Second Seasons Combined - The Edinburgh Film Guild

Transcription

Comradeship (Kameradschaft)
Germany | 1931 | 90 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
G. W. Pabst
Peter Martin Lampel, Karl
Otten, Gerbert Rappaport,
Ladislaus Vajda, Léon Werth
G. von Rigelius
Robert Baberske, Fritz Arno
Wagner
In a coal mine on the French-German border the aftermath of World War I is still
being played out: French prosperity and chauvinism hard up against German
inflation and unemployment. Then there is a disaster in the French wing of the
mine and it is up to the German miners go to the rescue.
Cast
Kasper
Wilderer
Wittkopp
Frau Wittkopp
Alexander Granach
Fritz Kampers
Ernst Busch
Elisabeth Wendt
The Moral Tendency: Kameradschaft
For all the reverential bows in its direction, pacifism has had
a rough ride in the cinema. Cruelty and violence weather
the years far better, for even their most fantastic
incarnations seem closer to the reality of our cruel and
violent times. “Cruelty was on the ‘good side’”, says Serge
Daney. “It was cruelty that said no to academic ‘illustration’ and destroyed the hypocritical feelings of a wordy humanism” (1). Haunted
by the shadow of naiveté, even uselessness, the aesthetic qualities of the pacifist cinema often suffered apace with its evident futility
in the face of real-life horrors. La Grande Illusion (1937) alone, perhaps, exists to this day with its artistic reputation intact, while a film
such as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is little more than an essential but stodgy footnote in film history,
sinking in the seas of critical regard with its League of Nations peace medal clutched in hand.
Much the same has happened to the second winner of that patently ironic decoration, G.W. Pabst’s Kameradschaft. Drawing inspiration
from the Courrières mine disaster of 1906, during which German miners violated the border to rescue their trapped French
counterparts, Pabst updated the event to the post-war period and relocated it in Lorraine, one of the sorest and most hotly disputed
regions on the Franco-German border. The symbolism was transparent, and thus effective. Kameradschaft received the requisite
acclaim for a humanitarian film by a major director, was awarded that fateful medal – and quickly passed into irrelevance as the National
Socialists seized control of the Reichstag in 1932 and went about heightening (if such a mild word can suffice) those very divisions
which Pabst had hoped might be eradicated.
And so Kameradschaft has faded into relative neglect, passing
nods to its technical accomplishment superseded by thinly veiled
contempt, such as David Thomson’s curt dismissal of the film’s
humanitarianism as “facile” (2) or the more scholarly
circumlocutions of Russell Berman, who sees in every facet of the
film a failure of revolutionary promise and a virtual paving of the
way for the ravages of Nazism. “If the solidarity of 1906 could not
prevent 1914, why should the viewer in 1931 trust an unreflected
repetition of that solidarity to prevent a new war?” Berman asks;
a kind of guilt by association which implies that hope is only
legitimate insofar as it yields concrete results. (4)
Undoubtedly, the maker of a pacifist film bears a profound
responsibility – not to ensure that world events conform to his
ideals, but that his artistry holds fast to the truths which give those
ideals relevance. Pabst can certainly be faulted for not pressing
far enough into perhaps the most crucial issue of his scenario: in
this film about proletarian solidarity there is hardly a mention of
Mines, Miners and Mining
class conflict, as if Pabst were unwilling to sully his paean to international
brotherhood with the dirty facts of economic exploitation. This hesitancy
adds something of a hollow ring to the otherwise moving speech at the
film’s end, when the French orator decries “our two enemies: Gas and
War!” – with not a hint as to what birthed those enemies, with hardly an
accusing finger pointed towards the seats of power. The dilution continues
with the oft-excised final scene of French and German officials resealing
the underground frontier which the German miners had broken through to
aid in the rescue, Pabst’s dark irony sapped of its power by the film’s
preceding circumspection.
While drawing attention to these faults, however, the great, short-lived
Depression-era critic Harry Alan Potamkin – no mean Marxist –
nevertheless praised Kameradschaft as a major progression for both Pabst
and the cinema itself: “It is a picture not more than pacifistic, it does not
assail or divulge causes, but its pacifism is [neither] flamboyant nor selfdelusive; it is on its way to an acute attack upon the war makers.” (4)
Profoundly affected by Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), finding
in it “if not the historic social base, at least a maximum intensity of
conscience and intensiveness of treatment”, (5) Pabst with Kameradschaft
honed his technical mastery – that “X-ray camera eye” which had adorned
the erotic dream worlds of Pandora’s Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl
(1929) with exquisitely dispassionate detail – into a moral instrument
stripped of either locked-in rhetoric or detached aestheticism. “Pabst is
never oratorical in his portrayal of the human element in the rescue, never
colossal in his depiction of the mechanics of the rescue”, says Potamkin.
“He is always close to the ethical fiber of the event, and from this
steadfastness emanates the artistry.” (6) Though concerned that the film
is “too empirical – does not develop its social tendency,” (7) Potamkin
concludes that “Kameradschaft, because it re-establishes the cinema on
the firm ground of the concrete record of an event of mass-reference, and that outside the land of the proletarian rule, is of mighty
significance.” (8)
Though he never lived to see what would become of his beloved land of proletarian rule, the ensuing monstrousness of Stalin’s purges
no more de-legitimises Potamkin’s searing insight than the rise of Hitler’s Germany diminishes the depth of Kameradschaft‘s artistry.
Ultimately, socially progressive art is answerable only to that part of it which is least social and least progressive: the art itself, which
can lift the social and the progressive beyond platitude, can illuminate them within their full human dimension. On this score,
Kameradschaft merits the value with which Potamkin invests it, not least because its humanism is linked so indissolubly – and so
improbably – with its technical achievement. Seldom do the two manage to coexist in equal measure – “a triumph of art over
humanity,” Robert Warshow famously labeled the Soviet cinema from which Pabst drew evident inspiration (9) – yet in the case of
Kameradschaft, the astonishing skill of its making is wholly attuned to its moral purpose. Far from the “opportunism” bizarrely charged
by Thomson, Pabst’s combination of location shooting at real mining towns with an enormous and minutely detailed mine set
constructed by Erno Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht (10) allows him to transcend both the pieties of documentary purism and the jewelbox effects of studio fabrication, to yoke actuality and recreation into a crystalline artistic whole. “Ethical, not esthetic values make
up the significance of this film,” claimed Pabst, but it is the film’s aesthetic values which give its ethical being such vivid, affecting life.
(11)
Like Antonioni’s in Red Desert (1964), Pabst’s striking visual treatment of the industrial landscape is his means of exploring how human
beings inhabit these spaces, how they have adapted to the strange new environments they have constructed for themselves. By
marshaling his masterful command of his medium to recreate the physical and mechanical environment of his tale, Pabst heightens
the human element within that environment – he roots his parable in the rhythms and processes of proletarian life, as and how it is
lived. The gliding, near-weightless freedom of Pabst’s camera both above- and below-ground employs absolute precision to evoke a
breathtaking spontaneity; here, Godard’s famous dictum about tracking shots constituting a moral issue comes down on the side of
the just. The workings of the mine, captured in subtly sweeping movements; the terrifying explosion which sends the black-faced
miners running in terror towards the camera, traveling backwards to reveal intersecting tunnels and streams of fleeing men; the shots
from a moving train as the town’s populace start running en masse towards the works, crowds flowing out of shops and restaurants
and into the streets; tracking past the mine’s main gate, behind which desperate women grasp the bars and cry to be let in; perhaps
most spectacularly, the blockhouse of the German miners, where pulleys ascend to the cavernous ceiling bearing laundered work
clothes and the camera cranes down to move through the massive communal showers. Rather than simply relying on the airtight
perfection of his scenario or the set-piece mentality of the Soviet directors, Pabst transforms his parable into a series of mini-epiphanies,
the essence of each moment brought forth in full illumination before receding to rejoin the greater stream. Even when Pabst feels the
need to italicise, such as the zoom into close-up of the handshake between a French and German rescuer as their squads meet in the
mine, the inherent power of the moment surpasses the unfortunate presentation: anonymous behind their gas-masks, the “cubist
men” of World War I here join in the preservation of life rather than its destruction.
Like his film, Pabst himself fell victim to poor timing. After leaving Germany for France and then the United States in 1933, he later
returned to Austria citing family reasons; when war again broke out, he found himself unable to leave and compelled to make films
for the Nazi studios in order to keep working. He would never again attain his former peak of success, and his reputation would always
remain tarnished by his wartime collaboration, whatever the circumstances may have been. Kameradschaft would be Pabst’s last
great achievement, but its explicit social concern and fervent optimism would distance it from the purely aesthetic refuge of his films
with Louise Brooks, or the cultural benchmark of his collaboration with Brecht on The Threepenny Opera (1931). But inadequate and
compromised as it is, Kameradschaft shows Pabst at the height of his powers, and no longer content to hide behind them. “I am
through with the social film”, (12) he reportedly said after completing the film, but the erratic social commitment of this erratic
filmmaker here yields a pacifist cinema worthy of Renoir. The humanism of Kameradschaft is writ in images rather than words, in faces
and bodies and that which surrounds them; not illustration, but the living matter of hope, finding embodiment on the screen at a time
when it could secure little place in the world.
Andrew Tracy July 2004 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 32
Endnotes
(1)
Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo”, trans. Laurent Kretzschmar, Senses of Cinema 30, January–March 2004.
(2)
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film Andre Deutsch, London, 1995, p. 567.
(3)
Russell A. Berman, “A Solidarity of Repression”, G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, Rutgers University Press, New
Brunswick, 1990, p. 116.
(4)
Harry Alan Potamkin, “Pabst and the Social Film” in The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, Teacher
s College Press, New York, 1977, p. 414.
(5)
Potamkin, 1977, p. 413.
(6)
Potamkin, 1977, p. 418.
(7)
Potamkin, 1977, p. 418.
(8)
Potamkin, 1977, p. 420.
(9)
Robert Warshow, “Re-Viewing the Russian Movies”, The Immediate Experience, Athenaeum, New York, 1975, p. 271.
(10)
Frederick W. Ott, The Great German Films, Citadel Press, New Jersey, p.119.
(11)
Herman G. Weinberg, “The Case of Pabst”, Saint Cinema: Writings on the Film 1929–1970, Dover Publications, New York, 1973,
p. 20.
(12)
Weinberg, 23.
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
Welcome Mr Marshall! (Bienvenido Mister Marshall)
Spain | 1953 | 78 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Luis García Berlanga
Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis
García Berlanga, Miguel Mihura
Jesús García Leoz
Manuel Berenguer
After finding out that North American people are visiting the Spanish villages, the
citizens of Villar del Río start preparing themselves to welcome them when they
arrive.
Cast
Carmen Vargas
Manolo
Don Pablo, el alcalde
Don Luis, el caballero
Lolita Sevilla
Manolo Morán
José Isbert
Alberto Romea
¡Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall! has long been noted as a landmark film
in Spanish cinema, “el clásico más irónico del cine español” that
“cracked open new possibilities for engagement with significant
socio-political commentary within conventional comedic modes”
(Moyano; Rolph 8). The Berlanga film can be listed as part of a
series of cultural, political, and economic events that make the early 1950s a key moment in the evolution of the Franco regime and
Spain in general. As such a classic film arriving at such a key moment, Berlanga´s film has been studied from a variety of viewpoints,
but typically either viewed as a film of social critique or aesthetic exploration. Ramón Gubern, for example, describes its ideological
project in terms of post-1898 “Regeneracionismo” while Kathleen Vernon reads the film as a critique of the seepage of Hollywood into
everyday life (Gubern, in Gómez Rufo 250-51; Vernon 321). In the following pages I argue that the two readings, while not discounting
the other, have not been sufficiently linked. By linking the two, I find in Berlanga´s film a social critique that extends beyond the
immediate historical limits of 1953 Spain defined by a flagging regionarationist spirit, its present cultural subservience to Hollywood,
or its forthcoming encounter with U.S. foreign policy. As aesthetic exploration and social critique are read together, ¡Bienvenido, Mr.
Marshall! may be viewed as a film more about processes than products. It is a film that invites its spectators along on an exploration
of the processes by which their nation has been imagined, is currently imagined, and especially how it may be imagined in the future.
In so doing, the film hints at new social, political, and spatial orders to come in the next half-century that begin with but extend far
beyond the simple remaking of a nation (Spain), of its internal components (Castilla/Andalucía), or of its basic international relations
(Spain/U.S.). It may be a stretch to argue that Berlanga´s film is a story about globalization. Still, I argue that by drawing social and
aesthetically-focused readings together, a view of the film surfaces that reveals the film´s registration of emergent processes through
which spectators as citizens (or citizens as spectators, as I will show) would participate to thoroughly rethink and reshape their world
in the coming decades…
The critical if comedic exploration surrounding the remaking of Villar is quite apparent to even the casual viewer. More critical to our
reading is the way that Berlanga positions his spectator to draw
connections between the imagination of Villar del Río, the Spanish
nation, and the international order, and, by way of meta-cinematic
devices, between the on-screen re-imagining and that which is
taking place in the dark of the movie theater. This more farreaching exploration of the re-imagining of nation begins with the
opening shot of the film. A still focus on a dirt road vanishing into
the rural meseta situates the on-screen story in the heart of
Franco´s officially celebrated Castilian countryside. As the opening
credits end, an automobile approaches along the road. As it passes,
the camera pans 180 degrees to the left to reveal the village of
Villar del Río in the distance as a flock of sheep graze in the
foreground. While classic Hollywood film-the kind parodied by
Bienvenido, but most familiar to its audiences-would dictate a
reverse shot at this point to follow the opening shot and thereby
suture a would-be spectator into an initial identification, here
Berlanga´s editing leaves the spectator in limbo. Explicitly, the
Spanish Cinema Under Franco
camera would seem to be a local villager on the outskirts of the town. Implicitly,
by breaking the magical invisibility of classic cinema, the would-be spectator is
not invited to identify with this look but left rather in the uncomfortable position
of an anticipating film viewer still awaiting the moment of suture. In light of this
separation, it is significant that the spectator stands just beyond the town sign,
explicitly a member of the community of Villar del Río, but implicitly empowered
with an outsider´s awareness of that community as yet an object of the cinematic
gaze. Hence, before the spectator meets Villar´s people and places-its signified–
, she sees (literally) Villar´s sign post-or signifier-and thereby recognizes Villar as
such…
Berlanga´s film, then, is not simply about a disappointing non-encounter, nor a
film about changing concepts of respective nations, but ultimately, a film about
the changing concept of the nation itself. The nation could not continue as
before because the technologies through which it had once been imagined had
changed. Berlanga´s film does not suggest that Spain would disappear, nor that
it would become one homogenous Andalucía, nor another US colony. Change
would appear more subtly but its effects would finally be more profound. After
all, at the conclusion of the film Villar del Río returns to its farming roots, just as
citizens of the global era so often flock to ethnic roots for security from
“Marshall-izing” motorcades.(20) Nevertheless, tapping back into those roots
now costs the villagers, just as sustaining “authentic” identities against
encroaching global cultural forces requires economic capital. And while, as the
film´s fairytale conclusion, “colorín colorado este cuento se ha acabado,” affirms
the right of all to keep dreaming, the fact remains that Villar del Río still lacks a
railroad—the means for the common citizens to move beyond their community
and do more than imagine themselves in other possible communities. As in our own global work, while the villagers are stuck, foreign
delegates at various levels blow in and out of town, raising and then dashing hope, promising prosperity but delivering only more—
and now more self-consciously felt—poverty (see Friedman 112-42; Harvey 59-72 for contemporary comparisons). The debate over
the film´s ending continues today. Is it hopeful? Is it terribly pessimistic? One might argue that Berlanga finally adopts a rather
postmodernist or globalist position: resigned, if playfully so. As writers from David Harvey to Thomas Friedman have remarked, many
of the processes of globalization simply cannot be reversed (Harvey 85; Friedman xxii). The community we inhabit can no longer be
imagined as it once was. Moreover, the subject who imagines is each day less a citizen and more a consumer and spectator.
Nevertheless, awareness of the nature of the spaces we inhabit and of the technologies that shape these spaces into imagined
communities can facilitate discovery of possible strategies for remaking those spaces. For all its playfulness and, finally, resignation,
¡Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall!, at least produces a degree of awareness that combines with its playful critique to open the door to potential
agency in the struggle to participate in the reshaping of a now postnational community. Perhaps in this empowering lays the
remarkable staying power of Berlanga´s film.
- Nathan E. Richardson, Bowling Green State University
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
He Who Gets Slapped
USA | 1924 | 80 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Victor Sjostrom
Carey Wilson, Victor Sjöström
(play by Leonid Andreyev)
William Axt
Milton Moore
Chaney plays a scientist, Paul Beamont, whose patron, Baron Regnard, takes his
wife and the credit for his work. Five years later and Beaumont is now a circus
clown, He Who Gets Slapped. One night he notices the Baron in the audience…
Cast
Paul Beaumont
Consuelo
Bezano
Maria Beaumont
Lon Chaney
Norma Shearer
John Gilbert
Ruth King
Never used to have a favourite film. Never felt the need.
Amongst the many reasons for watching old films are the obvious
pleasures of intellectual and emotional stimulation, the worthy ones
of education and exploration, and the guilty ones of camp and
nostalgia. On rare occasions, however, another form of cinesthesia
presents itself, the discovery of the path not taken: the abandoned innovation, the technical or aesthetic or narrative course only just
started upon before the juggernaut of film history turned another way.
He Who gets Slapped is a Hollywood film of a Russian play, made by a Swedish director – the great Victor Sjöström, star of Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries (1958). It is also the first film made by the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These are all good historical reasons
for studying it, and for expecting something special.
Sjöström is here paired with Lon Chaney, the silent era’s greatest character star, and a master of the grotesque. The director reins in
Chaney’s excesses and coaxes from him an eloquent, restrained, yet hugely powerful performance. It’s worth remembering what a
fine and subtle actor Sjöström himself could be – there’s a moment in his film The Phantom Carriage (1921) where he laughs
contemptuously… he doesn’t throw his head back, or clutch his sides, or do anything except grin – and yet I swear I can hear that laugh.
Chaney plays Paul Beaumont, an aspiring scientist who loses everything in one horrific day – his theories are stolen, he is disgraced
before his peers, and his wife scorns him in favour of the man who robbed him. Each horror culminates in a slap to the face. Beaumont
cracks, begins to laugh, and the next time we see him he’s employed as a circus clown and known only as HE. And then the film’s true
story begins.
Chaney is in love again, with a beautiful equestrienne (a young Norma Shearer). But she’s in love with a handsome young circus star
(John Gilbert, NOT looking good in tights), but her sleazy father is about to promise her hand to… but I won’t give it away. Over the
course of the narrative, HE will face his original trauma once more,
for real, and overcome it, after a fashion.
How can I describe the impression this story made on me? I didn’t
believe Chaney had any scientific theories (the film is very coy as to
what they might actually be) or that he would suddenly become a
circus clown as a result of a nervous breakdown. The film continued
to pile improbabilities on top of these, and yet I was utterly gripped.
Sjöström was creating intense, emotional drama from a story that
would hardly fool a child. Unlike in Chaney’s work with Todd
Browning, where lunatic plots are part of the hysterical appeal, the
kind of deeply serious melodrama found in He Who gets Slapped
should not have been sustainable without some suspension of
disbelief: how do you care for a character whose life is a series of
absurd contrivances? And yet I did. I do. And so will you.
Freud once remarked that Chaplin was a simple case: a rich man
driven to endlessly replay the trauma of poverty by dressing as a
Lon Chaney
tramp. As usual, Freud was mistaken, at least partly: Chaplin quickly tired
of his tramp persona but was compelled by the public to maintain it. But
Chaney’s character, HE, obsessively revisits his own trauma, re-enacting
the slap that ended his first life, again and again, for the delectation of the
circus audience. As an exploration of emotional masochism, He Who gets
Slapped is an extraordinary work, far removed from the romantic glitz
MGM would make its stock-in-trade.
Beyond the film’s bizarrely powerful narrative and tantalising psychological
undertones, there’s the technique. Sjöström was master of the matchdissolve, where one image bleeds into another, creating an expressive
juxtaposition. In his last film as director, Under the Red Robe (1937), the
image of a noose melts away to a close-up, framing the incoming face
through the loop of rope. Here, Sjöström produces numerous startling
mixes, each redolent with meaning, especially when he segues from a
spinning globe to a circus ring, perfectly framed so that the edge girdles
the earth like Saturn’s rings. It’s a stunning moment, reiterated at the film’s
end, where an intertitle dares pose the questions “What is love? What is
life? What is the world?” Sjöström proceeds to ANSWER those questions,
with a single image.
This dreamlike blending of image with image and image with word, and
this near-Brechtian, proto-Godardian form of melodrama (exposing the
artifice of narrative while preserving the emotion), together point towards
a kind of cinema we can imagine dominating all future Hollywood output,
yet it is a revolution that never happened. This slapstick tragedy offers a
flickering glimpse of a whole alternative history of movies.
While Sjöström made remarkable films both in his native Sweden and in
Hollywood, He Who gets Slapped stands alone in its weirdness and experimentalism. The Wind (1928) is a masterpiece, a blending of
drama and horror, illustrating Sjöström’s very Swedish fascination with the harshness of nature. The proposed original ending, changed
by the studio, would have reprised the climax of his earlier The Outlaw and his Wife (1918), with the heroine wandering off to die in a
storm. Few filmmakers have used the natural world as a character in their work with such conviction and passion as Sjöström. Yet in
He Who gets Slapped, his finest film, nature has only a walk-on part. When the young lovers picnic, nature seems tamed and romantic
– until we are granted a glimpse of their food, abandoned by them as they kiss: it is crawling with flies, a potent symbol of the corruption
around them, but also of the world’s indifference to human affairs. Rather than using landscape to evoke the vast apathetic universe,
Sjöström uses the microcosm of the flies, of the circus ring, and the image of the spinning globe itself. And in one famous scene,
Chaney stands in extreme long shot in the circus ring as the lights go out one by one, until only his white face is left, tiny in the darkness,
glowing like a planet in the vastness of space, until a slow fade to black snuffs it out.
This film is unique in MGM’s output, unique in its director’s work, unique in film history. It’s the film that tells us what life is (with a single
image!), the film that matches the laugh of the clown to the snarl of a lion, and the film that creates a great love story from a tale as
artificial as the whiteface makeup of a clown.
