James Parrott and Fred Guiol | Their Purple Moment / 1928

another fine mess

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Laurel (screenplay, uncredited) H.M. Walker (titles), James Parrott and Fred Guiol (directors, Guiol uncredited) Their Purple Moment / 1928

 

Just before Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel got married to each other’s sister in 1933, in the silent short of 1928 they were both married to wives who each week demanded that they had over their entire pay checks.

      Both had attempted to keep back a couple of dollars for their own expenses, but Ollie’s wife (Lyle Tayo) quickly discovers his hidden cache. It appears at film’s beginning that Stan Pincher (San Laurel’s name in this short) has been luckier, having stashed away a number of bills in a wallet he hides within a secret panel in a painting. While attempting to put his new dollar bill with others, however, he wife (Fay Holderness) observes his activities and sneaks back into the room later to replace his cash with paper tokens she’s been saving up to buy a pitcher.

      Sharing his good fortune with his friend Ollie, Stan and he decide to spend an evening on the town instead of hanging out their wives who have gathered to gossip, the neighborhood gossip (Patsy O’Brien) stopping by to join on the gab fest.

      Pretending to go bowling, the two run off to a nightclub with great steaks and performances by a group of little people, The Doll Family midgets.

        As they are about to enter, two men are thrown out of the place for their inability to pay, and their dates (Kay Deslys and Anita Garvin) are being held by the restaurant manager demanding payment, along with the Taxicab Driver (Leo Willis) who has been running the taxi the entire time their dates have been inside.

       Knowing that Stan is flushed with money, Ollie cavalierly offers to pay for the meal and for the taxi if the two women join him and his friend, a deal which they cinch by flirting with the two unsophisticated husbands.

       Ollie orders up large steaks, potatoes, beer, and sits ready to totally enjoy himself, when the cab driver returns to remind of the ongoing bill, even inviting him to join them in a meal.

       Meanwhile, “Miss Mischief,” the town gossip, has been walking by the restaurant at the very moment when Ollie and Stan enter it with girls on their arms, and she rushes off to report the news to their wives whom she has just left.

       As the tab increases, Stan checks his wallet just to be sure that his small financial windfall is still in place, discovering that they bills have been replaced by the tokens. He has a great deal of difficulty in trying to signal Ollie about their new situation, and when he finally does, the two determine to sneak out as the lights are lowered for the Doll Family’s performance.

       At that very moment, however, the waiter comes by with a full try, tripping on Stan’s crouching body, spilling it contents to the floor and forcing Stan to suddenly have to return to his chair as if nothing has happened.

       When the act is over, the two despair, wondering what could be worse—at the very same moment they spot their wives at the entrance, evidently set on having their own dinner at the place while forcing their husbands to suffer their impending shame.

        Another act is beginning, and again, as the lights dim, they attempt to make their escape. Once more at that very moment the waiter passes by, tripping over Stan’s semi-prone body, spilling everything to the floor and arousing the wrath of a nearby diner. And yet again Stan returns to his chair to pretend he is innocent of any involvement.

        Soon, however, the two bolt, running out and in through another door, racing past their wives who soon join the manager, waiter, and various others on their tail. Reaching the kitchen, their trapped, reacting the way any comedic actor worthy of his cinematic name does, throwing a pie into the waiter’s face, an egg at the cook, and other foodstuffs at those also chasing after them.

       Finally, their wives come to retrieve them, but we know for certain that they will remain in familial prison for months, even though Ollie tries to pretend that he was led astray by Stan, and he had no idea where they had been going or why the girls suddenly showed up to their table. Stan Laurel, as he so often is, remains speechless in the injustice of it all.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Raúl Ruiz | Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) / 1999, USA 2000

bending time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raúl Ruiz and Gilles Taurand (screenplay, based on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past), Raúl Ruiz (director) Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) / 1999, USA 2000

 

Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained, is not, as its title suggests, a film based on the last volume of Marcel Proust’s great Remembrance of Things Past, but rather a kind Proustian-like cut-up of the entire series of books, seen through the eyes of the character Proust (Marcello Mazzarella) in the last days of his life. Through photographs and the associations of the great writer’s mind, Ruiz brilliantly deconstructs Proust’s fiction, telling a grand story not through chronological events or even through a consistent narrative logic, but presenting us with a series of haunting and beautiful images of a world gone by, a world of floating women dressed in beautiful gowns and well-groomed handsome men haunting and taunting them with their affairs with other women and men. This gossipy, chattering, vengeful and often politically blind Parisian society creates a kind of dark symphony—what Proust describes as “a music that keeps coming back”—throughout the film which, with the poignant music of Jorge Arriagada, suggests themes which are embedded, repeated, and forgotten.

      At moments the director creates overlapping images which suggest multiple realities overlaying each other. At other times the film repeats itself, slightly altering the flow of occurrences. Surrealist images—including a room filled with black top hats each holding a pair of white gloves, a scene in which the partygoers are turned to stone for the child Proust’s cinematic entertainment, and a scene in a male bordello that features a sadomasochistic beating of the Baron Charlus (a beating which dissatisfies him in its timidity) by a young street-boy with Proust voyeuristically peering in on the action from a ceiling window. But mostly Ruiz’s camera focuses on the lavish parties and funerals of these wealthy Frenchman, in which people, along with hundreds of canapés and glasses of champagne, are swallowed up and spit out with sarcastic spite. Behind it all, we perceive, are the trenches filled with the dead men of World War I, a reality which will soon completely bring this close-minded society to its end. But as in Proust’s long work, the figures of his belle-epoch do not have clue about what lies ahead, and in fact are clueless about anything including the significance of their actions or lack of. Any coherent “meaning” we might glean from Ruiz’s stunningly gorgeous piece of cinema can come only from how we ourselves interpret these images, what we make of them. And as the critic J. Hoberman has pointed out, the film almost seems to be a film about a man who through his words created a kind of cinema himself.

      In short, this film is less about “events” than it is about the process of film-making or creating a fiction, focusing on how the mind perceives what the body’s eyes see, how it edits/processes those images, and how it puts them together or recalls them. All of Proust’s central characters—Odette de Créy (Catherine Deneuve), Gilberte (Emmanuelle Béart), Le Baron de Charlus (John Malkovich), Robert Saint-Loup (Pascal Greggory), Albertine (Chiara Mastrioianni), Morel (Vincent Perez), Madame Verdurin (Marie-France Pisier), and Madame Cottard (Dominique Labourier), even, for an instant, Swann (Bernard Pautrat)—are here, but Ruiz centers little on the continuity of their interactions, and even when it is quite apparent what they doing behind the scenes; for example Saint-Loup’s affair with the actress Rachel (Elsa Zylberstein) or his later sexual infatuation with working-class infantrymen. Events never truly coalesce into a “plot.” Indeed, Ruiz purposely, at times, mystifies the interrelationships of his figures, merely suggesting the lesbian bondings of some of his women or hinting at the Baron’s vicious political views and his pedophile tendencies with regard to the young Marcel. 

       Accordingly, even those who have never set their eyes upon a page of Remembrance of Things Past can enjoy this film. Indeed, if one has read the book, although it might help to enlighten certain scenes, it will more likely frustrate the moviegoer, since nothing comes of it. So removed from action is Ruiz’s Proust, as he shyly if debonairly winds his way through these wealthy charlatans, that he seems—as is more concretely revealed in the scene at the gay bordello—more like of voyeur than an actor. Of course, that is precisely the director’s role in filmmaking, to catch his actors “in the act” and mold them into a more coherent reality. But the “reality” here is not as coherent or orderly as a thing in process, as—much like Penelope of the Odysseus myth—Ruiz weaves and unweaves his tapestry again and again, as the various Proustian figures dance around one another as in a grand ball.  

