April 12: In Which We Serve (1942 -- Noel Coward & David Lean)

★★★★
In Which We Serve opens with some of the most self-congratulatory credits I've ever seen.  Staring Noel Coward, written by Noel Coward, art director for Noel Coward, Noel Coward’s music performed by…, and finally directed by Noel Coward, with second credit to David Lean.  And after this orgy of Coward self-promotional credits, In Which We Serve becomes a long, beautiful montage that portrays the construction and launch of the HMS Torrin in a way that  pure cinema, and much in style of Eisenstein.  I wonder if the completely unnecessary line of dialog that introduces this montage – “This is the story of a ship” – was the contribution of the film’s headliner, perhaps anxious that the real director’s mastery of cinema was a threat to the playwright’s presumption.  If so, Coward should indeed have felt threatened because the cinematic in In Which We Serve outshines the actors’ lines.

In Which We Serve is a film of flashbacks, far more than could be achieved on stage, and the skill of Lean is that we don’t get lost in the complicated narrative line. We first watch a disciplined Captain Kinross lead the crew in the HMS Torrin’s naval battle, but the ship is sunk by an aerial bomb, and a group of crew members assemble at a float. This is the film narrative’s base because much of the rest of the movie is flashbacks from three men at the float: Cpt. Kinross, Shorty, and CPO Hardy.  Lean cuts from each several times, each time joining the main character at a different time in his life, and it’s to Lean’s credit that viewers can follow the story.  In only one sequence – when we go from the float to Shorty’s flashback POV to Kinross’ flashback POV to the ship – did I get confused about where I was in the film.  Otherwise, the time and POV are very consistent and very clear.

And In Which We Serve presages how fruitful Lean’s collaboration with cinematographer Ronald Neame would be.  There’s a beautiful few seconds of film as the train with Shorty and Freda barrels from the left of the frame and heads deep into center screen, the low camera angle perfectly capturing the sun reflecting off its windows as the train rushes toward a break in the clouds.  It’s a brief moment is cinematic thrill.  Less serendipity than skill, another moment in the film has Lean and Neame directing a group of men as they leave the Torrin en mass.  As they head down the dock in eager anticipation, they separate and pass the young sailor who regrets his panic in the earlier battle and is sadly walking slower.  As the lights go down, the faster group streams off screen, and the young sailor is left walking alone in silhouette.  It’s another moment of  film beauty.  In another worthwhile moment of cinema, Lean does some flashy editing to give the scene with the wedding photographer punch.  These are moments of pure cinema that make this film worthwhile.

But credit Noel Coward with some of the most effective and unique elements of this propaganda film.  In Which We Serve puts a finger on the British qualities that will help it win this war.  It endorses duty above all, in the enlisted men and officers as well as in their wives.  And faced with hardship at the front and at home, the British suffer, but they endure and they sacrifice.  There’s no sentimental reward for the characters in this film; their reward is that they’re still alive.  It’s hard to imagine a French or American propaganda film that would endorse the values we find in this one.

Another great strength here is the scope of vision in the screenplay.  Not only does it span upper class to lower, but it gives as much weight to the women at home as it does to the men on the ship.  And these women have some complexity and depth.  Cpt. Kinross’ wife repeatedly complains about her husband’s devotion to his ship and his duty, often so strongly that there’s a sense that her humor is masking a genuine unhappiness.  Yet like him, she does her duty and stays with him and their kids.  We also watch Freda leave Shorty at the dock entrance after their honeymoon, and we see her begin to assume the role of Navy wife that Mrs. Kinross and Chief Hardy’s wife have already demonstrated to us.  There is no crying or dramatic expression of emotion here or anyplace else in the film; the British keep their upper lip stiff. 

It’s also through the women that we see that the dangers in the war are as potent at home as they are at sea.  In Which We Serve involves us as much in the lives of Chief Hardy’s wife and mother-in-law as it does in any of the characters, but these two affectionately-quibbling women are suddenly killed in one of the blitzkrieg strikes against London.  It’s a testimony to scope of the screenplay that we experience this as a loss of characters and not as the male character losing an important part of his life.  Such independently important female characters are not common in film of the time, and certainly not in what’s basically a propaganda film.

In Which We Serve is a happy joining of the sure hand of a cineaste to the instincts of a skilled crafter of narrative.  Lean and Coward’s first collaboration surpasses its genre aspirations and moves into a deeper artistic field.

