Rob Moretti | Crutch / 2004

understandably confused

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Jacks and Rob Moretti (screenplay), Rob Moretti (director) Crutch / 2004

 

According to the early credits, this film is an autobiographical work based on the experiences of the director. Given that, it is difficult to dismiss the terrifying events suffered by the teenager at the center of this film, David Graham (Eben Gordon), a young man whose father has left their alcoholic mother Katie (Juanita Walsh) primarily in the boy's care since neither his brother or sister seem to motivated enough to help tend to the problems she presents.

      In some respects, David, cooking and caring for the family, makes it appear almost as a normal suburban family, yet it quickly becomes apparent how fragile their life is as the mother alternates her relationship with her son as loving and even somewhat flirtatious with moments of drunken hostility and self-destruction.

 

    At the same time David is experiencing problems with his own sexual identity, and soon falls under the spell of his theater coach, the handsome thirty-some year-old Kenny (played by Moretti), who previously worked as an actor.

      As in too many such situations what begins as simply an interest in his student and an attempt to help David, gradually transforms into a sexual seduction, which quickly escalates into drinking and drugs along with sex.

    Coupled with his problems of his home-life, David increasingly turns to cocaine use and the relationship creates psychological struggles that are far beyond what a young boy such as he can endure.

    In short, Kenny becomes a symbol of man preying on a boy which makes his life even more precarious, as David feels finally rejected by not only his father and, in her illness, his mother, but his lover as well.

    The only difficulty is that the film itself, confused in its own narrative, seems to be unable to substantiate the older man being truly the villain of the piece, and we begin to see David himself using his lover as a kind of crutch to resolve his own problems. Although Kenny does indeed introduce the young man to wine and pot, given that almost all gay teen movies I’ve seen 

show their young heroes engaging in just those activities and in far more dangerous ways, it hardly seems outrageous that the older man presumes his young lover want to share in these activities.

     In fact, when asked Kenny argues that he doesn’t do other drugs, and when David finds cocaine hidden in Kenny’s bathroom cabinet, it is he who steals it and indulges without Kenny’s knowledge.

      Certainly, we might see Kenny’s legal adoption of David as another way to control his young friend, but one might also read it as a real attempt to help and nurture the troubled boy, and if nothing else, protect him since he and his siblings, with the mother institutionalized, are in danger of becoming wards of the state—although the movie does not even mention this possibility. When David begins to spin out of control, mentally and physically, he has already basically left Kenny, perhaps one of the reasons why things have ended so badly for him.

       In short, if the film seems to want to put the blame on a manipulative gay man who gradually engages a younger teen in a world which shifts him from attempting to maintain order in his life into a young man whose life has spun out of control, the film’s narrative suggests something else.

 

     Perhaps David was never actually in control or it may be that the Moretti is simply unable to fully express what he seems to be suggesting, either out of full honesty or lack of cinematic talent.

       Ultimately, although one is truly moved by the autobiographical facts, I have to agree with the reviewer from CinemaSerf, that “although this is clearly a labour of love for the director, it is certainly not for the viewer. The production is basic, at best. The dialogue resorts all too often to expletive-ridden rants that, though they do convey to an extent the frustration of this young man—actually served to lower the already struggling standards of the film. Sure, tell your story—but if you cannot connect with the audience then it becomes and remains little better than a vanity project. The acting here is mediocre, the pacing slow and it is all just a bit too self-indulgent to really engage. It's always a danger when one person controls the entire creative process of a film, and when it is about that person's life experiences too it can—and this one certainly does—lose any sense of objectivity.”

     In the end, I strangely found myself siding with man who the movie seems to want to portray as a sexual abuser, while seeing the central character David as simply a confused kid who gradually lost control of his life for reasons that are much larger than his sexual encounter with an older man.