     The point to all this, quite obviously, is that there can be no one truth, one way of seeing things, no day, as the voice of Proust asserts at the beginning, when things truly “change.” There is no true past: it gets reconstructed through memory and forgetfulness, through perception and distortion. Proust’s grand effort to “regain time” is “the frivolity of the dying.” Time is something that is meant to be lost, just as the figures of Proust’s Paris—of Woolf’s England, of O’Neill’s seaside Connecticut—would one day suddenly disappear.

     In the very last scene of Ruiz’s remarkable film, we see the teenage Proust being watched by Proust the elder, while between them the seated figure of the Baron de Charlus looks out at the boy, a demon about to descend upon his victim. We know the result. We see it in through sufferings of the elder Proust in his cork-lined room being cared for by his faithful Céleste. But there is no going back, no fixing of the clock. No matter how much one desires it, time cannot be recaptured nor held back.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2014).

Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo | Angelo (Angel) / 2024

the journalist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo (screenwriter and director) Angelo (Angel) / 2024 [27 minutes]

 

Poor Angelo (Eduard Galiá), having just broken up with his girlfriend Justina after the two had left their small hometown and moved to Barcelona. He’s not even happy with his heavenly name.

      In Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo’s short coming out film, however, with everything awash in a golden glow, we don’t have be sorry for long, however. Angelo simply takes out a lovely fresh gray-bound journal and begins to write, describing a life every young 20-some year-old gay man might have longed for.

     If for some time after his breakup he is lonely, dissatisfied with other women, and tired from hard work, this enterprising young man is soon visited by his high-school friend Marco, now living in England. Beautiful Marco (Sergio Pérez), so Angelo soon discovers, is now gay. And suddenly our angel is quite ready to put away his halo and the blue panties he’s kept from his relationship with Justina to try out gay sex.

 

     He’s a quick study under Marco’s gentle kisses and embraces, and within moments its clear that all the time, he realizes, that he has perhaps secretly been gay. All right, that’s not the way most of us experience coming out, with a sudden thrust of pleasure, never before having imagined that we might have contrary sexual desires, but Angelo is just lucky.

      Suddenly he begins to notice other male bodies, manly lips, buttocks, muscles—you know, all those things to which gay men are naturally attracted. And just as quickly our little angel is delighted with himself, after being a good boy all his youth, to do and feel something his parents wouldn’t have approved of. That’s called “self-identifying,” one of the first joyful things that happen to young gay men, their recognition that there’s something pleasurable in being queer, different from all the others. It’s one of the minor joys of coming out.

      But for me the major joy of coming out was simply the sex. And Angelo seems just as happy to write about his experiences from afar, voyeuristically watching the boys in the beautiful Barcelona sunlight. Somehow this writer and director can’t imagine that such a cute kid might now very much want to walk up to one of those local beauties and ask him to join him in his bed. Or that Angelo might suddenly get a yearning to visit some of the local gay bars.

 

     Poor Angelo, day and night he just keeps filling up his journal with his lovely observations of discovering the pleasures of being a gay man, apparently without experiencing any of them.

      This is a very pretty movie with far too little action.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).

King Vidor | The Other Half / 1919

 without feelings

by Douglas Messerli

 

King Vidor (screenwriter and director) The Other Half / 1919

 

King Vidor’s 1919 film, The Other Half, shares the theme of World War I soldiers returning home and the “buddy” themes of Harry Lorraine’s The Lads of the Village of the same year and the later William A. Wellman masterwork Wings of 1927. The returning hometown friends turned corporal, Jimmy Davis (David Butler) and office Donald Trent (Charles Meredith) are very similar, in fact, to the hometown pairing of Air Force partners in Wellman’s Wings.

      Beginning with the return home, one might almost argue that Trent has through his military experience been converted to socialism or even possibly an early form of US communism in his new commitment to the elimination of class distinctions and his determination to work alongside the everyday men in his rich father’s mill, built through ruthless Capitalism based on Martin Trent’s (Alfred Allen’s) philosophy of keeping all personal feelings out of business, interrupted later by his son’s fellow feelings for the human race.

