March 5: His Girl Friday (1940 – Howard Hawks)

★★★★★

This Howard Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is just fun.  Unlike Lewis Milestone’s 1931 talkfest, Hawks brings this play to the screen as a full-fledged screwball comedy that works as cinema.

In addition to the repartee that informs the dialog, there’s always something worth looking at in the frame in His Girl Friday.  In Hawks’ version, the camera is more fluid than in Milestone’s, which helps engage us with what we’re seeing and hearing.  The contrast in the opening sequences of the films points to that difference right away.  While both films open with a newsroom tracking shot, Hawks lets newsroom items loom suddenly into the frame and pass out, just as he has the newsroom personnel bustle in and out of the frame.  By contrast, Milestone’s pan is rather monotone.  One particular Hawks update on the opening is the way the camera tracks to the elevator, engages Hildy, then tracks back across the newsroom again as she walks to see Walter, greeting people as she goes.  Hawks tells us in this opening scene that it’s same story, but done in a more active, cinematic way.

There are other camera and action flourishes in Friday, too.  At one point, the camera pans around to a series of phones as they start ringing, replicating how the eye might move as one phone after another sounds.  And rather than simply learning that Hildy has discovered that Sheriff Hartwell's gun was used in the escape, which is what happens in Front Page, Hawks shows us Hildy chase down and tackle the sheriff.  The ironic humor in a woman of this era performing a running tackle adds to the audience engagement that camera and action are already creating in Friday.

To the dialog-heavy script, Hawks also adds action within scenes so there’s usually something interesting to look at while we're listening.  Early in the film, for example, as Hildy, Walter and Bruce go into a bar for lunch, the conversation among the three is continually supplemented with other input.  Hildy, for example, exchanges greetings with the waiter during their conversation, and as they walk to the table, the silhouette of a wood column momentarily splits up the three, attracting our eye.  With the dialog never pausing, Walter maneuvers Bruce to sit at the far end of the table away from Hildy, and when they’re sitting and still talking, Hildy is removing her coat, another action that keeps the film from becoming visually stale.  In a similarly animated scene after Walter’s physical, the editor is putting on his shirt and tying his tie while the dialog between him and Bruce unspools.  As the conversation continues, Walter puts his hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and Duffy pokes his head into the office to give a visual comment on the dialog he’s overhearing.  A long, two-person conversation like this could fall flat, but Hawks animates it with action and with having ancillary characters break up any monotony.

The cinematic wit here also adds to our experience of Friday, especially the way Hawks winks at Milestone’s version.  Hawks is clearly one-upping Milestone with his take on the earlier film’s opening tracking shot, and his embellishment of Hildy’s revelation about Sheriff Hartwell shows a similar wit.  And changing Hildy’s gender here, with the subsequent fun of having Bruce as the character with the mother, opens the door for lots of humor that Milestone could hardly access.  The intertextuality between these two productions is another fun element of Hawks' Friday.

Although Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is more cinematic than Milestone’s, Friday keeps the social critique of the original play.  Government is corrupt, and officials are mostly interested in keeping their jobs even if it means scare-mongering or outright bribery.  Experts are cluelessly self-important; the press is uncaring and unreliable.  And the people who bear the brunt of this pervasive self-serving attitude are the poor, like Earl and Molly.  In His Girl Friday, Hawks imbues the strong play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur with the director’s command of the cinematic, and the result is a thoroughly engaging, deep social critique.

March 4: The Front Page (1931 – Lewis Milestone & Nate Watt)

★★★

Four years after The Jazz Singer, Lewis Milestone and Nate Watt pack The Front Page from start to finish with nonstop, fast dialogue.   It’s a smart, fun movie that takes joy in skewering public and domestic institutions with wit and satire, all the while feeling like the directors are trying to make up for the previous silent decades by keeping dialogue going at a wild pace.  The Front Page is one of the earliest screwball comedies and sets a standard to judge the rest by.

The satire here is as funny as it is over-the-top.  The press is a cynical lot whose reporters embellish events with outrageous false information and, when they can’t get a story, simply make one up with extensive verbal dexterity.  They criticize whatever they encounter and pass their time in self-absorbed card-play if they’re not making the dullard jailer go out to get their lunch.  They cynically demand that an execution occur earlier in the morning so they can make their reporting deadlines, scoff at the sadness of the woman whose friend is facing execution, berate every government official they encounter and mock institutions from family to respect for the elderly.  However, they do all this with such joyful abandon that the audience can’t help but laugh.  Among them, Edward Everett Horton’s Bensinger stands out as a gullible hypochondriac, but it’s Adolphe Menjou’s Walter Burns whose merry disdain for decency lights up many scenes.  This editor ceaselessly promotes his newspaper and does everything he can to undermine the life of his reporter, Hildy, in order to keep him working at the Post.  Burns’ relish in sabotaging Hildy at the end of film brings an especially big smile.

