April 21: Brief Encounter (1945 -- David Lean)

★★★★★

April 18: Blithe Spirit (1945 -- David Lean)

★★

Blithe Spirit must rank among the most trivial of David Lean’s work, and it’s safe to guess that it’s not Noel Coward’s star achievement either.  This film takes the interest in spiritualism, already gently mocked in the character of Sylvia in This Happy Breed, and turns it into the butt of full scale wit.  Exaggerated characters strike poses and engage in repartee, but overall the film lacks punch or insight.   Or, for that matter, originality.  Blithe Spirit putters along like a stylized, commercial theatrical production, telegraphing its next plot turn well in advance.

Lean doesn’t rise above this material either.  Sight gags and double exposures work to create some interest, but Lean’s editing acumen and Ronald Neame’s cinematographic touch are largely absent here.  There’s even a continuity problem as the driver and passenger in a car inexplicably switch places at one cut.  There is some nice use of color palette in the Technicolor – Elvira’s green complements the colors of the first séance, and Ruth’s subdued orange blend nicely with her room – but there’s little to distinguish the color scales here from those in other Technicolor productions of the time.

As my friend Lou says, this film lacks spirit.

April 16: This Happy Breed (1944 -- David Lean)

★★★★

No sophomore slump here.  David Lean’s second collaboration with Noel Coward (and Ronald Neame) again pairs good character study with the cinematic to describe bedrock England.  This Happy Breed follows a middle class family though the two decades between WW I and WW II, showing the domestic values that underlie what is quintessentially English and the factors that stress them.

A lot of the characters in This Happy Breed recall those from In Which We Serve, and when the characters don’t obviously correspond, their qualities look familiar.  From the film’s opening panorama of London that slowly zooms in on a middle class neighborhood with gardens uniformly filling each identical back yard, the British affection for horticulture almost becomes a metaphor for the British character.  “We do things slow in this country,” Frank tells the impetuous leftist Sam, who will later become his stolidly middle-class son-in-law.  Steady, calm, and methodical with an eye to the future, -- these are the qualities of a good gardener and a good Brit.  Like the Chief of In Which We Serve, Frank tends his garden and his family conservatively, adjusting to whatever immediate crises arise so that he can get back to his happy equilibrium.

But This Happy Breed shows us that the British conservative isn't rigid because the British heart prods the conservative to adapt.  Ethel shows this dynamic the most clearly when she rejects her daughter Queenie because of the girl’s socially shameful behavior and her undermining the marriage of another woman.  Celia Johnson’s hardworking, determined Ethel vows never to speak to her daughter again for these social transgressions, but when the occasion for their reunion comes, the mother’s heart can’t hold out against her conservative values, and mother and daughter are reunited.  There’s a similar reunion between Queenie and Billy, the very decent suitor she has previously rejected as boring.  Billy has been diligently working his way up the ranks to be able to afford marriage while Vi has been learning that red dresses and the Charleston aren't what she really wants.  After their divergent paths, the two are able to embrace middle class, married bliss by the time the film ends.

There are other echoes of In Which We Serve in this film, too.  We again have an crabby, elderly, female in-law residing in the house, Ethel’s mother, and she’s continually bickering with a younger woman, Ethel’s sister Sylvia.  And the stolid middle class life in this film is punctuated by the same events as the middle class life In Which We Serve, a wedding and a Christmas celebration with paper decorations.  Both of these two Lean/Coward collaborations show the British middle class as stolid but open to change as compelling family needs dictate.

This Happy Breed doesn't have the sudden cinematic flourishes like the opening of In Which We Serve or the editing dazzle we see in some scenes in that film, but there are moments of cinematic pleasure here.  The opening with the London cityscape that ends in the garden of a single home has its thrill while it's also telling us that we’re seeing the story of but one little family among many.  And without a line that says, “This is the story of a family.”  Lean, and perhaps Coward, trust cinema enough at this point that they don't need expository dialog.  Another scene adapts theater technique to the screen.  The scene opens with Ethel’s mother and Sylvia listening to some upbeat jazz when they are interrupted by Vi with the bad news of Reg's death.  The peppy music continues unabated on the soundtrack while the two burst into tears and flee the room, creating an ironic emotional counterpoint.  The music continues while Vi goes to the garden to tell Frank and Ethel of their loss, but the camera stays in the room, motionless as always, with the jazz going.  Frank and Ethel reenter the room some moments later, clearly devastated, but the music continues at the same volume and the camera continues its static gaze.  It’s not hard to see this exact staging in a theatrical production, but it works well on film, too.

The cinematography makes the boldest film statement of This Happy Breed.  We know it’s Technicolor from the credits and from more traditional uses of the process like we see in the ranks of brightly dressed soldiers marching in the parade with red accents on their uniforms.  But most of the film uses Technicolor in an unusual way to create rich, muted brown and grey hues, from the drab wallpaper to the drab upholstery to the drab clothes.  The film can show color --  it does so in the Christmas decorations and in Queenie’s dance sequence – but Technicolor here only reinforces the drabness of the family’s environment, which is an appropriate corollary to the family’s conservative values.  There’s nothing too extravagant in behavior, values or décor with this middle class, British family.

This Happy Breed is a solid film that gives an insightful reading of bedrock British values.  Because of the film’s clear sympathy with the characters it portrays, it doesn't idealize, patronize or satirize.  By staying in the realm of drama as much as it does, This Happy Breed gives us a perspective on a certain segment of British society between the two wars.

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.