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).

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edgar Wright | Baby Driver / 2017

a hum in the drum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edgar Wright (screenwriter and director) Baby Driver / 2017

 

Who’d a thunk that a gangster film with stick-figure-like characters, a young “hero” who reluctantly works as a getaway driver, and a plot that revolves mostly around car chases could be brought together in an absolutely delightful work, the surprise hit of the year to date.       

     The reason this film works so well can be expressed in three words: “Ansel Elgort” and “music.” Both the central actor and the music he listens to while driving a host of seasoned criminals to the sites of their heists and, after, out of harm’s way, not only define the rhythm of this film but its actions—including the ambient gun-fire and conversations of everyone involved.

      Baby, who lost both his mother and father in an auto crash when he was a child, suffers from tinnitus, a heavy ringing in his ears, that he can block out only with the dozens of cassette mash-ups that he carries with him at all times and pipes into his body through earbuds. I purposely used the word “body,” because it’s not that Baby simply hears these compositions, most of which he himself has mixed, but quite literally lives his life to their beat. He, himself, has become a driving, walking manifestation of the eclectic mix of songs he daily inhales, which includes everything from Googie Rene, The Beach Boys, Dave Brubeck, The Commodores, Beck, the Incredible Bongo Band, and The Detroit Emeralds to Martha and the Vandellas, The Button Down Brass, Sam and Dave, Brenda Holloway, Queen, numerous others, and, finally, Simon and Garfunkel, whose song, “Baby Driver” is the source of the film’s title:

 

                         They call me Baby Driver

                         And once upon a pair of wheels

                         I hit the road and I'm gone

                         What's my number?

                         I wonder how your engines feel

                         (Ba ba ba ba)

                         Scoot down the road

                         What's my number?

                         I wonder how your engines feel

 

      Edgar Wright’s film might be described as the most aural piece of cinema that has ever been created. Certainly Jacques Demy, in his numerous pop-operas, Francis Ford Coppola in his mostly sung One from the Heart, and, more recently, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land put music and dance up front. But in Baby Driver choreographer Ryan Heffington insists on linking almost every movement with the music being pumped into Baby’s ears—at one moment humorously revealing his tricks when, as Buddy (Jon Hamm), his wife Darling (Eiza González), and the violent Bats (Jamie Foxx) begin to leave the car to do their dirty business, Baby calls them back in order to restart his recording in order to get their caper into sync with his song.

       This film, is also very much about hearing and the lack of it. Despite his earbud infatuation, the ear-budded Baby, at one point is called by gang leader Doc (Kevin Spacey) to reiterate the instructions he’s just given, which Baby does with complete accuracy. It may help, of course, that Doc and his cohorts themselves often speak in a kind rhythmic patter that comes terribly close to rap, rhymes included.

 

Bats: This one, they say that listens to the music all the time?

Griff: I mean, is he retarded?

Doc: 'Retarded', meaning slow? Was he slow?

Griff: No.

Doc: He had an accident when he was a kid. Still has a hum in the drum. Plays music to drown it out. And that's what makes him the best.

 

In short, listening is what it takes to survive in this world. Yet strangely, Baby’s loving foster father, Joseph (CJ Jones) is deaf (both on-screen and off), with whom Baby communicates through signing. By the end of the film, Baby himself has almost lost his hearing, after Buddy fires guns up close to the young man’s ears.

 

      Baby is “the best,” that is until he is tired of being used by Doc, from whom, years before he has stolen a car with important “merch” in it—that’s about as close that any of these criminal monikers come to plausible plot—and now wants to escape on an endless road trip with his new found love Debora (Lily James), a waitress in a nearby Atlanta diner. But plot, fortunately, in this film hardly matters, and it’s only when Baby has temporary ditched his car and earbuds that the movie bogs down and hardly matters, when, in a kind of weak imitation of Die Hard, Baby has to kill the villain Buddy over and over again.

 

      From that moment, in fact, the movie and its hero have lost meaning. Incarcerated and rehabilitated, the baby driver loses all his steam, along with, we gather, the rhythm of his music-obsessed life. We catch a glimpse of him in prison, his ears being checked by a doctor, who apparently is able to relieve Baby’s tinnitus or, perhaps, confirm that the young man is now completely deaf. And by the time of the final scene, when Baby is released, now under his real name, Miles, this car flick has been transformed into a romance. The only hope is a slim possibility that he and Debora get on that road and drive off into the sunset into a life that has none of the urgency it previously did.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).  