      Arguing against his father, who wants him to immediately become President of his factory, Donald insists on working alongside the likes of Johnnie and his girlfriend, Jennie Jones (Zasu Pitts) who also works in the plant.

      One can imagine that if Vidor had been only a little more daring and inclined to social and sexual issues, he might have shored up the male bonding between Jimmy and Donald as the two share lunches and Jimmy’s homelife, but the differences between the two in this film are so different than when Donald returns to the Trent mansion and interacts with his equally wealthy girlfriend, Katherine Boone (played by Vidor’s wife Florence) we can only imagine, what we soon realize as that Donald’s new ethic as merely an experiment.

     While it lasts, it does appear that that something truly interesting might occur in this film, particularly when Jennie faints in the factory laundry and is brought in the hovel in which she and Jimmy share by Donald and his friend. Donald calls up Katherine to come and look after Jennie. At first it appears that she will never be able to make the transformation, as dressed in a proper outfit and furs she arrives at the worker’s quarters and nearly faints at the sight.

      Yet she soon gets over her aversion, wanting to know more people like Jimmy and Jennie, not for charity’s sake, but just to expand her personal vision of the world. She brings flowers and chocolates to Jennie and, even more importantly, when she discovers that the worker’s newspaper The Beacon—one of the few pleasures of the workers’ lives—which is about the cease publishing; Katherine seeks out the editor and offers financial support and her own writing skills.

       As Jennie’s health improves, Donald’s father dies, forcing his son to take over the company. And from that moment on we realize that the ideals Donald has seemingly brought back from his military training are immediately abandoned. Even when Jimmy appears on a list of possible candidates for foreman, Donald, heeding his father’s words, refuses to be the one to make the final decision, suggesting his male secretary select someone for the position; by accident he chooses Jimmy, which leads Donald’s old friend to believe that the relationship between them still exists. But when, as foreman, he argues for plant improvements, Donald himself turns down any new financial investments.

       Katherine, moreover, who has been converted to a more egalitarian approach to life, demonstrates her uncertainly when Donald asks her to marry him, demanding more time to decide.

       In the meantime, a wall collapses on the workers, hospitalizing Jimmie who temporarily loses his sight. When Katherine brings up the issue, first reported by The Beacon, Donald doesn’t even appear to be aware that it was Jimmy who was the hurt statistic, and he never even bothers to visit him. Katherine refuses his marriage proposal. And when the workers threaten to go on strike she encourages Jimmy to seek out a meeting with Donald to explain to him what is about to happen if changes are not made.

      The final scenes of this film have been lost, but evidently Jimmy succeeds, Donald repents his industrialist behavior, Katherine and Donald are married, and Jimmy regains his eyesight. It would have been interesting to see how that all came about, how the meeting with Jimmy and Donald was treated, and whether their old friendship truly played a role or was only a recognized reiteration of Katherine’s criticisms of him. But we cannot imagine, given the vastly different worlds in which they both live, that there might be any permanent friendship on a personal level, despite Donald’s return to his former ideals.

       In the end this film seems to be primarily about social change, the personal being only an expression of values instead of body and blood as they are in Wellman’s love story or even Harry Lorraine’s deeply felt “buddy” fantasy. Often described as one of quartet of films influenced by Vidor’s embracement of Christian Scientism, this film represents a moral position moral rather than matters of the heart.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Jacques Rivette | La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967

beauty of destroyer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Gruault and Jacques Rivette (screenplay, based on the novel by Denis Diderot), Jacques Rivette (director) La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967

 

Jacques Rivette’s 1966 picture La Religieuse (The Nun), based on Denis Diderot’s novel of the 18th century, is really four major episodes patched together into a full film. It’s not precisely that the work does not weave together these parts, but that despite the fact that they all center on the adventures of a young innocent, Suzanne Simonin (the always radiant Anna Karina), they offer such entirely perspectives of the period in unreconcilable ways.

