Tod Browning | The Unholy Three / 1925

a little laughter, a little tear

by Douglas Messerli

 

Waldemar Young (screenplay, based on the novel by Tod Robbins), Tod Browning (director) The Unholy Three / 1925

 

One of the biggest surprises for me in a long while was seeing Tod Browning’s silent film of 1925, The Unholy Three. A mystery, detective story, and courtroom drama, as well as a romance and a tale of criminal perversity all in one, Browning wields his camera as if traveling through a rat maze, easily rounding corners before darting off into new spaces of horror and delight.

 

    Like so many of Browning’s works of cinema, this begins in a sideshow, featuring Professor Echo (Lon Chaney) as a ventriloquist with a dummy who agrees to join him at a local bar, a muscle man who bends rings of steel, Hercules (Victor McLaglen), and a “midget” performer Tweedledee (Harry Earles) who has such a short temper that at one point he attacks a child who heckles him, turning the crowd against all the performers so that the three and their picket pocket friend Rosie O’Grady (Mae Busch) are forced to run for their lives.

    But as they regroup, Echo has an idea that is so strange and unthinkable that they all agree to join him in an “unholy” trio in which he is determined to play the role of a kindly grandmother with their little friend performing as her young grandson, the strongman as the child’s father and her son-in-law, and Rosie as her granddaughter. With a hired man, Hector McDonald (Matt Moore) they open a pet bird shop using it as a cover to enter wealthy homes which they then rob.

 

    Although one can’t precisely describe Echo’s determination to dress in drag for most of this movie to be LGBTQ-related, one has to wonder why he—or more importantly perhaps, why the original novelist and screenplay writer Waldemar Young—chose a transgender figure for their central figure’s undercover identity. Chaney’s crossdressing is not only convincing, but contributes, along with Earles’ very realist portrayal of the infant whom Mrs. O’Grady often pushes around the city in a baby carriage, to the sense of the complete oddity of this group’s behavior and draws the film into a stranger territory than if they were simply a band of thieving thugs.

   Things are made even more complicated by Echo’s love for Rosie, who herself falls for the “straight” and almost nerdy clerk Hector. The constant plot machinations of the intelligent Tweedledee along with Hercules’ penchant for violence and the nearly inexplicable affection Echo has for his pet gorilla of whom Hercules is terrified further shift this film into a slightly surrealist world that reminds one a bit of later satires of such hothouse groupings such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Little Shop of Horrors, turning even a benign small town pet shop into a kind of sideshow.

      By the time the story catches up with their actions, they have already made several robberies whose treasures they keep in a safe. And the central heist they plan in the story is the robbery of a ruby necklace, just purchased by the local socialite Mr. Arlington. One of the ways they gain entry to the houses to stake them out, evidently, is to sell talking parrots using a breed of the bird that doesn’t actually speak, the ventriloquist granny doing the talking for them. When Mrs. Arlington comes home with the bird, of course, it has not a word to say, and her husband wants his money back. Mrs. O’Grady with her grandson in his carriage comes to the rescue, of course, childing the naughty bird for refusing to speak as baby Tweedledee cases the place.

      He doesn’t have to go far as Arlington’s effeminate assistant holds up the ruby necklace his boss intends to give his wife for Christmas, lovingly examining it as if he himself might at any moment put it around his neck. Seeing the baby reaching out for it, he takes it over to the carriage and dangles it almost as a toy just out of the baby’s reach. But suddenly Tweedledee succeeds in grabbing it, and it is only Mrs. Grady, returning from successfully coaxing the parrot to once more speak, who can retrieve it, promising her grandson some beads just like it for Christmas.

      As Christmas Eve arrives, the gang is almost out the door to collect the “beads” when Rosie and Hector return from shopping, gifts and a tree in hand, planning to decorate it in the shop. Echo quickly sends Hercules and Tweedledee into the kitchen to wait, while he gets back into drag, both angry about the intrusion and jealous for Rosie’s attentions to the clerk.