 

Los Angeles, February 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Robert Bresson | Au Hasard Balthazar / 1966, USA 1970

saint balthazar

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter and director) Au Hasard Balthazar / 1966, USA 1970

 

Perhaps my favorite of Bresson's excellent films is Au Hasard Balthazar of 1966, perhaps because it is one of his richest and yet most forgiving of all this director's films. For the characters of Balthazar, each suffering or causing others to suffer, are also likeable human beings for whom the filmgoer feels, despite their failures.

 

    At the center of this parable-like tale, is the donkey Balthasar, given upon birth to a young girl, Marie (the beautiful Anne Wiazemsky), who lives with her schoolteacher father (Philippe Asselin) and her mother (Nathalie Joyaut) on a farm whose owner also has a son her age, Jacques (Walter Green) and a sickly daughter. The three children, particularly the closely knit Jacques and Marie, lovingly care for and pet the animal, even performing over him a kind of baptism, which hints at the specialness of this beast.

     When those childrens' mother dies, the father with his son and daughter move away, leaving the farm to the schoolteacher, who has always wanted to try his hand at farming with modern methods. But as a busy farmer with a now pubescent daughter less attentive to Balthasar, he determines the animal is no longer worth keeping, and sells him to the local baker.

     Meanwhile, a small town thug, Gérard (Francois Lafarge) and his gang, have been sneaking into the farm, torturing the donkey while attempting to attract the attention of Marie. By coincidence, the baker hires Gérard to deliver his bread to outlying regions, using Balthasar as the beast of burden.

     One day, while out driving, Marie observes the boy and her former donkey, and stops to pet the animal. Gérard enters her car and refuses to leave, followed by a series of pushing and pulling between the two that ends, predictably, with sex. That incident begins a long and abusive relationship between the two that scandalizes her family and enrages the small town.

     Marie's father, meanwhile, has been a topic of gossip for the townspeople, mostly out of envy for his success, and when the gossip reaches the ears of the former owner, he demands a reckoning of accounts. Guiltless, Marie's father refuses to produce them, and the farm is taken from him. Jacques returns to try to reconcile the situation, but the father refuses to speak with him.

     Because of Gérard's continual abuse of the donkey, the animal ultimately refuses to move, as the boy ties a newspaper around his tail and sets it on fire. The animal runs off in terror, and when Gérard finds him, he unwillingly moves on. By the next day, however, Balthasar refuses to even rise, as the baker prepares to euthanatize him. A local drunk takes him on, using him and another donkey to bear the burden of his menial tasks. He alternates with love and brutality as well, and, at one point, in the middle of a city street, the animal escapes his tormentor.

     The next adventure for the poor donkey is at a circus, where he introduced to the other animals. Bresson's beautiful presentation of the animals' eye-to-eye contact, the doleful donkey meeting first a lion, then a polar bear, a monkey, and an elephant. A circus trainer perceives the donkey's intelligence and trains him to become a kind of Clever Hans who counts out major multiplications and divisions of numbers with his hoof. The animal is brilliant until he sees the drunk in the crowd and fearing him, breaks into a braying that ruins the act. Returned to the drunk, the donkey escapes once more, finding his way back to Marie and the farm.

     By this time, however, Marie has become so involved with Gérard and his friends, whom Bresson portrays almost as a French equivalent of a gang of hoodlums—that she rarely returns home—her parents caught up in their grieving for her and their idyllic past.

     The donkey is sent off to a local recluse, who uses the poor animal to grind wheat, beating the beast whenever it pauses in its endless circle of pain.   

      Miraculously the town drunk receives an inheritance, and celebrates with the young hoodlums and others at a local bar. Gérard, now drunk and almost in a rage, destroys most of the bar, dancing with another girl and refusing to even touch Marie. Marie, finally determined to escape her friends, shows up at the farm of the recluse, begging to stay in the barn for the night. He refuses, bringing her within the house, where she feeds herself—against his will—while discussing his greed. The evening ends with her offering him sex in return for a bed.

