Chaplin is his own narrator, that is, the poet of the biograph; Jannings is its manifold novelist. I cannot transcribe anything of his: his lively vocabulary of gestures and his direct facial language do not seem translatable to any other. Aside from the agonies of tragedy, Jannings knows how to render the strictly everyday. He knows not only how to die (an easy task, or easy to pretend because it cannot be verified) but how to live. Made of incessant, minute realizations, his unpretentious style is as efficient as Cervantes’ or Butler’s. His characters—the opaque heap of sensuality in Tartuffe, always with a tiny breviary before his eyes like a sardonic mask; the emperor in Quo Vadis, repulsively effeminate and grossly vain; the proper and complacently methodical cashier Schilling; the great gentleman in The Last Command, no less dedicated to the fatherland than knowledgeable of his frailties and complexities—are all so disparate, all so self-contained, that we are unable to imagine them understanding each other. How ironically uninterested the general is in Schilling’s menial tragedy, and what prophetic anathemas (written in Martin Luther’s heroic German) he would cast at Nero!
To die one need only be alive, I heard an Argentine woman say, indisputably. I would add that this precondition is indispensable and that the German cinematograph—as disinterested in persons as it is determined to seek symmetries and symbols—tends to omit it with a fatal frivolity. The German cinema tries to move us with universal shortcomings, or with the martyrdom of multitudes whose lives we have not witnessed and which, as insignificant bas-reliefs, are even further defamiliarized. Not realizing that the crowd is less than one man, it erects a forest to hide the lack of a tree. But in art, as in the biblical deluge, the loss of humanity does not matter as long as the concrete human couple inherits the world. Defoe would divide this example by two and substitute: as long as Robinson . . .
[1929] [SJL]
Films
Here is my opinion of some recent films:
Surpassing the others, Der Marder Dimitri Karamasoff [The Murderer Dimitri Karamazov] (Filmreich) is by far the best. Its director, Ozep, appears to have skirted effortlessly the much praised and voguish flaws of the German cinema—lugubrious symbolism, tautology or the meaningless repetition of equivalent images, obscenity, a propensity for teratology and Satanism—while also eluding the Soviet school’s even more glaring pitfalls: the omission of characters, photographic anthologies, and the awkward charms of the Committee. (I will not even mention the French: thus far their one and only desire has been not to resemble the Americans, a risk, I assure them, they do not run.)
I am not familiar with the cavernous novel from which this film was extracted, a felix culpa allowing me to enjoy it without the constant temptation to compare the present spectacle with the remembered book in order to see if they coincide. Pristinely disregarding, therefore, its irreverent desecrations and virtuous fidelities—both unimportant—I find the present film most powerful. Purely hallucinatory, neither subordinate nor cohesive, its reality is no less torrential than Josef von Sternberg’s teeming Docks of New York. Among the high points is a depiction of genuine, candid joy after a murder: the sequence of shots—approaching dawn, huge billiard balls awaiting collision, Smerdiakov’s clerical hand taking the money—is brilliantly conceived and executed.
Here is another film. All our critics have unconditionally applauded Charlie Chaplin’s latest, mysteriously entitled City Lights. The truth behind this published acclaim, however, has more to do with our faultless telegraphic and postal services than with any inherent, individual judgment. Would anyone dare ignore that Charlie Chaplin is one of the established gods in the mythology of our time, a cohort of de Chirico’s motionless nightmares, of Scarface Al’s ardent machine guns, of the finite yet unlimited universe of Greta Garbo’s lofty shoulders, of the goggled eyes of Gandhi? Could anyone afford not to know that Chaplin’s most recent comédie larmoyante had to be astonishing? In reality—in what I believe is reality—this much-attended film from the splendid creator and hero of The Gold Rush is merely a weak collection of minor mishaps imposed on a sentimental story. Some episodes are new; one is not: the garbage collector’s professional joy upon seeing the providential (and then false) elephant who will presumably supply him with a raison d’être is a carbon copy of the Trojan garbage col lector and the fake Greek horse in that neglected film The Private Life of Helen of Troy.
Objections of a more general nature can also be leveled against City Lights. Its lack of reality is comparable only to its equally exasperating lack of unreality. Some movies are true to life—For the Defense, Street of Chance, The Crowd, even The Broadway Melody—and some are willfully unrealistic, such as the highly individualistic films of Frank Borzage, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, and Eisenstein. Chaplin’s early escapades belong to the second type, undeniably based as they are on depthless photography and eerily accelerated action, as well as on the actors’ fake moustaches, absurd false beards, fright wigs, and ominous overcoats. Not attaining such unreality, City Lights remains unconvincing. Except for the luminous blind girl, extraordinary in her beauty, and for Charlie himself—always a wraith, always disguised—all the film’s characters are recklessly normal. Its ramshackle plot relies on the disjointed techniques of continuity from twenty years ago. Archaism and anachronism are literary modes too, I know, but to handle them intentionally is different than perpetrating them ineptly. I relinquish my hope—so often fulfilled—of being wrong.