     While Echo as Mrs. Grady attempts to deal with the couple, Tweedledee suggests that he and Hercules pull the caper, sharing the money they get for the necklace. And off they go before Echo can prevent their acts.

      Upon their return, the news has already reached the papers: Hercules has killed Mr. Arlington and severely injured their child. The dumb Hercules and the mean-spirited Tweedledee are almost delighted with their torture and murder, but Echo knows that their cover will soon be blown. When the police come to question them, they determine to place the necklace in Hector’s room, placing him under suspicion for both the robbery and the murder. 

    It works, and the poor innocent clerk is taken off for examination. Yet Echo knows they will be back for more questions and also that Rosie, now in love with the jerk, might well let the cops know that Hector was framed. He kidnaps Rosie, accordingly, traveling with the other two members of his “unholy three” to a cabin in the country where they hideout.

     Eventually, Hector’s trial comes up for hearing, Rosie growing more and more worried about saving his life. After promising to stay with Echo if he will only get Hector out of the bind, Echo suddenly regains a conscience, attending the trial in male attire and attempting, during the final summation, to provide some evidence, without incriminating himself, that Hector is innocent. At one point he even manages to get Hector back on the stand, speaking for him through his ventriloquy. But when no one will believe what Hector seems to say or his lawyer believe that he actually didn’t say anything, Echo has no choice but confess to the crimes.

      While he has been in town, Tweedledee again attempts to get Hercules to split the money and escape the clutches of Echo. When Hercules bulks, the little man looses Echo’s gorilla on him, the beast suddenly attacking and, presumably, killing them both, allowing Rosie to run away.

       In what seems to me an illogical plot development, but one that surely fits the logic of Browning’s outsider heroes, the court decides to let Echo free as reward for his confession. Rosie returns to him as promised, but now a redeemed man, he lies to her, suggesting that he was only joking about his love for her, permitting her to return to Hector, while a tear falls from his eye.

       In the very last scene, we once again see Echo, the dummy on his knee, performing in the sideshow, repeating the lines he spoke early in the film: “That's all there is to life, friends, ... a little laughter ... a little tear." Like the mythical Echo, this ventriloquist can only repeat what has previously been said, while losing his imaginary lover in the process.

       As in so many Browning films, we observe in this work his fascination with societal outsiders struggling with issues of identity, gender, deformity, and a double life involving imitation. Focusing on their world, rather than the normative society, the director demonstrates even more purely the moral differences of individuals, and the ability of some, like Rosie and Echo, to be redeemed. Basically, however, the outsiders of Browning’s world remain just that, permanently separated from the normal society that surrounds them, but perhaps more pure and morally exemplary for that very reason. One might describe Browning’s films as early exemplars of the kinds of issues pursued later by filmmakers such as Tim Burton and John Waters, moral fabulists with a fascination for the perverse.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Alfred Hitchcock | Notorious / 1946

opening closets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Hecht (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Notorious / 1946

 

On the surface, Alfred Hitchcock’s beautiful film Notorious is a straight-forward romance between T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) and Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), with the added intrigues of a spy-movie and underlying mystery. Hitchcock’s 1946 film is so well made, and so embedded in the romantic tropes of the day, that even the Hays Office’s ban on kisses longer than three seconds, was cleverly broken by allowing the actors to “nuzzle,” “kiss,” and “talk” their way through two and one-half moments, creating in most heterosexual viewers (and homosexual ones) one the most erotic love scenes in American film-making. In this work the “thriller” aspects of the plot are almost perfectly enmeshed with the problematic love-affair between Devlin and Huberman, two beautiful actors who seem to be naturals together, and, if film-lore was correct, were indeed comfortable—in part because of Grant’s acceptance of and help in making Bergman feel relaxed in her role—in one another’s company. Surely, one might argue, this is one of Hitchcock’s most openly heterosexual films, with the beautiful Bergman being loved not only by Devlin but by the well-educated and cultured, if utterly detestable, Nazi, Alexander Sebastian (the almost unctuous Claude Rains).

