Edmund Goulding | The Old Maid / 1939

kissing cousins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenwriter, based on the play by Zoë Atkins, based, in turn, on the novella by Edith Wharton), Edmund Goulding (director) The Old Maid / 1939

 

Edmund Goulding’s 1939 film, The Old Maid, starring Bette Davis, is a hot-house tear-jerker, based on a mediocre (but Pulitzer Prize-winning nonetheless) 1935 play by Zoë Atkins, which in turn was based on a somewhat sentimental novella by Edith Wharton. It short, it was perfect material for a Hollywood movie of the late 30s and 40s, just ripe for the mercurial acting talents of Davis and Miriam Hopkins, who Davis remembered fought her tooth-and-nail not only on the screen but during the filming of their scenes. By the time of this movie, Hopkins had lost her major star status to Davis, and was furious that the role of Jezebel that Hopkins had made famous on stage had been a triumph for Davis on celluloid. Of course, just such an on-the-set battle of divas assured the film would become a great public success; and it was!

     Today it is still a great deal of fun, and well worth watching. The Lovells may begin the film as “loving cousins,” but by end of this movie they have become “loathing competitors” for the love of Charlotte’s (Davis) bastard daughter, fathered, in a brief visit back home to claim the hand of Delia (Hopkins), by Clem Spender (George Brent, once Davis’ real-life lover). Delia, however, is at that very moment about to marry the wealthy Jim Ralston (James Stephenson), and has no intention of hooking up again with the irresponsible Clem, who soon after returns to the Civil War battlefields, dying a couple of years later without ever knowing that he had spawned a daughter, Clementina (Jane Bryan).

       The middle of the 19th century, obviously, was not the best time to flaunt the existence of a child born out of wedlock, and Charlotte establishes an entire orphan’s home to hide her Clementina, whom she passes off as a foundling.

      When Charlotte is finally about to marry Jim’s brother Joseph (Jerome Cowan), she, continually pressured by the Ralstons to give up her orphanage, makes it clear to her cousin why she will not do so. And the ever-conventional Delia quickly discerns from her cousins’ hints who the father was, insisting she intends to tell Joseph the truth; she doesn’t do that, but instead spreads a lie about Charlotte’s health which has the same effect, but doesn’t even give the fiancée an opportunity to accept the child as his own.

 

     Now without a cover, Charlotte does give up the orphanage and moves in with her cousin, her own daughter perceiving Delia as her mother, while Charlotte is perceived simply as her aunt. As the year’s pass the gulf between Charlotte and Clementina grows, as Delia spoils the girl while the now aging Charlotte, acting the role of the maiden aunt, corrects her and attempts to instill higher values than the vacuous Delia can even imagine.

      When the young girl falls in love with the son, Lanning Halsey (William Lundigan), of another wealthy local family, his parents attempt to block the romance by shipping Lanning off to Europe, leaving the young girl, quite obviously, heartbroken. Charlotte, finally determined to act, is about to tell Clementina the truth, until Delia offers another solution, suggesting she adopt the girl as her own daughter; surely, she argues, given her own inheritance she has received with her husband’s death, Lanning’s parents can no longer object to the liaison.

    That solution, quite obviously, even further removes Clementina from her birth mother, and continues to alienate the beautiful young girl, now about to marry Lanning, from her interfering aunt.          You can almost guess the rest. Davis has played a long list of self-sacrificing women in love, who give up everything for their moral principles and societal decorum. All Charlotte gets for her sacrifice is a last kiss before Clementina is whisked away to her new home. But, as always in such tear-jerkers, that seems to be enough, as the aging old maid turns back to a life of what will indubitably be continued in squabbles with her double-crossing cousin.

      What is truly at the heart of this work, however, is not Charlotte’s grace—which Davis offers up in ladles, making her the most likeable figure of the work—but the opposition between the free-spirited Charlotte and the social-conniving Delia, who has, unbeknownst to herself, given up love and self-reliance to social convention. If both women are left empty-handed by film’s end, Charlotte is far better able to organize and control her life. Delia, we are certain, will simply drift into a meaningless dependency, wasting away. Perhaps someday…. Well, that’s not in the script. Today they’d make a sequel you wouldn’t want to watch.

 

Los Angeles, May 19, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).

