuel and Gabriel Arout (screenplay, based on the novel by José-Andre Lacour), Luis Buñuel (director) La mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden) / 1956, USA 1977

 

Watching Luis Buñuel’s 1956 Mexican-produced film, Death in the Garden the other day, I was reminded again of John Farrow’s 1939 melodrama, Five Came Back. There are, of course, obvious

differences. Farrow’s work might be described as a disaster film, the likes of which almost saves the jungle escapees of Buñuel’s drama, since when the figures of Death in the Garden come upon a crashed airplane, they carefully pick through their luggage, including foodstuffs, clothing, and other baubles in order to survive. Although Farrow’s airplane travelers all amazingly survive their crash, very few survive their jungle experiences. And in both films, the denizens of the insufferable Eden in which they find themselves, reveal their psychological makeup and the beliefs and failures of imagination which define their actions.

 

       But, whereas, the characters in Five Came Back are basically all types, whose destinies are partially determined even before they crash into the desperate situation in which they suddenly find themselves, Buñuel’s figures seem much more unpredictable. We never might have imagined, for example, that the loving cook, Castin (Charles Vanel), a current diamond seeker who hopes one day to open a restaurant in Marseilles, would, under the punishment of the jungle leafage, go mad and kill two of his fellow travelers—just as we never might have imagined that his beloved mute daughter, María (Michèle Girardon) might have been strong enough to be one of two survivors.

       We can almost forget the cinematic reasons for their escape from a growing dictatorial South American country into an environment that they would be unlikely to come out of alive. It’s all too clear that the corrupt city that they all temporarily inhabit is a metaphor for Buñuel’s homeland, Spain—even given the fact of true dictatorships of Argentina, Venezuela, Columbia, Peru during that very same period. For Buñuel this film was clearly both personal and representative of current events.

       The director, moreover, based his heroes on personal values as well. While one might have thought that the committed, caring, and handsome priest, Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli) might be allowed into the survivor club, as a man who particularly espouses the status quo—and given Buñuel’s own anti-religious perspectives—he is not permitted to live, despite his attempts of saving his small band of disbelievers.

        You might also have thought the young whorish Djin (Simone Signoret), who, after all, loves and is loved by most of the men of this little party, might be among those “who came back.” And certainly, she is the liveliest complainer of the entire group—and with good reason, since a bedroom existence and complete non-involvement with revolutionary values makes her the most unlikely member of the conspirators. Yet, far beyond everyone else’s obvious failures, she is certainly the most absolute traitor, a woman who might sell out anyone for profit and sexual gain. Her amazing late picture presence, as she dresses up in gowns and jewels stolen from the plane they find crashed into the jungle, reveals her absolutely amoral sensibility better than anyone else in this movie—the priest having already tried to bury the jewels the young María has previously discovered. Djin, above all others, almost deserves to die, despite whatever true love she may or may not feel within. If she has convinced Castin that she loves him, and is attracted the macho-hero Shark (Georges Marchal), and has even sexually compromised the priest who is seen by the community as visiting her—she must die, even for Castin’s sake.

    

     The rakish hero of this director’s tale is the handsome, usually bare-chested, Shark, whose motives are never quite clear, nor is his morality, as he comes to be one of the vaguest of the all the figures gathered.  He comes out of nowhere and moves in a moral world where we can never quite be sure where he is standing. Yet, he seems more loyal to his small band of revolutionaries than any of the others, and, despite forays out into a world where he might easily have survived alone, he returns to them, even—when Castin goes mad—attempting to protect them. Clearly, he is a brutal adversary and has obviously survived through his ability to destroy others. But it is only through him that any of the others have the ability to survive, and it is he who takes away the beautiful young María to a new life in Brazil, wherever that may lead them. One suspects that their life together—even if it might not even be a shared one—will end, as it has for all the others, in tragedy. Certainly those who returned in Five Came Back might never have lead “normal” lives.

      As critics and even the director himself might argue, Death in the Garden is not one of his better films. But I might never forget these pilgrims’ greedy consumption of python flesh or, even more  notably, that python carcass coming to life again through its infestation of ants. And seldom has a jungle such as that Buñuel created ever before or again been so alive with the sense of often invisible life. Again and again, the characters regret that, despite all the noise and frightening possibilities of destruction, they can never actually see the world around them. The jungle knows them in a way that they can never know it.