     But, of course, and, as Grant might quip (as he does in this movie and in The Philadelphia Story) “naturally,” Hitchcock’s films always have several layers, as does Grant’s witty acting. If, by film’s end, the two major figures drive off into the sunset to live out their lives as a loving couple, they certainly have to find their way through a great deal of confused and twisted issues of sexuality to get there.

     First of all, and perhaps most importantly, the beautiful Alicia is a marked woman, even a possibly wonton one—certainly a being, as they used to say, with a lot of luggage. She is, after all, the daughter of a traitor, an American-Nazi sympathizer who is in the very first scene found guilty of espionage and sentenced to twenty years of prison. Even at the trial, he defends his position, threatening American society (“You can put me away, but you can’t put away what’s going happen to you, and to his whole country next time. Next time we are going….,” certainly a terrorist-like threat), and, soon after, commits suicide. Perhaps in reaction to her parentage, Alicia is a woman who drinks heavily, and has, so we are told, sought out the beds of numerous strangers. Indeed, it is her very history that has brought Devlin to one of her rather insipid, drunken parties, where he hopes to recruit her as a spy—for what purpose he has not yet established. Even she is disgusted by the emptiness of her “celebration,” dismissing her guests into the dark before she attempts to take a late-night drive with her uninvited visitor. The drive, in which she is almost arrested for drunken driving, ends even more disastrously as Devlin is “forced”—a very strange concept given his somewhat affable violence—to slug her, knocking her out. So ends their first “date.”

 

    The next morning she is hung over, as Devlin hovers over her, literally spinning in her vision, as he offers her a glass of liquid that chillingly reminds one of the milk containing a light-bulb he served up Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock’s Suspicion of five years earlier. Certainly, it is not an auspicious beginning of a “romance.”

      Despite the invitation to join her friends upon their yacht, however, Alicia—obviously attracted to the man who has already abused her—rejects their plea to join them, which requires nothing but her own readiness, without even a suitcase (“We have everything aboard!”)—in preference of Devlin’s invitation for a vague future in Rio de Janeiro. It will not be the first time that we perceive that this daughter of a Nazi readily assents to a more difficult path, a life that might even be said to be slightly sadomasochistic. She has, indeed been filled with self-hating: hearing of her father’s death, she responds:

 

                           When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything

                           went to pot. I didn’t care what happened to me. Now I re-

                           member how nice he once was, how nice we both were. It’s

                           a very curious feeling, a feeling as if something had happened

                           to me, not to him. You see I don’t have to hate him anymore—

                           or myself.

 

Even as in the new environment, she recovers some of her sense of self-worth and health, abandoning her alcoholic ways, she is tortured by Devlin’s taunts:

 

                          alicia: Well, did you hear that? [she has just refused a second

                               drink.] I’m practically on the wagon, that’s quite a change.

                          deddddevlin: It’s a phase.

                          alicia: You don’t think a woman can change?

                          devlin: Sure, change is fun, for awhile.

 

      One might almost think Devlin (Grant), a bi-sexual in real life, was talking of himself. Indeed, soon after, when she accepts the role as a kind of Mata-Hari to seduce Alex Sebastian, he uses her very love to verbally abuse her again: “I can’t help recalling some of your remarks about being a new woman. Daisies and buttercups, wasn’t it?”

      But even during their brief “love” affair, it is clear that, despite her deep love for him, he is removed, uncommitted to the love-making in which he participates. Hitchcock has, in fact, caught their relationship quite clearly in its sputtering interruptions: the kiss, the nuzzle, the questions which always intrude: Devlin is as unsure of his love of this “marked woman” as Sebastian is impetuously convinced of his. As Alicia herself proclaims:

 

                           alicia: This is a very strange love affair.

                           devlin: Why?

                           alicia: Maybe the fact that you don’t love me.