      Perhaps I should say there are actually five perspectives, beginning with the seemingly loving home life of the young beauty, which once her elder two sisters are married off with large dowries—a requirement of the day—leave nothing for her, which means for the family that she will have to be sent off to a convent wherein she will nicely disappear from their consciences.

      Surely there must be several books on how second sons and third daughters throughout the 17th-19th centuries were horribly destroyed by the fact that their wealthy parents simply couldn’t afford to marry off and support their younger children.

      Dozens of novels and plays deal with that very fact, usually leading to comical (in the case of Tom Jones) and tragic results of the financial dealings of the gentile lives of their parents. As if they were all “drunken sailors,” parents had to determine what to do with their later offspring whom they simply could not equally support. In a sense, that is even at the heart of many of Jane Austen’s fictions. When marriage equals money, it produces serious problems even up until the 20th-century when in Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles, the temporary husband of the heavy-drinking Bette Davis is forced to play a billiards game in order to settle the matters of the dowry. Even the peaceful family drama of I Remember Mama must pretend to deal with such issues. Women quite obviously needed to be sold off to their husbands, and younger sons were truly a nuisance. Only if you were the heir apparent might you expect to receive a decent survival in a world, particularly for women, it was not a nice place if you didn’t have cash to spend in it.

     

       What is worse is that the beautiful, well raised Suzanne, like Tom Jones, is the product of an illicit romance her religious mother, in this case, has had with another, unnamed man. Her guilt about her actions is confused with her intentions to send her daughter into hell—supposedly a life in a highly religious convent—in order to resolve their financial difficulties and absolve her own guilt.

     Suzanne, given her careful upbringing, is deeply religious young woman; but also is a proto-feminist, who resents the very idea of being sent off, to what Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang has described as a true prison. As Chang beautifully described the second perspective of this movie, it “might be one of the greatest prison movies ever made and certainly one of the most controversial.” For that is precisely, after the young girl, dressed in the wedding dress young novices must wait to wed their lives to God, rejects the “marriage,” declaring that she has no vocation in her commitment to religious conviction, perceived, obviously, as a scandal—after all, 

her mother has also had to pay—through secretly pawned jewelry—for her entry into the convent! Everything in this world is based on financial transactions; a reality, alas, time has not altered.

     Sent back to the convent, this time with the truth of her birth revealed, the beautiful Suzanne, who a bit like the beauty in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, resented by her sisters and mother, is sent off to a castle from which there is no escape—but, in this case, without even a loving father who might come to rescue her. There are elements in this story even of Snow White, a woman forced to suffer torture, particularly after the death of the one caring Mother Superior, Madame de Moni (Micheline Presle), and endless sleep without food—along with torture and beatings.

      Her white knight is the improbable lawyer, Dom Morel (Francisco Rabal), who warns her of what she will have to endure if she brings a lawsuit to escape the clutches of those who have imprisoned her. He even foretells, as what we later perceive is far too true, that she may not win her claim to remain in the world outside the convent walls. The society who has locked her up is determined, for numerous reasons—hypocritical morality, financial concerns, and simply dispassion—to keep her where she is. And, moreover, the social structure does not easily accept change, while the radical alterations she has demanded stand against the very bulwarks of the current French culture, with only a few outspoken figures attempting to totally transform the culture in which they exist. One must imagine an outspoken philosopher, if he or she might still exist, speaking out against the imprisonment of blacks or the immigrant children in our own time: their voices might be loud, but they are seldom heard. Suzanne loses her case.

       Fortunately, or one might proclaim “unfortunately,” Morel helps the suffering Suzanne to escape to another convent, this one a seemingly loving enclave, where she is treated as a kind of special supplicant to the Mother Superior, Madame de Chelles (Liselotte Pulver), a lustful lesbian who is determined to take the new beauty under her personal “wing,” while others, obviously comfortable in this Sapphic paradise, rush laughingly around one another with joy, behaving nothing like women devoted to God. Only Sister Thérèse, the former favorite of Madame de Chelles, warns the new member of their order of the dangers she must face.