     Ultimately, Marie returns home, and her mother insists that Balthazar be brought back to console her in her sorrow. Jacques revisits the family, offering to marry Marie, promising to never remind her of her past. But almost the moment he turns away to confer with her father, Gérard and his gang carry her off, raping her and leaving her naked in a nearby granary. Marie leaves forever, the father left to suffer, and, after a brief visit from the priest, to die.

    

      Marie's mother, completely desolate, is visited by Gérard and his friends, who want to borrow the donkey for the night, but she refuses. He is all she has, she insists, and "Besides, he's a saint." Later they steal the animal, using it to traffic goods—chocolates, hosiery, liquor, etc.—across the Swiss border. Authorities cry out "Customs Halt," and begin shooting, the boys running off. The donkey stands alone against the landscape as the camera moves in to reveal that Balthazar is bleeding.

     By the morning the animal is on its knees as a herd of sheep move toward him, and surround. By the time the herd has moved on, we see Balthazar lying upon his side, dead.

     For all the tears these last scenes bring to our eyes, however, Bresson's tale, we realize, is not as bleak as it sounds. In part, we readily recognize that all of the individuals of the film, cruel or loving, are humans very much like us. At times each of them is beautiful. Even the wrathful Gérard, sings out in a lovely voice in the church and is a stunningly sexual youth. As some critics have pointed out, each of the film's characters, while revealing themselves as potentially caring individuals, seem also to be inflicted with one of the seven deadly sins, a flaw which removes him or her from grace.

     The director reveals the complexity of their desires and behavior through images of their legs, eyes, and, as in most of his films, most potently, through their hands. From the first images of the children's hands petting Balthazar's body, hands reached out with sugar to feed him, and hands pouring water upon the beast's head, we recognize that it is the empty hand, the open giving hand that signifies love and salvation. But here we simultaneously witness filled hands: hands holding sticks, whips, chairs, and guns, flattened hands that slap, clenched fists that pummel and beat. In one scene we witness Marie upon a bench, with Gérard crouching behind her, offering his hand in love, which she refuses. While a few images later, we see him and his gang hurling their fists against the donkey's hide. It is precisely this duality of experience, the simultaneous existence of long hands laid to rest, against clenched and closed hands of punishment, hurt, and hate, that is clearly Bresson's central image. Almost every figure of the film has within them the potentiality of either greedily grabbing at life or openly excepting experience, and it is their alternate decisions of which position to take that result in love or sorrow.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2011).

Terrence Malick | The Tree of Life / 2011

a sentimental life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terrence Malick (screenwriter and director) The Tree of Life / 2011

 

"There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow"

                   —Mrs. O'Brien in The Tree of Life

 

Winner of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and recipient of substantial critical praise to date, the movie I saw this past weekend was one of the most portentously pretentious paeans to American piety that I have ever witnessed. While one might certainly call Malick's The Tree of Life ambitious, the work was stretched so thin that its three parts almost snapped their sinews, leaving behind a tattered tale of the American dream of the 1950s.

     Poor Jack O'Brien (Sean Penn), an extremely wealthy architect living in (what I presume is) contemporary Houston, is in a funk, a real depression, conveyed from the moment he dresses for the office and continues while he drearily performs the tasks of his business day and prepares himself for his return home.

    Companies are greedy, he quietly tells a cohort. The world is in a mess. Quite obviously, given the sleek high rise his company inhabits, he has been nicely rewarded for his greed. But we already know through the first hurried scenes of the film that at the heart of his emotional problems is family life, most particularly the death at 19 of his younger brother, R. L., who appears to have died in the Viet Nam War. Malick's premise is that Jack has never completely come to terms with his brother's death, nor, so we later discern, with his own relationship to his father and mother.

     Raised as a devout Christian (Roman Catholic), Jack is still unable to understand how a beloved creator can also destroy, how a caring parent can hurt their children. The film begins with a quote from Job, and God's torments of Job are repeated as a theme throughout.