 

Even in the midst of what might seem as a romantic tour of the beautiful Brazilian city, Devlin admits, in yet another of his on-film admissions, of his gay preferences: “I’ve always been a-scared of women.” We hardly need Ben Hecht’s open comments to make us realize this fact; but, as I have written before, the obvious in both Grant’s and Hitchcock’s films is often openly hidden.

      The plot turns even more sinister when his CIA associates reveal what they really want from Alicia Huberman, that she meet and romance the suspected Alex Sebastian. And, despite his somewhat subdued protests, comparing Alicia to the officials’ notably at-home, protected wives, he is party to what basically must be described as selling Alicia into sexual slavery. As Hitchcock himself has said in an interview with Truffaut, “Cary Grant’s job—and it’s rather an ironic situation—is to push Ingrid Bergman into Claude Rains’ bed.”

       Although the film indicates this action as arising from his sense of duty, we also clearly perceive it arises from his own disorientation with his attraction to a woman, which Hitchcock and Hecht further reveal in his purchase of a bottle of champagne for what was to have been their first domestic encounter—she cooking chicken (a chicken she admits that has caught fire; she is completely inexperienced with the domestic world, while she gushes about the joys they might one day experience together: “Marriage must be wonderful with sort of thing going on every day!”)—he leaves the champagne, symbol of romance, at the office.

      If Devlin is a reluctant lover, even more strange as a suitor is Sebastian, a man controlled by his dominating mother, who is perhaps the most powerful figure in this film. Just as in Casablanca, Rains performs Sebastian as a man, basically heterosexual, yet confused about that identity. Although completely caught up in the romantic world of his German upbringing with the young Alicia, she also represents—just as she does to the American “patriots”—a figure who represents a kind of trophy, symbolizing position and power, which, in Sebastian’s case, is utterly intertwined with the jealousy he feels about her. A great deal of his courting of Alicia has to do with the “attractive man” with whom he has first seen her: Devlin. And it is clearly Devlin, as much as her own charms, who appeals to him so much that it mentions it several times. Upon querying Alicia about her riding with Devlin when he has first encountered her, she puts everything into perspective: she was so upset and lonely after her father’s imprisonment, she observes, that she would have “gone riding with Peter Rabbit.”

      It’s a small statement, yet it expresses the utter complexity of all of their relationships in this densely-rich film. In the original Peter Rabbit book of 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter, dressed in human garb, disobeying his mother’s orders, sneaks into Mr. McGregor’s garden to eat as many vegetables as he can. McGregor spots him and is on the chase. Peter escapes, but loses his jacket and shoes, which McGregor uses to dress a scarecrow. Wearily returning to home, Peter becomes ill and is put to bed with a dose of chamomile tea. If one ever wondered about the brilliance of both Hecht and Hitchcock as writers, I need only observe that this is close to the story of Alicia’s experience in the Sebastian household.

      Without even consulting his domineering mother or receiving her “necessary consent,” Alex Sebastian determines to marry Alicia, mostly out of jealousy. His mother, accordingly, does not attend the marriage and belittles the relationship throughout, particularly at the horse track, where Alex keeps his lover in the eyes of binoculars, while he pleads with his mother to be pleasant; her response: “Wouldn’t it be a little too much if we both grinned at her like idiots?”

     Even at the couple’s first meeting at a restaurant, when she recognizes her American head agent Prescott (Louis Calhern), Alex speaks of his handsomeness. And when she later reports this to Prescott, he quips as she is about to attend a dinner party at Sebastian’s house, “Sorry I’m not going with you!”

 

    The world Alicia has entered is sharply misogynistic in a way that the outer shell of the plot does not want to reveal. If on the outer layer, Alicia is beautiful figure loved by two men, underneath this tale she is simply a “type,” perfect for the job, “not a lady.”

      Is it any wonder that upon her early return from the “romantic” honeymoon, Alicia spends her first days attempting to open every closet in the Sebastian mansion—despite the fact that Madame Sebastian, the overbearing mother, holds most of the “keys.” In these events, moreover, writer Hecht repeats two of his symbolic statements: Alicia does not like long, pleasurable sea voyages, and she is a woman who, metaphorically speaking, comes with a great deal of baggage.