David Cairns, http://sensesofcinema.com/
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
Lon Chaney
Face of the Frog AKA The Fellowship of the Frog (Der Frosch mit der Maske)
West Germany | 1959 | 89 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Harald Reinl
Trygve Larsen, J. Joachim Bartsch
(novel by Edgar Wallace)
Willy Mattes, Peter Thomas
Ernst W. Kalinke
The film that inaugurated the post-war krimi boom sees Scotland Yard and an
amateur American sleuth go up against a sinister criminal organisation led by
a mysterious mastermind known only as the Frog, in reference to both his
signature mark and penchant for a somewhat bizarre goggle-eyed costume.
Cast
Richard Gordon
Ella Bennet
Philo Johnson
John Bennet
Joachim Fuchsberger
Eva Anthes
Jochen Brockmann
Karl Lange
...
In Germany, what we think of as thrillers or murder mysteries are
called Krimis— as in Kriminalroman or Kriminalfilm. Broadly
speaking, anything from cops-and-robbers to a drawing-room
whodunit would qualify, but the primary association conjured up by
the term is that of a diabolical genius matching wits against a heroic
arch-sleuth, something like the Arthur Conan Doyle model as misimagined by Americans who forget that Professor Moriarty appeared in only two Sherlock Holmes stories. Both in print and on celluloid,
the quintessential Krimis are Sax Rohmer’s tales of Fu Manchu and Sumuru; they’re Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and its sequels; and most
of all, they’re the stories of British pulp superstar Edgar Wallace and his copycat son, Bryan. It seems a bit odd to me that the Germans
should go so unreservedly mad for the works of an English writer, but it was apparently a case of love at first sight. As early as the 1920’s,
Wallace’s novels of baroque illegalities were huge sellers across the North Sea, so popular indeed that the Nazis (ever eager to control
the public’s tastes) felt compelled to ban them after they came to power in 1933. There were also some Edgar Wallace movies made
in Germany during the Weimar period, although few if any of them survive today. Naturally it was going to take more than an interdict
from Hitler to get Wallace-mania out of the Germans’ systems permanently, and not too much time passed between the fall of the Third
Reich and the return of Edgar Wallace to what was by then West Germany. (For that matter, there’s some indication of renewed
popularity in the East, too, but that’s a subject I don’t feel qualified to take up just yet.) Wallace-derived movies took a bit longer to
reestablish themselves, not least because practically the entire German film industry had been destroyed in the war. Indeed, when the
first new Edgar Wallace mystery appeared in West German theaters in 1959, it wasn’t strictly a German production at all.
Rialto-Film was a long-established and locally very successful Danish studio, with roots going back practically to the beginning of
motion picture history. Originally controlled by Constantin Philipsen, the firm passed into the hands of its founder’s son, Preben, in 1950.
The new boss had rather grand ambitions. Setting up a distribution subsidiary called Constantin Film in Frankfurt am Main, the younger
Philipsen sought to expand his reach into West Germany and beyond, initially by exploiting his acquaintance with high-ranking figures
at United Artists to secure exclusive German-language distro rights to that company’s products. Of course, what Philipsen really wanted
was a German audience for his own films, and with that in mind, he entered into alliance with Horst Wendlandt, sometime partner of
the Central Cinema Company’s Artur Brauner. It was Wendlandt who suggested Edgar Wallace as Rialto’s winning ticket, possibly
inspired by a pair of Wallace adaptations that had lately captured promising audiences on West German TV (although Brauner would
later claim that Wendlandt had stolen the idea from him). Winning ticket indeed. The Fellowship of the Frog, the Philipsen-Wendlandt
team’s first foray into Wallace territory, was a monster hit, and in the aftermath, Rialto transformed itself into a veritable Krimi factory.
By the time the craze petered out in the early 1970’s, Rialto had produced an astonishing total of 32 Wallace-derived and Wallaceinspired films.
As was only to be expected, competitors sprang up left and right— none of them more determined than Brauner’s CCC. Only Kurt Ulrich
Film Productions made a true Edgar Wallace adaptation, however (and only one at that), because Philipsen was smart enough to
secure an exclusive deal with the Wallace estate, much like Anglo-Amalgamated did in the UK at about the same time. Brauner therefore
did both of the next best things, signing a pact of his own with Bryan Edgar Wallace and coaxing Fritz Lang back home to relaunch his
old Dr. Mabuse franchise. Meanwhile, Constantin Film rather puzzlingly went into the production business as a separate entity from
Rialto in the 1960’s, muscling in on the parent company’s racket by collaborating with British sleazemeister Harry Alan Towers on a
series of Fu Manchu movies starring Christopher Lee. And minor companies like Germania Film adapted mysteries by minor authors
like Louis Weinert-Wilton, desperate for at least some small piece of the Krimi action. The Krimis’ popularity quickly spread beyond
The Krimi
Germanic Europe, too. In Italy, for example, the Danish and
West German imports influenced the emerging giallo genre,
which then influenced them right back until the two styles
finally merged in Seven Bloodstained Orchids and What Have
You Done to Solange?. Danger! Diabolik and its imitators might
also be seen as an attempt to transplant the Krimi to Italian
soil, and that in turn puts Turkish archfiend movies like Kilink
in Istanbul within the Krimi lineage. The French (who arguably
laid the Krimis’ most basal foundation with characters like
Victor Hugo’s Gwynplaine and Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of
the Opera) got into the act as well, with an update of
Fantomas that did well enough to spawn two sequels. There’s
even a noticeable cross-fertilization between Krimis and the
European competitors to James Bond, which tend to
emphasize the outlandishness of their villains and to redouble
the complexity of their plots. All that back-and-forth
borrowing between genres naturally meant that the Krimis
grew steadily stranger as the 60’s progressed. That said, even
The Fellowship of the Frog is plenty weird in its way.
If evil masterminds are the defining feature of these movies, then it only stands to reason that we’d begin with the present one in
action. That would be the Frog, of course, ringleader of an army of thieves and killers who have terrorized London and its environs for
months. The Frog seems to take special delight in forcing his way into stout safes, be they in banks, private residences, or corporate
payroll departments, and as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, the only clues he leaves behind are planted deliberately to taunt the
authorities. Specifically, he likes to stamp the ruined shell of each safe he violates with the image of his namesake animal. As we’ll see
later on, it is not merely through police incompetence that the Frog manages to stay always a step or two ahead of the law. Internal
secrecy is the guiding principle behind the organization of his mob; none of his subordinates know the true names of anyone higher
up in the organization than themselves, and the Frog invariably wears a disguise in the company of even his most trusted minions. Mind
you, that getup defies in every other way the dictates of good sense, good taste, and practicality, suggesting as it does the costume
that might be worn by the Dark Overlord of the Universe in a Star Wars rip-off directed by Larry Buchanan. Our introduction to the Frog
gang comes while they’re pillaging the safe at the home of Lord Charles Farnsworth (Olaf Ussing) and his wife (Charlotte ScheierHerold). The criminals make off with all of Lady Farnsworth’s most valuable jewels, and although she blunders into the scene of the
crime while it’s actually in progress, she has nothing very useful to offer Inspector Hedge of Scotland Yard (Siegfried Lowitz, from The
Sinister Monk and The Brain) by way of testimony the next day. (Hedge, incidentally, is called “Inspector Elk” in the German version.)
The Farnsworths’ status among the nobility naturally means that they feel… well, entitled to lodge an official complaint with Hedge’s
boss, Sir Archibald (Ernst Fürbringer, from The Red Circle and The Secret of the Red Orchid), about Scotland Yard’s poor performance
in the Frog affair to date. Hedge has another heckler, too, in the form of Sir Archibald’s American nephew, Richard Gordon (Joachim
Fuchsberger, of The Black Abbot and What Have You Done to Solange?), who is currently in London for some unexplained reason.
Gordon’s meddling might actually do the authorities some good, however, for he fancies himself— apparently with some justification—
an amateur crime-solver. But despite all the grousing from outside observers, Hedge has some good news to offer his superior. One
of his men, Detective Constable Higgins (Werner Hedman, from The Terrible People and In the Sign of the Lion), has finally succeeded
in infiltrating the Frog mob. He’s due to meet the arch-criminal for his formal induction this very night.
Inevitably, Higgins’s mission doesn’t go exactly according to plan. A member of the Frog’s inner circle (Ulrich Beiger, from Teenage Sex
Report and The Forger of London)— his name is Everett, but good luck figuring that out from the English dub— does indeed escort
the undercover cop to a one-on-one meeting with his boss at the defunct cement factory that serves as the gang’s base of operations,
and Higgins even gets as far as receiving an assignment from the Frog that hints at upcoming capers more devious than any mere
safe-cracking. Higgins is to keep tabs on Ella (Elsie von Kalkreuth) and Ray (Carmen, Baby’s Walter Wilz) Bennet, the daughter and son
of reclusive country squire John Bennet (Carl Lange, from Mistress of the World and The Carpet of Horror), and to kill any man he sees
consorting with the girl. The detective overplays his hand, however, when he reveals his true identity and places the Frog under arrest.
The room where the evil mastermind gives his troops their marching orders is booby-trapped in a manner that must have given every
Eurospy villain in the business ideas, and the next morning, Higgins is no more than yet another puzzle for Hedge to solve, his body
dumped alongside the sandy shoulder of the road between London and Landsmoore.
Richard Gordon and his comic relief battle butler, James (Eddi Arent, from The Green Archer and The Door with Seven Locks), try their
hands at that puzzle, too, and Gordon takes it upon himself to follow the trail of fresh and distinctive footprints leading past the scene
of the corpse-dumping. Doing so brings Richard into contact with the Bennet family, for the man leaving those tracks is none other
than John Bennet himself. That would tend to cast suspicion on him as a possible Frog or Frog hanger-on even without taking into
consideration his overly protective attitude toward the heavy valise he’s carrying when Gordon catches up to him and offers him a ride.
Further suspicion accrues to Bennet from his visibly great dissatisfaction with Ray, who turns out to be an undisciplined layabout
unable to hang onto even the most undemanding job. And of course it wouldn’t be exactly unprecedented for a father to take such a
The Krimi
dim view of his daughter’s suitors as to issue standing orders for their
extermination. The Frog’s orders to Higgins clearly are standing, too,
since no sooner has Richard contrived an excuse to get Ella alone with
him than he comes under attack from Everett. Gordon proves more
than a match for the assassin, however— you may recall from other Bmovies (Bloodlust!, for example) that the late 1950’s were right about
when Western pop culture was discovering judo. Everett soon finds
himself handed over to Inspector Hedge, although he gloats that
“Number 7” will free him long before Hedge or his men will be able to
extract from him any intelligence about the Frog or his operation.
More Frog suspects come to light when we unexpectedly follow Ray
Bennet to his latest doomed attempt at gainful employment. To all
appearances, Ray got the job through a friend of the family named
Philo Johnson (Jochen Brockmann, of The Wizard and The Indian
Tomb), but that jowly nonentity doesn’t stand out as likely to be up to
no good. (Of course, the experienced mystery-watcher will begin
scrutinizing Johnson all the more closely for that very reason.) No, if there’s a card-carrying villain at Ray’s office, it’s Ezra Maitland,
the company president; really, the fact that Maitland is played by Fritz Rasp, from Metropolis and The Strange Countess, is enough all
by itself. Also of note is the blind beggar (Dieter Eppler, of The Head and The Slaughter of the Vampires) who stands outside the
building selling an assortment of cheap crap. It’s plain enough that he’s casing the joint even before he starts tailing Maitland—
although that could equally well make him the Frog, a Frog agent, or a pursuer of same, depending on what the dour and apparently
much-loathed businessman’s deal really is. In any case, the filmmakers wouldn’t bother revealing that the “beggar” maintains his vigil
in a fairly elaborate disguise unless they had big plans for him.
That night, John Bennet is demoted a bit on the suspect hierarchy when the Frog throws a scare into Ella right in her own bedroom.
It isn’t completely impossible that Bennet could change out of costume in the time it takes Ella to run to him in the aftermath, but it
would stretch the limits of plausibility even for a movie like this one. More importantly, what the Frog says to her— something about
going away with him of her own free will— doesn’t sound like a line that even the most jealous father would take. On the other hand,
The Fellowship of the Frog makes a big production out of not letting Richard Gordon find John’s closely guarded valise when he breaks
into the Bennet house to search for it soon thereafter, so obviously the man has to be hiding something. And speaking of secrets,
Gordon soon has a run-in with the phony blind beggar (out of disguise, mind you) at some duchess’s party, and the two of them get
into a verbal chess match of a conversation about somebody called Harry Lime. Lime was evidently one of the slipperiest criminals
Gordon ever tangled with, and similarities in modus operandi lead Richard to suspect that this old enemy of his may in fact be the
Frog. The only trouble with that hypothesis is that Harry Lime is dead, his mutilated body fished out of the Thames years ago. But as
Gordon points out, the mutilations were so severe that the only basis for believing the corpse to be Lime’s was the intact set of identity
papers in its pockets. What are the odds, right? Furthermore, Lime wasn’t the only person who was never seen again after that body
washed up; his closest accomplice disappeared right along with him. What if the accomplice was really the one who died? Or what if
the accomplice is the Frog instead of Lime? For that matter, what if the corpse in the river was just some luckless schmuck, and Lime
and his sidekick had a falling-out after going into hiding, leaving one to get back to business as the Frog and the other to… oh, I don’t
know… dress up like a beggar and stalk his former ally for some nefarious purpose?
Believe it or not, there are still two major aspects of the mystery to set up, even after all that. They fall into place when Ray Bennet
unexpectedly receives an invitation to a cabaret called the Lolita Bar, issued by the namesake floor-show headliner herself (Eva Pflug).
The doorman at the club is Lew Brady (Reinhard Kolldehoff, from Liane, Jungle Goddess and The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse), a sometime
career criminal whom Hedge knows very well; he claims to have gone
straight, but that’s almost certainly bullshit. Lolita says she has a job offer
for Ray, which is rather convenient right now, seeing as Maitland just
fired him. Lolita’s unlooked-for generosity is even odder than it sounds,
too, since Maitland happens to own the Lolita Bar. She also seems to be
offering Ray a position as her boyfriend, which if you ask me is even
shadier. Meanwhile, a team of Frog flunkies is knocking over a bank on
the other side of town, and there’s just no way it’s a coincidence that the
one who gets picked up by the cops during the getaway (Come to My
Bedside’s Michel Hildesheim) is officially employed as one of Lolita’s
spotlight operators. With the bar’s Frog connection thereby confirmed,
there can be no question but that Ray is being set up for some manner
of con or frame-job— perhaps to give the Frog leverage for coercing Ella?
Gordon gets to work investigating that angle, finagling his way into the
captured gangster’s old job at the cabaret. As for that Frog goon, his
arrest never does Scotland Yard much good, because the prisoner is
The Krimi
killed in a rather deliberate-looking traffic accident on the way to jail. And as if
that weren’t bad enough, Everett soon escapes from custody and returns to
active duty with the mob. Sir Archibald blames the two defeats on the ineptitude
of Sergeant Barclay (The Invisible Terror’s Erwin Stahl), the officer in charge on
both occasions, but Hedge fears something even worse. Remember what
Everett said about “Number 7?” Makes it sound like the Frog has a man on the
inside, doesn’t it? That’s about when the corpses start piling up in earnest…
I can see why The Fellowship of the Frog was such a hit, and why it inspired both
its creators and their rivals to keep mining this ground for more than a decade.
Although overly complex and frequently confusing, it exhibits those qualities in
ways that seem to appeal to most mystery-lovers. As would so often be the case
in subsequent Krimis, all of the characters toward whom director Harald Reinl
and writers Egon Eis and J. J. Bartsch attempt to direct audience suspicion turn
out in the end to have been up to something, whether or not their activities have
anything directly to do with the Frog’s crime spree. That tendency to give even
the reddest of red herrings an actual function in the story is something I much
appreciate, having come to the Krimis after years of watching their always loosejointed and often nonsensical Italian cousins. The pace is blisteringly fast, and
action set-pieces of one sort or another crop up far more frequently than I was
expecting on the basis of more conventional mystery films. I’m insufficiently
conversant with Edgar Wallace to judge The Fellowship of the Frog’s faithfulness
to its source specifically, but the film’s sensibility certainly is authentically pulpy
in more general terms. Inevitably that means logic is rarely very high on its list of
priorities (Just why is John Bennet walking all those miles home to Landsmoore
in his introductory scene, anyway? And what the hell did poor Lolita ever do to
earn that fate?), but it’s got energy to spare and an adolescent sense of fun that sets it starkly apart from the film noir that had
dominated the cinema of crime melodrama throughout the preceding decade. I particularly got a kick out of the relationship between
Richard Gordon and James, which comes across as a blend of Holmes/Watson and Jeeves/Wooster as interpreted by the writers of
“Danger Mouse.” Watching them discuss the mystery of the Frog while judo sparring in clothes appropriate to dinner at the chateau
of some third-string Romanov is a lunatic delight, and Eddi Arent, remarkably enough, is actually funny more often than not. Frankly,
the two men make a much more engaging couple than do Gordon and the insipid Ella Bennet.
But most of all, what makes The Fellowship of the Frog work is simply that it is so very different from the mystery films that preceded
it— even the ones based on something by Edgar Wallace. The black-and-white cinematography has a greasy, cruddy look to it (rather
like that in Eyes Without a Face), which clashes in an interesting way with the loopiness of the story overall. Much the same dissonance
is apparent as well in Reinl’s handling of the violence as the contest between the Frog and the authorities (broadly construed here to
include Gordon and James) escalates. The carnage inflicted on the bad guys during a third-act breakout from captivity by the amateur
sleuth and his deadly valet especially has some bite to it, and comes as quite a shock in the context of a movie about a master safecracker who dresses like Darth Kermit when he’s on the job. Other bits of paradigm-shifting weirdness include Lolita’s introduction
(which seems to foreshadow twenty years’ worth of Jesus Franco nightclub scenes), the nearly comical darkness of the manner in
which John Bennet’s secret finally comes to light, and the insistently skronky jazz score by Willy Mattes and Peter Thomas (who
subsequently scored Horrors of Spider Island and The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism respectively). There’s an experimental quality
to The Fellowship of the Frog, and by no means does everything that it tries work. Even its failures are interesting, though, and this
movie leaves me with a powerful urge to seek out more like it.
http://www.1000misspenthours.com/
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
The Krimi
The Proud Valley
UK | 1940 | 76 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Penrose Tennyson
Alfredda Brilliant, Louis Golding,
Jack Jones, Roland Pertwee, Pen
Tennyson (story "David Goliath" by
Herbert Marshall)
Ernest Irving
Roy Kellino, Glen MacWilliams
Paul Robeson plays a discharged American sailor who winds up in a Welsh
mining village where he proves an asset to both the local choir and at the
coal face. Unfortunately a disaster closes the mine, until the coming of the
Second World War necessitates that it be re-opened – a task that entails
someone undertaking what basically amounts to a suicide mission.
Cast
David Goliath
Dick Parry
Simon Lack
Mrs. Parry
Paul Robeson
Edward Chapman
Simon Lack
Rachel Thomas
“The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or
slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” - Paul
Robeson
Part of a loose movement of films depicting the difficulties facing
communities and workers around the Welsh coal mining industry,
THE PROUD VALLEY is perhaps the most immediate and rousingly
polemic of them all. This is not least due to the involvement of Paul Robeson, a singer, actor and star of stage and screen, already
famous by the time of production of THE PROUD VALLEY in 1939.
The coal industry was a key component of the industrial revolution, and for Wales it was an essential part of its economic development.
By 1913, Cardiff, the Welsh capitol, had become the largest exporter of coal in the world. In fact, in some form or other, mining had
long secured Wales’ economic viability, since before the Roman conquest of Wales in AD 78. By the 19th century it had established itself
as a true powerhouse. Unfortunately, the industry also relied on child labor, awful working conditions, health risks and worse, leading
to prolonged working-class unrest, including a number of uprisings throughout the 19th century. While the Mines and Collieries Act
1842 emerged from the unrest, explicitly prohibiting female labor and labor by children under 10, it was largely ignored, and by the time
Robeson arrived in the Rhondda valley, the situation had changed little in nearly a century.
The groundwork for Robeson’s participation in the Welsh miners’ struggle, providing the memorable foundation for THE PROUD
VALLEY, had been laid in the mid-1920s, as the UK was gripped by a general strike over declining pay and extended workdays for British
miners. The epicentre of the British coal industry, Wales was hit particularly hard by the crisis. Conditions continued to decline as the
Great Depression took hold, compounded further by lack of public support, poor health conditions and safety concerns. Between
1844 and 1909, over 1000 workers had died in the Rhondda alone, and things hadn’t improved much by 1938, the year in which THE
PROUD VALLEY is set.
In 1928, Robeson was performing in London’s West End, in a production of Show Boat. An essential component of his mythology,
Robeson’s performance garnered great acclaim and critical attention from white audiences, while drawing the ire of black critics,
understandably offended by the use of the N-word throughout the show. Nevertheless, Show Boat was the performance that featured
the iconic, career-making performance of “Ol’ Man River”, generally considered to be the definitive version of the song. Robeson
found himself the darling of the White British establishment, receiving a Royal summons to perform for King Alfonso XIII of Spain in
the Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace, and forging friendships among parliamentarians and the aristocracy. Robeson
and his wife, Essie, purchased a house in London, and were to remain in the UK for nearly 10 years.
During his time in Show Boat, Robeson met with a group of Welsh Miners, who had marched to London to protest and raise awareness
of the miners’ struggles in South Wales, a situation mirrored in THE PROUD VALLEY. The encounter resonated with Robeson, and as
his star continued to rise, his political awakening matured into strident activism and advocacy on behalf of the miners and other groups
involved in the struggle.
Although he now called London home, Robeson continued to work in film and theater, including return visits to the US. In 1933 he
starred in the US production of THE EMPEROR JONES, from a play by Eugene O’Neill. While the film was well received, particularly
Robeson’s performance, it fell foul of a plethora of black male stereotypes, not to mention, again, excessive use of the N-word (to the
point where censors excised the word from prints intended
for black audiences). Robeson found the experience to be an
instructive one, and, at his wife Essie’s coaching, found
nuance in a character that was essentially another stereotype.
In a pre-civil rights landscape, THE EMPEROR JONES can still
be seen as a breakthrough; Robeson’s casting made him the
first African American lead in a US sound film. It wouldn’t
happen again for another two decades.
Robeson’s return to the UK brought controversy when he
announced to the press his decision to reject performances in
French, German or Italian as “having nothing in common with
the history of (his) slave ancestors”, and criticizing the
“inferiority complex” of fellow African Americans. A period of
travel followed, including to Berlin - where he witnessed Nazi
ideology first hand - and, at the invitation of Sergei Eisenstein,
a visit to the USSR. There, he delivered a speech to Soviet
Cinematographers at the House of Cinema (in Russian), and
performed songs for his hosts, including, naturally, “Ol’ Man River".