     Buñuel’s world in this film becomes an almost surrealist landscape in which survival is simply a matter one’s own inner emotional realities, and as disturbing as these character’s souls are, most of them live only in their imaginations, and, thus, their deaths are certain even before the movie’s curtain rises.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

 

Jean-Luc Godard | Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) / 1964

pleasure or love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Luc Godard (screenwriter and director) Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) / 1964

 

     Although some critics might wish to describe the Godard work as a kind of romantic comedy, in its abstraction of the feminine figure, Macha Méril as Charlotte, and the camera’s almost mechanical analysis of her body, there is actually very little romance or comedy, despite the fact that the film begins with her lover, Robert (Bernard Noël), with whom she finds “pleasure” despite the fact she actually does love her husband, Pierre (Philippe Leroy) more, and serves as a fairly good mother to his son, born to Pierre’s first wife.

      Both men want her exclusively, which she refuses, demanding the same rights the French men have often assumed, to be able to have both a wife and a lover. Robert pleads with her to divorce Pierre and to marry him, while Pierre has previously had her followed and discovered that she was seeing Robert. What he doesn’t appear to know is that she is still seeing him.

     The story of the Godard work is slight, amounting primarily to a final reckoning up Charlotte’s discovery that she is pregnant (without the knowledge of which of the two men is actually the father); the director makes it quite clear early on that of the two, Pierre is the better man, a devoted father, an intellect, and an adventurer, while Robert is simply an actor. And it is that fact the finally most influences Charlotte’s decision to give up pleasure for love.

       The important thing about the film is the intellectual underpinnings of the work, particularly in the way Godard presents the different viewpoints of his characters. In a radical storytelling device, the director studies the relationship between love, sexual pleasure, and conception. Pierre, who argues that we must never forget the past, has a firm moral ground, particularly in connection with his attention to the Holocaust. Charlotte, on the other hand, lives and acts primarily in the present, not always knowing why or what she is attempting to embrace. It is Pierre’s filmmaking friend (Roger Leenhardt) that argues for conception, that the two, past and present, need to be arbitrated, compromised so to speak. A third set of views is spoken by their young son, Nicholas, who seems to argue for the future: you desire something and then set out to achieve it.

      Of course, all these views are needed simultaneously to live a full life. And it is only as a family, working together that we perceive the complete being living with knowledge of the past, a lust of the present, and a vision for the future, and is for that reason alone that the “married woman” remains just that.

 

    The other remarkable aspect of this film is Godard’s presentation of the media’s notions of womanhood.  Everywhere Charlotte goes, billboards and magazine ads call out for an idealized and male fantasized vision of women, women with perfect breasts, with desired bodyweight, and who wear the proper clothing. Her maid even expects her husband to be a kind of beast, and two young girls whom Charlotte encounters in a café discuss what to expect from the boys when it comes to sex, the more knowledgeable of the two arguing that the girl simply must be compliant. Is in any wonder in such a sexist world that Charlotte seeks equality, that she may seek a way to meet her own desires for pleasure.

     At film’s end, we have no way of knowing whether or not she might gain that equality. Yet, it appears she has learned about herself in her affair that she might bring to her relationships with her husband and children, certainly if that second child is a girl.

     In the end, it is Godard’s visual analysis of the problems of his hero that make this movie such an excellent piece. As in so many of his films, Godard creates a structure that works perfectly in tandem with its themes, in this case, the problems “the second sex” face in a patriarchal society.

 

Los Angeles, Easter day, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018). 

Marshall Neilan | A Little Princess / 1917

turns of fortune

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frances Marion (screenplay, based on a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett), Marshall Neilan (director) A Little Princess / 1917

 

This first version of the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, an hour-long silent film from 1917 is a truly surprisingly well directed and coherent work, with director Marshall Neilan combining long perspective shots, alternating simultaneous scenes, and ambitious story-telling landscapes, within the more domestic drama of the London boarding school into which the slightly spoiled Sara Crewe (Mary Pickford) is placed by her India-based father, Captain Richard Crewe (Norman Kerry).