In von Sternberg’s Morocco, too, I notice a certain weariness, though to a less overwhelming and suicidal degree. The terse photography, exquisite direction, and oblique yet suitable methods of Underworld have been replaced here by hordes of extras and broad brushstrokes of excessive local color. To indicate Morocco, von Sternberg has thought up nothing less vulgar than an ornate forgery of a Moorish city in the Hollywood suburbs, with a cornucopia of burnooses, fountains, and tall guttural muezzins preceding the dawn and the camels in sunlight. The film’s overall plot, on the other hand, is good, resolved at the end in the open desert, returned once more to the beginning, like our first Martin Fierro or the novel Sanin by the Russian Artsybashev. One may watch Morocco with pleasure, but not with the intellectual satisfaction derived from the first viewing (and even the second) of earlier works by von Sternberg, nor with the cogent intellectual sat isfaction produced by that heroic film The Dragnet.
[1931] [SJL]
Street Scene
The Russians discovered that the oblique—and consequently—distorted shot of a bottle, a bull’s neck, or a column had greater visual value than Hollywood’s thousand and one extras, hastily camouflaged as Assyrians and then shuffled into total confusion by Cecil B. DeMille. They also discovered that Midwestern clichés—the merits of espionage and betrayal, of everlasting wedded bliss, the untarnished purity of prostitutes, the finishing uppercut dealt by a sober young ma—could be exchanged for other, no less admirable clichés. (Thus, in one of the noblest Soviet films, a battleship bombards the teeming port of Odessa at close range, with no casualties except for some marble lions. This marksmanship is harmless because it comes from a virtuous, maximum battleship.)
Such discoveries, proposed to a world saturated to the point of disgust with Hollywood productions, were honored by a world that extended its gratitude to the point of pretending that Soviet cinema had wiped out American cinema forever. (Those were the years when Alexander Blok proclaimed, in the characteristic tones of Walt Whitman, that the Russians were Scythians.) The world forgot, or tried to forget, that the Russian cinema’s greatest virtue was to interrupt a steady fare from California. Also ignored was the absurdity of equating a few good, even excellent acts of violence (Ivan the Terrible, Battleship Potemkin, perhaps October) with a vast and complex literature, successfully executed in all genres, from the incomparably comedic (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon) to the purely fantastic mythologies of Krazy Kat and Bimbo. Alarm over the Russians grew. Hollywood reformed or enriched some of its photographic
techniques, and did not get too worried.
King Vidor did, however. I speak of the uneven director of works as memorable as Hallelujah and as superfluously trivial as Billy the Kid, that shameful chronicle of the twenty murders (not counting Mexicans) committed by the famous gunslinger from Arizona, a film made with no distinction other than the accumulation of panoramic takes and, to denote the desert, the methodical elimination of close-ups. His most recent work, Street Scene, adapted from the comedy of the same name by the exexpressionist Elmer Rice, is inspired by the simple, negative desire not to look “standard.” It has an unsatisfying, minimal plot: its hero is virtuous but under the influence of a thug; it has a romantic couple, but any civil or religious union is forbidden to them. It has a gloriously exuberant, larger-than life Italian who is obviously responsible for all the comedy in the piece, a man whose unlimited unreality also rubs off on his normal colleagues. It has characters who seem true to life and others in masquerade. Fundamentally not realist, this film is a frustrated, or repressed, romantic work.
Two great scenes elevate the film: a dawn where the splendid course of the night is epitomized in music, and a murder indirectly presented to us in the tumult and tempest of faces.
Actors and photography: excellent.
[1932] [SJL]
King Kong
A monkey forty feet tall (some fans say forty-five) may have obvious charms, but those charms have not convinced this viewer. King Kong is no full-blooded ape but rather a rusty, desiccated machine whose movements are downright clumsy. His only virtue, his height, did not impress the cinematographer, who persisted in photographing him from above rather than from below—the wrong angle, as it neutralizes and even diminishes the ape’s overpraised stature. He is actually hunchbacked and bowlegged, attributes that serve only to reduce him in the spectator’s eye. To keep him from looking the least bit extraordinary, they make him do battle with far more unusual monsters and have him reside in caves of false cathedral splendor, where his infamous size again loses all proportion. But what finally demolishes both the gorilla and the film is his romantic love—or lust—for Fay Wray.
[1933] [SJL]
The Informer
I am not familiar with the popular novel from which this film was adapted, a felix culpa that has allowed me to watch it without the constant temptation to compare the present spectacle with the remembered reading in or der to determine coincidences. I have watched it and do consider it one of the best films offered us this past year; I also consider it too memorable not to provoke discussion and not to deserve reproach. Several reproaches, really, since it has run the beautiful risk of being entirely satisfactory and, for two or three reasons, has not succeeded.