Next up was SANDERS OF THE RIVER (1935), a film by the legendary Zoltan and Alexander Korda. For Robeson, the film was a valuable
personal experience, meeting with the film’s 400 African actors who were living in the UK (including Wales), and apparently discovering
his ancestry as a descendant of the Nigerian Igbo tribe. However, while the film went on to launch Robeson to stardom, his role
required him to once again conform to stereotype, this time as the “noble savage”, contrary to assurances made to him by the Kordas.
Still, Robeson was able to largely transcend the cliché and crass imperialist exoticism to deliver a subtle, layered performance under
the circumstances. In any event, audiences turned out en masse, and the film was a big hit in the UK. While the film satisfied the easy
aspirations of the British colonial imperative, Robeson was ultimately able to observe that “if in Britain there were those who lived by
plundering the colonial peoples, there were also the many millions who earned their bread by honest toil.”
And so to Robeson’s experience in Wales. Following SANDERS, the now in-demand actor worked consistently, delivering SHOW BOAT,
THE SONG OF FREEDOM, BIG FELLA, KING SOLOMON’S MINES and JERICHO in quick succession. A film hiatus followed, allowing
Robeson to pursue stage work. More importantly, throughout this period, Robeson had returned repeatedly to the UK, developing
his relationship with the people of South Wales. He sang in the Welsh towns of Cardiff, Neath and Swansea, culminating in a 1938
performance in Mountain Ash, with an audience of 7000, to commemorate the loss of 33 Welshmen in the Spanish Civil War. Robeson’s
artistic and political maturation was ripe for the circumstances that became the project known initially as DAVID GOLIATH, the
foundation for THE PROUD VALLEY.
The original story was written by Herbert Marshall, a man with impeccable Leftist credentials. A communist and producer, Marshall
was educated in Moscow, where he learned Theatre, direction, and even translated works by Sergei Eisenstein. In London, Marshall
had directed Robeson in a play called A Plant in the Sun under the auspices of the Leftist Unity Theater, and wanted to create a vehicle
for the actor. With his wife (the magnificently monikered Alfredda Brilliant), Marshall worked up a film treatment that was promptly
rejected. Shortly after that, Marshall himself was stripped of his Associate Producer credit on the project.
Marshall claimed that producer Sergei Nolbandov was at least partly responsible for his ousting, and that producer Michael Balcon had
reneged on his assurance of a two-film deal for Marshall if he bowed out of THE PROUD VALLEY. Balcon, of course, was and is a
famously contentious, albeit key character in the British film pantheon - a recent Sight & Sound article describes him as a “middlebrow
demagogue”. His account of the film’s inception claims that, contrary
to other reports, THE PROUD VALLEY was an idea born on a train ride
that only later found the perfect delivery method in Marshall and
Brilliant.
Whoever came up with the idea, the script was finally developed from
the Marshall-Brilliant treatment into a script by ex-miner Jack Jones
(who appears in the film), left-wing novelist Louis Golding, and the
eventual director, Pen Tennyson, hashed out in a series of discussions
along with associate producer Nolbandov. The final film credits
Marshall and Brilliant with the story, and Tennyson, Jones and Golding
with the screenplay. Considering the imbroglio surrounding the
writing process, it’s remarkable anything coherent emerged at all.
Penrose “Pen” Tennyson is a curious, fascinating character in film
history. He had joined the project at Balcon’s behest, impressed by his
helming of THERE AIN’T NO JUSTICE the preceding year, from a script
co-written by Nolbandov. At the time of that film,
Tennyson was the youngest feature filmmaker in the
country, barely into his mid-20s.
As production on THE PROUD VALLEY began, the young
director had cut his teeth as assistant director to Alfred
Hitchcock, including THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
(when he was just 22), and THE 39 STEPS. A greatgrandson of Alfred Lord Tennyson, an old Etonian and
briefly an Oxford student, Tennyson became,
incongruously, an active radical and trade unionist. He
was heavily involved with the establishment of the
Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), the nascent filmmakers’ union, and it was even revealed that he had
called for “full-scale nationalization of the film industry”,
stressing the incompatibility of government and
privately run studios. Nevertheless, Balcon more or less
took Tennyson under his wing, as a family friend. In fact,
he had worked with Balcon in some form or other since
the Ealing magnate’s days as Hitchcock’s producer.
Production on THE PROUD VALLEY began on August 23, 1939, in Wales’ Rhondda Valley, an area synonymous with coal mining, and
significantly, the tradition of the Male Voice Choir. This was a region of particular resonance for Robeson - 10 years earlier, he had
begun his connection to the Welsh miners there, and would later sing in benefit concerts in the area. Inspired by the miners from
then on, he donated concert proceeds to the Welsh Miners Relief Fund; other concerts in the surrounding areas raised money for the
Spanish Civil War.
Eight days into the production of the film, a catastrophe struck, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Though production (which at the
time revolved around interior shots in London) wavered, Robeson did not. He had prepared for his role throughout by touring mines
and lodging with miners and their families, and when filming resumed, Robeson ploughed forward. According to Robeson’s son, Paul
Robeson Jr, it was during this time that his father renamed the film, from DAVID GOLIATH to THE PROUD VALLEY, his way of paying
tribute to the miners that he considered his friends and comrades. The feeling was apparently mutual:
“The Welsh miners...made it clear that there was a closer bond between us than the general struggle to preserve democracy from its
fascist foes. At the heart of that conflict...was a class division, and although I was famous and wealthy, the fact was I came from a
working-class people like themselves and therefore, they said, my place was with them in the ranks of labor” - Paul Robeson, Here I
Stand
Robeson exudes charisma in THE PROUD VALLEY. Significantly, his character, David Goliath, functions as a catalyst that galvanizes the
Welsh mining community that takes him in (indeed, the most obvious concession to Ealing orthodoxy is the notion of a rag-tag
community rallying around a cause). While there is some trepidation around the issue of race in the film, it is nevertheless fleetingly
addressed, and for a film of its time, the sense of unity and acceptance is rather remarkable. For some critics, this proved problematic,
suggesting that perhaps Goliath was simply too “good”. The South Wales Echo remarked that he was “the type of man who would
not do anything he thought might upset the susceptibilities of Welshmen.”
Inevitably THE PROUD VALLEY owes much to Robeson’s sonorous baritone - “rather too obviously” as Welsh critic Dave Berry has
observed - but, lest we forget, the film emerged at the crest of a wave of adulation for the star. It would surely be unforgivable to deny
an audience the pleasures of Robeson’s singing voice, and in any case, the glorious noise of the Welsh Male Voice Choir is more than
a match for the American. Twenty years later, Robeson would realize a dream as he was invited to participate in the Porthcawl Miners
Eisteddford, a Welsh celebration of the arts, with roots stretching back to the 1100s. It was nevertheless a bittersweet honor, as
Robeson’s investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the US had led to the withdrawal of his passport;
he was forced to participate by transatlantic telephone link. Those same miners later lent support to the campaign to revoke Robeson’s
travel ban, and in 1958, the Supreme Court reinstated his passport.
While THE PROUD VALLEY was a stirring, positive component in the development of British political cinema, one key participant met
with a tragic, untimely end. In 1940, Pen Tennyson finished his follow-up, CONVOY, a film that now seems quaint, but was well regarded
at the time. Sadly, it was to be his last. Tennyson joined the British Navy during the war effort, and was destined to head the Admiralty's
Educational Film Unit, when, in July 1941, his plane crashed, killing the young filmmaker and the rest of his crew.
Much of the filming of THE PROUD VALLEY took place in the Rhondda Valley, home of the majestic Tower Colliery. Tower became one
of the most enduring icons of the Miners’ strikes over the course of its long history, a bulwark against anti-union policy, working-class
oppression, and the dismal closures and salvos of the Thatcher era and strikes of the 1980s. Established around 1868, the mine fell foul
of economic realities in 1994, shuttered by British Coal, and an era seemed to die with it. However, in 1995, the site reopened, this time
run by a workers co-operative of 239, each of whom had contributed £8000 of their redundancy pay to set the machines back in
motion. But time continued to march on, and the colliery closed for good in 2008. Still, the story of Tower Colliery bears witness to
the sheer tenacity of generations of miners, exemplified by Robeson in THE PROUD VALLEY.
While THE PROUD VALLEY never quite achieved major commercial success, it was extremely popular in the Welsh valleys on its release
in 1940. This was unusual, as Welsh audiences tended to prefer the exotic, leaning inevitably towards American cinema. But, as film
historian Peter Miscall has observed, “Welsh audiences seldom had the opportunity to see themselves portrayed on screen...when film
companies in Britain or the United States did decide to produce pictures that used Wales as a setting, they attracted considerable
interest.” It even received a small release in the US, under the rather generic title, THE TUNNEL.
Although THE PROUD VALLEY has been eclipsed in pop culture by the rather more sentimental, less honest HOW GREEN WAS MY
VALLEY, released only months later, its legacy endures. Not the least of its triumph lay in David Berry’s assertion that the film was
“virtually the only British film of the thirties and forties to feature a black actor”, while its spirit of solidarity, resistance and social
justice marks it out as a testament to one of film, music and social history’s most enduring and important figures: Paul Robeson, the
artist and citizen.
Jim Kolmar, Guest Curator, SXSW Film Programmer, www.austinfilm.org
SOURCES:
David Berry, Wales & Cinema: The First Hundred Years, (University of Wales Press, 1994)
John Davies, A History of Wales (Penguin, 2007)
Mark Duguid, The Dark Side of Ealing (Sight and Sound, Vol 22, Issue 11, November 2012)
Peter Miskell, A Social History of the Cinema in Wales 1918 - 1951: Pulpits, Coal Pits and Fleapits (University of Wales Press, 2006)
Scott Allen Nollen, Paul Robeson : film pioneer (McFarland, 2010)
Paul Robeson, Here I stand, (Beacon Press, 1958)
Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson speaks : writings, speeches, interviews, 1918-1974 (Brunner/Mazel, 1978)
"THE PROUD VALLEY," BFI Screenonline"Paul Robeson," Coalfield Web Materials
"Leisure, Culture, Sport," Coalfield Web Materials
"Programme Notes for THE PROUD VALLEY," Edinburgh Film Guild
"Paul Robeson: A Modern Man," Criterion Collection
Robeson the Miner's Champion, Wales Online
"Singer and Campaigner Paul Robeson was Hounded by MI5 and FBI," Wales Online
THE PROUD VALLEY, Wikipedia
Paul Robeson, Wikipedia
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista)
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Juan Antonio Bardem
Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis
Fernando de Igoa
Isidro B. Maiztegui
Alfredo Fraile
Cast
María José de Castro
Juan Fernández Soler
Matilde Luque Carvajal
Rafael Sandoval dicho Rafa
Juan is an academic, his career stalled, teaching at the university because of his
brother-in-law’s prestige. María José is a socialite, married to wealth, bored but
attached to her comforts. The two are lovers. On an isolated country road, their
car strikes a cyclist; fearing exposure, they leave him to die. Distracted, Juan
unjustly fails a student. Rafa, a bitter savant in their social circle, hints that he
knows something, and he threatens to expose them to María José’s husband,
Miguel. Miguel’s pride may be the lovers’ best hope. Then Juan proposes a
solution.
Lucia Bosé
Alberto Closas
Bruna Corrà
Carlos Casaravilla
A bicyclist rides up an empty road in the evening. Just as he
passes the horizon and disappears out of sight, there is a
crash. A motorcar comes swerving into view and stops, its tires
screeching. A man and a woman emerge and go to the
downed biker. The man says the cyclist is still alive, but the
woman, who was driving, urges him back into the car. They
speed away, leaving the crash victim where he lay.
This is the opening of Juan Antonio Bardem's entertaining, suspenseful 1955 film Death of a Cyclist. There is no fuss, we are right in it.
As it turns out, the woman, Maria Jose (Lucia Bose), is married, and not to the man in the car. Juan (Alberto Closas) was her sweetheart
before the war, but she married a rich man (Otello Toso) before he could return. Now they are lovers in secret, and helping the man
they ran down would expose the adultery. This may not be that big of a deal for Juan, because he has nothing. Even his job as an
assistant professor at the university was secured for him by his brother-in-law. Maria Jose, on the other hand, has plenty to lose. She
enjoys her high-society existence, and even dares to suggest that it's her marriage that makes her affair with Juan possible. She doesn't
say it outright, but the implication is clear: there is no romance in poverty.
Bardem's film is a little like a Spanish version of Renoir's Rules of the Game. Juan and Maria Jose are part of a class system that allows
them to leave a man of lesser standing to die on the pavement. It's significant that the travelers are on the road going in two opposite
directions, one in an expensive machine and the other on a simpler device. The bicyclist was likely returning home from work, and Maria
was in a hurry so that she would not be late for her own dinner party. The division could not be more clear.
Really, the entire film is about divisions. Though the story is a rather standard murder plot, Bardem is using the pair's act of callous
disregard as an excuse to extend a larger social critique. Lines are drawn in multiple instances to show the gulf between the common
people and Spain's upper crust. The overcrowded tenement where the dead man lived is nothing like the large houses where his killers
reside. Juan's lack of success is in stark contrast to his brother-in-law and Maria Jose's husband, Miguel. There is also a marked
difference between the young and the old, between Juan and his students, particularly Matilde (Bruna Corra). Matilde has the
misfortune of giving her oral exam when Juan sees the
report of the hit-and-run in the newspaper, and instead of
acknowledging that her assignment was halted by his own
panic and not anything she did wrong, he flunks her. Her
quiet crusade to achieve some kind of redress ends up
being the catalyst for Juan's moral transformation. He is
reminded of his own youthful fire before the war
destroyed all of his beliefs. He is inspired not just by the
passion Matilde evokes in her fellow students, but also by
the compassion she shows him. Even though she is the
one who has been wronged, she intuits that there is some
kind of turmoil in Juan and would just as soon see it
resolved as have her rightful grade restored.
From a filmmaking standpoint, Bardem and editor
Margarita Ochoa show the criss-crossing interests
camera would seem to be a local villager on the outskirts of the town. Implicitly,
by breaking the magical invisibility of classic cinema, the would-be spectator is
not invited to identify with this look but left rather in the uncomfortable position
of an anticipating film viewer still awaiting the moment of suture. In light of this
separation, it is significant that the spectator stands just beyond the town sign,
explicitly a member of the community of Villar del Río, but implicitly empowered
with an outsider´s awareness of that community as yet an object of the cinematic
gaze. Hence, before the spectator meets Villar´s people and places-its signified–
, she sees (literally) Villar´s sign post-or signifier-and thereby recognizes Villar as
such…
Berlanga´s film, then, is not simply about a disappointing non-encounter, nor a
film about changing concepts of respective nations, but ultimately, a film about
the changing concept of the nation itself. The nation could not continue as
before because the technologies through which it had once been imagined had
changed. Berlanga´s film does not suggest that Spain would disappear, nor that
it would become one homogenous Andalucía, nor another US colony. Change
would appear more subtly but its effects would finally be more profound. After
all, at the conclusion of the film Villar del Río returns to its farming roots, just as
citizens of the global era so often flock to ethnic roots for security from
“Marshall-izing” motorcades.(20) Nevertheless, tapping back into those roots
now costs the villagers, just as sustaining “authentic” identities against
encroaching global cultural forces requires economic capital. And while, as the
film´s fairytale conclusion, “colorín colorado este cuento se ha acabado,” affirms
the right of all to keep dreaming, the fact remains that Villar del Río still lacks a
railroad—the means for the common citizens to move beyond their community
and do more than imagine themselves in other possible communities. As in our own global work, while the villagers are stuck, foreign
delegates at various levels blow in and out of town, raising and then dashing hope, promising prosperity but delivering only more—
and now more self-consciously felt—poverty (see Friedman 112-42; Harvey 59-72 for contemporary comparisons). The debate over
the film´s ending continues today. Is it hopeful? Is it terribly pessimistic? One might argue that Berlanga finally adopts a rather
postmodernist or globalist position: resigned, if playfully so. As writers from David Harvey to Thomas Friedman have remarked, many
of the processes of globalization simply cannot be reversed (Harvey 85; Friedman xxii). The community we inhabit can no longer be
imagined as it once was. Moreover, the subject who imagines is each day less a citizen and more a consumer and spectator.
Nevertheless, awareness of the nature of the spaces we inhabit and of the technologies that shape these spaces into imagined
communities can facilitate discovery of possible strategies for remaking those spaces. For all its playfulness and, finally, resignation,
¡Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall!, at least produces a degree of awareness that combines with its playful critique to open the door to potential
agency in the struggle to participate in the reshaping of a now postnational community. Perhaps in this empowering lays the
remarkable staying power of Berlanga´s film.
- Nathan E. Richardson, Bowling Green State University
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
The Monster
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Photography
In Brief
Roland West
Willard Mack, Albert Kenyon, C.
Gardner Sullivan, Roland West
(play by Crane Wilbur)
Hal Mohr
Cast
Dr. Ziska
Betty Watson
The Head Clerk
The Under Clerk
Lon Chaney
Gertrude Olmstead
Hallam Cooley
Johnny Arthur
Dr. Ziska, an insane surgeon who believes that he can bring the dead back to life,
presides over a sanitarium where he conducts bizarre experiments. He selects his
human subjects from passing motorists, whom he abducts and confines in a dark
dungeon. When the evil doctor kidnaps Luke Watson, Johnny, Watson's clerk,
who has just received a diploma as a detective from a correspondence school,
sets out to find him. He penetrates the sanitarium and is captured by Ziska, who
intends to use him in an experiment. Ziska also captures Betty, Watson's daughter,
and Hal, the senior Watson clerk. Johnny escapes from the sanitarium and returns
with help, arriving just in time to save Betty from a horrible death under the mad
doctor's knife.
TCM
A ghoulish figure lowers a large mirror attached to a rope
from a tree down into the road. A car approaches. The
driver sees the reflection of his headlights in the mirror. In
the darkness of the lonely road, he thinks that an
oncoming car is about to hit him head-on, veers to the left
and crashes.
The next day, the little town of Danburg is abuzz about
the disappearance of one of their townspeople. Johnny, a
hardware store clerk who is taking a correspondence
course to be a detective, is at the scene of the crash. When
the insurance investigator comes to town, Johnny tries to
show him a note he found at the crash scene that would
tie the abandoned sanitarium to the victim's
disappearance. The constable, his boss at the hardware store and the investigator brush him off. Although Johnny and his boss, Amos,
are in competition for the affections of Betty, Betty encourages Johnny to win them over by doing something "big."
One evening, Amos and Betty are victims of the same mirror trick on the road and find themselves captive in the old sanitarium by a
crazy doctor, Dr. Ziska, who is using residents of the sanitarium to capture victims for his experiments. Johnny is investigating the
crash scene that same night and falls through a hole in the ground that takes him through a chute into the sanitarium. All three are
now held captive by Dr. Ziska and his muscular, dumb assistant, Caliban. Dr. Ziska is delighted that he finally has a woman on which to
conduct his experiments. It is Johnny's "ingenuity" that finally rescues them, saving Betty just as she is about to go under the knife on
the operating table, thus winning him the girl and the respect of those who doubted him.
Spooky, weird and comical entertainment
Lon Chaney will always be remembered for some of the greatest performances in cinema history - the hunchback in "The Hunchback
of Notre Dame" (1923) Erik, the Phantom, in "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925), and a host of other amazing convincing portrayals
as Orientals, gangsters, a tough Marine sergeant, and more. However, some have taken exception to Chaney's appearance in "The
Monster" as beneath his dignity. For example, Eugene Brewster, editor and publisher of Motion Picture Classic (May 1925), bemoaned,
"After seeing Lon Chaney, the great artist in that wonderful masterpiece, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," I regret that I was tempted
to see him in this. 'How hath the mighty fallen!' He should never have lent himself to such a sad affair."
Admittedly, "The Monster" is a "diversion" for Chaney from his other performances; however, this is one more confirmation of what
silent movie fans have always known about Chaney - he was free of vanity or ego and obviously welcomed the opportunity to take on
a new challenge - even if it parodies the type of characterization for which he was so well respected.
And that's exactly what "The Monster" is - a parody of the "mad doctor" theme which apparently was "old hat" even in 1925 - but it's
a "fun" parody, one that will provide the viewer an hour and a half of spooky, weird and comical entertainment. And all bets are on
that Chaney was having just as much fun making the film as we are watching it!
Much about the film is unoriginal; however, when the players are able to pull it off as well as the cast of "The Monster," it doesn't
matter. Take Johnny Arthur as Johnny Goodlittle, for example. He's a wimpish clerk in Watson's Hardware Store in the small, sleepy
Lon Chaney
town of Danburg. His boss is the slick and dapper Amos Rugg (ably played
by Hallam Cooley). Both wish to win the affections of the town belle, Betty
Watson (the delightful Gertrude Astor), whose father owns the hardware
store. Betty is fond of Johnny, but, of course, she goes out with Amos
because he has money and a car. Nothing new yet, right?
When a prominent citizen, John Bowman, disappears after his car crashes on
a dark, lonely road one night, Johnny is right there with the constable and
others scouring the scene the next morning. Of course it's Johnny who finds
a curious piece of paper with "Dr. Edwards' Sanitarium" scribbled on it. But
that's not the most intriguing thing about the paper. On the reverse side is
the word "help" written backwards so it can only be read in a mirror. Of
course, Johnny is the only one who considers this a clue, as no one takes this
amateur detective seriously.
The whole idea of a crazy doctor (mad scientist, if you will) using a deserted
insane asylum for his experiments on abducted humans is pretty standard
fare, too, but, as noted, the cast - in this case, Lon Chaney as Dr. Ziska - still
makes it fun to watch. His entourage of weirdos and ghouls is equally as
entertaining. The barrel-chested and towering Walter James as Caliban makes
an imposing dumb (as in "can't talk") shirtless bodyguard. George Austin,
with dark lines creasing his face, a ghoulish face that is framed by his monk-like hood and robe, is the spooky Rigo. On the comical side,
we have Knute Erickson as Daffy Dan, acting as loony as he can - for example, asking for a match and then rolling an imaginary cigarette
and smoking it.
These are the characters with whom Johnny, Amos and Betty must deal when they find themselves captive in the insane asylum.