 

    For the first long part of this film, despite her despair for now having lost immediate contact with her beloved daddy, the mean boarding school mistresses, Miss Minchin (Katherine Griffith) and her sister Amelia (Ann Schaefer) go out of their way to treat the new girl, who her fellow residents dub “the little princess,” extremely well, expecting annual benefits from her wealthy father. Even the jealous girls grow to like her, particularly when late at night she secretly tells them stories she has learned in India. The film, indeed, devotes a quite entertaining episode of Ali-Baba (W. E. Lawrence) and the den of thieves.

     The scenes that accompany her story are quite lovely and complex in their imagery, far beyond most of the films of the day in their cinematic quality.

     But we get glimpses of the cruelty of the two administrators in their treatment of a girl without parents who is unable to pay, Becky (an early performance by Zasu Pitts), who they treat virtually as a slave and who speaks, apparently, with a cockney accent.

     Celebrating her 10th birthday with chocolates and other treats paid for by the Minchins, news suddenly comes that not only has Sara’s father died, but did so with believing that his best friend, Mr. Carrisford (Gustav von Seyffertitz) defrauded him regarding a diamond mine, leaving him and his daughter penniless.

     Now Sara is moved to the attic and like Becky, who has become her best friend, treated as a slave, fed only small portions of the food that they must help prepare to cook. Although she basically remains in good spirits, entertaining that not so very imaginative Becky, she too increasingly grows hungry and depressed.

     One day, while in her room, she is suddenly visited by a monkey, and soon after an Indian servant, Ram Dass (George McDaniel) crawls her window to claim him. Becky has long wondered whether her friend’s imagination does not take her beyond reality, but now poor Sara wonders as well if she has begun to imagine things.

      In fact, her father’s former friend, Mr. Carrisford has moved into the building next door with his Indian servant. And Ram Dass has long been observing the sufferings of the sweet, golden-haired child—a bit questionable if you think of it as being a kind of voyeurism of older man concerning a young underage child, but evidently perceived as innocuous in the day.

      In any event, by Christmas the men have planned a surprised dinner for the two girls, setting up a special table replete with a full turkey, cranberry sauce, and potatoes as Sara and Becky clean the school and help to prepare the sumptuous Christmas dinner to which they will not be invited.

      Returning to their rooms at the end of the day, first Sara and then Becky cannot believe their eyes—or their noses—as they sit down to enjoy the miracle before them.

     At that very moment, Miss Minchin shows up, shocked and quite flabbergasted by what she sees, apparently accusing the girls having somehow stolen the dinner from her own pantry. Watching the event from across the way, the two kind gentlemen immediately cross the roof and intervene, scolding the boarding house harpy for her treatment of the girls. In seeing Ram Dass again, she suddenly reverts to one of her Indian phrases, and Mr. Carrisford, amazed at hearing the phrase demands to know her background. She explains that her father, Captain Crewe died and left her penniless. Carrisford is suddenly overjoyed, explaining that he has been long looking for her, making every attempt to find her whereabouts since he returned from a sickness to find her father dead, having wrongly believed that he had defrauded him. In fact, the mines resulted in more money than even expected, and “the little princess” is now a very wealthy woman.

     Taking both girls into his own house, Carrisford celebrates the holiday by permitting Sara to invite street boys to share her Christmas treats and gifts under the tree.

     Although the story is rather implausible and the plot filled with too many meandering events and genres, the work overall is so brilliantly handled that one has to imagine that it must have seemed to be one of the most advanced films of the day, particularly when compared with the far cruder pictures of the year such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure or Roscoe Arbuckle’s The Butcher—although some of the most important movies of that year such as J. Gordon Edwards’ Cleopatra with Theda Bara have been lost.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Anthony Asquith | A Cottage at Dartmoor / 1929

ceremony for silent cinema

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Asquith and Herbert Price (screenplay), Anthony Asquith (director) A Cottage at Dartmoor / 1929

 

 Anthony Asquith’s carefully crafted and moving 1929 film A Cottage at Dartmoor ostensibly is a movie about love, jealousy, and revenge.    

 

   The central figure of the work, a barber named Joe (Uno Henning) has already fallen desperately in love with the shop’s manicurist, Sally (Norah Baring) before the film’s first shot. But he is tortured by her male customers who all seem to find her attractive and love interlocking fingers with her as she files and trims their nails, and is even more disconcerted by her disinterest in him. He invites her to a double feature of a movie—a popular convention of the year was a silent comedy before the “talkie” feature—which she immediately turns down, he tossing the tickets to the floor in dejection.