The first is the hero’s excessive motivations for his actions. I recognize that realism is the goal, but film directors (and novelists) tend to forget that many justifications, and many circumstantial details, are counterproductive. Reality is not vague, but our general perception of reality is: herein lies the danger of overly justifying actions or inventing too many details. In this particular case (a man suddenly turns Judas, denounces his friend to the police with their machine guns, condemning him to death), the erotic mo tive invoked seems to diminish the treachery of the deed and its heinous miracle. Infamy committed absentmindedly, or out of mere brutality, would have been more striking, artistically. I also think it would have been more believable. (L’Herbier’s Le Bonheur is another excellent film invalidated by its excess of psychological motives.) Obviously, a plurality of motives does not seem, in essence, wrong to me: I admire the scene where the informer squanders his thirty pieces of silver because of his triple need to confuse, to bribe his threatening friends (who are perhaps his judges and will end up as his executioners), and to rid himself of those banknotes that dishonor him.
Another weakness of The Informer is how it begins and ends. The opening episodes do not ring true. This is partly the fault of the street we are shown—too typical, too European (in the California sense of the word). A street in Dublin is certainly not identical to a street in San Francisco, but because both are authentic, the location resembles more the latter than an obvious sham, overloaded with thick local color. More than universal similarities, local differences seem to have made a great impression on Hollywood: there is no American director, faced with the hypothetical problem of showing a railroad crossing in Spain or an open field in Austro-Hungary, who does not solve the problem by representing the site with a set, built especially for the occasion, whose only merit must be its ostentatious cost. The ending has other faults: while it is appropriate for the audience to be moved by the horrifying fate of the informer, the fact that the director of the film is moved and grants him a sentimental death amid Catholic stained-glass windows and choir music seems less admirable.
The merits of this film are less subtle than its faults and do not need emphasis. Nevertheless, I would like to note one very effective touch: the dangling man’s fingernails grating on the ledge at the very end and the disappearance of his hand as he is machine-gunned and falls to the ground.
Of the three tragic unities, two have been observed: the unities of time and action. Neglect of the third-unity of place-cannot be a cause for complaint. By its very nature, film seems to reject this third norm, requiring, instead, continuous displacements. (The dangers of dogmatism: the admirable memory of Payment Deferred cautions me against mistaken generalizations. In that film, the fact that everything takes place in one house, almost in a single room, is a fundamental tragic virtue.)
[1935] [SJL]
Two Films
One is called Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky/von Sternberg. The fact that the first collaborator—the deceased Russian—has not actually collaborated will alarm no one, given the practices of Hollywood; that any trace left by the second—the dreamy Viennese—is equally unnoticeable borders on the monstrous. I can understand how the “psychological” novel might not interest a man, or might not interest him any longer. I could imagine that von Sternberg, devoted to the inexorable Muse of Bric-a-Brae, might reduce all the mental (or at least feverish) complexities of Rodion Romanovich’s crime to the depiction of a pawnbroker’s house crammed with intolerable objects, or a police station resembling Hollywood’s notion of a Cossack barracks. Indoctrinated by the populous memory of The Scarlet Empress, I was expecting a vast flood of false beards, miters, samovars, masks, surly faces, wrought-iron gates, vineyards, chess pieces, balalaikas, prominent cheek bones, and horses. In short, I was expecting the usual von Sternberg nightmare, the suffocation and the madness. All in vain! In this film, von Sternberg has discarded his usual caprices, which could be an excellent omen, but unfortunately, he has not replaced them with anything. Without transition or pause, he has merely passed from a hallucinatory state (The Scarlet Empress, The Devil Is a Woman) to a foolish state. Formerly he seemed mad, which at least was something; now he seems merely simpleminded. Nevertheless, there is no cause for despair: perhaps Crime and Punishment, a totally vacuous work, is a sign of remorse and penitence, a necessary act of purification. Perhaps Crime and Punishment is only a bridge between the vertiginous sound and fury of The Scarlet Empress and a forthcoming film that will reject not only the peculiar charms of chaos but will also resemble-once again-intelligence. (In writing “once again,” I am thinking of Josef von Sternberg’s early films.)
From an extraordinarily intense novel, von Sternberg has derived an empty film; from an absolutely dull adventure story—The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan—Hitchcock has made a good film. He has invented episodes, inserted wit and mischief where the original contained only heroism. He has thrown in delightfully unsentimental erotic relief, and also a thoroughly charming character, Mr. Memory. Infinitely removed from the other two faculties of the mind, this man reveals a grave secret simply because someone asks it of him and because to answer, at that moment, is his role.