Johnny ends up there first when he is back investigating the crash scene at night (why at night?) and falls down a chute covered by
brush - landing in what appears to be a living room in the asylum. Not long afterwards, Amos and Betty fall victim to the same trick
that caused Bowman to crash. Rigo lowers a large mirror by rope from a tree into the middle of the lonely road. As Amos' car
approaches it, it appears that another car is coming at him head-on. He swerves and crashes into a tree. Only dazed, they see a light
in the sanitarium and go there to use a phone. Once inside, they meet Johnny and learn they are prisoners.
At this point, Dr. Ziska appears - very calm, smiling from ear to ear, and smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder. The cat and mouse
game has begun. He proposes to be the accommodating host, yet our threesome know they are captives - and they can't let on.
Because of the storm outside (what else did you expect?), Dr. Ziska insists they must stay the night and are shown to a room that all
three must share.
And, yes, you guessed it! There are secret passageways, steel trap doors, and menacing gadgets. For example, when Betty lies down
on the bed, we see a large, steel weight begin to lower, slowly threatening to crush her to death. Also, as one would expect, the door
is locked - but when they attempt to go to a window, a huge steel panel comes down and shuts off that means of exit. They soon
discover a secret passageway through the closet door that leads down to Dr. Ziska's operating room - information that comes in handy
later.
A few chilling moments are thrown in, as well. Betty lies down on a divan in the middle of the room, and we see two arms come up
from beneath her on either side. The arms wrap around her waist, and she is lowered into the floor and disappears. Amos looks in a
closet for his missing gun and finds nothing. As he turns his back, the cloth backing in the small closet suddenly forms arms and drags
him back in - and he disappears. Lastly, we see Rigo come up behind Johnny with a club about to hit him over the head. The scene fades
before the blow is struck.
"The Monster," in spite of being a comical parody, doesn't get so silly that
the suspense and thrills are lost. Actually, the ending is rather exciting.
Johnny is chased by the huge Caliban and goes out a trap door onto the
roof, rain pounding and lightning flashing. He almost slides off the roof but
catches himself on the gutter. Trying to escape, he does a tightrope walk
across a power line high above ground using a piece of the gutter as a
balancing pole. Caliban rushes downstairs and out the door, then climbs
the light pole to catch Johnny when he arrives. Let's just say Johnny's
escape includes a cut power line, an open window, and a very long banister
that winds along the stairs down several floors. Good stuff!
Things get really tense when Amos is captive in an electric chair in Dr.
Ziska's operating room, and then Betty is wheeled in on an operating table,
straps holding her down at the ankles, waist and neck. But where is Johnny?
The last we saw of him, he was fighting Rigo outside in the middle of the
Lon Chaney
storm.
It goes without saying that Johnny captures the bad guys, wins the girl and impresses
everyone as a real detective.
Although released by MGM, "The Monster" is an not an MGM production. If was
produced by Roland West, who also adapted the story and directed it, and a company
called Tec-Art. MGM did buy all the rights to the story the next year, though. However,
the production values are excellent, and would lead one to believe it was made by MGM.
The atmospheric lighting and sets are effective and well done. The direction by West's
direction (who also did a commendable job on "The Bat" in 1926 and "The Bat Whispers"
in 1930) is above average. And, as noted, the cast is what puts it over the top. In spite of
the criticism by publisher Brewster in Motion Picture Classic, fans of Chaney will enjoy
his portrayal of Dr. Ziska. Although there are some stock mannerisms, Chaney makes the
crazed doctor menacing, not silly. It's classic Chaney as he delights over the woman which
his minions have finally brought to him and on which he can now conduct his
experiments. It's a bit chilling as we watch him move his hands back and forth over the
seductively clad Betty (she's wrapped in what appears to be a sheet) - not only
menacingly, but almost lasciviously as he grins his evil grin.
A relative newcomer at the time (he only had three other film appearances to his credit),
Johnny Arthur received praise fro several reviewers for his portrayal of Johnny Goodlittle.
Ore example, Picture Play said, "Arthur, a new face, makes a real comedy hit." However,
we found Arthur somewhat lackluster in the role - doing an adequate job, but lacking the
expressiveness needed for the silent screen. Arthur was much more effective as Darla
Hood's father in a couple of the Our Gang comedies of the thirties with his whiney voice
to add another dimension to his character. Another Arthur - who appeared in MGM films at the time - George K. Arthur, would have
been the better choice for the role of the wimpy Johnny Goodlittle. However, as noted, Johnny Arthur's portrayal is adequate for the
story.
Gertrude Olmsted, as the town beauty, Betty, does a grand job. She is pert and cute and oozes sympathy as she watches Johnny get
brushed off by the insurance detective, the constable, Amos and the other men when he tries to share the "clue" he found at the
crash scene. She is adorable as she tells Johnny, "Please do something big so they'll have to listen to you." Having appeared in 15 or
more films (variously as Olmsted or Olmstead) since 1921, Olmsted was a beauty who was in demand during the silent era but suddenly
quit the business in 1929 choosing instead to devote herself to being a wife to director Robert Z. Leonard - to whom she stayed married
until his death in 1968. Two other comedies that are highly recommended in which she appears are "California Straight Ahead" (1925)
with Reginald Denny and "The Boob" (1926), a great pairing of her with the aforementioned George K. Arthur.
The name of Hallam Cooley is not a standout from the silent era, yet he was a durable player who appeared in over 100 films between
1913 and 1936. The role of Amos Rugg is a typical one for him - mustached, handsome, well-dressed - many times the bad guy and never
winning the girl. Although he's more of a coward than a bad guy in "The Monster," we are obviously pulling for Johnny to win the girl,
and not Amos. And, of course, Johnny turns out to be the brave one who wins the day, while Amos is the reluctant one when the real
test of courage is called upon.
The New York Times wasn't taken with the film noting, "The starch seems to have been taken out of the pictorial conception of 'The
Monster' by the inclusion of too much light comedy. . . The thrills that might have chilled one's feet and finger tips end in causing
chuckles and giggles. . ."
Other publications, however, did react positively to the film. Harrison's Reports called it "An entertaining comedy and mystery play,
of the style of Griffith's 'One Exciting Night.' There are some situations which make one laugh and which, at the same time, hold him
in breathless suspense. . . Roland West's direction is masterful; the acting is good, and so
is everything else." Photoplay said, "B-R-R-R-R, this one will give you delicious creeps. . . A
real thriller." Movie Weekly called it "a thrilling picture" and "Lon Chaney's best part of
recent years . . ."
edinburgh
Respected Chaney biographer Michael Blake feels "The Monster" is an unsatisfying film for
Chaney fans. "'The Monster' does not hold up well today as a chiller-comedy," he says.
"The sets and lighting provide a wonderfully moody and suspenseful atmosphere but the
supposed comedy angle causes the film to drag and ultimately to suffer comparisons with
similar genre pictures. . . The comedy is neither funny nor original, and whatever suspense
that might have been created fails to reach the apex needed to hold the interest of the
audience."
Tim Lussier, http://www.silentsaregolden.com/
fi
l
m
guild
Lon Chaney
Dead Eyes of London
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Alfred Vohrer
Trygve Larsen (novel by Edgar
Wallace)
Heinz Funk
Karl Löb
London is struck by an epidemic of rich, well-insured old men being fished out of
the Thames. Scotland Yard are called in to investigate and a clergyman running
a mission for blind down-and-outs becomes the focus of their attentions.
Wallace’s novel had earlier been filmed in the UK as Dark Eyes of London, with
Bela Lugosi in a starring role.
Cast
Inspektor Larry Holt
Nora Ward, geb. Finlay
David Judd / Mr. Lennox/
Reverend Paul Dearborn
Stephan Judd
Joachim Fuchsberger
Karin Baal
Dieter Borsche
Wolfgang Lukschy
A gang of blind peddlers terrorise London under cover of
night and fog and kill rich visitors from overseas who all had
insurances with the same company. Messages left behind in
Braille give Scotland Yard the first clues as to the identity of
the killers.
Dead Eyes of London was Alfred Vohrer’s Wallace debut. With 14 Krimis he was soon to turn into Rialto’s most proficient director. In
this movie he already established a lot of his typical cinematic quirks that were often reminiscent of Dario Argento’s ideas a decade
later: The camera films a mouth wash from behind a set of teeth; Kinski’s dark sun glasses clearly reflect a roulette table and Harry
Wüstenhagen’s image; a victim’s eyes are shown approaching through a little spy hole in a wall shortly before he’s being shot.
Vohrer’s most ingenious directorial ideas, however, were in the use of classical music. In contrast to most of the other Wallace movies
which generally relied on specially composed, often jazzy, tracks, Vohrer opted to have Beethoven’s 5th symphony played to
accompany scenes of torture, murder and general mayhem, a device which predates Kubrick’s similar use of the composer’s music for
A Clockwork Orange by more than a decade.
Although this was also Klaus Kinski’s Rialto debut he had his first Wallace outing a year earlier in Kurt Ulrich Film’s rival production Der
Rächer/The Avenger (1960).Though his character can see, he is constantly wearing large, dark sun glasses that obscure his eyes and
underline his involvement with the gang of blind men. Any time he removes his glasses, he goes into widely staring overdrive.
Joachim Fuchsberger unsurprisingly plays the lead, a Scotland Yard inspector. What else? Eddi Arent is his colleague and comic side kick
who knits woollen jumpers incessantly in order to calm his nerves and is nicknamed “Sunny” on account of his cheerful disposition.
Dieter Borsche is a blind Reverend who runs a soup kitchen for blind down and outs. Or is he? Karin Baal is a young girl who reads Braille
and helps Scotland Yard by going undercover in Borsche’s church community. Franz Schaftheitlin introduces the character of Scotland
Yard’s Sir John who was subsequently played by a couple of different actors until finally finding his quintessential interpretation with
Siegfried Schürenberg from Die Tür mit den 7 Schlössern/The Door With Seven Locks (1962) on.
The film’s most memorable part, however, is cast with Adi Berber. His Blind Jack, a big, blind brute of a man, is the kind of iconic role
that would otherwise have been cast with Tor Johnson or Milton Reid and like these two he also was a professional wrestler before
going into films. His hulking, threatening presence is emphasised by the fact that he never seems to utter a word and just looms quietly.
His massive, hairy hands that he uses to choke his victims are genuinely frightening. When we finally hear him talk, he begs for his life
in incomplete baby-ish kind of German, just to emphasise the childlike mind set that is hidden behind his murderous persona.
Dead Eyes of London is a relatively violent Wallace production for its time. We see a torture chamber complete with specially designed
drowning tanks and attacks by Bunsen burner. We also have smoky gambling joints, a happy hooker with strong Eastern European
accent, a death through an elevator shaft, a TV set that shoots bullets and a skull that doubles as a cigarette dispenser.
This is the first Wallace Krimi that presents the title sequence blood red on top of the otherwise black and white images - a gimmick
that was soon copied by other Krimis outside the Rialto series - and is overall one of the best of the early Wallace series.
Dead Eyes of London was previously filmed in 1939 with Bela Lugosi and Rialto themselves subsequently made an unofficial remake
of sorts with Der Gorilla von Soho/Gorilla Gang in 1968 again directed by Vohrer.
krimifilm.blogspot.com
The Krimi
The Inn on the River
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Alfred Vohrer
H.G. Petersson, Trygve Larsen,
Gerhard F. Hummel (novel by
Edgar Wallace)
Martin Böttcher
Karl Löb
A wet-suit wearing, harpoon-gun shooting master-criminal, The Shark, is
terrorizing the London underworld. Inspector Wade comes to suspect there are
links with a smuggling operating run out of a seedy Thames-side dive, The Mekka.
Cast
Insp. Wade
Leila Smith
Nelly Oaks
Gregor Gubanow
Joachim Fuchsberger
Brigitte Grothum
Elisabeth Flickenschildt
Klaus Kinski
A quick lesson in plot construction:
Scene 1: Inspector Wade (Joachim Fuchsberger) and Dr. Collins (Richard Munch) discuss mysterious murders committed with a
harpoon. The killer is dubbed the "Shark" and has, until now, always eluded Scotland Yard.
Scene 2: At the Mekka, the titular inn on the river, owner Nelly Oaks (Elisabeth Flickenschildt) performs a seductive song, while her
innocent step daughter Leila Smith (Brigitte Grothum) has to fight off advances from horny seamen. Wade stops by to interrogate both
about a murder committed by the "Shark" not far from the Mekka. No one has heard anything, of course, and if they have, they're not
willing to share any information with the police. Wade also makes the acquaintance of Gregor Gubanow (Klaus Kinski donning a
mustache), a mysterious businessman who seems to know more about the murder than he is willing to spell out.
Scene 3: Leila is commanded to the cellar to make an inventory. While she is there alone, camera work and music strongly imply that
the "Shark" is preying on her. Just as he is about to grab her, Wade appears to question Leila. Do we get to see the "Shark"'s face? Yes:
it's Kinski. Leila tells Wade that she saw the "Shark" on the night of the murder. Wade urges her to keep it to herself, lest the "Shark"
will most likely kill her. But the "Shark" is presumably already listening to the entire conversation in the shadows.
Thus, the intrigue is set up in a few story beats and after ten minutes one knows exactly in which direction the story is heading. But
Edgar Wallace wouldn't be Edgar Wallace if there wouldn't be numerous complications along the way. The problem is that these plot
twists and reversals aren't integral to the outcome of the story, namely the reveal of the "Shark"'s identity. Granted, we learn that
Leila is the unsuspecting inheritor of a large sum of money and we suspect that the "Shark" eliminates everyone around her to get to
that money. But it is never explained and the killings ultimately make no sense.
The Inn On The River, while more focussed than The Door With Seven Locks for example, is still a rather sensationalist whodunnit that
sacrifices plausibility for shock value and is wholly uninterested in explaining any of the character motivations. The reason why Wade
gets involved at all is because he fancies Leila (who, by the way, is not even of legal age) and fears for her well-being. And because the
plot demands it, both kiss at the very end of the movie, although no real relationship developed during the film.
At first, Kinski plays his typical Edgar-Wallace-Kinski sleazebag, but in an interesting plot twist, we discover that he is a police officer
who supposedly worked undercover the whole time. Did Wade know that? It's not clear. Kinski's character dies in a chase with the
"Shark" (oops, spoiler alert). When Wade sees the body he mutters: "It's a pity. He was one of our best men". But what was he doing
posing as a shady business man before? Was he feeding Wade with information from the underworld, or is it just one plot point more
that is not supposed to make sense and is merely introduced to shock and wow? In any event, Kinski's character is never mentioned
again after his sudden death and the investigation immediately continues as is he had never existed.
Quiet some fun is to be had doing the guessing game of who the "Shark" might be, and after the one hour mark, we quickly burn
through several candidates who are then either killed immediately by the real "Shark" or are proven innocent. And the only palpable
character trait Wade has is his frustration with the fact that Scotland Yard is seemingly unable to catch the killer, which is nicely
exploited at the end of the movie when it looks like Wade won't be able to lay his hands on the "Shark" although he mobilizes a sizable
amount of police officers to surround the harpoon-wielding murderer.
The "Shark"'s real identity is a disappointment and a little ridiculous. It makes no sense from a story point of view and is not satisfactory
on an emotional level. Audiences, however, didn't seem to mind. The Inn On The River was the most successful Edgar Wallace krimi
of the series with over 3.5 million tickets sold at the box office in 1962.
http://sporadicscintillations.blogspot.co.uk/
The Krimi
The Molly Maguires
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Martin Ritt
Walter Bernstein (suggested by
a book by Arthur H. Lewis)
Henry Mancini
James Wong Howe
Cast
Jack Kehoe
Detective McParlan
Miss Mary Raines
Davies
Pennsylvania, 1876: a secret society of Irish immigrant mine workers, the Molly
Maguires, respond to the brutality of the bosses with acts of sabotage and
violence. A detective, also an Irishman, is hired to infiltrate the Molly Maguires
and finds his sympathies and loyalties tested. Sean Connery plays the Maguires’
leader, Richard Harris the detective. Director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter
Bernstein both suffered under the Hollywood blacklist due to their political beliefs;
they later collaborated again on the blacklist-themed The Front, showing
elsewhere in our program.
Sean Connery
Richard Harris
Samantha Eggar
Frank Finlay
There have been few first-rate American fiction
films made about labor conflict. One of the most
memorable is John Sayles’s visually striking and
politically compelling Matewan (1987), about a
coal strike in rural West Virginia in the Twenties.
There was also Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae (1979), a
sentimental, politically liberal film about a
successful textile strike in the Seventies. That
film’s focus, however, was less on labor issues
than on a character study of the politically unformed, half-literate, but spunky heroine (Sally Field, who won an Oscar for her portrayal)
realizing her potential as an independent, strong woman and a courageous union organizer.
Ritt, who had been blacklisted in the Fifties, directed other social dramas (Sounder, The Great White Hope, Edge of the City) during
his long career. He also directed one earlier film about labor conflict, the big-budget, box-office failure The Molly Maguires (1970),
from a screenplay by Walter Bernstein (Fail-Safe, The Front), who also suffered during the blacklist era. Given who the director and
screenwriter were, the film was, of course, deeply sympathetic to the plight of the miners. But its focus was more specifically, and in
a more complex fashion, on the Molly Maguires, a violent nineteenth-century secret organization, comprised mainly of Irish-American
miners working in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, that was a splinter group of the nonviolent Hibernian Society, originally founded to
aid Irish immigrants.
The film is set in 1876, with the miners shown as doing dangerous and exhausting work for little money, with no redress for their
exploited situation; their attempts at unionization have been continually put down by the owners and their brutal police force. The
Mollies, led by strong, sullenly simmering Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery), engage in acts of sabotage, blowing up mines and trains, as a
means of striking back at the owners who oppress them.
The center of the narrative is a tough, charming Pinkerton Agency detective, James McParlan (Richard Harris), who is hired to infiltrate
the Mollies and provide the police with the
evidence needed to hang them. The Mollies
are wary of strangers, but they accept
McParlan after he proves himself by joining in
their violent actions with courage and even
enthusiasm. At the same time, McParlan
betrays all their plans to a dour, harsh
Welshman, Davies (Frank Finlay), the captain
of the mine’s police force, who feels nothing
but contempt for the miners.
It’s McParlan’s goal to scramble up from the
bottom, fleeing poverty to get his piece of the
American Dream, and he is willing to do
anything to achieve this. He believes in
grabbing what you want and has little use for
loyalty. Nevertheless, he develops some sympathy and understanding for the
miners’ painful lives, and even for the actions of the Mollies. An uneasy friendship
develops between McParlan and Kehoe, as well as a romantic relationship of sorts
with his landlady, Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), a long-suffering woman who
feels utterly entrapped by the world of the coal town. While McParlan may wish,
on some level, to save the lives of the Mollies, he has no compunction about
continuing to betray them in order to send them to the gallows. Still, Ritt depicts
the character in shades of gray rather than portraying him as an outright villain.
The film’s distinctiveness resides more in James Wong Howe’s cinematography
than in any of the film’s relationships, none of which quite come alive emotionally.
Although both Connery and Harris are powerful screen presences, their characters
lack any interiority, and the sense of two of them being larger-than-life, angry alter
egos (pursuing different ends) isn’t worked through. But the film’s images are
memorable: coal dust- and soot-covered miners vigorously using their pickaxes
on the coal faces to the point of exhaustion, while standing in pools of water and
breathing the fetid air of the mines; ten-year-old children already at work sorting
coal; and the world around them a wasteland almost free of vegetation, with bare
trees, and a befouled gray landscape without a touch of green. The town is grim,
with its bars filled at the end of the day with worn-out miners, while their
unsmiling, overburdened wives are at home with the children. The mine itself is
realistically re-created with operating ore cars and a fully functioning colliery aiding
the effectiveness of those scenes. The film does provide one arresting set piece:
a savage rugby match between two teams of miners—one Irish, the other
Welsh—that conveys a moment of volatile pleasure in their joyless lives.
Ritt is sympathetic to the Molly Maguires, but avoids turning them into heroes.
They commit their terrorist acts, without hope of winning or changing things, but
merely to assert that they are alive and aren’t whipped, that “they can push the bastards a little.” Indeed, the film makes us aware of
how limited the political consequences of their acts are and doesn’t glorify their violent methods. But it also makes clear that the
miner’s job is a “rigged” and exploitative game in which the company store gouges the workers and the bosses arbitrarily take
deductions from their wages. It’s an oppressive milieu where the only other voice speaking for the miners is the eloquent local priest,
who condemns violence and the Mollies, but offers no realistic alternative. Consequently, the Mollies are the only political option
extant, albeit an inadequate one, for the miners.
The Molly Maguires would have been a more politically penetrating film if we had learned something about the personalities, beliefs,
and machinations of the mine owners, who barely make an appearance. It’s their hirelings—the police—who are there to embody their
values. Although The Molly Maguires may not be not be on the level of Ritt’s arguably best films—Hud (1963) and The Spy Who Came
in from the Cold (1965), which demonstrate that he couldn’t be simply pigeonholed as a director of social dramas—it’s a solid
reconstruction of a relatively obscure piece of labor history.
In 2013, the film also serves as a powerful reminder of how abject and abused American workers were before unionization and New
Deal legislation. Given the antiunion and antiworker policies of today’s Republican Party, it’s not that difficult to imagine that American
labor could return, in a gradual, more sinuous manner, to that level of hopelessness.
Leonard Quart, http://www.cineaste.com/
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
Main Street (Calle mayor)
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Juan Antonio Bardem
Juan Antonio Bardem (play
"La señorita de Trévelez" by
Carlos Arniches)
Joseph Kosma, Isidro B.
Maiztegui
Michel Kelber
In Gamblers persuade a young stud from Madrid to propose to a plain spinster. One
of Bardem's masterpieces, this splendidly somber film lays bare the suffocating
hypocrisy of a 1950s provincial town and the sad lives of its residents. Imprisoned
while shooting the film, Bardem satisfied the censors by adding to the film a claim
that the events depicted could happen anywhere. The film won the International
Critics' Prize at the 1956 Venice Mostra after nearly successful attempts by censors
to block its exhibition.
www.moma.org
Cast
Isabel
Juan
Federico Rivas
Tonia
Betsy Blair
José Suárez
Yves Massard
Dora Doll
Calle Mayor, the Main Street... First time I watched this movie
sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. It was one evening, we were at home
the whole family, and together with us there was a close friend of my
parents, an aged lady, distinguished and very nice. The movie was
aired on TV. After it ended, for a long while everybody remained silent.
It was a special feeling, hard to name. And then, suddenly, the lady
asked why hadn't Juan let Isabel make him happy, as that would have
been the natural way. The story of Isabel was also her own story, she
had never been married.