      The young innocent nun is confused—by everything, her newly aroused feelings of joy and contentment, her own personal doubts about her religious commitment, and, of course, her own inability to find vocation within the confines of the life she has vowed to live. Confessing to the local monk, she is advised to stay far from the truly “Satanic” influences of Madame de Chelles—ironically a term that had previously been applied to herself. Is she Satan or is Satan present in the world all around her? She has no way, apparently, of even comprehending evil.

         Sent away through a complaint by the Mother Superior (or perhaps by his own tender feelings for the nun to whom he must attend) the elder confessor simply disappears, a new, younger monk taking his position, a man who confesses to his confessor that he feels very much in the same position as her, locked away in a religiously sanctimonious society in which he does not feel at home.

       What also becomes quickly apparent to everyone but Suzanne herself is that he too has fallen in love with her, forcing her to keep a distance from her Mother Superior while he plots her escape. For people like us, he confides, there is only escape or a jump into suicide, his words re-planting the seeds of what Suzanne has already imagined for herself.

 

      Suzanne agrees to his plot, but quickly realizes, when he attempts to rape her, that her actions have been for no avail; that he simply plans another kind of imprisonment for her. And indeed, when his plot is revealed to authorities, he, himself, is imprisoned. She has no choice but to again escape, this time into the indenturement of a cleaning woman for a provincial French household. The newspapers and gossip of the day warn her even away from this rustic world, and she chooses to run again, this time into the poverty of the streets, begging for a few coins in order to survive.

      Once more she is seemingly saved by a passing figure, a well-dressed woman who takes her home in order to protect her. Suzanne is once more pampered and given a beautiful dress to wear until she realizes, at the evening party, that the role she has been chosen to play this time is a courtesan in a high-class bordello. The approach of a customer forces her again to flee, this time through the window the earlier monk had suggested, to her death.

       If this is a true melodrama, it is also an amazingly well-wrought and beautifully filmed New Wave protest against religion, and most particularly, the Roman Catholic Church. Faced with serious challenges by French censorship authorities, Rivette worked time and again to bring the language into a context that did not threaten the church leaders, even adding a ridiculously long introductory statement which expressed that this was, after all, a fiction and did not represent the way the Church had in any way truly behaved.

      All lies, of course, and in a later 2007 film, The Duchess of Langeais, this based on a story by Balzac, some of the same territory is repeated, since the major figure of the work is also incarcerated and tortured in a convent. Religion, we know, has not always been the best source of protection for its believers. Ask the thousand and young men and women preyed upon by priests, or the masses of innocents who have gone to their early graves believing that what the Church spoke was the Holy Word of God.

     Even though Rivette had the permission of the censors, when the movie was about to open the French press and religious figures shouted it down. Only in Cannes did it finally receive a fair hearing, and even then the film did not appear in Paris theaters until the following year.

     Just as importantly, Rivette’s film is not only about religion but about the restraints put upon women, then and now. Suzanne may have never been quite able to comprehend her role as an outspoken representative for her sex—she was clearly just as uncomfortable in the ordinary world as she was in the world of the sacred—but she knew something was wrong, that being forced into a role in which she didn’t feel comfortable to embrace she was being robbed of her identity. Diderot, long before Rivette, realized that instead of being asked, she was being told how to behave and survive in a world not at all accommodating to her own sensibility. Rebelling against the very idea, again and again, she finally was left no choice finally but to destroy herself in the process. The “MeToo” movement, and numerous other contemporary issues all seem, in this film, too close to bone to watch it comfortably. This is an edgy movie even today given the various choices of life it offers its hero: dark and brutal devotion, worlds of sexual difference—lesbianism or licentious heterosexuality—utter slavery, or begging on the streets. Being deeply religious, apparently, is a dangerous occupation for a beautiful young girl.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2019).