Beyond the press, The Front Page takes aim at government and municipal elections.  A corrupt mayor and incompetent sheriff want to hang an innocent man to shore up their support in an upcoming election.  The sheriff falsely links the man with Bolshevism – to the delight of the sensationalist press -- and when a pardon arrives from the governor, both try to suppress the news until after the execution.  They fawn over higher authority, bully their underlings and make error after error when pursuing the convict the sheriff has inadvertently let escape.  Government here is as bungling as it is self-serving.

The Front Page is a lot of fun, but it’s not without its drawbacks.  While it condemns hypocrisy and ineptitude, it doesn’t know what to do with goodness.  Molly’s suicide, for example, injects stakes into the movie that makes the film’s overall satire feel trivial.  And we discover a complexity to Earl, who is both innocent because he’s mentally ill but also dangerous that doesn’t fit into the good guy/bad guy ethical structure of The Front Page’s mockery.  And on a technical level, the film begins to seem monotonous at its midpoint due to the consistently high-pitched banter of the characters.  The movie could benefit more vocal variety for its first two-thirds.

But overall, this is a fun and funny film, many of whose satirical flourishes still feel timely.  And it sets up the genre of screwball comedy well.

March 3: J'accuse! (1938 – Abel Gance)

★★★★

March 1: Bad Girl (1931 – Frank Borzage)

★★★

Bad Girl is an O. Henry short story wrapped in comedy.  Like in “The Gift of the Magi,” the two protagonists here miscommunicate throughout, though O. Henry lets things run to a bitter conclusion while Frank Borzage reigns in the consequences for this comedy.  Early in the film, Eddie says that he thinks things but they don’t come out like he thinks, and this condition governs much of what we see.  Dorothy thinks that Eddie doesn’t want them to have the baby she’s carrying, while Eddie is desperately doing everything he can to care for her and prepare for the child.  He’s gives up his dream of having his own store for Dorothy, and he’s almost late for the birth itself because he’s trying to get more money for Dorothy’s preferred doctor.  Dorothy meanwhile loves Eddie and wants him to realize his ambitions, but she’s saddened by what she thinks is his aversion to fatherhood.  Three-quarters of Bad Girl unspools with this misunderstanding as its most significant narrative spring.

But Bad Girl is a comedy at base, and Borzage layers in humor at every possible moment, most of it related to gender roles.  The film opens with a funny sight gag when we realize that what looks like a wedding is actually a department store show of wedding dresses, and a good deal of the rest of the humor in the sequence centers on the harassment women face in public from men.  The film follows this same line of humor as the girls leave the department store and later that evening at Coney Island with the women sarcastically batting away the constant harassment men direct towards them.  Later in the film, another sight gag also draws its humor from gender roles.  The shot starts with an apron and hands washing dishes until the camera draws back showing that we’re watching Eddie doing the dishes and not Dorothy, another good-natured dig at gender expectations.  Overall, the funniest dialog in the film occurs in the banter between Edna and Eddie, and it largely plays on what women should do and what men actually do.  It’s a forecast of future screwball.  A later, extended sequence in the film takes the gender joking beyond dialog as it dwells on how hard it is for men in the hospital to wait for their wives to deliver the baby.  It’s a funny and obviously ironic take on the birthing experience.  There’s other humor in Bad Girl to mitigate the pain from the misunderstandings between Dorothy and Eddie.  As they discover during a conversation while they’re locked up in a mid-ring fight, both Eddie and the professional boxer are fathers; this being the case, the pro lets Eddie last a few extra rounds to increase his earnings to take home for Dorothy.  It’s a funny scene that doesn't play on gender roles but that’s set up early in the film when Dorothy brushes off a suitor by saying her boyfriend is a boxer.

Bad Girl is not without its serious elements.  There’s a lot of pathos when Eddie breaks down and tells Dr. Burgess of his love for Dorothy and his anxiety to provide for her.  And overall, the film shows the travails of the working man, from the life we see in the tenement houses to the financial worries of the service clerks in stores.  But Bad Girl never successfully blends the serious, the humorous and the central plot device of the misunderstandings within the central couple.  It’s a good enough look at the early sound period, but this Borzage project never pulls its content together enough to make itself more than a pleasant time at the screen.