I didn't know anything about Betsy Blair, actually I was confounding her name with that of another very different actress. And now
this revelation! As for the director, Juan Antonio Bardem, I had once read in a movie magazine an interview given by him, and I had
seen, a couple of years before, Muerte de un ciclista. But this movie was special. Beautiful and sad.
I remained with the memory of Calle Mayor, and I placed it for ever among the greatest movies. Together with the memory of that
friend of my parents, with her sudden question, beautiful and sad like the spell of this movie.
Along the years new movies came, new directors and new actors, and the fame of Calle Mayor, of Juan Antonio Bardem, of Betsy
Blair, started to fade among cinema goers, toward oblivion. Decades have passed, and I watched many other great movies, so it has
proved difficult to keep my list of masterpieces unchanged. But, I must say, Calle Mayor remained there, unflinching, among the
greatest movies I have ever seen.
There was also another thing. Along the years I found DVD copies for many great movies. Not for Calle Mayor, it was impossible to be
found. A video on youTube or some other web site, either. It was a movie living in my memory, lost for ever.
Meanwhile I had read about another movie with Betsy Blair, Marty,
made in 1955, where she was playing a similar role (also the plot was
somehow similar, up to a point, Marty ending in an optimistic tone).
Well, I didn't have the chance to watch that movie, and Betsy Blair has
remained for me Isabel from Calle Mayor. The unforgettable image of
a dry and shy spinster, forgotten by time and left to God, who
transfigures herself as she is bathed by the rays of love.
Last year I found unexpectedly a DVD copy on Amazon. I bought it
immediately, though its region was not matching my player. It took
then several months to find a multi-region player. I installed it on a
computer that broke down. It took another couple of months till the
computer was fixed.
And finally I was able to watch the movie, the second time after more
than forty years. An encounter with a long lost friend, you're rubbing
your eyes, you cannot believe it's true, despite the obvious.
How is this movie after so many years? It has kept its poignancy, and it has kept
its spell.
Like Muerte de un ciclista, the other movie of Bardem that I watched, also Calle
Mayor operates on multiple levels.
The most obvious is the neorealist level. A province town in the Spain of the
1950's, where time has died. The main street, the Calle Mayor, like an attempt
of this place to claim an identity. Pathetic and vain. There is a church, there is a
sordid café (or a brothel, whichever), there is a town library (under the billiards
parlor), and there are the arcades, beautiful while not enough to demonstrate
life deserves to be lived. People light candles at home and go to church on
Sundays. The Civil War is still there in family wounds, while already forgotten
history. Isabel's father was a colonel in the army of Franco, killed in the war,
she is just an old spinster. There is a group of guys making stupid jokes to run
away the boredom. Juan (José Suárez, in the best role of his career) will
pretend to fall for Isabel, to make her ridicule. She believes him and becomes
happy. The story goes on till it is too late. Maybe he falls in love, too, that'd be
the natural way. Only nothing can be natural in that place. Anyway, Juan has to
chose between the courage to remain with her and to be happy (covert by the
ridicule of his friends, and ultimately of the whole town) and the cowardice to
just get out. Of course he'll choose cowardice, because that's the way it is.
There is a political dimension: all this happens in the Spain of Franco. Bardem
adds here a hint (I noticed this method also in Muerte de un ciclista; there the
female lead was dying in a position reminding the hanging upside down of
Mussolini and Clara Petacci). Here in Calle Mayor the hint lays in the name of
one of the personages:a honest and cultivated guy (played by Yves Massard)
who came from Madrid to stay in the town for a while. He is the only one who
criticizes the prank made to Isabel, and eventually he is the only one who sees the life positively. His name is Federico (an inside homage
to Federico Sánchez, pseudonym used then by Jorge Semprún to manage the clandestine activities of the Communist Party of Spain
- wiki).
There is also another level, beyond the neorealist drama. I would name it existential level. It is not only about that particular place in
that particular time. It's about a universal experience. The street, the Calle Mayor, where all those people walk frenetically, like to
show themselves that they really exist, this street comes in the movie like a dream. A dream in subtle dark tones, with imprecise
images. An illusion of life. For several times the movie shows the railroad station, where trains are leaving, while no person is able to
get on and escape from the illusion. Juan remains trapped in the town stupidness, Isabel remains trapped, ultimately everybody there
is trapped, everybody is a spinster. A place of zombies. The impossibility of life to get off the illusion, to become reality. And the
question addressed to us, who are watching the movie: is this real or are we just participants in a dream? Are we really alive?
And beyond all these levels, Calle Mayor (the same as Muerte de un ciclista) is a reference to other essential works in the history of
cinema. Firstly, Fellini's Vitelloni: more has been said about their similarities. Then, the beginning scene (with the guys making the joke
with the coffin) calls in mind Buñuel; also the superb scene at the end, with Isabel beyond a window washed by rain, an accolade for
the Meshes of the Afternoon with its celebrated image (Maya Deren beyond a window washed by echos of reality and illusion) that
in turn had come from Weinberg's Autumn Fire.
Pierre Radulesc, http://updateslive.blogspot.co.uk/
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
The Unholy Three
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Photography
In Brief
Tod Browning
Tod Robbins, Waldemar Young
David Kesson
The title characters are circus performers – Chaney’s ventriloquist, a strongman
and a midget – who use their talents to form an unusual team of jewel robbers.
Directed by Chaney’s most famous collaborator, Tod “Freaks” Browning.
Cast
Echo - The Ventriloquist
Rosie O'Grady
Hector McDonald
Hercules
Tweedledee
Lon Chaney
Mae Busch
Matt Moore
Victor McLaglen
Harry Earles
Perhaps the greatest talent of director Tod Browning was his
ability to make even the most preposterous story somehow
plausible. Throughout his early career he specialized in crime
melodramas that were tinged with the unusual but The Unholy
Three (1925), his first of sixteen films for MGM, allowed him to
plunge headlong into the perverse.
In a plot that would have been played for slapstick by any other director, a trio of dime museum oddities - Hercules the strongman
(Victor McLaglen), Tweedledee the midget (Harry Earles) and Echo the ventriloquist (Lon Chaney) - join forces to perpetrate a series
of nocturnal burglaries. Shedding their carnival personages, they reinvent themselves in a warped reflection of the traditional family.
Donning granny wig and black dress, Echo becomes the elderly Mother O'Grady, while Tweedledee climbs into a cradle to become her
toddling grandchild and Hercules stands by as her muscle-bound son. Rounding out Echo's larcenous troupe are a beautiful pickpocket
(Mae Busch) and a monstrous ape, which is inevitably unleashed in the film's suitably outrageous final reel.
In publicity stories, Browning exaggerated the ferocity of the primate. "Every shot that was taken of this animal was taken at great
personal risk," said Browning in the original press book, "We were in momentary dread that he would break from his cage and kill
everybody connected with the taking of the scenes." In reality, the ape was nothing more than a large yet docile chimpanzee, which
was made to appear bigger than life through the use of miniature sets and optical effects. To accomplish the illusion in one scene, a
child was costumed as Echo so that the ape would loom large in comparison.
Though The Unholy Three has moments of visual brilliance - the shadow of the dark triumvirate hatching their plans, the oft-parodied
image of the infantile Tweedledee wearing a criminal scowl and smoking a fat cigar - Browning's primary accomplishment was shaping
the macabre story and coaxing the proper degree of melodramatic abandon from his cast. Chaney's performances have, at times,
been criticized as excessive, but his fire-and-brimstone acting style was ideally suited to the aggrandized plots that Browning and his
screenwriters fashioned around him.
The Unholy Three's peculiar subject matter inspired a great deal of behind-the-scenes tomfoolery. To test the effectiveness of their
disguises, Chaney (as Mrs. O'Grady) took Earles (as Little Willie) to the studio's wardrobe department for a diaper change. Just before
the undergarments were unpinned, Earles shouted, much to the wardrobe lady's surprise, "You will like hell, madam!" On another
day, McLaglen filled Earles's baby bottle with Scotch, which was quickly swiped by the costumed Chaney. "You should have seen Lon
in a wig and a false front and big false keister sucking on that nipple," recalled Earles, "You'd have died laughing!"
So popular was Browning's twisted tale that MGM made The Unholy Three, conceived as nothing more than a low-budget melodrama,
one of their high-profile releases of the season, alongside such monumental films as King Vidor's The Big Parade, Ben-Hur and Erich
von Stroheim's The Merry Widow. It scored a multi-picture contract for Browning and enabled him to direct seven more films with
Chaney, surprisingly unique thrillers populated by twisted bodies and criminal minds. In 1930, The Unholy Three was remade by director
Jack Conway (Browning had left MGM for Universal, where he would direct Dracula in 1931). The talkie version, a scene-for-scene
duplicate of Browning's original, would be Chaney's first and only sound film before his untimely death on August 26, 1930.
Earles would reunite with Browning in 1932 for the director's most notorious production, Freaks, while McLaglen (former heavyweight
boxing champion of the British Army and Navy) would become known as a character actor in the films of John Ford, including The
Informer (1935) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).
Bret Wood, TCM
Lon Chaney
The Inn on the River
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Alfred Vohrer
H.G. Petersson, Trygve Larsen,
Gerhard F. Hummel (novel by
Edgar Wallace)
Martin Böttcher
Karl Löb
A wet-suit wearing, harpoon-gun shooting master-criminal, The Shark, is
terrorizing the London underworld. Inspector Wade comes to suspect there are
links with a smuggling operating run out of a seedy Thames-side dive, The Mekka.
Cast
Insp. Wade
Leila Smith
Nelly Oaks
Gregor Gubanow
Joachim Fuchsberger
Brigitte Grothum
Elisabeth Flickenschildt
Klaus Kinski
A quick lesson in plot construction:
Scene 1: Inspector Wade (Joachim Fuchsberger) and Dr. Collins (Richard Munch) discuss mysterious murders committed with a
harpoon. The killer is dubbed the "Shark" and has, until now, always eluded Scotland Yard.
Scene 2: At the Mekka, the titular inn on the river, owner Nelly Oaks (Elisabeth Flickenschildt) performs a seductive song, while her
innocent step daughter Leila Smith (Brigitte Grothum) has to fight off advances from horny seamen. Wade stops by to interrogate both
about a murder committed by the "Shark" not far from the Mekka. No one has heard anything, of course, and if they have, they're not
willing to share any information with the police. Wade also makes the acquaintance of Gregor Gubanow (Klaus Kinski donning a
mustache), a mysterious businessman who seems to know more about the murder than he is willing to spell out.
Scene 3: Leila is commanded to the cellar to make an inventory. While she is there alone, camera work and music strongly imply that
the "Shark" is preying on her. Just as he is about to grab her, Wade appears to question Leila. Do we get to see the "Shark"'s face? Yes:
it's Kinski. Leila tells Wade that she saw the "Shark" on the night of the murder. Wade urges her to keep it to herself, lest the "Shark"
will most likely kill her. But the "Shark" is presumably already listening to the entire conversation in the shadows.
Thus, the intrigue is set up in a few story beats and after ten minutes one knows exactly in which direction the story is heading. But
Edgar Wallace wouldn't be Edgar Wallace if there wouldn't be numerous complications along the way. The problem is that these plot
twists and reversals aren't integral to the outcome of the story, namely the reveal of the "Shark"'s identity. Granted, we learn that
Leila is the unsuspecting inheritor of a large sum of money and we suspect that the "Shark" eliminates everyone around her to get to
that money. But it is never explained and the killings ultimately make no sense.
The Inn On The River, while more focussed than The Door With Seven Locks for example, is still a rather sensationalist whodunnit that
sacrifices plausibility for shock value and is wholly uninterested in explaining any of the character motivations. The reason why Wade
gets involved at all is because he fancies Leila (who, by the way, is not even of legal age) and fears for her well-being. And because the
plot demands it, both kiss at the very end of the movie, although no real relationship developed during the film.
At first, Kinski plays his typical Edgar-Wallace-Kinski sleazebag, but in an interesting plot twist, we discover that he is a police officer
who supposedly worked undercover the whole time. Did Wade know that? It's not clear. Kinski's character dies in a chase with the
"Shark" (oops, spoiler alert). When Wade sees the body he mutters: "It's a pity. He was one of our best men". But what was he doing
posing as a shady business man before? Was he feeding Wade with information from the underworld, or is it just one plot point more
that is not supposed to make sense and is merely introduced to shock and wow? In any event, Kinski's character is never mentioned
again after his sudden death and the investigation immediately continues as is he had never existed.
Quiet some fun is to be had doing the guessing game of who the "Shark" might be, and after the one hour mark, we quickly burn
through several candidates who are then either killed immediately by the real "Shark" or are proven innocent. And the only palpable
character trait Wade has is his frustration with the fact that Scotland Yard is seemingly unable to catch the killer, which is nicely
exploited at the end of the movie when it looks like Wade won't be able to lay his hands on the "Shark" although he mobilizes a sizable
amount of police officers to surround the harpoon-wielding murderer.
The "Shark"'s real identity is a disappointment and a little ridiculous. It makes no sense from a story point of view and is not satisfactory
on an emotional level. Audiences, however, didn't seem to mind. The Inn On The River was the most successful Edgar Wallace krimi
of the series with over 3.5 million tickets sold at the box office in 1962.
http://sporadicscintillations.blogspot.co.uk/
The Krimi
Harlan County USA
Credits
Director
Music
Photography
In Brief
Barbara Kopple
Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis
Kevin Keating,Hart Perry
Winner of the best feature documentary at the 1977 Academy Awards, Barbara
Kopple’s film tells the story of the Brookside colliery miners’ strike against the
Eastover Mining Company after the company refused to acknowledged the
miners’ unionisation.
The current popularity and cultural importance of documentaries would have
been inconceivable in 1976, when Harlan County USA briefly ignited
commercial movie screens. It was the dawn of the blockbuster age: the buzz
around Jaws had barely receded, and Star Wars loomed on the horizon.
Although realistic dramas still attracted mass audiences—as evidenced by Dog
Day Afternoon, All the President’s Men, and Network—feature-length
nonfiction remained an essentially highbrow pursuit. During the mid-seventies,
only a handful of docs per year were released theatrically, almost exclusively
in art-house venues. Despite an uproar over Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’s
1974 dissection of the Vietnam debacle, press coverage was sporadic at best,
and television had scaled back its earlier commitment to documentary programming.
Barbara Kopple’s detailed analysis of a Kentucky mine workers’ strike is unmistakably of this time—a virtual hub of urgent themes,
formal tendencies, political debates, and material practices that define post-sixties documentary in America. But unlike other docs of
the period, its theatrical distribution and relatively wide appeal generated considerable public support; it is still the only nonfiction film
to have played the New York Film Festival, won an Academy Award, and been granted a listing on the National Film Registry. Moreover,
its compelling dramatic structure, hybrid visual style, and rejection of fly-on-the-wall impartiality anticipate key developments in
contemporary nonfiction. Despite its modest subject and visual resources, Harlan County USA encompasses an extraordinarily broad
and complex aesthetic agenda whose influence can be felt in later fictional movies—including Norma Rae (1979) and Harlan County
War (2000)—as well as political docs.
Kopple’s cinematic career has been equally broad, a singular concatenation of nonfiction and scripted dramas, independent and
commissioned projects, network TV episodes and theatrical features, celebrity portraits and journalistic reports, pharmaceutical TV ads
and public television miniseries. Kopple served an apprenticeship in the cauldron of American cinema vérité, or Direct Cinema, with
Albert and David Maysles, and to varying degrees, her later films—even fictional productions like the recent Havoc (2005)—display
traces of a vérité ethos: spontaneous, mobile-camera observation of ongoing events; ambient sound textures; chronological
organization.
Of course, none of the fabled Direct Cinema exemplars are nearly as pure, as detached, or as unencumbered by editorial manipulation
as their makers often claim. (Grey Gardens, by the Maysles, for instance—completed a year before Harlan County USA—turns on
repeated exchanges between its two female subjects and the pair of brothers, just off camera, a foregrounding of process usually
proscribed by nonfiction advocates.) But Harlan County USA’s deviations from vérité orthodoxy were even more telling. Not settling
for strict present-tense exposition, Kopple tapped into an emerging documentary paradigm of direct interviews coupled with archival
footage—a format intended to bring history “to life”—exemplified by James Klein, Miles Mogulesco, and Julia Reichert’s Union Maids
(1976). Further, when Kopple questions rural Kentuckians in their homes and in public spaces, her voice is often heard in dialogue with
the social actors; she makes little effort to disguise her subjective imprint as filmmaker or her engaged partisanship. Although Kopple’s
authorial presence is different from, say, Michael Moore’s first-person antics in Roger and Me (1989), it constitutes an initial step
toward an ethics of self-reflexivity, the belief that because no filmmaker can exert complete authoritative knowledge over a given
reality, it is more truthful to disclose tensions between straightforward recording and personal sympathies.
In terms of chronology, Harlan County USA adopts an unusual trajectory by starting in 1973 and then circling back to recount the
contentious, turned murderous, election between Tony Boyle and Jock Yablonski for president of the United Mine Workers. A major
theme embellished over the course of the film concerns historical continuities of union struggle and the persistence of worker
exploitation. To augment and corroborate the verbal testimony of retired miners and union supporters, Kopple inserts shots taken of
local battles in the 1930s—the origin of “Bloody Harlan” and of Florence Reece’s famous song “Which Side Are You On?” The legacy
of the past imbues the present strike with heightened meaning, for participants but also for the director, who at least implicitly links
her active witnessing to a tradition of radical newsreels produced by the Workers Film and Photo League.
Kopple has indicated that unfinished sections of Harlan County USA were used as organizing and fund-raising tools—besides having
a powerful dramatic arc, it is practically a how-to manual for conducting a strike—and certain sequences are unabashedly pro-union
arguments. Just as left documentarians of the thirties relied on Soviet-style montage to create symbolic connections, Kopple scores
rhetorical points through clever editing juxtapositions; in one instance, she derisively
annotates company spokesman Norman Yarborough’s euphemism about “upgrading”
miners’ living conditions by inserting shots of abject housing as he speaks. Later, the
strikers’ desire to escalate their tactics is expounded visually by cutting from a local
picket line to protests at Duke Power’s corporate headquarters, in North Carolina, then
to demonstrators on Wall Street imploring passersby not to buy energy stocks. At each
new location, the action is framed in such a way that we are temporarily disoriented, a
pattern that forces us to see how local miners’ issues segue into our own immediate
economic concerns. The stirring effect is to posit an abstract concept—the solidarity of
miners and urban energy consumers—through the collision of small fragments of
actuality.
During the latter sequence, a snippet of Reece’s song is heard over the spreading protest
activities. Among Harlan County USA’s many deviations from vérité dogma is its
innovative sound design, featuring the intensive use of working-class musical anthems,
which is crucial to the film’s emotional impact. American Graffiti (1973) had recently
captured commercial audiences with a nonstop pop-song soundtrack. Kopple’s fourteen
tunes, many sung by Hazel Dickens, serve several functions: as transitional devices
between scenes, as aural evocations of a distinctly rural cultural heritage, and, at times,
as editorial supplements to hammer home messages of misery and defiance.
Coincidentally, the mid-seventies is a period celebrated not only for Hollywood’s
rediscovery of social class as a dramatic device—Rocky (1976) is an obvious, baleful example—but also for a popular reengagement
with proletarian musics, including recondite folk and blues masters recorded on tape and film by Alan Lomax and the buoyant regional
ethnomusical portraits of Les Blank.
The fact that Harlan County USA’s dominant musical voice is female is hardly incidental to its wider themes. Although Kopple was not
a charter member of the feminist filmmaking cohort that emerged in the late sixties and early seventies—including Joyce Chopra,
Claudia Weill, Cinda Firestone, Amalie Rothschild, and Martha Coolidge, among others—the impact of feminist thought and cultural
activism is everywhere apparent in her first feature. A signal aspiration of the women’s movement was to document the lives of
ordinary women, produce “counterhistories” to combat the habitual and continuing exclusion of women’s contributions from
narratives of social change. Kopple clearly demonstrates how the political resonates through the deeply personal, gendered tasks of
child rearing and other domestic chores in the daily lives of miners’ wives. However, these women are also shown taking vital leadership
roles: organizing picket lines, forming support committees, and directly confronting the violence of scabs and company thugs. Their
double duty, as it were, is indicative of a dilemma still afflicting women’s labor. The film’s two strongest personalities are the guntoting adversaries Basil Collins and Lois Scott, the latter a charismatic agitator who embodies the film’s most troubling, and enduring,
question: how to fight against corporate intimidation without jeopardizing the goals or moral capital of the union cause.
Oddly, in its time Harlan County USA was repudiated by elements of the cultural left, including some feminists; it centered a debate
involving the political efficacy of documentary realism and the probity of commercial distribution. If a supposedly progressive film
reached a popular audience, was that evidence of a compromised political perspective? Could adherence to standard codes of dramatic
closure or visual transparency be understood as reaffirming aspects of bourgeois ideology? These were heated issues in the midseventies. While it is true that Harlan County USA privileges individual agency as a driving force in political struggle, and that it lays out
a craftily calibrated three-act structure—replete with an epilogue of poststrike updates and two gritty excursuses: the union election
campaign and a mini-essay on mine safety and black lung disease—it is far from a simple, unselfconscious recording of events.
Accusations of naive propagation of documentary authority seem, on closer inspection, particularly ill-founded.
Paradoxically, it is Kopple’s avoidance of liberal, ecumenical nostrums that makes the “voice” of her film so spiky, and its commercial
distribution so significant. In the early seventies, specialized companies such as New Day and Women Make Movies were formed to
enhance public access to feminist work. Kopple supported these initiatives but went a slightly different route via Harlan County USA’s
original distributor, Cinema 5, which carried primarily European auteurist titles. If her film
never quite managed to break out of the art-house league, it signaled a breach in the
invisible barrier separating the fiction and documentary markets. This de facto resistance
to compartmentalizing movie genres or categories of production resurfaces in Kopple’s
subsequent career, especially in her tenacious mixing of social analysis and entertainment.