Alfred Hitchcock | Sabotage / 1936

a dark and dangerous place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bennett (screenplay, based on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad), Ian Hay and Helen Simpson (dialogue), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Sabotage / 1936

 

Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film Sabotage is set in a run-down movie theater run by the anarchist Verloc (Oscar Homolka) to hide his real avocation even from his wife (Sylvia Sidney) and her young brother who lives with the couple. That location, indeed, offers Hitchcock the opportunity to explore the cinematic issues of dark and light as people come and go through the small auditorium where movies are being screened.

     The film begins with a “blackout”—Verloc having tossed sand into the nearby Battersea power conduit—the cinema-goers, with true Hitchcockian wit, demanding their money back. Mrs. Verloc and the theater ticket-seller try to hold the angry crowd off, fearing that if their loose the night’s take, their business will go bankrupt. Even the next-door grocer’s assistant gets in on the action by explaining to the crowd that the event was not the theater’s fault, the theater being protected by law. But when Mrs. Verloc finally discovers her husband home and in bed, pretending to sleep, he tells her to refund the money, which she is ready to do when the lights suddenly are restored, the customers now able to continue viewing the movie.

      In this scene, not only do we discover Verloc’s duplicity, but come to perceive the threats of mob violence. Evil lurks everywhere in the London of Hitchcock’s story, ready to be unleashed at the flip of a switch. Many of the films shown in this small cinema, indeed, seem to be horror films, and even in a Disney cartoon (from Silly Symphonies) features the murder of “Cock Robin,” which incidentally is included in my book My Queer Cinema.

      If Verloc is dangerous, those above him are brutal, willing to blow up a busy train station. Verloc is forced to visit a local pet store owner, who will provide him with the bomb, buried in the bottom of a bird-cage, which is set to “chirp” at precisely 1:45. In what appears as an act of great kindness, Verloc gives the birds to his wife’s brother.

    We soon discover that the next-door green-grocer is a government plant, and after the agent takes her and her brother to an expensive lunch in an attempt to get information, Verloc becomes suspicious, perceiving that he is being watched. Unable to take the bomb to the proper location, Verloc hands over its delivery, along with a few reels of film to the young brother-in-law. The boy is delayed temporarily by a parade and, after, is held back by a street peddler who uses the boy as a stand-in to sell his toothpaste, both events creating a nearly unbearable tension as we begin to realize the child’s fate. Suddenly the entire streetcar explodes, killing everyone within, including the child and a cute puppy.

      In retrospect, Hitchcock felt that the boy’s death was a critical mistake in not permitting the audience a release from the building tension. Certainly the event, while brilliantly filmed, does dim anything in this film that might be associated with light. After that event it is difficult any longer to care what might happen. And Mrs. Verloc is suddenly forced, in her bitter grief, to take up a carving knife and kill the man whom she previously described as being so kind.

 

     Her act, moreover, seems to put her in jeopardy, even though she and the agent knows what has been behind her murdering of him. Another explosion—this one destroying the movie house, presumably by Verloc cohorts—allows her to escape any suspicion, while, as in Blackmail, the policeman keeps silent about the woman he will surely now wish to marry.     

      Accordingly, this film leaves a somewhat bad taste in one’s mouth, with all the villains, except Verloc, still on the loose, while the tawdry London Hitchcock has created remains a very dark and dangerous place.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).

Joseph Kaufman | The Amazons / 1917 [Lost film]

boys will be girls

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Marion (screenplay, based on a play by Arthur Wing Pinero), Joseph Kaufman (director)

The Amazons / 1917 || lost film

 

Produced in 1917 by the Famous Players Film Company-Lasky, the silent film The Amazons is now presumed as lost.

     As described in a film magazine of the day: Because the parents are disappointed that their three children are girls instead of boys, they are brought up by the Marchioness of Castlejordan (Helen Robinson) as boys, no real males 

      The three young boys (Marguerite Clark as Tommy, Elsie Lawson as Willie, and Helen Greene as Noel), however, become quickly known for their antics, upsetting the local villagers, and resulting in a great deal of gossip.

      The youngest of the “boys,” Tommy, is sent to London to visit relatives.

      There, she slips away from the house dressed as a gentleman in evening clothes and visits a dance hall. Encountering a bully at the affair, she knocks him out in self-defense. Escaping the dance hall she jumps into the cab of Lord Litterly (William Hinckley), who takes “him” home, a warm friendship quickly developing between the two of them.