Armando Iannucci | The Death of Stalin / 2018

sad satire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Armando Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin (based on the graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin) (writers), Armando Iannucci (director) The Death of Stalin / 2018

 

Watching British director Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin the other day, I asked the same questions as my husband, Howard, what does this movie really intend to say? Yes, it is a satire, one can imagine, but how can one possibly satirize the life of a man who killed millions of his own citizens? And then turn the later violent figures around him into a kind of “three stooges” satire of their later takeover. True, Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power did lead to what many described as a “thaw,” or simply a milder version of Stalin’s truly mad attacks on all of Russia’s cultural institutions—including most of the nation’s artists, poets, musicians, and, as the movie asserts, even Moscow’s physicians (they, so he claimed were all plotting to kill him) not to say anything about journalists and simple truth-sayers, and anyone else who might have bothered to question, or even not have openly questioned Stalin’s iron rule. Russian citizens slept in their clothes so that, when they might be rounded up in Stalin’s/Beria’s nightly purges, they would not be entirely naked. The lessons of the Nazi round-ups of Jews had been well learned. At least, if they were about to die, they would not go naked into their graves.

      Yet, Iannucci’s film is, at least as many members of the audience with whom I attended this strange film attested, a comedy. If nothing else, they laughed, giggled, clapped their hands to thighs, etc. as if it was truly a “three stooges” comedy. I felt creepy, to the say the least. I know of the terrible fate of those who suffered under Stalin and even under his survivors, Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), and the even the more reform-minded Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), that I simply couldn’t laugh, as the younger audience members seemed able to do, about their clownish maneuvers as they struggled for new power.

      Based on the French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, Iannucci’s film is a kind of comic book recreation of the significant event that was Stalin’s death, in this case, apparently, caused, at least in part, by a vitriolic pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina (Olga Kurylenko), who includes a note within the re-recorded concert that Stalin demanded be delivered to him—despite the fact it was only a live performance.

      All right, I appreciate the fact that this film is a kind of post-modern re-do of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (a film that mocked Hitler), but then I never much liked that movie nor the other film it calls up, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be again about Hitler—also a work I have problems with. Comedy about mass killers, I guess, is just not my thing. And laughter never once dominated Iannucci’s “comedy”; in fact, the inordinate chuckles and thigh-slaps of several audience members almost made me want to get up and leave the theater.     

      Call me prudish, or simply unable to laugh at a good joke, but, despite an occasional chuckle, I just couldn’t cough up a good laugh at the death of this desperate despot, any more than I might have sped along with any of what Trump describes as jokes. I like comedians, just not murderous ones.

      Was Iannucci and company simply trying to tell us that we should just laugh away these monstrous beings? Or was it merely trying to tell us, in a Kafka-like sense, to cough the deaths of thousands off into the absurdity of history? Well, I’m all for that; but I just can’t do it. I guess I have too much memory, and Stalin is still someone who I cannot laugh away.

      I recall when I attended O What a Lovely War! with my elderly friend Ruth Lagesen, the great interpreter of Grieg, in Oslo. I remember her saying—and this still about World War I—“I just still cannot find it funny; I lived through that war!”

     I didn’t even live through the 1930 and onward tyranny of Stalin, although he died in my 6th year of life, but I don’t easily sniffle at his and his followers’ surely clumsy attempts to gain control over a country still in the clumsy and very ugly control of Putin.

 

     Surely, Iannucci realized the territory he was attempting to breach. He has said as much in this morning’s Los Angeles Times.

      Well, the cast is wonderful (they rehearsed together for weeks before filming), and the images are quite marvelous, the beauty of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, who we know in this country for her book about her father’s tyranny (played by the beautiful Andrea Risborough), is stunning. Despite my reactions about this film, there were many wonderful elements. I’d simply say, this is not a comedy, but a kind of very dark vision, with comedic elements, slightly blurring the terrible facts. And then I’d be somewhat uncomfortable with its ruminations, despite the somewhat manic quality of its presentation.

      Finally, in the last 2/3rds of the film, I grew to somewhat appreciate it. These were fools, after all, just not the stooge figures that the movie first presented them as. They were all determined to take over roles that could only present them as fools in history, just like the terrible manic fool we have given over to our current government. He will not survive, and he will be seen for what he was, just as Khrushchev’s ridiculous determination to “bury us” will always be perceived as a ridiculous bluff.

      What the director ultimately reveals is that men fighting for power who will all eventually bury themselves, fall into their graves more quickly than even they might imagine, to be replaced by equally rapacious figures. But some will simply fall away, be forgotten, even ignored by their ignominious histories. Who remembers Beria or even Molotov today? If we can’t forget Stalin, then perhaps we might soon forget the clown Trump. I think that might be what Iannucci is saying here, although I’m not yet sure of what he thinks he is truly saying. And this movie, still eventually seems to be without purpose.