March 12: Duck Soup (1933 -- Leo McCarey)

★★★
I don’t care for this film as much as I had expected to.  It’s true that the humor is impressive, unpredictable and nonstop.  The dialog is barrage of puns and non sequiturs, the verbal equivalent of Monty Python’s visuals.  There’s an unrestrained, anarchic element to the brilliance that the Marx Brothers use in attacking language and its masters.  Oh, your Excellency! says Teasdale.  Firefly replies, You're not so bad yourself.  Much of the humor in Duck Soup comes from cascades of such verbal virtuosity.

There’s similar wit and spirit in many of the visuals. Harpo cuts things with scissors whenever he isn’t being watched in Ambassador Trentino’s office, and there are ongoing gags like Groucho trying to get a ride in a motorcycle side car and his constant changing of battlefield uniforms in the war scenes at the end.  The mirror scene in this film is justly famous for its cleverness.

But for all the moment-to-moment pleasure here, Duck Soup doesn’t leave you with much at the end.  The film doesn’t fix its sights on a main, satirical target, and the personages here aren’t characters.  It’s hard to be invested in the film because all its energy and sparkle impresses us and makes us laugh but fails to engage us in a story with stakes.  Sound was reasonably new when Duck Soup came out, and the Marx Brothers rush to exploit it here with their verbal humor.  As a result, it’s easy to chuckle in thinking back on the dense dialog in the film, but the brothers ultimately fail to touch us the way the silent Buster Keaton or Little Tramp do.

February 23: Street Angel (1928 -- Frank Borzage)

★★★★★

I decided to try one of the new MOOCs, and Street Angel has already made the effort worthwhile.  What a great film.  At the end of the silent era, Frank Borzage does an all-out assault on viewers here, and it’s almost impossible to turn away from this film while it’s playing.

As usual, the visuals are make-or-break for me, and I was captivated.  Street Angels opens with a long tracking shot across a huge sound stage brimming with action, a bravura opening worthy of Spielberg that pulls your attention immediately into the film, where the story and characters will soon anchor you.  And a similar shot later gives visual variety as the camera follows Gino‘s hunt for the missing Angela.  Borzage also uses fog for visual interest – as when the couple heads to Naples on a boat and later as Gino searches the wharves for Angela—and he works with depth of field to hold the eye in shots like the one of the circus on top of a hill overlooking a bay.  In that shot, the eye is torn between the beautiful background and the action in the foreground.  The camera also shifts perspective to keep the eye alert.  During Angela’s act on stilts, we see the bottom of the stilts in the foreground with bowling pins and the faces of the audience in front of us, as though we’re looking directly at them from backstage; similarly, we peer around a bottle on a table when Angela is trying to negotiate her departure from Gino in order to head to jail.  And at the end of the film, the camera is suddenly elevated with the characters looking up.  This restless energy, with occasional off-center, dynamic composition, Street Angel has a visual energy that makes it hard to turn away from.

Into this, Borzage throws a little German Expressionism for added engagement.  Shadows are fraught with significance as they arch and loom behind characters.  In early scenes of Angela’s narrow escape from the police and her climbing down a gutter, exaggerated shadow heightens the menace.  Later, Angela’s induction into jail is an abstract play of light, shadow and shapes which become jail bars, stairs and spears.  And the jail scenes themselves are very Expressionistic since we see the female prisoners as large shadows before we see them as people; the prison work stations are as elevated and exaggerated as any scene in Metropolis. 

The teacher in the MOOC holds that silents use melodrama (and, I suspect, humor) to engage an audience, and the melodrama is on full show in Street Angel.  Financial desperation figures in some of the melodrama as we’re moved that Angela is forced into prostitution because she can’t afford medicine for her sick mother, and we’re touched that the sweet Gino takes some of his little money to buy Angela a flower.  There’s also the gratuitous melodrama of Massetto’s goodbye and the sacred and profane love contrast as the prostitute and her john pass the happy couple of Angela and Gino exiting their apartment.  There’s also ironic melodrama as the couple toast their future although there’s a policeman just outside waiting to incarcerate Angela, and even 21st century me was moved as Angela sends the drunk but happy Gino to bed but turns back and grab at his feet one last time before she’s taken off.  And the ending of the film is high melodrama as Gino is about to kill her in a church but sees the portrait of her he has previously done showing her angelic side; he looks from the painting into her eyes and forgives her because he recognizes her goodness.  This melodrama is certainly outdated, but there’s no denying the power it certainly once wielded and, to a much lesser extent, still has.

