January 10: Sumurun (1920 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★

I was a little underwhelmed here though you can see Lubitsch trying as many audience appeals as he can.  More than anything, I found that this story didn’t engage me at all.  It’s long, it has interesting turns, and it’s romantic, but I never plugged into it the way I did in, say, I Don’t Want to Be a Man.  The story seemed very conventional to me, though I suspect a contemporary audience might have responded more strongly, knowing the film from the play it’s based on.

That said, two aspects of the film were very worthwhile.  For one, I enjoyed the visuals a lot.  The film is chock full of beautiful sets draped with orientalist fabric in the bold patterns of early 20s cinema.  The sets are immense, too – huge, exotic exteriors of palaces and streetscapes; interior courtyards; plazas teeming with extras.  And everyone dressed in orientalist fantasy costume that blends Northern India, Syria, Ancient Egypt and Morocco.  Whenever my interest in the various love triangles in the film flagged, I could always find something worth my attention in the scene in front of me.

I also liked the comedy in the film.  I kept thinking of Shakespeare while I was watching the life-and-death-and-love drama of the upper-class leads regularly being undercut by the comedy of their servants.  The cloth merchant desperately seeks time with Sumurun, but she is the favorite of the very mean and possessive Sheik.  Meanwhile, the cloth merchant’s two servants, dressed in stripped tights, cavort and roll around the shop poking at each other and satirizing their master; Sumurun’s supporter in the harem jokes around while manipulating and fooling the eunuchs and directing the other women in the harem to help the couple unite; and the Sheik’s guards first toss out the slave trader and then run rapidly after him making goofy faces.  There’s an awful lot of lightness about the humor here, and it’s one of the film’s most endearing aspects.

Otherwise, the two love triangles are simply too diverse to engage much sympathy.  The Sheik is certainly scary, and Yannaia is an original gold-digger. But neither Sumurun nor her cloth merchant love are particularly engaging because you simply don’t see enough of them to care about them, and while we feel some sympathy for the hapless hunchback Yaggar early in the film, he spends much of the last part of the film asleep in a bag.  With the focus so spread out in Sumurun, it’s hard to be very engaged with the film’s characters.

Sumurun is certainly worthwhile for its great visuals, and I got several smiles from comic touches here, too.  And this is my introduction to Pola Negri, a silent star whose name I was very familiar with but whose work I’d never seen.  I can tell she has a real presence on film and will look forward to seeing her more.  Overall, though, I’m not sure I’d recommend this film for the silent movie initiate because of how hard it is to engage.

January 9: Anna Boleyn (1920 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

Anna Boleyn was a pleasant surprise to me.  I knew Lubitsch could direct comedy, but I hadn’t expected he’d be so capable at drama.  And historical drama at that. While a lot of this kind of film can drag badly, I was plugged into the characters all the way –especially King Henry, Anna and Henry Norris – and I was invested all the way through.

The most memorable performance here is Emil Jannings as Henry VIII.  Jannings’ is  a tour-de-force silent portrayal of a complex sociopath.  His Henry is impulsive, young, and very hormone-driven.  Obsessed with Anna, he divorces Catherine, but his affections then wander to Jane (and any garden nymph that happens to be around) until some court machinations stimulate his jealousy of Henry Norris.  But Jannings’ Henry is not off-the-rails crazy; Jannings finds a coherence and even a likeability in Henry VIII that you’d think would come from a method actor’s approach to the character rather than from someone so well-versed in classic theater.  With a cut of the eye or shift of posture, Jannings communicates even tiny variations in the King.

The other characters don’t have the complexity of Henry, but they’re still sympathetic throughout.  Anna experiences many conflicts – desire/duty, King Henry/Henry Norris, sacrifice/happiness – and we watch her navigate these contradictions throughout the film with, however, a little more mope than we’d see in her portrayal today. For his part, Henry Norris goes from one bad decision to the next as he inadvertently makes Anna’s life more difficult, and he’s also tripped up by sheer, melodramatic bad luck. But Anna Boleyn is melodramatic, and we’re carried along in Anna’s tribulations and Henry’s inefficacy by the excellent story more than by the range of their respective emotions.  Anna mostly suffers here; Henry gets angry and suffers.  As melodrama is wont to do, the last part of the story moves to elaborate pathos with the baby Elizabeth and the treacherous Duke of Norfolk.