      Well, let us imagine it as an absurd, somewhat factual comedy of the end of the Russian empire, even though it has already reimagined itself and is trying to recreate its terrible vision across the world.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Katzelmacher / 1969

laughing underneath our tears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Katzelmacher / 1969

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s second film of 1969 already reveals his genius. If his lovely premier film, Love Is Colder Than Death, is an interesting send-up of his love of American crime films, particularly the noir masterpieces of the 1940s and 1950s, that second film, Katzelmacher (a word meaning, quite literally, “cat-screwer” and, more generally, “troublemaker) takes us firmly back into the German milieu which Fassbinder was to explore most of the rest of his life.

     Particularly in this work the director explores the younger generation of German “losers” upon whom he focuses in Fox and His Friends, In a Year with 13 Moons, The American Soldier, The Merchant of Four Seasons and Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, as well of Fassbinder’s insistent revelation of his being a culture that painfully excludes outsiders, such as he portrayed in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

       Here he focuses, in a series of very theatrical vignettes (the work was first presented as a play), introducing us, pair by pair, quartet by quartet to Marie (Hanna Schygulla), Paul (Rudolf Waldemar Brem), (Helga (Lilith Ungerer), Rosy (Elga Sorbas), Gunda (Doris Mattes), Erich (Hans Hirschmüller), Franz (Harry Baer) and Peter (Peter Moland), none of them (with the exception of Marie, Rosy, and Franz)—most unusual in Fassbinder’s films—worth giving a second glance,  all, having grown up in the same Munich neighborhood, after having gone to high school together, and now believing that their friends are “primo,” the best in the world. They not only hang out together on the street, but in bars and in each other’s apartments, sharing sex, gossip, local barbs, and, mostly, empty stares. This group of supposedly 20-year-olds are going nowhere fast, with some of the men clearly beginning to plot some petty crime to help make them richer before their military duty comes calling.

 

    Although they have all long played sexual musical chairs (in one scene they actually act out their previous interrelationships by changing chairs in a small bar), the women proclaim to the heavens that their men are wonderful sexual partners, if only they could get their current partners to commit to marriage.

       They are, in fact, a quite despicable little clan, the type that make up hundreds of small American towns and even Australian ones (as portrayed in Muriel’s Wedding), who, left behind, feel that they exist as the center of the universe, despite their poverty, bigotry, and inability to find real love.

       Fassbinder reveals their emptiness by putting them, time and again, into a starkly black and white lineup, one beside the other or one posing next to another, or, at other times, spread out on the street like waiting whores, both men and women basically playing those roles in their private lives. Rosy has even become a real whore (with regular paying customers from this group of “friends”) with dreams of becoming a television star; Paul brings in a few marks each week by servicing a homosexual patron, Klaus (Hannes Gromball), who is probably the nicest of the men in this movie.

        The rest mutter inanities to one another or often sit sipping beer and endlessly smoking cigarettes; the women share romance magazines, smoke, and tell horrible tales behind each’s other back. No one of these characters dares to look one another in the eyes, with the men suddenly slapping their girlfriends brutally across the face if they present even the slightest of resistance to their endless “suggestions” on how they might rake in thousands of marks.

      Indeed, throughout most of the movie’s first 50 minutes, Fassbinder tests our patience with his endless dialogues, mostly empty of any content, except to quite brilliantly reveal his character’s pointless lives—this is a true drama of despair—and prepare us from the arrival, in their neighborhood of an outsider, a Greek worker, Jorgos (brilliantly performed by Fassbinder himself).

  

   Jorgos has come to Germany to make more money for his family back in Greece, and Elisabeth (Irm Hermann), the only woman of this coven who seems to be able to financially survive (she supports her ape-like husband Peter), determines to rent an empty room in her house to Jorgos. Like a kind of Maria Braun, the powerful title character of a later Fassbinder film, she knows how to truly succeed.

      Her neighbors not only harass her, but bully and berate the Greek, who cannot even comprehend their German-language taunts, believing that they are perhaps being friendly with their xenophobic comments. When Marie leaves her current lover, falling in love with the gentle stranger, the men plot castration and much else, fortunately as empty in terms of action as most of their meaningless plots.