In this sense, Harlan County USA can be considered a signpost for recent nonfiction
successes like Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and
The Corporation. As Florence Reece put it, “They say in Harlan County, there are no
neutrals there.” For Barbara Kopple, the absence of neutrality proved to be not just a
virtue but a cultural prophecy.
edinburgh
Paul Arthur is the author of A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (University of
Minnesota Press). He is a regular contributor to Cineaste and Film Comment and is coeditor of
Millennium Film Journal.
fi
l
m
guild
The Wheelchair (El cochecito)
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Marco Ferreri
Marco Ferreri, Rafael Azcona
(novel by Rafael Azcona)
Miguel Asins Arbó
Juan Julio Baena
Cast
Don Anselmo Proharán
Carlos Proharán
Alvarito
Matilde
José Isbert
Pedro Porcel
José Luis López Vázquez
María Luisa Ponte
Only the fusion of two genius -the director Marco Ferreri and the script writer
Rafael Azcona- could have created this magnificent movie. If we add to this duet
the acting of Pepe Isbert (possibly one of the best Spanish actors ever) the
combination could not have been better. This is a dark movie about characters
usually scorned by the society. Characters normally separated by the rest just
because they are old or handicapped. All this tension developed between this two
poles of the society ends in a brutal and nonsense murder. This chapter of the
movie was censored by the Franco´s regime who could not bear such brutality. In
any case the result is a dark movie who lets us see how were the darker years of
the Spanish recent history.
garcia nacho, imdb.com
On Golden Wheelchair
Despite a long and prolific career, Marco Ferreri is not as
well known outside his native Italy as contemporaries
like Fellini and Antonioni. His anarchic, iconoclastic vision
of the world and bizarre, often surreal humor may be the
reason. Although on the surface this early film initially
seems grounded in the Neo-Realist tradition of DeSica's
"Umberto D," it carries a bittersweet subversive theme
that would become increasingly apparent in Ferreri's
later work.
Jose Isbert plays septuagenarian Don Anselmo Proharan,
a retired government minister who has reluctantly ceded
his home to son Carlos, an officious, condescending
solicitor, his bourgeoisie wife, and Yolanda, their homely
daughter. Carlos' law offices, which he shares with his
daughter's ambitious fiancé, are also located on the
premises, so Don Anselmo is limited to a single stifling and confining room in his own home. As he also has to share space with Yolanda,
the old man has no sense of peace and quiet or privacy. In addition, Carlos has control of his father's pension, which he parsimoniously
doles out as a parent would to a child, further restricting the old man's freedom. Ferreri emphasizes the situation with very effective
traveling shots that follow the old man around the house's constrictive, almost claustrophobic, corridors.
Don Anselmo's only escape seems to be attending funerals, and when his paraplegic friend Don Lucas gets a motorized wheelchair,
known as a "cochetito," Proharan accompanies him to his wife's grave to leave flowers. Don Anselmo soon becomes obsessed with
getting his own "little coach" and joining the subculture of other "cochetito" owners that Don Lucas belongs to which congregates
and interacts daily. These physically challenged people have achieved an exhilarating sense of independence and freedom, and the old
man views joining them as an escape from his restricted life with his tyrannical family. However, to join them, he needs his own "little
coach."
Like Toad in Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," Don Anselmo becomes obsessed with owning one and regaining his lost
dignity. When his tight-fisted son dismisses his requests for his own chair, the old man tries several gambits in which he feigns physical
infirmity to get one. Frustrated, Don Anselmo sells his dead wife's jewelry in order to buy a cochetito outright, but the son, who has
already earmarked the jewelry for his daughter, humiliates the old man by forcing him to return the "cochetito" and reclaims the
jewels.
After further humiliating him, the son threatens to institutionalize the old man, to the delight of granddaughter Yolande, who is only
too eager to co-opt the bedroom for herself. His self-esteem shattered, a desperate Don Anselmo poisons his family's food and runs
away from home like a disaffected teenager. The film ends ambiguously with many issues left unresolved.
Ferreri directed his early films in Spain, and Don Anselmo's repression by his bourgeoisie family could be interpreted as a quietly
subversive allegorical criticism of Spanish dictator's Francisco Franco's repressive fascist state. The whimsical early scene when Don
Anselmo sees a surreal line of men marching in military fashion armed with
mop handles for guns and wearing toilet bowls for helmets is in stark contrast
to the film's more sober conclusion when the fugitive old man is arrested by
the iconic uniformed actual Guardia Civil.
In any case, Ferreri left Spain for his native Italy after the release of "El
Cochecito" and although this minor masterpiece is relatively obscure, he soon
received some international critical acclaim for trenchantly scathing social
satires like "The Ape Woman," "The Conjugal Bed," "La Grand Bouffe," and
Felliniesque burlesques like "Don't Touch the White Woman," a wild send-up
of Custer's Last Stand set in Paris.
Ferreri would return to the theme of aging with dignity in the poignantly
sobering realism of "The House of Smiles" nearly three decades later. The
director has been quoted as saying that his job is to give the audience a
"punch in the stomach." "El Cochecito" is a punch, albeit a gentle one.
duke1029, imdb.com
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
Mr Wu
Credits
In Brief
Director
Screenplay
Chaney is the titular Chinese patriarch, whose grand-daughter is
dishonoured by a young Englishman. Chaney’s sensitive performance and
the presence of Chinese-American star Anna May-Wong help the film avoid
the worst Yellow Peril clichés.
William Nigh
Lorna Moon, Lotta Woods (Play by
Maurice Vernon & Harold Owen)
Photography John Arnold
Cast
Mr. Wu / Wu's Grandfather
Mrs. Gregory
Nang Ping
Mr. Gregory
Loo Song
Lon Chaney
Louise Dresser
Renée Adorée
Holmes Herbert
Anna May Wong
In the pictorial conception of the play "Mr. Wu," the versatile Lon
Chaney is in his element as a cultured but sinister Chinese mandarin,
who, despite his Oxford indifference, when it comes to vengeance finds
that he must abide by the letter of the Chinese code. This Mr. Wu
welcomes everybody with a good-natured smile, but behind it there
frequently lurks an ugly intent, which may even mean the death or
perhaps the torture of an individual. This suave and modern Oriental,
who robes himself with garments spun with gold, enlists no little sympathy, for just as he has arranged a wedding for his fascinating
daughter. Nang Ping, to a scion of another ancient Chinese family, he hears that the girl has been seen in the arms of an Englishman
named Basil Gregory.
Mr. Gregory, in a Gilbert and Sullivan manner, has taught the almond-eyed maiden how to kiss, and, according to the laws of the yellow
man, the bearer of such news, instead of being rewarded for his loyalty, must immediately have his tongue silenced; this Mr. Wu
accomplishes with a short, curved dagger. Hence, after you have seen the majestic mandarin listening to the account of the love scene
in the lotus garden, you perceive the plebeian gossiper, after a thrust from Mr. Wu's gleaming blade, sink to his death.
Know you that the punishment of this one man is not sufficient in such circumstances. Others must shuffle off this earth, and perhaps
if Mr. Wu had had his way many white men would have fallen far below the faded lotus blossoms. But it happens that Mr. Wu himself
succumbs, prior to completing his full plan of revenge. And as the white persons in this story emerge unscathed and with beating
hearts, the film story may be adjudged as having a more or less happy ending. But what of poor little Nang Ping?
William Nigh, the director of this picture, deserves no little credit for his handling of the subject, but at the same time either he or the
scenario writer might have unfurled the story so that the far-reaching powers of Mr. Wu could have been dilated upon. In this picture
his vengeance is more limited than it was in the play. It is a narrative that could have been told with infinitely greater depth, and the
film loses some of its dignity when Basil Gregory, bound to a tree, is beheld writhing to free himself.
In the subtitles of this photodrama there is a constant exaggeration of Chinese idioms, which casts ridicule upon that which might have
been poetic.
Mr. Chaney is excellent in his performance, but his make-up might have been more
effective, by less perfect eyebrows and more perfect Oriental eyes. His cunning is cleverly
portrayed, and this Mr. Wu is the personification of the man of culture who reverts to his
kind. Renée Adorée plays the part of Nang Ping, and although her smile is far from Oriental,
her portrayal of trust and of affection is splendidly suited to the part. She is, however, far
too pretty to be left in the lurch by the white hero. Louise Dresser, who for the first time
la permitted to appear in a rôle that does not detract from her grace and looks, is capital
as Mrs. Gregory, Basil's mother. Ralph Forbes, who officiated as one of the brothers in the
picturization of "Beau Geste," is easy and natural in the hapless rôle of Gregory.
By MORDAUNT HALL, New York Times, Published: May 16, 1927
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
Lon Chaney
Room 13
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Harald Reinl
Quentin Philips (novel by
Edgar Wallace)
Peter Thomas
Ernst W. Kalinke
Dancers at the High-Low club are falling victim to a straight-razor wielding maniac. The
nightclub also serves as the base of operations for gangster Joe Legge. An obvious
influence on Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebrae, the film
also includes some topless shots of the High-Low dancers. This blatantly opportunistic,
exploitative move backfired as the film was given an adults only rating in its homeland
that hindered rather than helped its box-office.
Cast
Johnny Gray
Denise
Joe Legge
Sir Marney
Joachim Fuchsberger
Karin Dor
Richard Häussler
Walter Rilla
Zimmer 13, AKA Room 13, is a moody Krimi
film that spends a great deal of time relying
on its gothic and crime infused themes,
while unraveling out a caper filled with
blackmail, kidnapping, and murder. The tone
of the film is dark, emphasizing the seedy underbelly of this cinematic criminal world, and the filmmakers only sprinkle a few comedic
pinches every now and then so as not to drown the audience in its overwhelmingly dire atmosphere. With its beautifully haunting
black and white photography and its mystery laced narrative, Zimmer 13 is a Krimi with exceptional quality.
The film begins with infamous gangster Joe Legge, blackmailing a respectable London man named Sir Robert Marney, in order for
him to help out with a train heist that he’s planning. The reluctant Sir Robert refuses the proposal forcing Legge to threaten to kill
Marney’s daughter unless he gives some unspecified help when the time comes. Fearing for his daughter’s safety, Marney enlists the
help of a private detective named Johnny Gray, London’s top man. With the stage set and the players presented, all the clues of this
mad caper begin to point to a nightclub called Highlow, where a rash of girls have been recently murdered by an unknown serial-killer.
Do the train heist and the string of murders have an underlying connection; is the murderer among them; and what the hell is the
mysterious Room 13 that the title is referring to? All of these question and more are answered in this excellent Krimi entry that has
atmosphere to spare and enough entertainment value to fill a room…. Possibly Room 13. Mwahahaha!
Joachim Fuchsberger plays the role of Johnny Gray, the private detective with a soft spot for the ladies. Joachim is a regular in the Krimi
world, and his go at the role of Johnny Gray is serious and straight forward. He’s far more focused in this entry then in Der Hexer,
where he played more of a comedic role in the film rather than a hard-boiled detective up against some insurmountable odds. Either
way you slice it, I enjoy anything that Joachim puts out and his approach to Johnny Gray in Zimmer 13 is a well-rounded performance
that hits all the right notes to compliment the already excellent atmosphere the film establishes. In the film, Johnny Gray falls for the
beautiful daughter of Sir Robert Marney and their courtship and pairing is inspiring, making it puzzling that the film kind of ends on a
cold note between the two with Johnny showing little to no emotion when their lives swirl wildly out of control and their relationship
unpredictably becomes severed. Be that as it may, the chemistry between the two is remarkably portrayed making their bitter destiny
all the more tragic.
As mentioned above, one of the other
central roles of the film aside from the
character of Johnny Gray, is the daughter of
Sir Robert Marney, Denise, played by the
enchanting Karin Dor. I’ve only recently been
aware of this wonderfully intoxicating
actress after seeing her perform in the wild
Eurospy, Upperseven, where she absolutely
stole the limelight from her male
counterpart every time she graced the
screen. Karin does much the same thing in
Zimmer 13, as she demands the viewers
attention each time she hauntingly stares off
The Krimi
into the distance pondering what horrible things will happen to her character as
the film progresses. What is nice about this movie is that it is split right down the
middle in giving each main character the screen time they deserve. Both Johnny
Gray and Denise Marney are given ample opportunity to hook the audience into
their lives, forcing them to give a damn on whether they live or die. Karin does an
exceptional job with her character and the black and white imagery compliments
her beauty in all the right places.
Aside from the two main players of the piece, Johnny Gray and Denise Marney, the
film is filled with a vast cast of memorable characters. Some like Sir Robert Marney,
played by Walter Rilla, or Joe Legge, played by Richard Haussler, are inherently in
step with the tone and feel of the narrative. They’re personalities gel perfectly with
the dire situations that they find themselves in, but there are a few minor characters
that stand out like a sore thumb because of the total contrast of their personality
to the film’s overbearing tone. One in particular is the role of Dr. Higgins, played by
Eddi Arent, who brings a heavy dose of comedy to his character, which in the end,
feels wholly out of place, yet highly entertaining. Higgins is a scientist for Scotland
Yard, and he is basically the Krimi version of Q from the James Bond series, except
that he has an unhealthy obsession with a mannequin named Emily. Say what? Yeah
the concept is really out there and excruciatingly out of place within this narrative,
but I really enjoyed the inclusion of his character, even if he did kind of derail the
atmospheric tone from time to time.
Even with the existence of such an odd and comedic infused character as Higgins,
the film can’t help being extremely atmospheric and unabashedly dark in its
portrayal of this sinister crime filled caper. This gothic/noir blend is beautifully
imagined, taking the iconic imagery from both genres and blending it into one breathtaking amalgam that just looks absolutely
exquisite. The locations also add to the atmosphere of the piece, with one in particular exuding a creepy presence that captures the
tone of the film perfectly and that would be the entrance to Sir Robert Marney’s mansion. The long drive up to the estate is lined with
rows upon rows of lifeless trees that sway terrifyingly in the cold autumn breeze, mimicking the doom that lies in waiting at the end
of the movie for our cast of characters. I really couldn’t get enough of that location and I thought that it was a brilliantly placed moment
when introducing us to it very early on in the film. If there’s one thing to take away from this Krimi entry, it’s that it succeeds beautifully
in creating some wonderful imagery that compliments the overall theme perfectly.
Zimmer 13 is a substantially well made Krimi, that has a few missteps here and there, but nothing that derails the film from being highly
entertaining. The atmosphere and tone is top notch, and the locations of the Marney estate and the Highlow nightclub compliment
the mood beautifully. As with most Krimi films, the attention to gothic and noir injected imagery is rampantly apparent, and with
Zimmer 13 we get that in abundance. The haunting visuals of this movie are simply outstanding and they help maintain that sense of
awe and fear that never lets up.
With the inclusion of an outstanding cast, including Joachim Fuchsberger and Karin Dor, the film gives us a mass of characters that really
chew up the scenery and push the narrative along, even if it becomes confusing as things get more complicated. The decision to
include a comedic relief character into the mix is not a very inspiring one, but in the sake of entertainment Eddi Arent knocks the
performance out of the park as he made me laugh a number of times despite the dire situations that were taking place around him.
On the whole, Zimmer 13 is an obscure case, where despite its flaws the film still manages to work as an entertaining piece of
crime/thriller cinema. Check this gem out and you’ll be cheering that it’s…... Krim-irific!
http://thelucidnightmare.blogspot.co.uk
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
The Krimi
Germinal
France | 1993 | 160 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Claude Berri
Claude Berri, Arlette Langmann
(novel by Émile Zola )
Adapted from the novel by Emile Zola, Germinal depicts a miner’s strike and
repression by the authorities in mid-19th century France. Gerard Depardieu and
Miou Miou star.
Cast
Maheude
Étienne Lantier
Chaval
Toussaint Maheu
Miou-Miou
Renaud
Jean-Roger Milo
Gérard Depardieu
'Germinal' a Vision of Hope for Workers
Claude Berri's soaring, magnificent film of Emile Zola's
"Germinal" (at the Royal) cuts right to the movies' unique,
paradoxical power of rendering human misery at its most
unrelenting with images of surpassing grandeur and meaning.
Pictures don't get much bleaker than this 158-minute epic saga of the grinding existence of 19th-Century French coal miners--but they
don't get much more beautiful either.
Berri and his formidable yet understated cinematographer, Yves Angelo, aided by Jean-Louis Roque's subtle yet stirring score, bring
a unifying, majestic lyricism to their contrasting views of the few ultra-rich and the many desperately poor. "Germinal," France's official
entry in the Oscars, glows with the humanism and passion for authenticity that were Zola's hallmarks, and is a worthy successor to
Berri's similarly powerful "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Springs."
The story is set roughly a century ago, but it's actually unfolding, with varying degrees of severity, around the world right now. As a
leader in the international Naturalist literary movement, Zola believed that the destinies of most people, especially the poor, were
dictated--and usually harshly--by environment.
In any event, the Maheu family and their friends and neighbors, who labor mightily at the Voreux pit in Northern France, could scarcely
be more trapped. Times are bad, which means that the miners must concentrate on loading their carts as fully and as often as possible
at the expense of properly securing the mine's tunnels with timber; if they complain, they risk losing all payment for timbering.
Maheu (Gerard Depardieu) and his wife, Maheude (Miou-Miou), have seven children, more than they can support, but doubtlessly
religion--and quite possibly ignorance as well--have made birth control out of the question. Besides, as the community's resident
anarchist (Laurent Terzieff, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lenin) remarks, "Capitalism allows workers only to eat dry
bread and make babies."
But now pay cuts threaten to take away the bread and to
starve the babies. A quiet, reasonable man, Maheu, a
foreman, emerges as the leader of a strike movement after
management has refused his modest plea for enough pay to
provide daily bread.
What keeps cuts between the Maheu's barren table and that
of the mine's managing director (Jacques Dacqmine) with its
elaborate, abundant fare from seeming heavy-handed is that
Zola--and Berri--are able to perceive that the haves are actually
vulnerable to the same economic system as the have-nots.
Zola may have had a passion for social reform, but thankfully
it is tempered by a healthy pessimism that keeps it from
seeming like self-righteous ax-grinding. "Germinal," which has
too profound a vision of life to be a mere message movie, is no
Marxist tract--just a simple urging for the privileged to share
more generously with the needy, i.e., you shouldn't be eating brioche when
your workers can't afford bread.
In an actual abandoned mining community, restored for the film down to the
last detail, Berri has gathered a large and superb ensemble cast that includes
Jean Carmet as the Maheu grandfather stricken with black lung, Judith Henry
as their grown daughter and Jean-Roger Milo as her hot-tempered, homely
suitor.
Triggered by the arrival of the idealistic, dangerously naive, labor-organizing
machinist Etienne Lantier (Renaud), the plight of the Maheus and everyone
else at Voreux goes from bad to the unspeakably worse, culminating in
multiple tragedies characteristic of ancient Greek drama.
Since "Germinal" is so determinedly grim and the socioeconomic ills and
injustices it depicts so depressingly familiar, one might well ask why one should
submit to it--and submission, make no mistake about it, is precisely what is
required. The answer is that we can see ourselves in the film's people and be
moved by their plight, buoyed by their warm, earthy spirit and thrilled by how
vividly Berri has brought the past back to life. "Germinal" offers only the most
tentative note of hope, but that it was made in the first place is in itself an act
of affirmation.
Kevin Thomas, LA Times
Germinal - Emile Zola
warning contains full synopsis
Germinal(1885) is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece
and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers'
strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film
adaptations and two television productions.
The title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring
month. Germen is a Latin word which means "seed"; the novel describes the hope
for a better future that seeds amongst the miners. Germinal was written between
April 1884 and January 1885. It was first serialized between November 1884 and
February 1885 in the periodical Gil Blas, then in March 1885 published as a book.
The novel's central character is Étienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir
(1877), and originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the
trains" thriller La Bête humaine (1890) before the overwhelmingly positive reaction
to Germinal persuaded him otherwise. The young migrant worker arrives at the
forbidding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France
to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting
a superior, Étienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere
to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit.
Étienne is portrayed as a hard-working idealist but also a naïve youth; Zola's genetic
theories come into play as Étienne is presumed to have inherited his Macquart
ancestors' traits of hotheaded impulsiveness and an addictive personality capable of
exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Zola keeps his
theorizing in the background and Étienne's motivations are much more natural as a
result. He embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class
movement literature and fraternizing with Souvarine, a Russian anarchist and
political émigré who has also come to Montsou to seek a living in the pits. Étienne's
simplistic understanding of socialist politics and their rousing effect on him are very
reminiscent of the rebel Silvère in the first novel in the cycle, La Fortune des Rougon
(1871).
While this is going on, Étienne also falls for Maheu's daughter Catherine, also
employed pushing carts in the mines, and he is drawn into the relationship between her and her brutish lover Chaval, a prototype for
the character of Buteau in Zola's later novel La Terre (1887). The complex tangle of the miners' lives is played out against a backdrop
of severe poverty and oppression, as their working and living conditions continue to worsen throughout the novel; eventually, pushed
to breaking point, the miners decide to strike and Étienne, now a respected member of the community and recognized as a political
idealist, becomes the leader of the movement. While the anarchist Souvarine preaches violent action, the miners and their families hold
back, their poverty becoming ever more disastrous, until they are sparked into a ferocious riot, the violence of which is described in
explicit terms by Zola, as well as providing some of the novelist's best and most evocative crowd scenes. The rioters are eventually
confronted by police and the army that repress the revolt in a violent and unforgettable episode. Disillusioned, the miners go back to
work, blaming Étienne for the failure of the strike; then, Souvarine sabotages the entrance shaft of one of the Montsou pits, trapping
Étienne, Catherine and Chaval at the bottom. The ensuing drama and the long wait for rescue are among some of Zola's best scenes,
and the novel draws to a dramatic close. Étienne is eventually rescued and fired but he goes on to live in Paris with Pluchart.
Historical context
Michele Angiolillo uttered clearly the word Germinal before he died.
The title, Germinal, is drawn from the springtime seventh month of the French Revolutionary Calendar and is meant to evoke imagery
of germination, new growth and fertility. Accordingly, Zola ends the novel on a note of hope and one that has provided inspiration to
socialist and reformist causes of all kinds throughout the years since its first publication:
"Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and
avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their
ripening would burst open the earth itself."
By the time of his death, the novel had come to be recognized as his undisputed masterpiece. At his funeral crowds of workers
gathered, cheering the cortège with shouts of "Germinal! Germinal!". Since then the book has come to symbolize working class causes
and to this day retains a special place in French mining-town folklore.
Zola was always very proud of Germinal and was always keen to defend its accuracy against accusations of hyperbole and exaggeration
(from the conservatives) or of slander against the working classes (from the socialists). His research had been typically thorough,
especially the parts involving lengthy observational visits to northern French mining towns in 1884, such as witnessing the after-effects
of a crippling miners' strike first-hand at Anzin or actually going down a working coal pit at Denain. The mine scenes are especially
vivid and haunting as a result.
A sensation upon original publication, it is now by far the best-selling of Zola's novels, both in France and internationally. A number of
exceptional modern translations are currently in print and widely available.