February 28: Children of Divorce (1928 – Frank Lloyd)

★★★★

Melodrama is the language of popular silent film, and Children of Divorce speaks it fluently.  The story moves from one melodramatic scene to the next, starting in the opening when Kitty as a child is dropped off a convent while her newly-divorced mother goes merrily out into the world.  Kitty is rejected by the other girls there until another child of divorce, Jean, befriends her.  Jean then takes care of new girl, even comforting her in a very expressionist dorm scene.  The melodrama continues at this same clip throughout, making Children of Divorce a moving film experience.

But as touching as the film is, Frank Lloyd doesn’t connect us with the film as strongly as he might because he doesn’t exploit the drama that good characterization can build.  Jean, for example, is largely a self-sacrificing paragon of virtue who worries about Kitty, her daughter, and everyone else.  She’s not a character with conflicts or with much background.  Meanwhile, Vico has no character development at all and seems more a plot device than anything else, while Ted is little more than the handsome pawn of the two women, doing whatever either one of them wants.  Clara Bow’s Kitty is the most complex character, repeatedly torn between her love for Vico or for Jean but at the same time following her mother’s teachings that she needs to secure an income through marriage.  Bow's acting delivers this moral conflict especially well.  In an early scene with Einar Hanson's Vico, Lloyd leaves the camera on Bow's face, and we watch her go from resisting Vico's profession of love to joyfully accepting it and then to setting her determination to marry Ted for his money.  And all this  only by changes in her facial expression.  But even with such masterful acting and a character of some complexity, Kitty remains difficult to sympathize with because her script treatment is so thin.  It's hard to sympathize with her internal conflict because the film doesn’t build the importance of wealth to her.

But while Children of Divorce isn’t as strong as it could be, it still packs a melodramatic punch at its end.  We know that Kitty should end up with Vico and Jean with Ted, so we expect to see how the couples overcome the blocks to these relationships.  Kitty and Vico need to resolve the problems the Catholic church would pose if Kitty were to divorce, and Jean and Ted would need to solve the problem posed by Ted’s daughter with Kitty so the girl doesn’t become another child of divorce.  At the end of the film, Frank Lloyd gives us an unexpected resolution to this tension, and it’s not a resolution that a viewer would expect or, for that matter, want.  The film goes dramatic through its final moments.

An irony of Children of Divorce is that although it wants to condemn divorce, money is the real force that drives the melodrama to the tragic ending.  Torn between love and money, Kitty choses money to the detriment of everyone involved.  While high divorce rates and an irresponsible approach to marriage is indeed an issue, it’s not the center of the film.  Children of Divorce ultimately condemns allowing money to rule the heart.

February 26: L'inhumaine (1924 – Marcel L'Herbier)

★★★★★

When Marcel L'Herbier made L’inhumaine, cinema was still in a state of creative flux.  It had settled down into a narrative form to a large extent, and some of its most important elements like editing, cinematography and mise-en-scene were well-understood and established.  But in 1924, L'Herbier wasn’t focused on using these accepted elements in a conventional way.  Instead, L’inhumaine is excited about the out-of-the-ordinary, expressive possibilities that the elements of the new medium of film had to offer.

In launching this experiment, L’Herbier kept one foot in convention in order to maintain audience engagement.  A key element of that effort is the overall narrative of a love story between an earnest, young engineer – Einar – and Claire Lescot, a middle-aged singer.  Surrounded by older and better-off suitors, the object of his love at first rejects Einar, but as the young man makes headway with Claire, the love story morphs into another conventional storyline, that of a villain threatening a woman.  L’Herbier uses a clever combination of tried-and-true stories to keep his audience with the film.

He also makes ample use of conventional melodrama in this film.  Melodrama is the lifeblood of silent cinema, and L’inhumaine is laced through with overwrought situations and poses.  A rejected lover threatens to kill himself, and a grieving singer decides the show must go on.  A rejected suitor kills for revenge, and an innocent dies in the arms of her mother, comforted by the beauty of music.  In an emotional moment when an overcome lover must identify the body of the beloved, a gusty wind blows up and L’Herbier shifts tinting to a strong red.  Even the dead are saved, a resurrection that L’Herbier draws out by the requiring a second attempt after the first fails.  In fact, L’inhumaine stretches out every melodramatic moment, wringing from it the maximum amount of audience sentiment and angst to keep the viewers firmly engaged in the film.