     Jack's first cries (presented in voice-over) parallel those of numerous literary children, most notably the child in James Agee's poem "Knoxville, Summer of 1915," who puzzles that none of the beloved family around him can tell him "who I am." And how, moreover, can one ever come to comprehend one's own life without being able to reconcile a loving God with a destructive one? These are not stupid questions to be waved away, although they certainly have been voiced countless times. There are, of course, no answers for true believers. As priests and ministers have repeated over and over (and so do friends in this movie), "God acts in mysterious ways."

 

    In order to explore this dilemma, Malick apparently feels he must take us back to the creation, and spends a long portion of his film with images from lush microbiological pictures, National Geographic-like spreads of oceans, Icelandic and Hawaiian volcanoes, marine life and other animals, and, finally, though his visual effects supervisor, Dan Glass, animations of dinosaurs, both preying upon others and in the throes of death. The publicity department described these scenes as not being narratively linked to the other parts of the film, and certainly there is some truth to that; but, in fact, it is clear that Jack must ponder these images—at least in his imagination—in order to comprehend the links of living beings.

     At least, this is what Malick seems to intimate. Unfortunately, the images he tosses out, while quite beautiful, in this cinematic context almost become kitsch as Malick takes all those stunning scientific and geographical images and frames them, as if to say, here is my art. Do we really need to see frame after frame of whirling waters, fiery volcanoes, swirls of various early invertebrates and plants, and unconvincing animations of ancient animals, to comprehend that everything in life is interrelated, that there is, to use Malick's transparent symbol, a tree of life?

    At least now the brooding Jack can focus on family itself, as the director turns his attention to Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien (the beautiful couple of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) of Waco, Texas, beginning with their early years as a couple and growing a family of what eventually become three boys, Jack, R. L, and Steve.

     As in his other films, Malick works less through narratively conventional scenes than through a series of fast-moving images. As film critic Dave Kehr (in his 2011 collection of reviews, When Movies Mattered) describes Malick's Days of Heaven, so too might we characterize the director's approach to The Tree of Life:

 

                          Throughout the film, the director seems remarkably stingy

                          with his visual creations. A brief glimpse is all we are given of

                          a particular composition, and then Malick is off to something

                          else, rarely granting us the leisure to contemplate and assima-

                          late the images he puts before us. If this movie is a coffee

                          table book, someone is turning the pages too fast. For all the

                          languor of the plot, Days of Heaven plays like a taut, driven film,

                          relentless in its rhythm, hurrying the viewer along from image

                          to image, scene to scene, tableau to tableau. The dialogue

                          scenes, few and far between, are terse, clipped. Exchanges

                          seldom last longer than three or four lines, as Malick insists

                          on cutting away just as the characters seem ready to reveal

                          themselves.

 

     For Kehr this creates a dynamic pattern or rhythm that makes for a graceful, moving film. And we must grant that Malick's approach is perhaps the best one for an exploration of childhood. For all we are left as adults and, perhaps, all we can assimilate from childhood, is a series of glimpses of moments recalled or slightly perceived.

 

   In one scene, in particular, I recognize the appropriateness of Malick's technique. An elderly man suddenly falls to the ground, suffering what seems to be a seizure, while in the foreground the mother draws her children to her, moving in the other direction, as if to protect them from what is probably the death of their grandfather. If we blinked we could miss the entire scene, but obviously Jack has subliminally witnessed it in a split-second that reminds us of another young child of cinema, from Carson McCullers' A Member of the Wedding, Frankie Addams' quick glimpse of boys sexually intertwined in an alley.

     The trouble is that in shooting this glowingly-lit world of the 1950s, the camera becomes mannered, lingering endlessly on the strawberry-haired mother and the serious-minded music-loving father. The boys are all action, racing through the streets with sticks, cans, and other play toys with which boys have done battle since the beginning of time. In the fairly well-to-do neighborhood in which the O'Briens live, lights come on with a golden aura, children are called inside, and meals are served with formal pleasure. It is a flow of Norman Rockwell scenes that, at times, is so saccharine that I was afraid my teeth might rot. And, of course, there are trees, one tree in particular, that the camera, obviously flat upon the ground, looks longingly up at again and again and again.