Wikipedia
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
The Executioner (El vergudo)
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Rafael Azcona, Ennio Flaiano,
Miguel Asins Arbó
Tonino Delli Colli
Cast
José Luis Rodríguez
Carmen
Amadeo
Antonio Rodríguez
Nino Manfredi
Emma Penella
José Isbert
The business of death provides the framework for this black comedy about a
mortician's assistant who wants to marry an executioner's daughter. Her father
really wants to change professions, but cannot, as he will lose his new
government-sponsored apartment. The young man is persuaded to take over the
job, but he swears he will quit before he must kill someone. Unfortunately, an
execution is scheduled shortly before the beginning of a major carnival, a time
when many executions are halted. The bride and groom travel there, hoping the
victim will be pardoned, but he is not and the groom must fulfill his duty. Although
he swears he will never do another, his face tells another story, and the old
executioner knows that many more state-sanctioned deaths will follow.
Sandra Brennan, Rovi
It is a black comedy of the highest order, with much of its
humor being derived from the seriousness of the characters in
the farcical situations they find themselves in. The story opens
with a young undertaker José Luís Rodriguez (Nino Manfredi)
going to a prison to carry away the latest inmate who has been
executed. While there, he and his partner meet the aging
executioner (or el verdugo), Amadeo (José Isbert), who is
approaching retirement age and wondering who will carry on
the dying tradition of his trade. When José Luís gives Amadeo
a ride home and is invited into his home, he meets Amadeo’s
daughter Carmen (Emma Penella). The two quickly discover
that they share an embarrassing dilemma – neither of them is
able to find a spouse, as any prospective partners are scared
away due to the nature of their work. For José Luís, people shy
away from an undertaker. For Carmen, nobody wants to marry
the daughter of a professional executioner.
The two begin to casually date each other, going together on picnics with Amadeo and other innocent excursions. Eventually things
progress to the point that they sleep together and are very nearly discovered in the act when Amadeo returns home one day. When
it is learned that Carmen is pregnant, there is only one solution in the strict Catholic nation of Spain: the two will be married. The
complications ensue once they are married. Amadeo learns that the apartment he thought he was receiving upon retirement would
no longer be given to him if his daughter is married. The only exception would be if he can convince his new son-in-law to assume his
duties as the state executioner. José Luís understandably balks at the notion, not wanting anything to do with the sanctioned killings.
Amadeo is persistent, however, promising that he’ll never actually have to go through with an execution, as pardon almost always
comes through before the act. And even if a pardon does not
come, he can simply resign before he has to follow through.
José Luís eventually relents, takes the job, and quickly begins
making more money than he has in his life. But at the same time
he becomes obsessed with following the news and crimes
beats, constantly worried that a killer will be caught and
sentenced to death. When one such murderer is sentenced to
die, José Luís gets the letter he has been dreading, summoning
him to come and perform his job. He begins to scramble to
figure a way out of the situation, but is he willing to give up the
cushy life that the executioner’s paycheck has provided him?
It is a film of great comedic performances, starting at the top
with Nino Manfredi. He plays José Luís Rodriguez as an affable
man who is ambitious to move out of his brother’s apartment
and make it in the world on his own. It’s easy to feel sorry for
his outcast status and easy to understand why the high pay of
the executioner’s job is enticing. He comes across as something of an
everyman, which is why it’s funny to see him squirm at the prospect of
following through on his job. It’s easy to understand how he is reacting,
because he seems so normal. Arguably even funnier is José Isbert as the aging
executioner Amadeo. It is impossible not to laugh when he shows off his copy
of “Public Garroting” to José Luís or when he uses his hands to measuring the
neck size of his new son-in-law. Amadeo discusses methods of execution as
you or I would discuss the weather, and such matter-of-fact tone is what puts
the comedy over. Other performances are just as funny. The exchanges
between José Luís and his sister-in-law, who he lives with before marrying
Carmen, are priceless. They clearly do not care for each other and make it
well known in their interaction. José Luís is constantly taunting her about
being a poor parent, while she responds by declaring that his mother would
drop dead if she saw the state of her son. Whenever the two of them are on
screen together it is hysterical. The dialogue is fast and furious, with subtitles
coming at a pace that is neary too difficult to keep up with. It’s like trying to
read the dialogue in a Howard Hawks screwball comedy. Still, if you stay on
your toes, you are rewarded for following every word.
One scene in particular sticks out in my mind as comic and cinematic
brilliance. When José Luís is summoned to the prison for the execution, he
tries desperately to explain that he took the job only so his father-in-law could
maintain his apartment. The warden is determined to carry out the execution
as scheduled and will hear nothing of it, prodding José Luís to do his job.
When it finally reaches the point of no return, José Luís still cannot go
through with it. The warden’s response is to have his staff forcibly carry José
Luís, in the same fashion as the guards are carrying the soon-to-be victim just
steps ahead. Berlanga films it like a death march, which it is, but the one
struggling not to be led to the execution chamber is José Luís. At times, the inmate and his entourage even stop and turn around to
watch the ruckus that José Luís is creating. It’s a wonderful sequence that requires no dialogue whatsoever to be funny.
The film evidently is considered to be the pinnacle of Spanish cinema, making it even more shocking how underappreciated it is. Many
hypothesize that it has been so unknown due to the fact that it was released during the Franco reign and thus was not promoted as
much as would be a major film in other European nations. Still, even to this day it always places at or near the top of any major film
polls in Spain. If it were to get proper exposure, it very well could begin to place near the top of major film polls throughout the world.
http://goodfellamovies.blogspot.co.uk/
edinburgh
fi
l
m
guild
The Unknown
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Photography
In Brief
Tod Browning
Tod Browning, Waldemar
Young, Joseph Farnham (novel
by Mary Roberts Rinehart)
Merritt B. Gerstad
Arguably Chaney’s finest performance and almost certainly his most perverse:
Alonzo is a supposedly armless knife-thrower whose passion for his circus partner
Nanon, who cannot bear to be touched, leads him to have his arms amputated.
Joan Crawford, who plays Nanon, said she learned more about acting from
working alongside Chaney than the rest of her career combined.
Cast
Alonzo
Malabar
Nanon
Zanzi
Lon Chaney
Norman Kerry
Joan Crawford
Nick De Ruiz
A unique figure in early American cinema, director Tod Browning
is best known for his stupefying Freaks (1932) and for his
standard-setting Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi. Between
1919 and 1930 he made eleven films with another rather singular
Hollywood figure, actor Lon Chaney. Dubbed ‘the man with a
thousand faces’ for his mastery of startling make-up effects,
Chaney shared with Browning a fascination for the bizarre and
the unconventional and for physical deformity, possibly as a result
of their respective early years: Chaney’s parents were deaf-mutes
while Browning allegedly worked in a circus as a clown, a contortionist and an act called ‘The Living Hypnotic Corpse’.
In The Unknown, Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower in a gypsy circus in love with Nanon, the daughter of the circus owner
(played by a very young Joan Crawford). Malabar, the show’s strongman, is similarly infatuated but Nanon’s intense phobia of being
touched by men’s hands keeps them apart and brings her closer to Alonzo. Little does she know that Alonzo is in fact a wanted criminal.
Distinguished by a deformed double thumb that would make him instantly recognizable to the police, he passes himself off as a cripple,
concealing his arms under a tight corset. Desperately afraid that Nanon will reject him if she finds out the truth, he resorts to a drastic
course of action and decides to have his arms cut off. While Alonzo disappears into a shady clinic, Malabar perseveres in his courting
of Nanon and wins her over. On his return Alonzo learns that Nanon and Malabar are to be married. Only one thing is left to him –
revenge.
There is of course an undercurrent of sexual anxiety in Nanon’s phobia and in the contrast between Malabar’s muscular limbs and
Alonzo’s lack of them. But more interestingly, body parts are the currency in which love is traded between the characters. Malabar has
to rely on attributes other than his arms in order to earn Nanon’s trust while Nanon learns to accept them as a sign of love and Alonzo
gives up his in a trade-off which he hopes will deliver Nanon to him. Devoured by his obsession for Nanon, he is prepared to pay for
her in his own flesh. Love turns him into a real cripple, physical deformity conveying the intensity of his emotions, which are literally
carved into his body. Mutilation here is a poignant, literal image of the sacrifice the obsessive lover is prepared to make to be loved
back.
But deformity is also an act and here we recognise Browning’s fascination for theatrical illusion. The knife-throwing number that opens
the film is doubly a show: a freakish circus act on the surface, it is also Alonzo’s secret cripple impersonation, witnessed only by us and
his midget sidekick Cojo. In fact, the whole of Alonzo’s relationship with Nanon is based on pretence, which does not make it any less
deeply felt. When Nanon wishes that God would cut off all of men’s hands, Alonzo feigns to be genuinely hurt. When she tells him she’s
getting married to Malabar after Alonzo has just mutilated his body for the love of her, he has to simulate happiness. At no point can
he be sincere and at no point does she find out the truth about him. Fittingly, Alonzo dies on stage, a true performer to the end.
Browning returns here to one of his favoured themes – the tragedy of the performer, who, being too good an actor for his own sake,
dies utterly isolated and misunderstood.
Only with Cojo can Alonzo throw off the mask and be himself. But as the performance becomes second nature what this self truly is
becomes increasingly muddled. In an astounding scene, Alonzo, distraught by the prospect that Nanon may never belong to him,
smokes a cigarette with his feet, forgetting to use his arms, which are untied at that point. Over the course of the film he becomes what
he was simply pretending to be at the beginning, overwhelmed by his own performance. To complicate matters, there is the fact that
Lon Chaney
a body double was used for some of the scenes – Peter Dismuki, who was born
without arms – so that what we see on screen is an intricate illusion where a bizarre
composite of Chaney and Dismuki’s bodies pretends to be Alonzo pretending to be
a cripple… In the theatrical world there is no real self – all is illusion.
As the cigarette-smoking scene shows, tragedy is never far from comedy in
Browning’s cinema. While Alonzo’s despair is truly heart-rending, there is also
something positively funny about that scene. Browning started his Hollywood
career as a slapstick actor and some of what he learnt during those years clearly
rubbed off on his work as a director. He is a true master of the grotesque, nimbly
walking the fine line between repulsive and ridiculous, between horror and
burlesque. In that he is seconded by Chaney’s amazing powers of expression, the
actor’s craggy, lived-in face moving from hate to love, from need to menace and
despair in the blink of an instant. Able to express contradictory emotions at the
same time, Chaney beautifully handles the uneasy balance between tears and
laughter, remaining deeply moving in the most incongruous situations. As a result,
even though Alonzo is a criminal, a frighteningly possessive lover and a man driven
by the darkest impulses, he is the one that you root for. This is where Browning’s
heart clearly is – with the freaks, the loners and the misfits, with the anguished
yearnings of troubled souls.
Virginie Sélavy, www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk
Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces
Kevin Brownlow | USA | 2000 | 85 minutes
narrated by Kenneth Branagh, chronicles Chaney's life from his birth in 1883 to his
death in 1930, shortly after appearing in his first talking movie. It not only examines
the film career and techniques of this diverse actor but also provides details on Chaney's early life with his deaf parents and the
circumstances that contributed to the actor's chameleon persona. Rare, rescued film clips; personal photos and letters; and interviews
with such luminaries as author Ray Bradbury, writer/director Orson Welles, author and make-up artist Michael F. Blake and Chaney
family members illustrate this story of his life and characters. The documentary was produced by Patrick Stanbury for Photoplay Prods.
in association with TCM and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and directed by Kevin Brownlow. The latter is well known
internationally for his film preservation efforts and his love of silent cinema.
Since starting his own film collection at the age of 11, Kevin Brownlow has always worked in the cinema, either as a filmmaker, or
cinema historian. He was supervising editor on Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). With Andrew Mollo, he
directed two feature films, It Happened Here (1964), released by United Artists, about an imaginary German occupation of England,
and Winstanley (1975), made for the British Film Institute and set in the aftermath of the English Civil War.
In 1980, with David Gill, Brownlow produced and directed a 13 part television series, Hollywood, based on Brownlow's book The
Parade's Gone By. The series stimulated so much enthusiasm that Brownlow's reconstruction of Napoleon was shown as part of the
1980 London Film Festival. The five-hour Abel Gance epic was accompanied by a full orchestra playing a specially commissioned score
composed and conducted by Carl Davis. The outstanding success of the event demonstrated to a modern audience the power and
excitement of silent filmmaking, long dismissed as primitive and inaccessible. Napoleon continues to be shown around the world.
In 1990 Brownlow and Gill formed their own company, Photoplay Productions, to continue their work. In 1992, Channel Four Television
agreed to support silent film revivals under the name of Channel Four Silents with a restoration of the Rudolph Valentino classic The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The restorations continued with Wings, The Iron Horse, Sunrise and The Phantom of the Opera.
Brownlow also produced the original documentary Universal Horror for Turner Classic
Movies.
edinburgh
http://www.tcm.com/
fi
l
m
guild
Lon Chaney
The Hunchback of Soho
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
Alfred Vohrer
Herbert Reinecker (novel
by Edgar Wallace)
Peter Thomas
Karl Löb
Cast
Inspektor Hopkins
Alan Davis
Wanda Merville
Sir John
Günther Stoll
Pinkas Braun
Monika Peitsch
Siegfried Schürenberg
When Wanda Merville inherits a million bucks, she’s promptly kidnapped, replaced by
a fake "Wanda," and spirited away to a school for delinquent girls. Sponsored by crazy
General Perkins (who’s still fighting the Battle of Tobruck in his basement) and the
General’s dotty wife Lady Marjorie ("Give me some whiskey... Straight!"), the school
is actually run by evil, reptilian-faced Alan Oavis, the Reverend Dave (who sings church
choirs in German), and a masculine matron with a riding crop who force the girls to
work in a laundry sweat-shop that resembles something out of WHITE ZOMBIE. The
more attractive young gals are sent to work as "hostesses" in Mrs. Tindle’s gambling
club while the more rebellious are strangled by Harry the hunchback and his hilariously
huge hump...
Another terrific Edgar Wallace shocker where almost no one is whom they appear to
be (even Harry has an ersatz hump). Fast paced and stylish with rich, atmospheric
color and a great swinging 60’s score. It also makes one wonder if this is what England
would have been like if Germany had won the war...
Frank Henenlotter
Edgar Wallace: the Man Who Wrote Too Much?
Back in the 1920s there was an oft-repeated joke about the British thriller writer
Edgar Wallace. A friend was said to have telephoned him one day, only to be told
that Wallace was writing a new novel. “That’s okay,” the caller remarked, “I’ll wait.”
One of the most popular writers of the early 20th century, and certainly one of the
most prolific, Edgar Wallace turned out an astonishing 130 novels (18 alone in 1926),
40 short story collections, 25 plays, some 15 nonfiction books, plus journalism,
criticism, poetry, and columns, in a little over 30 years. During his peak it was
claimed that one-quarter of all the books read in England were penned by Wallace,
and he remains one of the most filmed authors of all time. Yet today he hovers like
a ghost over the mystery genre, his name often invoked, but his books seldom read.
The man whose name would become a synonym for crime fiction was born in the
London suburb of Greenwich in 1875, the product of a one-night stand between
two actors. His mother placed him with a foster family when he was a week old.
Called Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman in his youth, he enjoyed a happy childhood
and was something of an extrovert, though from an early age he demonstrated a
habit of withdrawing and running away from any problems he encountered rather
than dealing with them. As a young man he worked a host of different jobs before
joining the Army and ending up in South Africa. Upon finding he had little taste for
soldiering, he bought his way out, eventually returning to London, where he
became a crime reporter. It was then that he adopted “Edgar Wallace” as his byline,
borrowing his new last name from General Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur.
The first few years of the 20th century would prove to be a challenge for Wallace, who by then had married and had a child, but who
habitually lived beyond his means. It was said that he believed any attempt at thrift was a bad omen, implying that his fortunes might
someday diminish. In 1902 he went back to South Africa, this time to take a job as a newspaper editor, but, while there, his baby
daughter Eleanor became ill and died. Devastated, Wallace and his wife Ivy escaped back to London, but before long he was approached
by his birth mother who, because of his growing renown, believed him to be wealthy. Already overwhelmed by the weight of his
personal problems, Wallace sent his impoverished mother away with a pittance, an act that would fill him with guilt in later years.
In 1904 Wallace was engaged to cover the Russo-Japanese War for the papers and relocated to Europe. There he met a group of spies,
which gave him the idea for his first mystery novel, The Four Just Men, which was published in 1905. The first of Wallace’s “secret
organization” stories, it chronicled the actions of a quartet of wealthy vigilantes who combat what they perceive to be unpunishable
wrongs through assassination. His decision to publish and promote the novel himself, though, proved financially disastrous and forced
him to declare bankruptcy.
With nowhere to go but up, he began turning out book after book, scoring his first real success with 1911’s Sanders of the River, an
adventure novel based on his time in Africa. More African novels followed, as well as more Just Men adventures, plus a series featuring
Inspector Elk of Scotland Yard. After divorcing Ivy in 1918, he threw himself into his writing, producing over the next decade scores of
The Krimi
crime thrillers (even a second marriage in 1921, to his former secretary, did little
to slow his pace).
The fictional world of Edgar Wallace is populated with colorfully named criminal
organizations—the “Fellowship of the Frog,” the “Red Hand,” and the
“Crimson Circle,” to name a few—supervillains, outwardly respectable men
with secret lives, intrepid young amateur sleuths (often reporters), plucky
heroines, and assorted hoods, crooks, and gangsters. He was also one of the
first to feature a policeman as the protagonist in a story, as opposed to an
amateur sleuth. His narrative style is at once breathless, conversational, and
melodramatic, while he frequently confides in the reader.
He could be playful as well. The 1928 adventure The Feathered Serpent opens
with the following bit of self-satire:
What annoyed Peter Dewin most, as it would have annoyed any properly constituted reporter, was what he called the
mystery-novel element in the Lane case.
A really good crime story may gain in value from a touch of the bizarre, but all good newspapermen stop and shiver at the mention of
murder gangs and secret societies, because such things do not belong to honest reporting, but are the inventions of writers of best
or worst sellers.
Wallace’s work ethic and concentration while writing remain legendary. He kept the plot of each book entirely in his head, never
making notes, and worked very long hours, all the while chain smoking cigarettes through a dramatically long holder, and downing cup
after cup of sugared tea. He habitually wrote the first page of each book in longhand, and then dictated the rest either to a secretary
or into a machine.
In 1924, he introduced his most resonant series character, John G. Reeder, in the novel Room 13. A former Scotland Yard man, Reeder
worked in the Public Prosecutor’s office, but was called upon by the Yard to solve unfathomable cases, most often bank heists. Middleaged, unfashionably dressed, and timid of character, he possessed a keen, wily intellect whose ability to understand the criminal
element actually makes him nervous. “I see wrong in everything,” he confesses in The Mind of J.G. Reeder (1925). “That is my
perversion—I have a criminal mind!” Reeder’s adventures were chronicled in three novels and two story collections.
While Wallace’s works had been sources for films as early as 1915, he started writing directly for the movies in the late 1920s. He was
lured to Hollywood in 1931, where his most notable script would be for King Kong. He also contributed the screenplay to the 1932
version of Hound of the Baskervilles, which was produced in England. But his roller-coaster life was facing its final turn. Already suffering
from diabetes (exacerbated by his passion for sugary tea), he contracted double pneumonia and died in Beverly Hills in 1932, at the
relatively young age of 56.
Over 50 films based on Edgar Wallace stories were filmed in the UK between 1925 and 1939 alone, most enjoyably the flamboyantly
sensational The Dark Eyes of London (1939; dir: Walter Summers) starring Bela Lugosi as the villain and Greta Gynt as the lady in distress.
It was colorized and re-released after WWII as The Human Monster.
How is it that a writer once considered to be second in popularity only to Dickens, whose face once adorned the cover of Time
magazine, became a memory so quickly after his death? Possibly because Wallace’s output was so enormous that it was hard for any
one work, even any one series, to achieve classic status. Also, unlike his contemporaries Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Rice
Burroughs, he never created a truly iconic character. It was the name Edgar Wallace that sold the books, not a particular title or
character, and once the real Edgar Wallace was gone, his readers moved on and his works fell out of print. But beginning in the late
1950s, Wallace’s name enjoyed a posthumous renaissance in Germany, where film adaptations of his thrillers became a cottage industry.
In 1969, Wallace’s daughter Penelope (by his second marriage) formed The Edgar Wallace Society in order to promote his legacy.
Today, thanks to the ebook and download revolution, his works are easier to find than at any time over the past 40 years, and anyone
today wishing to connect the legendary name with the master storytelling talent behind
it would do well to pick up an Edgar Wallace thriller. There, one will discover that the
public’s appetite for gripping, bizarre, thrilling adventures involving supervillains with mad
schemes was being satisfied long before the creation of a fellow named James Bond.
edinburgh
In 1905, Edgar Wallace self-published his novel The Four Just Men. As a publicity gimmick
he kept back the solution to the mystery and offered a cash prize to anyone who could
solve it. The book sold tremendously well and helped set off a craze for detective fiction.
Unfortunately for the author, though, the plot wasn’t as impenetrable as he thought—
reducing him to bankruptcy. Undaunted, the flamboyant Wallace wrote on—and
eventually became one of the most successful writers of his era.
This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Summer Issue #130.
fi
l
m
guild
The Krimi
Blind Shaft
China / Germany / Hong Kong | 2003 | 92 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Li Yang
Li Yang
Yadong Zhang
Yonghong Liu
Cast
Song Jinming
Yuan Fengming
Tang Zhaoyang
Xiao Hong
Yi Xiang Li
Baoqiang Wang
Shuangbao Wang
Jing Ai
Quite literally an underground film from China. The writer-director shot his vérité footage
inside illegal Chinese mines without government approval. This is doubly understandable
when you consider the plot. Two criminal drifters have developed a scam: they befriend
one of the many uprooted men looking for work and tell him that they know of a job at a
rural mine, but that the man must pretend to be their brother in order to be hired. Once
they go down the shaft with their new relative, they stage his accidental death, and, as the
dead man’s nearest
relations, collect
payoff money from
the mine’s owners.
Decency as Redemptive:
A Review of Li Yang’s Blind Shaft
In the past twenty years, China has undergone rapid economic
changes, marked by privatization and market reforms. Shot
entirely in China, documentary filmmaker Li Yang’s first feature,
Blind Shaft, is an unblinking look at the underside of these
reforms in terms of human suffering and costs.1
For foreign viewers, this is not China as economic miracle, confidently striding into modernity. This is another China—beyond the
coastal cities dotted with Starbucks, McDonalds, shining skyscrapers and the cyberspace inhabited by 80 million Internet users wired
to the world. Although the film garnered a host of prestigious international awards following its release,2 it may be some time before
it can be publicly shown inside China.