      Later, his fellow barber picks them up and invites another of the shop’s female employees to the movies, an offer she gladly accepts. At the end of the day, when Sally somewhat reluctantly accepts his offer, he, accordingly, no longer has the tickets, and they are forced to have dinner at her boarding house made up mostly of elderly women.

       The evening is a disaster, not primarily because of the intrusive elders’ chatter—spotting young love on the horizon, they spread the message to one another to strategically retreat after dinner—but because Joe is so shy and innocent that he fears to even touch his date, let alone hugging her close to him and engaging in a kiss. When he finally stands and comes close to her while she plays the piano, the one elderly who has not gotten the message intrudes, demanding that each of the young pair speak loudly into her ear horn. 

      Despite the failure of the evening, Joe still hopes for a relationship, delivering to Sally a violet nosegay the next morning with a note expressing that she will wear some flowers to give him hope. The note falls to the floor before she receives the bunch, but still she pulls off a few of the violets and pins them to her sweater. But his hopes are dashed nonetheless as her male customers, particularly Harry (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), flirt with her and she pays utter no attention to her barber friend.

        Over the next several weeks Harry returns to have his nails manicured and treats himself to every shave, tonic, coloring job, and massage that the tonsorial shop offers, just to get close to Sally. Harry soon announces that he’s purchased a small farm in Dartmoor, and finally offers Sally a ring and a marriage proposal. Joe suffers in silent despair through all of this—most notably in a movie theater where he watches the double feature with the couple sitting nearby as he suffers in near torture—before he is asked yet again to shave his competitor.

       Asquith focuses for a long while on Joe’s early morning sharpening of his razor and on his character’s inner suffering expressed in images of the past joy interspersed with visions of horror, before he begins the job of removing inch by inch the later on Harry’s face. So we like Sally, when the razor actually cuts into Harry’s throat find it difficult to imagine it was not intentional, even while Joe insists it was not. For a long while Harry lies on the floor, possibly near death, as the policeman queries those who saw the event, Sally herself insisting that his near murder of her lover was predetermined.

 

       Joe is sent away to prison, and the first scenes of this film before the long flashback, are of his escape from the Dartmoor prison facility, his race through the moors, and his sudden appearance of Sally and Harry’s cottage. The only questions that remain is whether his visitation is in revenge of their testimony or a last gasp of his inconsolable love for Sally, and if, as we discover it is the latter, how Sally and Harry will respond.

       Oddly, despite her initial terror, Sally is willing to hide him in the upstairs bedroom where he baby lies in his crib. And when Harry returns, Sally easily convinces him to help her keep the police who have arrived to protect the couple of Joe, distracted long enough so that the prisoner may again escape. The mystery of this tale is why the couple is still willing to hide and protect the man who might have torn them apart.

       Harry dismisses the police long enough to hide Joe in an outlying barn, from which with a gift of new set of clothes, they encourage him to escape. But at the very last moment Joe decides to make a run back to the cottage, knowing that he will be shot and killed by the policemen who have expected him to return to the cottage. He is shot, arriving the front door to die in Sally’s arms; in this last moment’s tears come to Sally’s eyes and Joe attains at least a symbolic enactment of his fantasies.

       Yet none of this, of course, actually explains in full why Sally and Harry have tried to save Joe from his seemingly just punishment, even if we might imagine they have come to terms with the incident and realize that he may have been innocent of actually committing the crime.*

        Perhaps to solve that mystery we may have perceive what this film is truly about. Although the “plot” tells us that our trios’ sexual desires are very much at the center of this film, the images and structure of the work tell us something different: that this film is truly about cinema itself, in particular the transition from silent to talking movies. Writing in The New York Times, one of my favorite critics Dave Kehr puts it succinctly:

 

“The film’s centerpiece sequence is, in fact, a sustained act of film appreciation: Joe follows Sally and Harry to a cinema, where a crowd is shown laughing with delight at a silent comedy and then falling into numb annoyance when the talking feature comes on. (A sound disc, now lost, provided a rumble of muffled, incomprehensible dialogue.)

     The late ’20s was still a time of transition for the movies, when no one knew with certainty whether sound would vanquish silent drama or be used mainly to present canned music and vaudeville acts, though many filmmakers, Asquith apparently included, believed that silent storytelling had reached such a high level of refinement that mere chatter would never be enough to extinguish it.