      Yet even Marie senses, as does the audience, a truly violent encounter is in the air, suggesting these people know each other so well that they can smell their acts. And after Gunda lies about being raped by the stranger in the playground, and another of them reports that Greece is filled with Communists, suggesting than Jorgos is himself a sympathizer—an even more terrifying possibility for these thoughtless Germans—four of the males beat him when he attempts to pass their horizontally-controlled universe.

       Jorgos survives, and Elisabeth requests that, despite the “bam-bam” incident he has suffered that he stay on, while her boyfriend reveals that she is getting a top-rate rent for the room and is now planning to divide the bedroom where he lives to invite in another “outsider.” The group gradually perceives the wisdom of her ways. “Elisabeth always was a good business woman,” they sigh. “These foreigners work hard and keep their money within the country,” they suddenly perceive, after reading a newspaper. Maybe it’s not too bad to have a few Greeks and Turks around to help out the German economy. Marie even believes that come spring-time Jorgos might take her on trip to Greece, despite the existence of wife: things are different there in Greece, she imagines. Like so many of Fassbinder’s films, one might cry out in despair if only we weren’t laughing just underneath of tears.

       Today, when we think of the strategies of Angela Merkel in relationship with our new xenophobia promoted by Donald Trump, Fassbinder’s 1969 film seems absolutely prophetic!

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2018).  

Jacques Demy | Peau d'Âne (Donkey Skin) / 1970

the princess who hits the jackpot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenplay, based on a story by Charles Perrault), Jacques Demy (director) Peau d'Âne (Donkey Skin) / 1970

 

Although Jacques Demy’s film, Donkey Skin, is very little known in this country, it was a large hit in France, where the story’s originator, Charles Perrault is highly beloved. Like that poet’s “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella,” “Donkey Skin” is a tale about a young woman who must be transformed before she might receive her reward of the handsome prince. Like “Cinderella,” the prince is able to track her down, in this case with a ring which she has embedded in a cake, rather that a golden slipper, and like that other work, in this case, the young princess has a fairy godmother protecting her.

       Yet Demy’s version is far more transgressive than many other versions. Unlike the magical love tales such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, this Michel Legrand collaboration concerns a far more problematic kind of love: the incestuous love of a king for his daughter. And the fairy aunt (Delphine Seyrig), who absolutely loves the color lilac (a blue mixed with just a hint of red), might just as well be a gay fairy attempting to outwit the film’s fixated king (Jean Marais) so that, at the very last moment, (s)he might helicopter in to marry him.

      Despite his long marriage to fellow film-maker Agnès Varda, Demy was also gay (he died of AIDS), and the musical, in this case, is often a loving send-up of Demy’s fellow gay filmmaker, Jean Cocteau, paralleling many scenes and techniques of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (including using Marais, who appeared in that film) and later referencing Cocteau’s Orpheus when the charming prince (Jacques Perrin) comes up with his nose against a protective mirror surrounding the princess’ (played by his Umbrellas of Cherbourg actress, Catherine Deneuve) hut.

      A bit like the American political landscape, the reigning groups of this tale are divided up between the blue and the red; however, we must remember that these are central colors also in France’s flag, so that the fact that the princess is born into the blue to be wooed by the red prince, should not be given too much credence; yet it does hint of a kind of Romeo and Juliet-like romance; and that, in turn, lends this fragile story a bit more depth. If nothing else, the young beauty has been forced to escape her own father and kingdom hidden in the skin of her father’s favorite ass (who happens also to be the secret to his father’s financial success). 

     But even here, Demy further satirizes the original, by allowing the now scullery maid (hired mostly to clear out the pigsty) to take along the three dresses she has demanded from her father, one defining spring weather, a second celebrating the moon, and the third radiating gold like sun. In short, this Cinderella ain’t so very bad off as it appears. And the rather effete, certainly foppish “charming prince” who catches a glimpse of her dressed in the sun-based dress, might almost be a kind of closet-fashion admirer; after all, he’s utterly bored (much like the princess’ father) with seeking out a princess to marry, and even leaves a celebration to wander off into the forest wherein 

he discovers this beauty.

 

     Accordingly, there is a very camp element to this tale, which I’m certain accounted for some of its 2 million and more sales in France. Yet, as in nearly all Demy films, there is a lightness and grace to Donkey Skin—despite its absurd circumstances—that allows us to fall in love with its myths permitting us to bathe happily in Legrand’s Broadway theater-like songs. Why this film was never turned into a stage musical I simply can’t explain. Perhaps the movie is just that, a kind of stage musical captured on film.