     I can assure you that in the 1950s small-town life was a sort of idyll. I lived, in many respects, with the same family as did Jack, with only superficial differences—a reversal of the characters of my parents, less participation in typical male behavior—during that same period. But I don't think I would want to impose that daily blandness upon anyone else. These may have been a magical "days of heaven," but gradually, as I grew older, they transformed into the days of hell.

     Just as in that earlier film, Malick associates the shadowy figures of The Tree of Life with different natural elements. Mrs. O'Brien—a woman who believes less in nature than in grace, representative in the film of (who'd have guessed?) love ("Unless you love, your life will flash by," she tells her son)—is associated with water, as she sprays that element over the yard again and again, gracefully washing her feet in the pulse of the hose.

     Mr. O'Brien—a would-be musical artist, disappointed with his job, but determined to make the best of it—is tied to the earth, warning his son to make something of his life, continually insisting that he learn the simplest of gardening skills so that he might redeem their Eden. The impossibility of that redemption is what begins to transform him into a stern taskmaster, as simultaneously he turns his son against him and nature itself, the force he has chosen to obey.  

     That transformation, finally, is the most satisfying element of Malick's prose song to everyday American life. As one might not have perceived back then, the tensions between his parents, his secret witness of death and intimations of evil, ultimately begin to show up in psychological manifestations that include violence, breaking and entering, petty robbery, and even thoughts of patricide. He's on his way to becoming what we would have called a "bad kid." Disobedience clearly is the only way he can begin to define himself. In short, he associates himself with the element of fire, forging eventually the world of steel and glass he later inhabits.

     In this rebellion he even comes to torture his beloved younger and more passive brother, a child who, like his father, is musically inclined, but gentler, lighter in manner, almost air-born, returned to them in the film's earliest scenes as a body borne by an airplane.

    A temporary resolution comes in the form of the humbling of the ambitious father, as he loses his job, and they must move to another town or house. Father and son draw closer in the crisis, while his mother slides into silence. But the guilt of that childhood rebellion remains. Self-hate is inevitable, and we finally come to suspect it is what Jack describes as his life-long wrestling with his mother and father within that has brought this successful man to such a terminus.

 

    The last scenes in Malick's film, while inevitable I suppose, are the emptiest, revealing just how vacuous is the director's vision. Exhausted by his memories, Jack plays out various Jungian tropes along with visions of an afterlife in a desert landscape, following figures of his mother, father, and brothers until he reaches a door frame through which, with some hesitation, he passes only to discover himself now walking a beach upon which the dead stroll in small groupings, greeting and holding one another with tenderness and love. To me it resembles something like a Mormon vision of the afterlife, a world into which I would never want to be reborn. But to Malick, clearly, it is a grand resolution to the questions Jack has posed: Who am I? Who is our creator? What is the purpose of life?

     The film closes with an image of a bridge, connecting, quite obviously, Jack's past and present, while symbolizing his trip home to his possibly redeemed relationship.

     Thinking back to my dismissals of the Coen brothers' approach to some of the same questions in their 2009 film A Serious Man, I now feel a little guilty; at least they had a sense of adolescent humor about it all. Malick is dead serious, and clearly doesn't give a damn about those of us who don't share his angst and ready-made solutions.

     I am certain that those who desperately seek out this kind of spiritual reconfirmation, will love this film. If nothing else, one has to admire Malick for considering these issues and for presenting them in way that Hollywood producers might not have allowed. Yet, it seems to me that he might have been better served by an old-fashioned studio head shouting out, "Cut the crap!" 

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2011).