      Later, Litterly saves Tommy from a fall from a runaway horse.

      Meanwhile, Willie and Noel arrange a meeting, one evening, with two men in the gymnasium. For his part, Tommy, climbing through a skylight, literally “drops in” for a late night meeting with Litterly, who not only discovers his friend is a woman but that she is a relative.

      When the Marchioness discovers the whereabouts of her missing charges, she recognizes that her boys will be girls, and gives them her blessing for a triple wedding.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2021

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

Charles Chaplin | The Cure / 1917

curing waters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vincent Bryan, Charles Chaplin, and Maverick Terrell (screenwriters), Charles Chaplin (director) The Cure / 1917

 

Somewhat like the figure played by Harpo Marx in the 1930s, Chaplin’s The Little Tramp of the teens occasionally displays significant bisexual interest, particularly when he mistakenly believes another male is flirting with him or when he believes women are asking him to engage with another man in physical manner.

 

    In The Cure, for example, Chaplin’s character has checked into hydropathic hotel in order to “dry out,” and after a series of drunken maneuvers such as his inability to enter the center through its revolving door and other pratfall actions which results in the immediate enmity of a gout-stricken sanitarium guest (Eric Campbell) whose bandaged foot he not only steps on by catches up his revolving door frenzy, he his taken by a sanitarium attendant (Albert Austin) to enjoy the natural waters.

     Seated between a children’s nurse and the attendant, Charlie is offered time and again a cup of the water which he accidentally spills out, seemingly by purpose, like the later comedian W. C. Fields, refusing to let water touch his lips.

     Finally, the attendant attempts, with the encouragement of the nurse, to make clear that the water provides health and strength, offering his biceps to Chaplin as an example of the wonders it has done for him. Chaplin, with the nurse’s approval, somewhat nervously puts his hand around the attendant’s bicep, and when the nurse indicates her pleasure, takes it one step further by groping the man’s leg, which the attendant seems to enjoy, Charlie giggling like a fellow sissy over the results and even slapping the attendant in the face as if to scold his flirtatiousness.

      Later, joining the other patients in the lobby, Chaplin once more encounters the man with gout, who in the meantime has come close to physically “mashing” a girl (Edna Purviance) on her way to her room. The girl has finally escaped to the lobby and there meets up with Chaplin whose more gracious behavior attracts her. He sits near her on a settee, joining the man with gout sitting in a nearby chair.

       As the bearded man attempts to openly flirt with the girl, the tramp, thinking his attentions are meant for him, reacts in kind, flirting back at him and finally throwing up a leg in girlish delight which of course comes down on the man’s bandaged foot once again.

        Outraged, the man rises, attempting to sit on the other side of the woven cane settee at the very same moment when Chaplin stands and turns it around, sending the large, bearded man to the ground, an act that almost gets our friend thrown out of the hotel.

        Such willingness to please whoever might be demonstrating any pleasure in him—a rare situation for the Tramp—is displayed at several moments in his short films, generally getting him, through his momentarily sexual confusion, into even further trouble much like Harpo’s more physical attraction to both female and male legs is a source of constant rejection and disdain. Even before the Tramp, in George Nichols 1914 short The Film Johnnie, Chaplin’s display of such sexual pliability causes further problems for his character who, just for a moment mistakes the gestures of another male movie-goer as being meant as a come-on.

       If nothing else the sexual shifts of Chaplin in these instances, suggests not only an attempt to please but a naive confusion of his own proper gender behavior.

       As for the rest of The Cure, Chaplin, as expected, brings chaos to the place by carrying along a huge portmanteau filled with enough bottles of liquor that when they are later discovered by the sanitarium manager, who orders them to be thrown away, they change the magic waters of the small hotel drinking pool into a festive punch bowl for the patrons who regularly come there to drink. By the time the Tramp returns to the lobby, he discovers that he is the only sober person in a mass of drunken dancers and revelers. The normally dour sanitarium folk have all been turned into rowdy celebrants, one man seen chasing after another for no other purpose, it appears, but to capture him and reward him a kiss, hug, or perhaps even more. Having been ordered to drink of the pool’s healing waters, who can blame the Tramp for joining in the fun?

      Clearly the girl can and does. But when she discovers that the pool has been polluted by alcohol, she forgives him and he, having once more fallen into normative heterosexual love, abstains from further drinking—at least temporarily. 

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).