There’s also a cuteness in this silent film that involves us in the story and characters.  The casting here certainly engages as the archetypal innocent waif of Janet Gaynor is teamed with the heartbreakingly cute Charles Farrell.  While the waifishness of Gaynor may not play as well today as it did then, the innocent hunkiness of Farrell is still fresh.  And the two actors play on these characteristics.  Too cute and inexperienced to sell herself, Angela comically fails as a prostitute, and the goofy hunk Gino gets chewed on by a bear as he gazes longingly at Angela.  In fact, animals contribute no small amount of humor here as a monkey salutes the policeman and a goat gives Angela a particularly hard—and funny—butt.  One sweet, humorous moment has Angela wrapping herself in Gino’s coat pretending he’s holding her, a scene that Michel Hazanavicius elaborated in last year’s silent film salute, The Artist.  The humor certainly engages in this film.

Coming at the end of the silent era, Street Angel is an affective high point in that art.  The film already forecasts some of innovation that sound will bring as it gives us some music with an identifiable source in the whistling (while Gino is painting and when Angela is on stilts), in the rower singing, and in the band performing on the bridge.  But Street Angel doesn’t need sound to engage us.  Borzage is a master of the language of silent film, and he takes us along on this ride just fine without it.

February 18: Titanic (1953 -- Jean Negulesco)

★★★
This is the fourth Titanic I’ve seen, and I’m enjoying how each film uses the disaster for a different purpose.  As would be expected from a 1953 Hollywood film, there’s a romance at the center here; Richard and Julia’s marriage has grown stale, and as they duke it out, there’s a major melodramatic reveal as well as the sinking of the great ship.  This is, however, Hollywood, and love eventually triumphs, if not over the cold Atlantic then over the coldness in the marriage.

Titanic 1953 has a larger idea to develop, too: the difference between good ole American values and the artificiality of European culture.  The source of the problems between Richard and Julia is this cultural difference because Julia wants the kids to have a stable home and to grow up without the ongoing seasonal migrations and the pretension that make up their European life.  Richard, however, wants them to fit into European high society with elegance and superficiality.  Americans are fun, earthy, energetic, warm and frank in this film, while Europeans are dull, mannered, stolid, cold and indirect.  Characters from the beau Gifford through the plainspoken Maude demonstrate the American outlook on life.  Titanic details the contrast in cultures most directly though the character arc of Richard, who is so superficial that he breaks the heart of his own young son by coldly rejecting him only to move toward the American value of family by embracing him at the end of the film. 

Perhaps an echo of the cultural duality at the center of the film, the characters here often move in contrasting light with bright whites and dark blacks.  While one character is walking to the bridge, we only see the headless torsos of crew members who are standing in sharp black and white.  And later, while Richard is shaving in the lounge, Julia startlingly emerges from the shadows of a corner to engage him in bright whiteness.  Even the kiss of Gifford and Annette is a series of rapidly shifting black-and-white.  This cinematography adds to the interest in the film, building an air of vague film noir menace that's first suggested in the opening calving of a white iceberg. 

Titanic 1953 isn’t the best cinema treatment of the catastrophe, but if we see the British cultural/documentary point of view in A Night to Remember and National Socialist ideology in 1943’s Titanic, here we watch Hollywood focus the tragedy on the love travails of a couple working though different cultural values.  In gorgeous black-and-white.  It’s a worthy addition to the Titanic canon.

February 15: Les Vampires (1915 -- Louis Feuillade)

★★★★★

Lou and I watched Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade over several nights, an internet age way to enjoy this 1915-1916 silent serial.  While some of the elements here are outdated, if you grant this serial a little of its historical context, it’s fun and engaging.

The flat-out, fifth-gear story in all the episodes is one of the major reasons we can still enjoy Les Vampires some hundred years after it was made.  People die, dare and make so many spontaneous decisions that, though some moves are clearly telegraphed ahead, you often don’t foresee how an element will be used until it is actually exploited.  And throughout, we’re involved in what’s going to happen to Philipe, Mazamette, Philipe’s mother, Irma and whoever happens to be the Grand Vampire.  Accidents and unlikely coincidences prevent you from getting complacent since storylines and characters can cross at any moment and send the plot off in an unexpected direction.  The story is fun.

There’s also a no-holds-barred element to the violence and daring in the series that keeps the audience on edge.  The severed head of an inspector makes a sudden appearance in the first episode, setting up not only the ruthlessness of the Vampires but also an expectation in the audience that anything can happen.  And it does happen.  There’s a murder by hatpin, a gassing of the social elite of a city, the poisoning of an innocent and several accidental killings or killings of innocents.  The Vampires are not Buster Keaton bad guys; they are brutal and ruthless.  These episodes don’t dwell on violence and enjoy it the way today’s film does, but the blunt brutality here is affective in a different way.