Carl Theodor Dreyer | Du skal ære din hustru (Master of the House) / 1925

the great tyrant

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer and Sven Rindom (screenplay, based on Rindom’s play), Carl Theodor Dreyer (director) Du skal ære din hustru (Master of the House) / 1925

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s sly 1925 silent film, Master of the House is a story about a great tyrant, Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer), who narcissistically rules over his domain with total disdain for those who live within—his wife, Ida (Astrid Holm), his children, Karen (Karin Nellemose), Dreng and Barnet and his former nanny, “Mads” (Mathilde Nielsen), who volunteers to help out his wife from time to time—until finally, in one way or another, they all are in psychological duress, the youngest crying endlessly as the “howler monkey” spits out his orders, Dreng forced to stand in the corner while the family eats their frugal supper (even butter is scraped away from their sandwiches in order to slather more of the tyrant’s bread) simply because he has dared play in the streets with friends a bit beyond his allotted time, and Karen being terrified of not meeting his strict demands. When the hard-working Ida is finally sent away to a place to rest—part of a plot that Mads has hatched with Ida’s mother, Alvilda Kryer (Clara Schønfeld), his wife has a nervous breakdown. Sound familiar?

 

     Unlike that grand tyrant of our times, however, Viktor, at least according to Ida’s testimony, is not truly a bad man, but, having lost his business to bankruptcy, has simply transferred his anger to his devoted and now suffering family. And the wise Mads—as the family members have renamed Mathilde—who has watched this monster with a smoldering sense of horror for some time, has plotted out his authoritarian demise. Having safely transplanted Ida to a safe and hidden location, she begins to run the house in a way that forces the tyrant to realize the errors of his ways.

 

    Unlike Ida, she forces him to participate in the daily care of house and family members, which Viktor, recalling her sometimes harsh penalties for misbehavior in his youth, reluctantly obeys. Dreyer brilliantly portrays an increasing series of daily upbraids and orders as she forces him to help with the laundry, now hanging in the kitchen where he has previously forbidden Ida to place it, to help with food preparation, and to light his own fires, fetch his own shoes, and even care for the children he is rearing. Such an exhausting schedule not only does not permit his frequent visits to a local pub, but gradually helps him to realize just how much work his wife has endured previously alone.

     “Mads” is indeed a more than a bit “mad,” but underneath it all, the director helps us realize, she does have a heart of gold, and realizes that it has become necessary to retrain her early pupil. And when he truly shows signs of breaking because he sorely misses his loving wife, she summons the girl home, forcing her to hide in a cabinet for a brief period so that she might witness Viktor’s transformations.

 

    It the entire shift in behavior seems a bit unlikely, and if we wonder whether it might represent a more permanent psychological change, Dreyer’s deft handling of this domestic satire is, nonetheless, entertaining and, more importantly, educational. Beware you male chauvinists, he seems to be claiming in a day when few other males had arrived at this conclusion, the day of reckoning will soon arrive! Ida’s mother even suggests a new career for the baffled tyrant, writing out a check so that he might purchase an available optometrist's shop—perhaps since he has simply come to better see how things are.

      Coming just after Dreyer’s masterful study of a homosexual behavior, Michael, and only 3 years before his significant portrait of Joan of Arc, Master of the House seems purposefully like the lighter piece it is. Yet, the Danes certainly seemed to comprehend its metaphorical implications in the manner of the nearby Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen’s earlier play, A Doll’s House. The film was well-received in Denmark, and is now recognized as a gem of silent-film productions.

      If nothing else, in its straight-forward and spare direction, much like the determinedly level-headed Mads, Dreyer’s film makes it point almost immediately. In just the first 7 minutes of the film, we, like Mads, perceive what’s truly amiss in the Frandsen household, which the rest of the film demonstrates how to solve. If most of Dreyer’s films do not have such seemingly easy solutions, shifting as they do between deep religious and personal compulsions, Master of the House, nevertheless, explores the boundaries between explicit expressions of authority and individual needs and desires, which ultimately can and do trump superficial ideas of power.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2017).