Counting on a love story and melodrama to keep the audience in their seats, L’Herbier is then free to test new ways of using what had become standard elements of movies.  In his cinematography, he uses tints aggressively.  Brilliant reds appropriately tint the Mongolian revolution and heighten the emotion of the Apostle’s plotting to ruin Claire’s performance out of jealousy.  The same tint expresses the intensity of the body identification scene.  To opposite effect, a saturated, cold blue tint informs the nighttime search for the body of a suicide.  Most daring, L’Herbier sometimes inserts frames of pure color to express emotion.

L’Herbier also plays with other aspects of cinematography.  He uses blurring and double exposures to communicate Einar’s emotional distress, first as the young man is late for Claire’s dinner and later when she’s rejected him.  The manipulated shots of roads and woods as seen from cars communicate speed as well as the young man’s strained emotional state.  In another scene, L’Herbier borrows some Expressionist lighting to communicate Einar’s frustration and fear as he watches Clair’s suitors approach her one-by-one.  In his garden niche, a low light casts a grotesque, elongate silhouette of Einar on the wall behind, an image of his heightened emotions.  In another bravura moment of cinematography, L’Herbier frames only the legs and torsos of guests as they rush out of party after word of the accident, a shot that shows us the urgency of the moment very effectively without relying on facial expressions.  In still other places, the director uses silhouettes on a paper wall to show us the action.  All these are instances of L’Herbier pushing the expressive possibilities of cinematography.

He also experiments with the possibilities that editing offers.  L’inhumaine has many examples of rapid cutting to build suspense and intensity.  During Claire’s party, the rapid cutting between the dancing, juggling and guests shows us what a great time is being had.  Likewise, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, quick cutting between Claire’s performance and faces of the audience first builds our suspense at how they’ll react and then shows us her wild success.  In a later scene, L’Herbier also builds suspense by cutting rapidly between the face of the driver of Claire’s car and Claire in the passenger compartment behind with the venomous snake.  Here, the cuts increase in speed as Claire moves from finding the snake to the effects of the snake’s bite.  And L’Herbier also uses fast cuts between the laboratory and the re-animation to build suspense around the success of the experiment.

In addition to building suspense, L’inhumaine has edits that accomplish other expressive purposes.  As each suitor proposes to Claire at the party, L’Herbier cuts to a fantasy of her life if she were to marry the individual.  We see her imagined as an American theatrical success, the leader of a Mongolian revolution, and the center of an exotic wedding in India.  And L’inhumain uses intercutting in a poetic way, to provide images for the emotion or action of a moment.  While Einar is trying to tell Claire of the intensity of his love for her, L’Herbier intercuts their conversation with scenes of the fire eater and the hot jazz band that is performing at Claire’s dinner.  These images become correlatives of the young man's emotion.  And when Claire sends Einar a razor blade to mock his vow to kill himself if she refuses him, L’Herbier intercuts a sword fight.  All these moments show L’Herbier testing the expressive possibilities of the new film medium.

He does the same with the mise en scène.  From the opening of the film, we’re aware of the director’s interplay between realism and self-conscious artificiality.  The portrayals of Claire’s house and Einar’s car oscillate between these poles of representation early in the film.  We first see Claire’s house as an architectural model that even has the lighting and shadows painted on it; likewise, the model of Einar’s car jerks with exaggerated artificiality when we see it pull up to the model of the house.  But in each case, L’Herbier soon cuts to the real objects -- a real house and a real car -- as though to highlight the way his mise en scène is playing with the notion of art, reality and representation.

In Clair’s house, this same play continues.  There is no reality to the space of her house.  The main room features a dining platform floating in a pool with ducks paddling around it.  There is a garden area with models of plants that are botanical abstractions more than vegetal, and while Einar can see Clair from there, it’s not at all clear where the garden is in relation to the rest of the house.  Likewise, we can’t imagine where the jazz band is seated in relation to the guests.  And through all the festivities, servants attend the guests in disturbing, smiling masks, a flourish of artificiality that gets a realistic explanation when Claire points out that they can’t frown if they’re wearing such masks.

L’Herbier’s play with the artificial and the real reaches its high point in Einar’s lab.  Functionality and plausibility have only a minor role in this mise en scène, with its set designed by modernist Fernand Léger.  Einar’s lab is, in fact, a large art installation of pendulums and geometrical lines, angles, and circles designed around a theme of science.  And Einar moves around this installation in an exaggerated jacket with impossibly highlighted lines and, later, a rubber raincoat.  In this part of L’inhumain, as in the earlier, L’Herbier plays with mise en scène in a creative way that has the film questioning its own representational status while still functioning in a representational way.