Hiroshi Shimizu | 有りがたうさん (Arigatō-san) (Mr. Thank You) / 1936

in circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hiroshi Shimizu (screenwriter, based on a story by Yasunari Kawabata; director) 有りがたうさん(Arigatō-san) (Mr. Thank You) / 1936

Film critic Alexander Jacoby explains several of the reasons that the marvelous Japanese director, Hiroshi Shimizu, is not better known, not only in the US but in his home country. First, Shimizu was born in the same year as his good friend, Yasujiro Ozu, who simply received far more attention for his filmmaking, particularly in the fact that while Ozu was celebrated in Japan and Europe with full retrospectives, Shimizu received only partial tributes, the fullest of which was in a “101st birthday” celebration in Hong Kong. Secondly, Shimizu’s most popular film, not truly representative of his large and varied oeuvre, was a lightweight children’s film, Children in the Wind, a film which came to characterize his talent as lightweight, centering upon children being “simply delightful.” And finally, the most important, in fact, is the director saw himself as a kind of outsider, working, often, against traditional Japanese values and mores, while Ozu creatively worked within the tradition.

    Recently, however, critics and audiences have begun a reassessment of Shimizu’s varied career, and Criterion, for example, reissued four of his most popular films.

    The first of these I watched, Mr. Thank You—titled after its friendly and handsome bus driver (Ken Uehara), who shouts Arigatō (“Thank you”) after the numerous farmers, hikers, and others who politely move out of the way of his bus as he travels from the outlying Izu over two mountain passes to a train station connecting to Tokyo—is truly “delightful,” but it also has deeply dark tones and cultural issues at its heart. The likeable driver not only hauls his travelers the long distance of his route, but also stops by local towns and waits for passing travelers who hand him messages or ask him to bring them back trinkets from the city. He permits young boys without any other mode of transportation to ride for free by hanging on the back of his vehicle, and, at one point, even briefly waits for them to catch up when they are forced to drop away when the bus visits an outlaying stop. In his cordiality and open friendliness, he has become a popular driver for whom some wait to catch his particular bus, and it is this sense he is a kind of comic hero who symbolizes the best of the Depression-era society.

 

      But his passengers are not quite so nice. Among those on this particular “road voyage” is a rather nasty bureaucratic man with a fake mustache in a hurry to get where he’s going, a sharp tongued “modern” girl, who, at one point, even passes out liquor to most of the passengers—while refusing to serve it up to the fussy bureaucrat—and most importantly, a mother with a daughter (Mayumi Tsukiji), who are traveling to Tokyo, the daughter having been sold into prostitution since the mother is longer able to provide for her support. The mother/daughter travelers explain the trip by suggesting the daughter is going to Tokyo to stay with relatives, but few of the friends they encounter along the voyage and no one is the bus buys their lie, recognizing that the shy young girl, who at one point breaks down into miserable tears, is terrified of her future.

      Several times Mr. Thank You, invites the mother and daughter to sit closer to the front, but they are dissuaded by the lecherous advances of the mustachioed man and perhaps a bit fearful of the “modern” woman whom, we suspect, has herself suffered her own difficult time in Tokyo before returning home. As she herself suggests, she has been everywhere, and truly no longer has a “home,” and clearly, she has been hardened by her difficult experiences.

     Gradually, as they move through the beautiful countryside—wonderfully captured by Shimizu’s fluid camera—we begin to perceive that the friendly bus driver, the only link with urban Japan these mountain dwellers have, is himself a kind of permanent voyager, even if it is travel that only takes him back and forth. When the driver admits to the “modern” woman that he has now saved up enough money to buy an American Chevrolet, we sense his own aspirations to move forward in space and his desire to travel into new worlds that might break out of his circular motions. And we also recognize that he is perhaps bored in his everyday travels when, along the voyage, he briefly becomes distracted by his rearview mirror, almost sending the vehicle he is driving over one of the many high cliffs he must negotiate along this trip. Even our breezy hero, in other words, has dreams that might take him out of the depressed economy of the times.