     There is nothing in these small closets to uncover, but this strong woman must know that the sexuality of her world is somehow locked up. After the dinner party, where once more liquor has been the subject of demonstration and protestation—an important sub-theme in this movie of stuporous individuals—Alicia is encouraged to open the Sebastian house up to a huge celebration, a very dangerous thing in a world of dark secrets.

     The grand party ends in the basements of the mansion, with Devlin and her seeking out the “key”—the literal version of which she has stolen from her husband’s key-chain—to the Nazi activities. Once more, it is the “lack” of Champagne—the romantic symbol at the center of this tale—that destroys their cover. Deep in the confines of the wine cellar, Devlin accidentally breaks open a bottle of vintage wine to find not the source of lover’s pleasure, but black sand, the darkest remnants of what might be described as a romantic representation, and in this case, even more disturbingly, the leftovers of uranium, possible atomic destruction.

      Without proper time to cover and hide the discovery—something Devlin/Grant has never been able to do throughout this revelatory myth—he must again “pretend” a love which clearly does not exist, intensely kissing Alicia only to try to convince Sebastian than it is a frustrated last attempt at an impossible love:

 

                    “I knew her before you, loved her before you, only I’m not as

                    lucky as you…” 

 

But we know the truth. Devlin has in that very action of symbolic romance sent Alicia to certain death.

      By early in the morning, Sebastian has discovered her deceit, and returned to the beside of his mother for consolation and protection:

 

                    “Mother, mother, I need your help….I am married to an American agent.”

 

     The chamomile tea of the Peter Rabbit fable follows, laced with a poison that will kill the “wanton lady” if Madame Anna Sebastian has her way. In her attempts to get Alicia out of the way, Madame Sebastian even suggests that Alicia and she take a long sea voyage together, a form of “pleasure,” which we already know, Alicia abhors.   

    Although the plot requires Devlin to unexpectedly (particularly given his determination to the leave the country) and somewhat ridiculously come to her rescue, in the more sublimated fantasy of Hitchcock’s masterwork he saves her only in order to have “the poisons” removed from her system; she is still a venomous being not worthy of his attentions. Despite his cinematic assurances, “You’ll never get rid of me again,” we realize that in his claims of being “a fat-headed guy, full of pain,” the pain may not have been simply his jealousy of her relationship with Sebastian, but the pain of his own sexual orientation.

      As Alex Sebastian is called in to face his Nazi compatriots for his sins, asked to admit to his self-created lies for which he will surely face death, the “happy” couple of Alicia and Devlin drive off into the dark shadows of this cinematic romance with only the audience’s applause. Although I love this film, I cannot bring my hands together, but joyfully offer up the bifurcations of my head.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2013; revised March 15, 2015

Reprinted, in a different version, from World Cinema Review (June 2013).

Roberto Rossellini | Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) / 1945

a morality play

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini (screenplay, based on a story by Amidei and Albert Consiglio), Roberto Rossellini (director) Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) / 1945

 

At an early point in Robert Rossellini’s memorable film Open City, one character asks another whether or not the Americans really exist; he looks up to a ruined building, and comments something to the effect of “Yes, they exist.” By 1944, the year in which the events of the film presumably take place, Italy was already a defeated nation, Mussolini having been toppled. A civil war between the Nazi controlled northern provinces of the country, and the southern provinces controlled by the monarchist and liberal forces with soldiers fighting with the Italian Co-Belligerent Army was being waged. Declared an “open” city, Rome was anything but safe for Resistance and Communist fighters such as Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) and the underground printer Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet). Ruled by the Italian puppet government controlled by the Nazis, the citizens of the Holy City were exhausted through deprivation and near-starvation. The long year ahead until War’s end seemed like a decade. And the Americans, even those stationed in the south, seemed far in the distance.