L’Herbier also uses unique mise en scène for more typical purposes.  For example, when he wants to show us Einar’s tele-vision device, which lets us see where the broadcast sound is going, we have stereotypical vignettes that show us Arabia, Africa, an artist studio, Latin America, a man in car, and people in front of store.  And in a borrowing from previous films, when Einar wonders what Claire meant when she said “something” might keep her in in France, L’Herbier scrolls the French word for that, “quelque chose,” all along the scenery to show us Einar’s obsession.  All these show L’Herbier using mise en scène in creative ways.

L’inhumaine is also, no doubt accidentally, a primer on silent acting.  As Einar, Jaque Catelain is wonderful.  His body language and facial expression communicate so effectively that we know exactly what he’s feeling when he's hesitant about going into the dinner he's late for and when he's getting pushed aside by the older, richer suitors.  We’re with his every thought.  This is in contrast to the performance of Georgette Leblanc, who was a stage performer but not a silent film actor.  She communicates little of what’s in her heart; she squints instead of performing open-eyed, and her stand-and-deliver stage posture means she uses little to no body language to involve us in her emotions.  Although she funded much of this film, her performance is the weakest element of it.

L’inhumaine is a wonderful silent film experience.  It shows us what was powering the medium in 1924, but more than that, it gives us a look at the experimentation behind what cinema was becoming.  And L’inhumaine should be obligatory viewing in every engineering school where what Einar calls the “magic of modern science” wins the heart of the beloved when romance and money fail.

February 25: Cleopatra (1963 – Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rouben Mamoulian & Darryl F. Zanuck)

★★★★

This pop culture classic has a lot going for it.  Its visuals stun with their opulent grandeur.  The sets are justly praised, from the sheer-draped interiors to the justly famous pageantry of Cleopatra’s entry to Rome on a high sphinx platform surrounded by the exoticism of North Africa.  Costuming, too, creates visual pleasure, especially the series of gowns that Elizabeth Taylor wears, most inspired by Egyptian art.  They vary from pleated wraps to rich dresses in a variety fabrics and embroideries.  Her costuming in every sequence of the film is something interesting to look at.  Taylor’s makeup and hair styling also keep her as a focus for the eye, from her outlandish Egyptian eye style that can appear as blue eye-shadow or even sequins to her 60s-inflected piles of black hair.  Cleopatra always gives us something on screen worth looking at, generally around the character of the queen.

For all its problems, the script here also gives us points of narrative interest.  The film’s five-and-a-half hour run time gives us two tragedies of historic importance, the assassination of Julius Caesar and the deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, as well as two different love stories in their entirety.  And though the script’s larger structure has serious flaws, each individual scene is a jewel of language with the wit and skill that we expect from dialogue crafted largely by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  The writer's precision of the word choice encourages us to pay close attention to shifts in mood and character relationships throughout each scene.

But it’s also true that the script is the biggest problem in Cleopatra.  After colossal delays and budget overruns, Mankiewicz ended up writing as he was directing, and that’s obvious in the uneven, first-draft feel of the script.  The two halves of the film seem like separate movies, the first half a witty romance between an established older man and a vivacious younger woman and the second half a Shakespearean tragedy of domed love.  There’s little flow of tone between the two parts, and the only tenuous plot connection is Antony’s brief encounters with Cleopatra toward the end of the Part I.  In fact, the script misses many opportunities to develop Antony in its first half when such detail would have made the second part much deeper.

The haste of writing might also explain the muddled motivations of the central character, Cleopatra.  In the first half of the film, it seems she’s mostly in love with Julius Caesar, though the occasional line makes us wonder if power isn’t a big motivation, too.  This confusion comes to the fore in the second half, when Cleopatra’s motivation varies from scene to scene.  At one point, she’s pushing Antony to ever-greater achievement and using him for her own purposes, but at the next point, she’s a lover concerned for his happiness and well-being and distraught over him to the point to suicide.  In flipping Cleopatra’s motivation haphazardly between love and power, Mankiewicz’s script gives us a hero with little cohesion at the center of the film.

Mankiewicz doesn’t excel at directing action, either.  He produces grand-scale scenes well, like the one at the beginning of the film that shows the aftermath of a battle, but his direction of action is seems desultory.  Battle and fight scenes have an almost perfunctory quality to them, and Battle of Actium, the major naval battle that resulted in Antony and Cleopatra’s final military defeat, looks painfully like models with an occasional roman candle arcing over the scene.

So Cleopatra is not without its flaws.  Effective in individual scenes, its script lacks the larger structure that would have made this film more coherent and moving, and Mankiewicz misses his opportunity for great epic action.  Still, this sprawling movie has great visuals that hold our attention and dialogue that certainly entertains.  It’s worth spending time with for just those.