SUMURUN / ONE ARABIAN NIGHT (1920)

Ernst Lubitsch already had five years of successful comedies (many starring himself) & trail-blazing ‘intimate’ historical dramas to his credit when he had a filmmaking breakthru in 1920. CARMEN/’18, MADAME DU BARRY and THE OYSTER PRINCESS/’19, successful as they are, still 'speak' film as a second language, but in SUMURUN (and ANNE BOLEYN/’20), cinema becomes Lubitschian native tongue. A bit of a paradox for a breaththru, since SUMURUN was adapted from a Max Reinhardt stage production Lubitsch had starred in, playing the sort of role Lon Chaney would soon make his own, the ugly, broken-hearted Pagliacci, scheming for the love of a girl he’ll never win. In his final film role, Lubitsch gives a broad, but very effective perf, suffering the pangs (and violence) of unrequited love for the alluring dancer in his traveling troupe, Pola Negri, easily stealing the film. Equal screen time goes to the royal court where the Grand Sheikh’s favorite (lovely Sumurun) refuses his entreaties because she loves a man of the cloth. Bolts of cloth, that is, he’s a lowly fabric merchant. The story has a tricky structure that uses the Sheikh’s son, also in love with Sumurun, as a ruse to affect an escape. It proves one storyline too many for Lubitsch who fumbles a bit at the climax. (Or is the print incomplete?) But there’s loads of funny supporting bits, especially for a couple of twin schemers and the not-so-loyal Court Eunuchs. (The harem’s top girl tells their leader to ‘act like a man.’) The whole production is a visual treat, with clever use of perspective, trompe l’oeil effects and multiple heads popping up thru multiple framing devices. Reinhardt would have approved, but it’s doubtful he’d have made it all so deliciously funny. The original Stateside release, retitled ONE ARABIAN NIGHT, dropped more than a reel of footage, but the current KINO DVD, with a fine piano accompaniment, seems reasonably complete even if the image quality suffers from blasting.

CARLOS (2010)

French writer/director Olivier Assayas stepped out of his comfort zone for this blistering three-part bio-pic on self-styled terrorist-liberator Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka ‘Carlos.’ The film, released theatrically in various cuts, easily justifies its fullest running time of about 5½ hours in three easily digestible parts, no scorecard needed. Mostly playing out in the ‘70s, when Carlos was at his most active & reckless, we tag along on a series of escalating political attacks, police shootouts and plenty of collateral damage as Carlos and his unit attack whatever power they feel stands in the way of their anti-capitalistic, pro-Palestinian goals . . . whatever that might be. And that’s the question, since they wind up being against pretty much everything & everybody, and for . . . what? Carlos certainly shows no concrete idealism after he gains a measure of fame. It’s all Carlos (brilliantly played in a dazzling turn with confounding weight fluctuation & facial hair by Édgar Ramírez), or rather, all about Carlos & his ‘Carlo-istas.’ With Assayas keeping the action and politics triumphantly clear, the constantly shifting Middle Eastern alliances have rarely been navigated so well. But the film is also pure pulse-pounding thriller, beautifully paced with great perfs all around. The group’s high water mark has them taking hostage of an entire OPEC Council membership meeting. The lack of security now looks bizarre, but the film holds more closely to the facts than is usual in these things. (A fourth disc holds an hour-long documentary.) But perhaps most breathtaking of all is the group’s all but complete lack of self-awareness in joining forces exclusively with repressive governments in the Communist Block, partnering with the KGB, STASI and a variety of Arab dictatorships. (Megalomaniacs apparently lack the irony gene.) The wonder is less in Carlos’s success, being perfectly comfortable with murder takes you pretty far, but in how such a self-aggrandizing publicity whore was able to avoid arrest for decades. Maybe it was because he started out thinking he’d be the next Che Guevara and ended up closer to Scarface. The film is fabulous.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jean-François Richet’s MESRINE/’08 (a mere two-parter) with Vincent Cassel as France’s top ‘60s outlaw is like an apolitical companion piece.

THE RED PONY (1949)

Casting is destiny, so pairing Myrna Loy with Robert Mitchum in John Steinbeck’s fine self-adaptation purports an unspoken romantic connection that shadows this boy-and-his-pony story. It proves a good thing, adding a note of prairie rue to the sub-text of Lewis Milestone’s handsome, slightly static film. Shepperd Strudwick, as the husband with one foot back in the city, plays reluctant outsider, even to his own son who’s drawn to Mitchum’s natural authority as the ranch-hand with all the answers. Hence, Dad’s gift of the pony which, this being Steinbeck country, leads to tough-love/life-and-death family lessons. Loy’s restraint as Mom, burying herself in chores, is a coping mechanism; her old dad (Lewis Calhern) gets by on his frontier memories, boring everyone with tales of ‘Westering.’ (And it helped Calhern in the real world with an offer to take over the role of Buffalo Bill in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN/’50 when Frank Morgan died.) Milestone also does nicely with the non-pro school pals of Peter Miles, the day-dreaming son. Miles himself has a few awkward line readings, but his look of constant expectation makes up for a lot. So does the look of the film in general. Tony Gaudio, the great Warners D.P., on his final credit, gives the production the supra-realism of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover come to life. (Excellent color & picture quality on the 'Olive' DVD.) Quite a change from our current fashion for no-holds-barred grubbiness. And it pays off excitingly in a climactic fight between the boy & a deadly turkey vulture, bringing out the silent film montage theorist in Milestone, a fast-edit bit of violence Hitchcock may have remembered when making PSYCHO/’60 and THE BIRDS/’63. Finally, there’s composer Aaron Copland, on his third film with Milestone, tying it all together with his great original score. (Said to be his personal favorite, it’s well served by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony on an RCA disc of Copland film music.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Mitchum did a near practice run for this in RACHEL AND THE STRANGER/’48 with William Holden, Loretta Young . . . and his guitar. The man had a real set of pipes on him. For another boy-and-his-horse pic, it’s tough to beat WHITE MANE/’53, a five-reel masterpiece from Albert Lamorisse of RED BALLOON fame.