 

     Rossellini’s film, shot in 1945 on the still derelict streets of the city and in actual apartments, is represented today as the central film in Italian Neorealism, combining an often documentary-like style with the grainy effects of live filmmaking, made necessary by the wartime conditions, the lack of high-quality equipment and materials, and absence of good lighting. Yet, on reflection, we can easily perceive that Open City—as freshly improvisational as it feels—was more often carefully staged, melodramatically composed, and highly scripted by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini (based a story Amidei and Alberto Consiglio). Some of the melodrama of script and stock character types, the often mincingly effeminate behavior of the Nazi Gestapo leader, Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) and the menacingly lesbian titillations of his cohort Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), as well as the hackneyed declarations of the Nazis as in the following scene may seem to not only weaken the story, but to detract from its presentation of a spontaneous reality.

Major Bergmann: I've a man who must talk before dawn and a priest who is 

praying for him. He'll talk.

Hartman: And if not?

Major Bergmann: Ridiculous.

Hartman: And if not?

Major Bergmann: Then it would mean an Italian is worth as much as a German. 

It would mean there is no difference in the blood of a slave race and a master race. 

And no reason for this war.

 

     Similarly, the pious religiosities spouted by the Resistance-supporting priest, Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi) seem out of sync, and further contribute to the sense of this work as being just short of a dialectical propaganda piece. If this is a “new” realism, it certainly relies heavily on the old-fashioned dramatic conventions of pre-War Italian film and theater.

     But, in fact, it is just these conventions that help to make it so effective. And we don’t feel cheated in gradually coming to recognize that Open City represents a version of reality that might never have been discovered on the mean streets of Rome.

     The most important scenes in the film, in fact, depend upon spectacular gestures of passion rather than accidental documentation of real events. Pina’s sudden decision to chase after the Nazi jeep into which Francesco—the man whom she was to have married that same morning, has been taken under arrestment—is almost explicable as a rational act, but utterly representative of the boiling over of emotions of love, desire, desperation, and, perhaps most importantly, hate that her chase signifies—actions which can only be dealt with from the would-be-conquerer’s point of view death. And her emotionally moving fall to the street is explicitly symbolized in its image of the pieta and a holy death.

     The almost impossible-to-bear scene in which Don Pietro is forced to watch the torture of Manfredi, who beaten, whipped, and torched, is visually represented as the scourged and tortured Christ, again reiterates the incredible hate the Nazis have crafted, described by Hartman in his drunken conversation with Bergmann.

     Rossellini and his cinematographer express this impulsive horror once again in the final shooting of Don Pietro, where the priest, observed this time by the children—the future generation of witnesses—is shot, strapped into a stool, in the back.

     In short, the central scenes of Rossellini’s film are about as far from naturalistic as one might get. These and others through the work serve more as emblems of iconic meaning rather than as a documentation of everyday events.

    Often even the ordinary street scenes, such as the attack on the local bakery by starved mothers and children, are played for comic relief when the sexton, Agostino (Nando Bruno) suddenly determines to get his share of the daily bread which has so long been denied the citizens of the city.

    If the street scenes shot through windows often seem compelling real, we only have to observe how the director uses his camera, winding down from the heights in the circular patterns of staircases, or zooming from high to low position in order to get a better look at what is transpiring below.

 

   In short, throughout Open City, Rossellini is more interested in the theater of his tale and the passion it evokes than in glimpsing the reality of everyday life in the war-weary city. But rather than seeing such mini-passion plays as failures in an otherwise convincing documentation, I would argue that what appears as documentation serves simply as filler for the emotionally appealing and moving interchange throughout of good and evil. The realistic scenes of the film serve less as substance than as links that cement the morality play that Open City truly is.

    Today, perhaps, many of us find it more difficult to appreciate such grand theatrics—unless we staunchly assert that the film mimics truth—but the audiences of 1945 were not yet fully imbued with the anxieties of post-War audiences. Truth was still—which is why, in part that this work is so brilliant—a dramatic convention. Even though the Americans did finally show up, their demand for the “real” had not yet truly infected the Italian arts. Someday, in fact, even we will realize that the “real” is what one makes it.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2015).