       Whatever, I’m a big lover of Demy’s outrageously beautiful film fantasies, even when the princess, to escape her father’s lust must hide out in his ass.

 

Los Angeles, March 23, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).

 

Jean Renoir | Toni / 1935

the doomed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir and Carl Einstein (screenplay, based on a story by Andre Levert), Jean Renoir (director) Toni / 1935

 

There could hardly be a more appropriate film for the increasingly anti-migrant attitudes growing internationally in 2018 than Jean Renoir’s 1935 film Toni. In this beautifully filmed black-and-white work Renoir turns his lens on an immigrant worker, Antonio Canova (Charles Blavette) who arrives from Italy into Southern France as a worker in the local quarry, along with many others arriving almost daily into that area after World War I.

      The workers cheerfully arrive, finding housing with the local citizens, as does Toni, who takes a room in Marie’s house (Jenny Hélia), with whom he quickly falls in love, sharing her bed.

      He also makes friends with others, who also befriend Marie. And, at first, things seem quite cheerful, despite the guest worker’s difficult jobs, with immigrant guitarists strumming late into the night, and strolling through the beautiful landscape.

     But things quickly turn darker when Toni falls for the flirtatious local Spanish girl, Josefa (Celia Montalván), realizing that he loves her far more than Marie, which angers his landlady. A proper peasant, Toni approaches Josefa’s father, a local wine-maker, asking for her hand in marriage, which her father agrees to, soon after, on his death bed, insisting that Toni be her protector, and offering him what is certainly a far preferable job as overseeing his grape fields. For a moment it appears that this migrant worker has become lucky and will be assimilated into his new culture with a good job—and get his love to boot.

      The villain enters in the form of Albert (Max Dalban), Toni’s quarry boss, who is also taken with the beautiful Spanish girl. In order to marry, he brutally rapes her, forcing Toni to except that he has now no choice but to marry the demanding and selfish Marie.

 

     The brute Albert beats his new wife and generally treats her badly, while Toni cannot help but admit to Marie that he still loves Josefa. Marie demands he forever leave her house at the very moment when Josepha seeks to steal money from Albert and escape.

       Discovering her intentions, Albert beats her again, while Josefa takes up a knife and kills her husband, Toni arriving to claim that he has done the terrible act.

       If this plot sounds like something out of opera—and it might be wonderful to see this work set operatically—Renoir, with his amateur actors and delight of filming the everyday occurrences of southern France make it a far grittier experience than the sentimentalized works of Marcel Pagnol, who produced and distributed the film. Yet, as in all of Renoir’s cinematic works there is in this film a subtlety that reveals just how trapped Toni and his friends are from the very beginning. They are not only outsiders, hated not only by French but by other immigrants who have proceeded them, and they remain so, even as they become involved with the locals.

 

     Just as today when a figure such as Donald Trump, a Viktor Orban, and the right wings of many, many countries, declare entire immigrant populations as being criminal in intent, so are Toni and his compatriots, as different as they are, perceived to be subversives, forced to spend many of their nights in outlying camps where they sleep on the ground. In the last scenes of the film, after being thrown out of Marie’s house, Toni joins them, almost refusing to eat and to share even in their beautiful singing and dances.

      Throughout this film, the great director makes us aware that these men (and the few women and children who have joined them) will forever be outsiders; any attempts at assimilation are checked and squelched.

       And just as the guiltless Toni takes on the crime which he has not committed, so must they all bear the crimes of those locals around them.

       As critic Michael Campi writes:

 

“The cyclical nature of the narrative reinforces the inevitability of the drama and this prefigures such later Renoir masterworks as The River (1951). Of special intensity are the final minutes in which Toni tries to escape his fate by running across the viaduct linking parts of the town. Finally, we can get an overall sense of where these people have been living out their dramas, but it is too late for Toni by then.”

 

    Toni is a tragedy less personal than national, a crime of an entire nation which cannot quite come to accept people of other countries entering their provincial territories. There can be no real justice for the likes of men like Toni, or even like Josefa. They remain at the peripheries of a society that, while possibly attracted to their appearances and even behaviors, will remain always suspicious of them, and demand that they completely assimilate at the very moment that they refuse that process.

      Like so many of his great films—and this one was long unavailable to the American audience—Renoir’s film is masterpiece of the analysis of his society. And it has a great deal to say to us still today.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).