     When, after long observing his endless kind acts to all of those along the voyage, now almost at an end, the “modern” woman quietly suggests that the young girl might be saved from prostitution if he used his saved car money to help her, we also come to recognize the humanity of this previously seeming hard-hearted girl.

      The last scene of the film shows Mr. Thank You traveling back to where he has started his voyage, the mother and her daughter still seated in the back. Obviously, he has taken the other woman’s advice and saved the young girl from her ignominious fate. But in so doing, he has also, perhaps, doomed himself to a hamster like circularity, to a voyage to and from rather than breaking out into any other identity. We never learn his real name, and, in that sense, he has no real identity except through his endless acts of kindness and his beautifully open friendliness. But certainly, in those acts he has created a reality that is truly more profound than most of us will discover within ourselves.

     Arigatō, the audience might wish to shout back!

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).

Charles Chaplin | The Masquerader / 1914

disappearing beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) The Masquerader / 1914

 

     The Masquerader* is a far less raucous and vastly more entertaining piece of cinema than was Chaplin’s first crossdressing movie. Chaplin begins this film on home turf, in the dressing room of the Keystone Studio where we see him sitting across from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle as they both make up and get into costume for their roles. There is the usual horse play of Chaplin attempting to steal a sip of Arbuckle’s soda and the latter’s tricking him to drink from a bottle of hair-tonic, all of which results in brief flurry of powder puffs and a final butting of foreheads as they rise simultaneously to look over the barrier that divides them. But this is merely a warm-up for the more important business of the film shoot for which the Tramp has been hired.

 

   The director (Charles Murray) quite explicitly explains what he wants the Tramp to do in the melodrama they are about to shoot. As the villain (Jess Dandy) raises his knife to threaten the poor widow (Minta Durfee, Arbuckle’s wife at the time) and her baby in the crib before her (represented by a doll), the Tramp is to rush in and attack the evil-doer, saving the day.

     The camera begins rolling, but the Tramp becomes distracted by two flirtatious actresses and misses his cue. Frustrated, the director replaces the Tramp with another actor (Chester Conklin), who the Tramp holds back from entering, finally after a scuffle himself returning to the set only to scoop up the baby and hit the villain over the head with it, pushing his replacement out a nearby window.

      The Tramp is terminated once again, but not without a lot of pleading from the desperate-to-work actor and a fair number of pratfalls and scuffles that finally send Chaplin’s character out the door, suitcase in hand.

      The next morning the studio is visited by a glamorous and stunningly beautiful “Newcomer,” an immediate hit with all the studio males, particularly the director, who dubs her the “magnate.” In a long interview with her in his office he attempts to caress and kiss his newfound beauty, who smiles and batts her eyes while skillfully slipping through and around his embraces and his attempts at a full body press. This, and the scene after it in the dressing room, where he chases her around the makeup cubicles, must be one of the first on-screen portrayals of the phenomena long known as the “casting couch.” It would have been fascinating to see what might have happened if he caught her. But she has evidently teased and evaded him just enough that he momentarily retreats, leaving her to put the finishing touches to her face.

      Those consist of her pulling off her wig, shaking out her own curly hair, and applying a moustache, becoming recognizable now as our belovèd Tramp who rises just in time to face off with the director who, pressured by the men he has temporarily dispossessed, returns to find his nemesis standing at the very spot where a moment before sat the woman over whom he had been drooling. The Trump, now fully recognizable, doesn’t budge, and when the director turns to peer into a locker to see if his dreamboat might possibly have hidden herself away, the little clown raises his foot and implants a good swift kick in his butt before returning to the endless road he must eternally wander—only after a chase, however which lands him once more in dark waters, this time of a wishing well.

       This film is not only one of the first “real” Chaplin films, but serves as a kind of master template for later films such as Some Like It Hot and even Tootsie.

 

*A reedited version of this film, so I’ve read, cuts the section where the Tramp misses his cue and interferes with his replacement’s entry. Added intertitles unintentionally reveal the surprise ending.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).