      This, of course, was not to be, but A Cottage on Dartmoor provides ample illustration of how elegantly and assuredly expressive silent film had become, and how hard it must have been to believe that this magnificent medium, then just over 30 years old, was doomed.”

      The silent film that Joe, Sally, and Harry watch is apparently with Harold Lloyd, who with another of Asquith’s favorite silent early silent film directors, Charles Chaplin, seldom is able to win the woman he desires. In film after film, Lloyd gains the momentary attentions of a woman, only to have her stolen away from him or for her to turn to another more virile man.

  

     In opposition to that silent comedy, the second, talkie film, is clearly a romance, possibly since audience members continually turn their faces away unable to watch the events on the screen, the kind of work such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder, one of the first major British talkies, also made in 1929.

      It is nearly impossible, accordingly, to associate Sally’s two suitors with the two forms of cinematic representations played out in this very long scene, something which even the young boys attending this film do when they spot the man in glasses sitting near to them and immediately associate him with Harold Lloyd, the man on the screen.

 

   Clearly the more attractive of the two Joe, like Chaplin and Lloyd, is a true romantic who dreams for much of the film instead of effectively acting. Although he clearly adores the female gender, when it comes to interacting with women he is clumsy and nearly silent. His passion is expressed in the imagined images of the film, interposed within a montage of countering images in a manner that demonstrates Asquith’s own influence of directors such as Eisenstein and Murnau. And when Joe first shows up to the cottage he looks very much like Caligari’s creation, waiting only to be locked back into the cabinet or funeral carrying-case.

       Strangely, the more effeminate Harry is nearly all action. When he invites Sally to the movies his tickets are in hand. And so too is the ring ready to put on her finger, his announcement of having purchased a farm on Dartmoor, his determination to marry her and take her away from her lowly job as a manicurist. Even in this silent film, we can almost hear his loud and forceful proclamations.  Through many scenes in the cottage, Sally and Harry’s baby makes a series of loud noises as it cries, whereas Joe manages later to quiet him down.

       Although Sally may be attracted to Joe, she recognizes him as a loser, a man who may remain a barber for the rest of his life, unable to sustain a family, let alone a wife at home with a child. It is almost inevitable to Sally would choose Harry over Joe. Joe has only what he already knows, while Harry looks forward to a future working in nature, the real world of sound and sense. Yet it is also clear that Sally holds Joe in her heart, realizing that if only he were somewhat different she might have chosen him over Harry. When Harry asks how much she loves him, she first signifies the amount with two fingers, later with two hands a few inches from each other instead of opening her arms wide as we might expect in reaction to such a question.

        When Joe later asks if she is happy, she pauses and even turns away before responding with the world, “Very.” Despite her fulfillment in her relationship with Harry, there seem to remain some longing for the romantic past he represents.

         Even Joe’s death in her arms is straight out of the melodramatic silent movies, not the real world which the talkies claimed to represent. And finally, what we realize we are observing in Joe’s death is the end of an era, something beautiful from the past that is no longer viable in the louder and brutal world in which both Harry and Sally now live. It is almost as if Asquith in this film was playing out the film’s own epitaph, an eloquent final gasp of the form that everyone knew could no longer survive.

       The couple in the Dartmoor Cottage choose to put it gently to death or even permit it to escape into history rather than, as the unthinking police have chosen, to simply mow it down the way police would often do in movies of only a few years later. One might, finally, describe this director’s film as a glorious ceremony for silent cinema.

      

*This film appears on some LGBTQ lists, presumably from a gay reading of this seemingly heterosexual only tale. I can only imagine that these viewers read the relationship of the trio as some kind of ménage-à-trois, since both men love Sally. But there is utterly no indication that the two men have anything but a hostile relationship, and certainly do not have an earlier sexual friendship as in, for example, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Indeed, Harry takes up a gun and tells Joe that he is helping him only because of Sally’s wishes. Their relationship to Sally is mutually heterosexual, and the relationship with each other is existent only because of Sally, which manifests itself in envy and jealousy. There is utterly no indication of an attraction to one another. Even though I have through the years interpreted many a film that might have been read by others as completely heterosexual as having LGBTQ implications, this is not one of them, despite the fact that Asquith himself was apparently a closeted homosexual and I have included others of his films in My Queer Cinema.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).