I was impressed by the art direction here, too.  There are great sets with oversized furniture crowding rooms, and there are castle and church exteriors full of extras in period clothes.  In fact, the costumes here are wonderful to look at, an interesting amalgam of 20s style and English Renaissance.  I several times noticed that a woman was wearing a scarf pulled around in flapper style, for example.  But whatever the style, the costumes are wonderfully complex and elegant.

This is a film that’s definitely worth the two-hour run time.  What a pleasure to discover this story-telling side of the great comic director.

January 8: I Don't Want to Be a Man/Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

This movie is charming; Lubitsch’s touch is all over it.

While Princess goes for the big, obvious and ham-handed, I Don’t Want to Be a Man has scene-after-scene of cute subversions or affectionate critiques.  The treatment of the governess comes to mind as a small example of this affection.  After she squashes Ossi’s smoking, the governess picks up the cigarette herself to give it a try, and to her delight, discovers she likes it.  Later, the somewhat unattractive older woman trembles with delight after the dashing, new guardian kisses her hand, and the wiggle in her walk humanizes her with affirmative satire.  This is the mood that infuses the entire movie and makes it so light.

Ossie here reminds me of Ossie in Princess, too.  Early in this film, she pouts; fusses with her father, governess and guardian; and throws things about in her room.  There’s a clear continuity in the two.  But when she dons her male apparel, things change for her.  She’s soon made to give way on the subway and bear up when her toe is stepped on.  She’s then bounced around trying to get to the coat check and falls ill smoking a cigar.  It’s these later experiences that give her a humanity – a sympathy – that the Oyster Princess never has.  It’s funny watching this woman trying to be what she imagines a man to be, but we feel for her unexpected difficulties, too, and sympathize with her in a way we don't for the princess in the other film.

The most fun in this movie is the multiple transgressions that Lubitsch piles up as soon as Ossie begins her cross-dressing odyssey.  She looks like a young, pampered boy, and the image of her in a tux is transgressive on its own.  Many of her actions violate social standards in a comic way, as when the ladies joke about this dandy powdering his nose.  Even scenes when she is dancing with the women are comically breaking barriers as the women take the lead from the “boy” and sling him around.  Some of the best humor in the film comes from scenes like the one with Ossie trying to draw her guardian’s girlfriend away.  When the girlfriend responds to Ossie, it’s an ironic revenge but one we don't typically see on film between two women.  And a transgressive one because we're actually seeing a woman responding to another woman.  Scenes like this one are what Lubitsch’s comedy is about when he’s at his best.

 

Two scenes in this film still made me squirm, over 90 years after it was made.  When the sick Ossie heads to the restroom at the club, I felt the tension increase as I waited for her to choose a restroom.  As she headed toward the women’s, I tensed up in anticipation about  how the women in the restroom would react.  I relaxed as she changed her mind, but I redoubled my anticipation as she headed toward the men’s.  I could hardly imagine how that would go and was honestly relieved when she changed her mind there, too.  Lubitsch led me 100% of the way through that ebb and flow of anticipation.  


The pinnacle of transgression in the film, though, is when the guardian kisses the Ossie/boy, and I’m still not exactly sure what that was about.  I don’t know if such affection was accepted at the time, or if the guardian is simply a profoundly bisexual man. All of those questions wrapped up with the added dimension of the cross-dressing by Ossie.  With all these levels already at play, the urbane Lubitsch ends the film with the guardian referring back to the kiss in as cool and matter-of-fact manner as possible.  That whole episode is masterful, transgressive  comedy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this little film, even with the problems of continuity and film quality.  What an engaging, fun tour.