NEOTPRAVLENNOYE PISMO / LETTER NEVER SENT (1959)

(To be read with stagy, Ruskie accent, please.) After CRANES ARE FLYING/’57* win international prize (during Cold War, yet), with sweet, but sad tale of young Soviet love during Great Patriotic War, director Mikhail Kalatozov and ace cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky make fantasy ‘dokumentary’ I AM CUBA/’64. First film, sentimental tripe everyone love; second film, movie geek porn unseen for decades, now famous for impossible cantilevered tracking shots. Very boring, but . . . hoo, boy, some show! Forgotten in middle is here, noble three-hankie tale of four intrepid geologists (three menski, one womanski) searching, searching, searching for diamond lode in not so cheery Siberia. Will love triangle tear them apart? Will radio hold up? Will dancing for joy cause broken toe? Much noble sacrifice; much handsome images & artful silhouette; many stupendous tracking shots thru forests. Why? Who care! And score? Nikolai Kryukov make music dramatics worthy of Bolshoi; Aram Khachaturian drooling with envy, consigns SPARTACUS ballet score to flames! (Lucky have back up copy.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Fatal mission pics are not so rare, think SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC/’48, NORTHWEST PASSAGE/’40 or Kalatozov’s final pic, THE RED TENT/’69, an international dud with Sean Connery, Peter Finch & 70mm. (Sergey Bondarchuk had a similar international wreck when he followed his huge production of WAR AND PEACE/’66* with Rod Steiger(!) playing Napoleon in WATERLOO/’70.) Best to pop this pretentious bubble with Buster Keaton’s THE BOAT/21, his two-reel existential masterpiece (with laughs) as Buster & family get permanently lost at sea . . . or some absurdist no man’s land. Damn if I know.

*Reviewed on this site.

DÉSIRÉ (1937)

This is one of the strongest play-to-film transfers from author/actor/director/bon vivant Sacha Guitry’s wildly productive mid-1930s, when he seemed to be filming his effervescent boulevard comedies in batches. DÉSIRÉ sits neatly between the ironic social commentary of a Shavian exercise and a classic Ernst Lubitsch gloss on how sexual attraction effects every action. And if Guitry’s gifts in technique, structure and dialectic drama never go too deep, he’s perfectly delightful within his limits. Here, he’s an irresistible valet, that is, irresistible to his mistresses. And it’s happening again. At the same time, Guitry runs a sort of Upstairs/Downstairs dialogue on politics, manners, mores, house-service rituals and sex. Well, mostly sex, and with a blushing frankness that can still send out ripples. Adding to the fun is that his employer, and the object he denies himself, is Guitry’s actual wife at the time, Jacqueline Delubac. Desirable as she is, another beauty works below stairs, Arletty as Madame’s chambermaid, a servant who knows the proper tip for everything. Add in Madame’s longtime lover, a highly placed minister; a tetchy cook; and a well-placed, but slightly appalling, older couple for a climactic, hilarious, politically-incorrect dinner. (She’s deaf as a post; he’s both politically & sexually expedient.) As director, Guitry goes his own way, with a handmade quality to staging & editing that bumps along. You get used to it, and it pays off in a couple of tour de force soliloquies Guitry wrote for himself which might not work at all under more conventional terms.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Might as well go for the matching pair and try Hollywood’s take on French manners, mores & sexual attraction in DESIRE/’36. That’s a non-accented DESIRE from one year earlier.) Frank Borzage directs this yummy Ernst Lubitsch production with Marlene Dietrich & Gary Cooper.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/desire-1936.html

BLANCANIEVES (2012)

It took Spanish helmer Pablo Berger a decade to get his second feature made; and no wonder, since it’s a highly stylized modern silent-film retelling of SNOW WHITE. No surprise it turns out to be just the sort of prize-worthy, over-cooked, artsy film-fest entry you feared it’d be. BIG surprise that shortly past the halfway mark, six bullfighting dwarfs show up to help make the film everything you hoped it might be. How’d that happen? Simply put, Berger overloads his first act with one precious shot after another, you ‘oo’ and ‘ah,’ but worry about the cost of the frame. Couldn't we just move along? With so little filmmaking experience, he’s no whiz at setting up situations or clarifying action; and risibly kick-starting FATE with an ill-timed, but obviously needless flash photo at a bullfight when its Andalusian high noon. Meantime, silent film buffs will scoff at his unending use of ‘clever’ camera placements, optical tricks and lens choices. But once those gentlemanly little bullfighters come to Damsel’s rescue, the panting & flourishes recede and the narrative drive takes off. The film stops trying to revive Expressionist manners and runs more along the lines of classic Hollywood adventure pics, not so far from Rouben Mamoulian’s kinetic, nearly danceable MARK OF ZORRO/’40. And Berger tops it all off with a terrific coda that threads the needle between enigmatic and sentimental.