There’s a modern element here, too, in this serial before the time that audiences and filmmakers had worked out movie conventions.  I was struck that characters sometimes look directly at the audience and even play to camera.  In the very beginning, Mazamette winks at us as he tries to wiggle out of being caught stealing some of Philipe’s material, and later in the same episode, the inspector does the same.  A kid mugs for the camera in one of the latter episodes, too.  Most of this breaking the illusion of the movie is done for comic purposes, which is comedy being its irreverent self.  Les Vampires also tosses in some self-referentiality.  Characters go to movies for fun several times, and on one trip, a character in Les Vampires appears as a real woman in a news reel, thus playing with several levels of realism.  Gestures like these have a very modern feeling to them.

There’s interest in the contemporaneity of Les Vampires, too.  Unless Feuillade mounts it on a car to get a chase scene or action shot, the cumbersome camera of 1915 stays rock still, yet Les Vampires manages to engage us.  And the special effects here recall those we see in later silents by the likes of Buster Keaton as we watch real people climbing real walls, gutters and ropes, making real effort in real time.  There’s a thrill in recognizing that Musidora is at one point lying under a real train that pulls out over top of her.  We also get a few peeks into the social environment of early 20^th century Paris.  We see that today’s Parisian suburbs were quite undeveloped at that time, and we get to experience the small boxes of a turn-of-the-century theater and to review the menu for a fancy bourgeois dinner.  And the historical context touches this serial in other ways, too.  Filming in the middle of WW I, Feuillade brings in gas, canons and terrorism.  And if we keep losing the Grand Vampire through the series, that’s partly because young men were being conscripted for the trenches.

Although this serial is far removed from us, it still holds elements of life that span the century and touch us.  French body language has apparently changed little since 1915; even today, a perplexed Frenchman will hunch his shoulder an say “bof” with exactly the same expression as we see Philipe do.  And Feuillade flounders in front of the same paradox as English poet Milton and many after him: Evil is more interesting and fun than good.  To see this contrast, one only has to consider the extravagant energy of Irma’s wedding to Venomous – with its fun spontaneity, irreverent games, creative play and passionate dance – with the boring affair that is Philipe’s marriage to Jane.  And that’s how the serial ends.  Irrepressible Irma will no longer wear her sleek signature tights, and the Vampires will no longer terrorize Paris.  But despite the triumph of law and order, something has been lost.

January 11: Argo (2012 -- Ben Affleck)

★★★

I’m at a loss to explain all the accolades Argo has been receiving.  Of course there are things I like about the film very much.  For one, the art direction evokes 1980 so well that, from the cars to the clothes to the colors, I can’t deny a bit of a nostalgia tug.  The film looks so familiar to me and yet so forgotten; I like that sensation.  There’s also some good cinematic story-telling here in Affleck’s resurrecting action thriller narrative techniques while sparing the viewer the now-common explosions and frenetic chase scenes we're so used to.  Scenes like the opening assault on the embassy, conversations among the Americans at the Canadian ambassador’s house and the tense exchange in the Iranian market all have a deft economy that creates tension and uncertainty.  And the humor and parody in Argo are fun, too.  Credit Alan Arkin and John Goodman with pulling off some very funny pokes at Hollywood, though the film ultimately goes on to show us how patriotic Hollywood actually is.

And it’s that heavy hand of conventionality that keeps Argo from soaring.  Affleck shows us he can build suspense effectively, but we see he doesn’t sustain the suspense as the film loses its balance at the very points near the end that should be the closer.  There’s tension at the airport as the guards begin to question the Americans, but the sequence goes on far overlong, eventually including the predictable character reversal of the dissenting American escapee.  And shortly after that, when we watch the soldiers chase the airplane in jeeps just as the plane takes off, Hollywood cliches have taken over so visibly that it’s hard to remain in the spell of the movie.  Conventions more hoary than those two would be difficult to find.

Which is only to say that Argo is good, capable entertainment even if it doesn’t break new ground or offer new insights.  There’s some controversy about the film drumming up anger against Iranians in our own time of American/Iranian tension, but the opening historical background certainly explains the anti-American anger of 1979 Iran.  And if that’s not enough, the Iranian housekeeper lies to the Revolutionary Guards in order to protect the Canadians and the Americans and has to go into exile as a result.  Through the history and through the housekeeper character, Argo goes to some length not to condemn the country or its people.  And it manages to create a fun cinematic thrill while doing it.

January 5:Grave of the Fireflies/Hotaru no haka (1988 -- Isao Takahata)

★★★★★