January 7: The Oyster Princess/Die Austernprinzessin (1919 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★

Lubitsch might have been too busy in 1919 to put equal effort into all his film projects because the humor in this one doesn’t quite get to the level of that in The Doll.  The film is funny, but the humor here is more broad than that of The Doll and relies on exaggerated gestures and ridiculous situations more than the deft stokes we see in the other film.

Of course, it’s Lubitsch, so there are some points worth thinking about in The Oyster Princess.  For one, I liked the parody of the American industrialist, or in this case, oyster magnate.  Quaker is an oversized guy with long sideburns who is unable to light his own cigar, comb his own hair or even turn over in bed.  He’s surrounded by a coterie of black servants dressed in colonial jackets to perform all such actions for him.  His daughter, Ossie, is a spoiled, petulant brat who breaks and tears things up when she doesn’t get her every whim met.  She and her father have nothing but money and believe they can get anything they want with their money, including a European prince.  It’s an interesting perspective on how Europeans might have viewed the Americans flooding Europe in 1919 after the war.  Lubitsch also parodies the American love of big here:  the Americans live in a gigantic palace that requires a large map, they have giant dinners with massive quantities of food, and the guests are waited on by giant numbers of servants.  Even Quaker and his Ossie have a large number of servants who follow them around.  The Europeans, meanwhile, are threadbare and have a hard life, as we witness when the Prince borrows some money for a night on the town but finds his money nicked by his friends bit by bit.

I also enjoyed the large-scale, spectacle choreography here, a practice that Busby Berkley would take to its apotheosis in the 30s.  Ossie’s bath sequence is a precursor to an Ethel Merman performance, and the delirious foxtrot interlude clearly points to what the Gold Diggers will be up to in 1933.  Even the foodservice for the wedding banquet is a large-scale performance number aided by its rhythmic editing, and we witness a mass, women's boxing match that is choreographed right down to the fighters' departure.

Oyster Princess doesn’t win by its use of the Lubitsch touch.  This is a broader, exaggerated humor that shows Lubitsch can use different, if less effective comic devices.  It’s a funny film, but these are jokes we can see in other movies.

January 5: The Doll/Die Puppe (1919 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

This is a funny movie.  It’s 1919, but there are already filmic elements that persist to today.  The cute, smart-aleck kid, for one, reminds me of the kids in so many TV sit-coms today, and the story is a romantic comedy that ends in marriage.  I was a little surprised to see these already so well-developed in 1919.

The Doll is also another early film that plays with question of what a human is.  The doll here is not far from the machine that will imitate Maria eight years later in Metropolis, and we see some of the same concern about the mechanization of humanity in Eisenstein’s Strike and Potemkin.  And, later, in Charlie Chaplin.   Somnambulism suggests a human body without human consciousness, too, and that plays a role in The Doll as it will the following year in Dr. Caligari.  And all this brings to mind the human/nonhuman intersection in Island of Lost Souls (1933), where animal and human consciousness battle in bodies that are human and animal.  But all these later films take a serious approach to the subject; in The Doll, Lubitsch uses his mechanized creature as a device for satire and for comedy.

And The Doll bursts with good humor.  There is satire about specific institutions like the monastery and the court, and there is satire about human nature as we see the relatives checking out their future inheritance and finding a chamber pot.  I don’t know exactly what to make out of Lancelot, the hero, but much of the comedy revolves around him.  He’s either gay or just a dandy who is inexperienced and insecure around women, but whatever his situation, his character leads us to a lot of the laughs in the film.  The chase scene as he runs around the city pursued by the nubile women is very funny -- and a device we still see in comedy today -- and there is additional humor as the sequence is intercut with the occasional aside of the sulking boyfriends the women have abandoned to pursue royalty. Likewise, the wedding is memorably comic. I’m especially fond of the horses that pull Lancelot's carriage at one point.

I also like the opening of the film a lot.  The Doll starts with the Lubitsch himself taking miniature props out of a box and arranging a set that the film soon cuts to with Hilarious walking down the hillside of the prop.  I’d guess this self-reflective, anti-mimetic  gesture arises from the same modern theatrical background that Bertold Brecht was contemporaneously participating in.  But Lubitsch’s comic sensibility comes into play here because the set he constructs for the audience is impossibly small; in fact, his “distancing effect” of showing the props as fake only add to a mimetic sense by making the opening itself feel real.  But this first scene underscores the theatrical irreality of the rest of The Doll’s sets.