DOUBLE-BILL: While Mamoulian’s ZORRO strikes a similar tone, his luscious, TechniColored BLOOD AND SAND/’41 is the more obvious pairing, even as it reverses BLANCANIEVES by working best in its first half. For a silent film pairing, there's the superb grotesquerie of Paul Leni's THE MAN WHO LAUGHS/'28.

THE CANTERVILLE GHOST (1944)

Oscar Wilde’s oft-filmed story was pummeled into a WWII pep talk for U.S. soldier boy Robert Young in this glossy, studio-bound wartime version from M-G-M. Stationed with his squad in England, Young discovers he’s the latest inheritor of the Canterville curse of cowardice. What’ll happen when he’s sent off to battle? Charles Laughton hams things up as the ghost who begat the jinx 300 years ago, still prancing about the joint now run by his descendant, 6 yr-old Margaret O’Brien, quivery of lip, loose of tear duct. Lapped up back in the day, its little lessons, forced comedy & sentiment now feel awful thick, though the prologue does offer a chance to see young Peter Lawford as Laughton’s kid brother. That’s a stretch! Jules Dassin took over the film when Laughton nixed original director Norman McLeod, but the film’s need for whimsy, and lots of it, was something neither of them specialized in.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *At M-G-M, Norman Taurog was the obvious choice as helmer, but with no credits between ‘43 and ‘46, he was presumably in service at the time.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Ian Richardson, Patrick Stewart, John Gielgud, Richard Kiley, Michael Redgrave & David Niven have all played the ghost, but a recently announced remake lists Hugh Laurie & Stephen Fry in its cast. (Who’ll be playing play the ghost?) Sounds promising, especially if they do it straight and unmodernized.

THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM (1966)

Harold Pinter didn’t win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his commercial screenplays. They’re unhappy compromises that find his vaguely menacing signature dialogue, pregnant pauses and absurdist free-association (often weirdly comic) fancies fighting against the demands of whatever genre he’s tickling. Here, it’s the international spy game with Alec Guinness as George Segal’s ‘controller,’ tossing him into a tangled web of Berlin Neo-Nazis twenty years after the war. Max von Sydow is the main target, but Segal can only find his headquarters with the help of Senta Berger who holds a key to the underground world and becomes Segal’s latest conquest. If only something happened along the way or was being planned! Perhaps we’d take less notice of what’s missing if director Michael Anderson took charge on the spare action sequences, but not much happens in those either. (Or even looks convincing.) Meanwhile, Guinness, along with George Sanders, Robert Helpmann, Robert Flemyng and other supporting espionage players get almost nothing to do. No doubt, a sly, Pinteresque joke on the useless nature of the spy game, but dramatically unsatisfying. Much like the non-surprising, twisted-allegiance grace note finale.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The ending seems to have THE THIRD MAN/’49 on its brain. Vienna instead of Berlin, but still a good idea.

DANGEROUS (1935)

Doubling down on her no-holds-barred perf in R.K.O.’s OF HUMAN BONDAGE/’34, Warner Bros. gave Bette Davis plenty to chew on, swallow and spit right back at you in every reel of this trashy tale. She’s a jinxed actress, down on her luck when society architect Franchot Tone takes her on as a charity project. Naturally, they capitulate, screw up his engagement with unexciting Margaret Lindsay and nearly destroy each other. Real-life doomed actress Jeanne Eagles (prominently mentioned in the storyline*) was the likely inspiration for these melodramatic doings, but there’s little resemblance to anything real under Alfred E. Green’s mechanical megging. (Second-unit man Russell Saunders is likely responsible for the famous third-act smash-up.) It still remains intensely watchable, in spite of some unintended giggles, thanks to lots of chemistry between Tone & Davis, plus a few lifelike moments, as when Davis tells off housekeeper Alison Skipworth. Yikes! Few actress worried less about playing the sympathy card, compare with Kate Hepburn’s actress in MORNING GLORY/’33, yet they each got Oscar’d for them.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Davis always claimed to have dubbed the nameless Academy Award statue ‘Oscar’ after she brought the award home and noted a resemblance to her then-husband’s (Harmon Oscar Nelson) backside. Hmm.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The astonishing Jeanne Eagles survives in one film, a stage-bound, but utterly fascinating early Talkie adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER/’29, handsomely remade by Davis with William Wyler directing in 1940.