The narrative centers on two itinerant mine workers, Song Jinming and Tang Zhaoyang, who murder fellow-workers in a scam to
extort money from mine owners. Facing financial pressures to support their families, willing to do anything to survive, these two men
are cynical guides across a devastated human landscape. The film opens in silence and complete blackness, with a few production
credits in red Chinese characters. Then the opening shot of men emerging out of a doorway stepping into the blue light of morning.
Against the spare sounds of a dog barking in the distance and boots crunching on dirt, the camera tracks the line of men as they move
through the “safety” check before being handed their equipment. Song, Tang and a third man move into a frame and are sharing a
cigarette. Men emerge out of the dark mine pit and Song, Tang and the third man replace them and begin their descent. The camera
suddenly shifts perspective and the viewer is now watching the square of light at the top of the mine opening get smaller and smaller
as the title credit appears—Mang Jing—Blind Shaft—in large, bold red characters.
The world we have entered is almost pitch black, with only the lights of the miners’ hardhats eerily lighting faces, their bodies
disappearing into the darkness. The men address each other as “brother” and are engaged in light banter during a rest break when
Tang asks the third man, “Are you homesick?” There is a dangerous edge in his voice. The man does not seem to hear it. Tang continues,
“Hey, want to go home? I’ll send you back home.” The man replies, “You wouldn’t trick me, would you?” Tang replies, moving closer,
“Why would I?” There is the sound of an iron pickaxe dragging across the mine bottom and the man is hit from behind and falls forward.
Back on the surface, an alarm is sounded as men run across to the opening where a shaft slide has been triggered below. The show
of false grief for one’s dead “relative,” the negotiations for compensation, the mine boss’s calculations over whether to kill the two
of them or pay up and how much, now begin in earnest. The boss offers Tang 30,000 yuan ($4,000) because that is cheaper than the
hefty cut his police chief pals would demand if the two men were killed. Tang takes the money, and as they move on to their next scam
he throws the cremated remains of his “relative” onto a garbage heap.
The bleakness of this world is both literal and spiritual. Across a gray barren landscape of hard, beaten-down dirt, the narrative unfolds
to depict a morally bankrupt social order marked by cynicism, murderous self-interest and calculated interpersonal relations. Nothing
is quite as it seems and everything can be faked—identity cards, passports, familial relationships, friendship. Tang declares at one
point, “Now only a mom’s feelings for her kids aren’t faked.”
Without any artifice, stepping into the void of a disappeared father (possibly one of the murder victims of Tang and Song) to support
his sister and his mother, a 16-year-old boy, Yuan Fengming, embodies another moral center. In an open square, Tang first spots Yuan
Fengming, his narrowed eyes marking the boy as the next scam victim. Tang stalks him and strikes up a conversation, playing upon the
boy’s need to find work and his trust in others. The story’s resulting
moral and psychological tension is shaped by the shifting
negotiations among this odd triangle of Yuan Fengming,
innocently carrying his values of filial piety, respect for his elders
and faith in a future; Song, now adopting the role of the boy’s
“uncle” while finding his level of comfort with murder slowly
eroded by the boy’s simple decency and innocence; and Tang, a
lost, murderous soul. Even in this world a code of behavior is
invoked; even murderers, it seems, have codes to live and kill by:
Song argues the boy cannot die a virgin; the boy cannot die without
his first drink.
And yet, there is a glimmer of hope: despite Song’s gruff rebuffs,
the boy is slowly humanized in his eyes through his sharing of a
family photo, his focus on making enough money to pay for his little
sister’s school tuition, his own aspirations to go back to school and
his determination to find his missing father. The resemblance of the
boy’s father in the photo with the last man Tang and Song
murdered, the possibility that the boy’s murder would end his family line and Song’s clear concern for his own son back home—all of
these also begin nagging at Song’s conscience. When Yuan Fengming asks to borrow some money from Song to give to a young
begger raising money for his school tuition in the market, Song also throws some money into the boy’s bowl. Tang walks away
muttering that the high school acceptance certificate displayed is probably false. The alliances shift imperceptibly.
Woven throughout this story are critiques of the authorities and the rampant greed and disregard for human life their bankrupt
stewardship has engendered. The mine boss’s reaction to the first “cave-in” and possible injuries and deaths is a reflection of the
Chinese authorities’ reactions to disasters. He orders the immediate blocking of the exits to the outside world to prevent any
information from getting out, and later orders the immediate cremation of the bodies to destroy evidence, echoing the Chinese
government’s approaches to the HIV/AIDS and SARS health crises.
There are pokes at socialism. At a karaoke bar, Tang insists on singing “Long Live Socialism,” recalling that he was in the front row when
they sang this years ago: The socialist countries are on top—the reactionaries are overthrown, the imperialists run away with their tails
between their legs. But two young prostitutes laugh and say the words have changed: The reactionaries were never overthrown; the
capitalists came back with their US dollars, liberating all of China, bringing the sexual climax of socialism. The men laugh, sing along
drunkenly, new words to an old song.
Although set primarily in the coal mines, the film also powerfully presents China’s hundreds of millions of displaced farmers,
unemployed factory workers, migrants, young women driven to sex work and other groups discarded in the reform calculus. Standing
around in the cold winter light desperate for work, they squat in public squares with signs selling their skills, pull johns into prostitution
parlors or wait in line far from home to wire their hard-earned money back to their families. This is the lived reality today for the vast
majority of Chinese struggling to survive by selling their bodies, labor and even their souls.
In an interview in Hong Kong, Li Yang disclosed that he shot five different endings in hopes that one might be cleared by the censors.
But Chinese censors will probably fear the harsh spotlight focused on rampant corruption and greed, and the implicit criticism of the
authorities. That would be a pity, because the ending of China’s reform story has yet to be written. Powerful art such as Blind Shaft
provides not only a critical social mirror, but also a glimpse of the redemptive power of simple human decency that survives against
all odds, a hope flickering in the darkness.
Endnotes
1. Born in China in 1959, Li Yang grew up in a family of actors. After high school, he worked as an actor in the China Youth Arts Theater
in Beijing from 1978 to 1985, and then studied film directing at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute from 1985 to 1987. He left China in 1988
to study German literature at the Free University of Berlin, and went on to focus on
dramatic theory at Ludwig-Maxmillian University of Munich from 1990 to 1992. After
graduating from the University of Munich, Li Yang went on to study Film Directing at the
Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. While at the Academy he wrote and directed several
documentaries—Women’s Kingdom (1991), Happy Swan (1994) and The Wake (1996)—the
last film completed after his graduation.
edinburgh
2. Blind Shaft received the Silver Bear for Artistic Contribution in Directing and Writing at
the Berlin International Film Festival 2003, and awards at the Deauville Asian Film Festival
(five out of all six awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor), Buenos Aires
Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival (Firebird Award), and the Tribeca
International Film Festival (Best Feature Film).
Sharon Hom, www.hrichina.org
fi
l
m
guild
Cousin Angelica (La prima Angélica)
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Photography
In Brief
Carlos Saura
Rafael Azcona, Carlos Saura
Luis Cuadrado
Cast
Luis
Angélica
Anselmo
Angélica niña
Lina Canalejas
Fernando Delgado
Mª Clara Fernández de Loaysa
When the single middle-aged Luis travels from Barcelona to bury the remains of
his mother in the vault of his family in Segovia, he is lodged by his aunt Pilar in her
old house where he spent his summer of 1936 with her. He meets his cousin
Angelica, who was his first love,
living on the first floor with her
husband and daughter, and he
recalls his childhood in times of
the Spanish Civil War entwined
with the present.
La prima Angélica is another of Saura's films that centres on the issue of memory and
shares with El jardín de las delicias not only a lead actor (José Luis López Vázquez) but
also the use of him to portray a character in both adulthood and childhood. We first
see Luis-as-child when Luis-as-adult pulls his car to the side of the road as he sees
Segovia in the distance and he becomes lost in the memory of the first time he was
at this roadside - his father's car pulls up behind him and his mother (dressed in 1930s
attire) comforts Luis and tries to reassure him about his stay with her side of the
family (on the right, politically) in a safer area while his parents return to Barcelona.
As the Civil War develops, Barcelona becomes cut off, and Luis will see out the war
apart from his parents and in the midst of a family from the 'victorious' side. His
return to Segovia as an adult in his 40s shows how those war years shaped the person
he became and why he now feels the need to confront the past. D'Lugo observes
that the film stands as 'the first compassionate view of the vanquished' (1991: 116):
'In choosing the theme of interdicted history -the Civil War years as remembered by
the child of Republican parents- Saura pursues more than just the external demons
of censorship that had suppressed all but the triumphalist readings of the war. He
confronts the psychological and ethical traumas that the official distortions of the history of the war years in public discourse had
conveniently ignored but that had scarred and even paralysed a generation of Spaniards' (1991: 115-116).
Quintana points out that in the context of Spain today, and the contentious issue of 'historical memory', 'Luis's character gains symbolic
force as the first fictional character that recovers the power of memory as an act of resurrection of the hidden and of justice to that
which is silenced' (2008: 95). La prima Angélica was controversial and had its release curtailed (one Barcelona cinema that screened
it was firebombed), but also became the most commercially-successful film of Saura's career at that point (Quintana 2008: 87).
As with El jardín de las delicias the past is not simply evoked, but reenacted. Although it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is
being 'relived', as these are not the theatrical stagings of the earlier film but rather Luis weaving in and out of the present and the past
as the return to the family apartment envelops him in memories. Another conceit that is repeated from earlier Saura films is to have
the same actors playing more than one character: Lina Canalejas plays Angélica's mother in the 1930s segments and the grown-up
Angélica in the present; María Clara Fernández de Loayza plays Angélica in the 1930s and the grown-up Angélica's daughter (also called
Angélica) in the present; Fernando Delgado plays both Angélica's father and later her husband (although this is one of the points
where the tricks that memory can play on you are pointed out - the grown-up Angélica shows Luis a photo of her father to prove that
there is no resemblance to her husband). This 'doubling' obviously aids the transition back and forth in Luis's memory onscreen, which
occasionally becomes confusing as Luis loses himself in the past and the lines between the two eras become indistinct. López Vázquez
is the only actor to play the same character in both eras - Luis's childhood self is distinguished by voice, body language, and facial
expression: for example, his habit of tucking his chin down so that he is looking up (his eyes wide) serves not only to indicate the shy
and withdrawn nature of the boy, but also to make the actor seem physically smaller. One particular sequence that I liked comes
almost halfway into the film, at the point when Luis has carried out his mother's wishes and is driving back to Barcelona. He stops at
the same roadside and the same memory that we saw at the start of the film plays out again. But this time, instead of being immersed
in the memory, reliving it, he observes it from the other side of the road; in revisiting the sites of childhood trauma, he has acquired
some of the distance required to review the past objectively. He turns his car around and heads back to Segovia to confront the past
head on.
http://nobodyknowsanybody.blogspot.co.uk/
The Unknown
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Photography
In Brief
Tod Browning
Tod Browning, Waldemar
Young, Joseph Farnham (novel
by Mary Roberts Rinehart)
Merritt B. Gerstad
Arguably Chaney’s finest performance and almost certainly his most perverse:
Alonzo is a supposedly armless knife-thrower whose passion for his circus partner
Nanon, who cannot bear to be touched, leads him to have his arms amputated.
Joan Crawford, who plays Nanon, said she learned more about acting from
working alongside Chaney than the rest of her career combined.
Cast
Alonzo
Malabar
Nanon
Zanzi
Lon Chaney
Norman Kerry
Joan Crawford
Nick De Ruiz
A unique figure in early American cinema, director Tod Browning
is best known for his stupefying Freaks (1932) and for his
standard-setting Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi. Between
1919 and 1930 he made eleven films with another rather singular
Hollywood figure, actor Lon Chaney. Dubbed ‘the man with a
thousand faces’ for his mastery of startling make-up effects,
Chaney shared with Browning a fascination for the bizarre and
the unconventional and for physical deformity, possibly as a result
of their respective early years: Chaney’s parents were deaf-mutes
while Browning allegedly worked in a circus as a clown, a contortionist and an act called ‘The Living Hypnotic Corpse’.
In The Unknown, Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower in a gypsy circus in love with Nanon, the daughter of the circus owner
(played by a very young Joan Crawford). Malabar, the show’s strongman, is similarly infatuated but Nanon’s intense phobia of being
touched by men’s hands keeps them apart and brings her closer to Alonzo. Little does she know that Alonzo is in fact a wanted criminal.
Distinguished by a deformed double thumb that would make him instantly recognizable to the police, he passes himself off as a cripple,
concealing his arms under a tight corset. Desperately afraid that Nanon will reject him if she finds out the truth, he resorts to a drastic
course of action and decides to have his arms cut off. While Alonzo disappears into a shady clinic, Malabar perseveres in his courting
of Nanon and wins her over. On his return Alonzo learns that Nanon and Malabar are to be married. Only one thing is left to him –
revenge.
There is of course an undercurrent of sexual anxiety in Nanon’s phobia and in the contrast between Malabar’s muscular limbs and
Alonzo’s lack of them. But more interestingly, body parts are the currency in which love is traded between the characters. Malabar has
to rely on attributes other than his arms in order to earn Nanon’s trust while Nanon learns to accept them as a sign of love and Alonzo
gives up his in a trade-off which he hopes will deliver Nanon to him. Devoured by his obsession for Nanon, he is prepared to pay for
her in his own flesh. Love turns him into a real cripple, physical deformity conveying the intensity of his emotions, which are literally
carved into his body. Mutilation here is a poignant, literal image of the sacrifice the obsessive lover is prepared to make to be loved
back.
But deformity is also an act and here we recognise Browning’s fascination for theatrical illusion. The knife-throwing number that opens
the film is doubly a show: a freakish circus act on the surface, it is also Alonzo’s secret cripple impersonation, witnessed only by us and
his midget sidekick Cojo. In fact, the whole of Alonzo’s relationship with Nanon is based on pretence, which does not make it any less
deeply felt. When Nanon wishes that God would cut off all of men’s hands, Alonzo feigns to be genuinely hurt. When she tells him she’s
getting married to Malabar after Alonzo has just mutilated his body for the love of her, he has to simulate happiness. At no point can
he be sincere and at no point does she find out the truth about him. Fittingly, Alonzo dies on stage, a true performer to the end.
Browning returns here to one of his favoured themes – the tragedy of the performer, who, being too good an actor for his own sake,
dies utterly isolated and misunderstood.
Only with Cojo can Alonzo throw off the mask and be himself. But as the performance becomes second nature what this self truly is
becomes increasingly muddled. In an astounding scene, Alonzo, distraught by the prospect that Nanon may never belong to him,
smokes a cigarette with his feet, forgetting to use his arms, which are untied at that point. Over the course of the film he becomes what
he was simply pretending to be at the beginning, overwhelmed by his own performance. To complicate matters, there is the fact that
Lon Chaney
a body double was used for some of the scenes – Peter Dismuki, who was born
without arms – so that what we see on screen is an intricate illusion where a bizarre
composite of Chaney and Dismuki’s bodies pretends to be Alonzo pretending to be
a cripple… In the theatrical world there is no real self – all is illusion.
As the cigarette-smoking scene shows, tragedy is never far from comedy in
Browning’s cinema. While Alonzo’s despair is truly heart-rending, there is also
something positively funny about that scene. Browning started his Hollywood
career as a slapstick actor and some of what he learnt during those years clearly
rubbed off on his work as a director. He is a true master of the grotesque, nimbly
walking the fine line between repulsive and ridiculous, between horror and
burlesque. In that he is seconded by Chaney’s amazing powers of expression, the
actor’s craggy, lived-in face moving from hate to love, from need to menace and
despair in the blink of an instant. Able to express contradictory emotions at the
same time, Chaney beautifully handles the uneasy balance between tears and
laughter, remaining deeply moving in the most incongruous situations. As a result,
even though Alonzo is a criminal, a frighteningly possessive lover and a man driven
by the darkest impulses, he is the one that you root for. This is where Browning’s
heart clearly is – with the freaks, the loners and the misfits, with the anguished
yearnings of troubled souls.
Virginie Sélavy, www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk
Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces
Kevin Brownlow | USA | 2000 | 85 minutes
narrated by Kenneth Branagh, chronicles Chaney's life from his birth in 1883 to his
death in 1930, shortly after appearing in his first talking movie. It not only examines
the film career and techniques of this diverse actor but also provides details on Chaney's early life with his deaf parents and the
circumstances that contributed to the actor's chameleon persona. Rare, rescued film clips; personal photos and letters; and interviews
with such luminaries as author Ray Bradbury, writer/director Orson Welles, author and make-up artist Michael F. Blake and Chaney
family members illustrate this story of his life and characters. The documentary was produced by Patrick Stanbury for Photoplay Prods.
in association with TCM and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and directed by Kevin Brownlow. The latter is well known
internationally for his film preservation efforts and his love of silent cinema.
Since starting his own film collection at the age of 11, Kevin Brownlow has always worked in the cinema, either as a filmmaker, or
cinema historian. He was supervising editor on Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). With Andrew Mollo, he
directed two feature films, It Happened Here (1964), released by United Artists, about an imaginary German occupation of England,
and Winstanley (1975), made for the British Film Institute and set in the aftermath of the English Civil War.
In 1980, with David Gill, Brownlow produced and directed a 13 part television series, Hollywood, based on Brownlow's book The
Parade's Gone By. The series stimulated so much enthusiasm that Brownlow's reconstruction of Napoleon was shown as part of the
1980 London Film Festival. The five-hour Abel Gance epic was accompanied by a full orchestra playing a specially commissioned score
composed and conducted by Carl Davis. The outstanding success of the event demonstrated to a modern audience the power and
excitement of silent filmmaking, long dismissed as primitive and inaccessible. Napoleon continues to be shown around the world.
In 1990 Brownlow and Gill formed their own company, Photoplay Productions, to continue their work. In 1992, Channel Four Television
agreed to support silent film revivals under the name of Channel Four Silents with a restoration of the Rudolph Valentino classic The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The restorations continued with Wings, The Iron Horse, Sunrise and The Phantom of the Opera.
Brownlow also produced the original documentary Universal Horror for Turner Classic
Movies.
edinburgh
http://www.tcm.com/
fi
l
m
guild
Lon Chaney
The Monk with the Whip AKA The College-Girl Murders AKA The Prussic Factor
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Alfred Vohrer
as Alex Berg (novel by
Edgar Wallace)
Martin Böttcher
Karl Löb
This colour in-all-but-name remake of 1965’s The Sinister Monk is one of the most
deliriously over-the-top entries in the series, as suggested by its titular murderer and
girls’ boarding school setting – a locale also used in Antonio Margheriti’s giallo of the
same year, The Young, The Evil and The Savage.
Cast
Inspektor Higgins
Ann Portland
Betty Falks
Keyston
Joachim Fuchsberger
Uschi Glas
Grit Boettcher
Konrad Georg
Bullwhips, gas-guns and killer bibles
- The College Girl Murders has it all
In the opening scene of College Girl Murders (1967), a mad scientist invents an “undetectable” poison gas, and promptly murders his
assistant with it. The poisoner then shows up in a foggy British cemetery, and sells the new toxin to a shady criminal, who departs with
the cryptic phrase “Wait right here. You’ll get your reward right away.” Seconds later, a monk wearing a scarlet hood appears out of
the fog, unfurls a luminous white bullwhip and uses it to break the scientist’s neck!
What the hell is going on here?
Welcome to the bewildering world of the “Krimis,” a delicious subgenre of crime film native to Germany, and based on the writings
of Edgar Wallace, a prolific English novelist/journalist/playwright who had already been dead for 30 years by the time the Krimis
movement took off.
Wallace’s avowed formula for a successful novel included “crime and blood and three murders to the chapter,” but as you can see by
the monk-with-a-whip example cited above, the murders tended to be anything but straightforward. Killers in Wallace stories never
simply shoot someone when they can send a trained orangutan after them, or dress up in a skull mask and kill them with a specially
designed steel glove.
This kind of overly complicated homicidal nonsense is in glorious abundance in College Girl Murders , a campy ’60s time capsule that’s
as silly as it is sinister. After the pre-credit monk-in-the-cemetery scene, an unseen criminal mastermind recruits an imprisoned
pickpocket to take part in a ludicrous murder plot. The prisoner is smuggled out of jail, and tasked with handing a booby-trapped bible
to a schoolgirl. The girl goes to church with her classmates, opens up the gimmicked bible, gets a face full of poison gas, and dies
screaming. Meanwhile, the pickpocket is smuggled back into prison, giving him the perfect alibi.
Naturally, this outrageous scheme attracts the attention of Scotland Yard, so the killers have to resort to sending the monk-with-a-whip
after any witnesses or potential squealers. There; problem solved! After all, there’s nothing suspicious about a whip-wielding intruder
sneaking into a girl’s dormitory wearing what amounts to a bright red KKK uniform, is there? The monk is spotted (of course) but gets
away through a secret passageway hidden in the fireplace (of course) before the fuzz show up, question the girls and decide that they
must be lying about seeing a monk in the first place (of course).
Meanwhile, the pickpocket is given a ridiculous-looking poison-squirting science fiction handgun once the criminal mastermind decides
that the gas-spraying bible just doesn’t cut it anymore. More people get killed, including the pickpocket, who swiftly gets replaced by
yet another prisoner who gets smuggled in and out of jail in the same manner. While this is going on, shadowy figures watch from
hidden peepholes, chauffeurs fetch machine guns hidden in Rolls Royces, the villain behind a desk turns out to be a mannequin with
a hidden speaker, the college girls discuss their predicament while lounging around the pool in ’60s swimwear, and the baffled police
detectives provide inept comic relief.
College Girl Murders is vibrant, colourful, fast-paced, ridiculous, compelling and lurid in an approachable, almost PG-rated way. It’s fun
as hell, and you can watch it for free at amctv.com . If this flick whets your appetite for more Krimi silliness, be aware that Rialto Film
produced a whole series of similar movies that await your discovery, such as The Hunchback of Soho (1966) and Creature With the Blue
Hand (1967).
by John Tebbutt, www.ffwdweekly.com
The Krimi

Second Seasons Combined - The Edinburgh Film Guild

Transcription

Similar documents

Presskit

star signs a daily crossword sudoku puzzle daily

PDF of this page

karaoke! press kit

Section 3 - p18-27 - 103 (Page 22)

BAL I BO