I like Lubitsch’s comedy, whether it’s the “Lubitsch Touch” or whatever.  Never broad or heavy-handed, Lubitsch is deft with his humor.  He brings an intelligent lightness to his satire and a delicacy to his situational comedy. 

It was a pleasure to find that touch again in this film.

January 4: War Horse (2011 -- Steven Spielberg)

★★★

This movie doesn’t set any new standards in film, but it’s a good watch.  Instead of drawing from the action/adventure tradition of American film, Spielberg is mining the melodrama here.  I felt manipulated throughout the film, and usually in a way to evoke tears: Albert and Joey plow the field, Ted sells Joey, Cpt. Nicholls gets shot…..  But I didn’t care because I felt for the characters in front of me, especially for the horse, Joey.

War Horse hearkens back to older anti-war films like All’s Quiet on the Western Front with its détente on the front lines. And war here corrupts, damages, breaks or destroys everything.  Even Joey, an animal, experiences traumatic loss because of the war.  The film also looks to other types of melodrama.  The end of the movie, supposedly in England, looks every bit like the Midwest during the depression in Grapes of Wrath with its silhouettes and bright backlighting.  And both film citations work great.

There isn’t a single surprise in this story, but at least one of sequences is unforgettable.  What Spielberg accomplished at the opening of Saving Private Ryan with the landing at Normandy he duplicated with Joey panicked and running through the trench lines getting entangled in barbed wire and dragging it with him until he can run no further.  That is one powerful film sequence.

You’d hardly say War Horse is creative or ground-breaking, but it’s a compellingly entertaining film that certainly had me engaged throughout its 2-1/2 hour, episodic run.  It’s emotional and moving -- a good quality time at the movies.

January 1: The Skin I Live In/La piel que habito (2011 -- Pedro Almodovar)

★★★★

This is a movie I liked a lot.  I rediscovered everything I like about Almodovar here, and he has it all under more control than he sometimes has recently.

I watched The Skin I Live In as something like a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but one that’s incredibly magnified and distorted through a gay perspective.  In Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, for example, a playboy has a boat accident that results in an innocent woman’s blindness.  The playboy then becomes a brain surgeon and cures the woman.  The Skin I Live In also starts with an initiation accident, but the film then goes off in a series of ridiculously unlikely consequences as the wife commits suicide, the daughter has a mental breakdown and is raped, and the father kidnaps the rapist and transforms the rapist’s gender and appearance to resemble that of his lost wife.  And the transgendered rapist is then raped by the father’s hitherto unknown brother.  Almodovar’s film is clearly in the same line of melodrama as Sirk's, but Skin I Live In intensifies the already-intense melodrama tone and adds a dollop of interest in gender identity and even horror.

And the film is peppered through with themes that Almodovar regularly returns to – identity, sexuality, mothers, the hidden.  There are hidden identities and identities that change.  Mothers try to protect their sons but become involved as agents in the spiraling action.  There are gay relationships and straight relationships, but that becomes confused as Vincente becomes Vera and is involved with the two brothers, Roberto and Zeca, in different ways.  The Skin I Live In doubles characters and actions to create a wonderfully complicated mix of themes and characters.

And as Almodovar keeps all the characters and stories in balance, he does so by creating striking images of beauty and surprise.  One of the more surprising images occurs as a man in a tiger outfit walks up to the estate, rings the bell and is admitted by Marilia.  It’s carnival, and Zeca is using the festival to travel in disguise, but the scene is visually striking until we get that information.  Similarly, the interior of the Legard mansion is beautiful, an interior out of Sirk.  The images here are yet another element of the pleasure this film gives.

It’s great to see Almodovar working at the peak of his powers again in a film like this.  It’s a pleasure to watch a master do what he does so well.