I promise you, I really am in Pordenone, not in Paris. But honestly, the geography is becoming a little subjective. We seem unable to escape the Rive Gauche for long. This morning, a really quite exceptionally taut melodrama from Louiis Feuillade, with sets,of course, by Ben Carré, illustrated how the Latin Quarter exerts its own gravitational pull, morally, if not physically. In La Tare (1911), part of Feuillade’s “La Vie telle qu’elle est” (Life as It Is) series, Renée Carl gave a really beautiful performance as Anna, who works in the dance halls of the Latin Quarter, but given the chance, moves to the South of France and devotes herself to a new career caring for patients young and old in a nursing home. Ah, but cruel fate intervenes and a medical student who used to tap her for cash in the Paris days, takes it upon himself to inform the medical board that their “secular saint” is really a “girl of easy virtue”, sooner than you can say “Madonna-whore complex”. And so we are left with a tragic, yet ambiguous ending, following a rather harrowing scene in the unemployment office with a crowd of women, all of whom had remarkable faces (no, not Léontine, I don’t think, but maybe this is the kind of place where she might be found). A very special film, enhanced, naturally, by John Sweeney’s sensitive accompaniment.
The Canon Revisited strand has a stark way of humbling the average Pordenaut (that’s me). I had never heard of Chimmie Fadden Out West (Cecil B DeMille, 1915), which is the followup to Chimmie Fadden (Cecil B DeMille, 1915), also entirely new to me. Today we were watching the western sequel, with New York-Oirish Chimmie transplanted to the gold mining territories of Death Valley. Why? Because some evil capitalists refuse to abide by the rules of fair play in business. As I say, my ignorance was on full display, but then again we know who DeMille is, and his screenwriter Jeanie McPherson too. And you know who Victor Moore is, even if you don’t think you do – he’s the plumber in The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955, his final role). And in both appearance and comic mannerisms here he is uncannily like Jack Black. I had to go and look him up to see if they were actually related. No, not as far as I can tell.
Chimmie Fadden Out West relies heavily on type comedy, with Oirish intertitle and some rather gentle physical comedy based on familiar scenarios – overcrowded bunks on a sleeper train, Chimmie trying to make a camp breakfast, dreaming of his sweetheart while snuggled up to his mule, etc. While I can convince no one that this had me in peals of laughter, it’s sweet enough. Much as a single page from a camping handbook set alight doesn’t generate enough heat to fry a pan of bacon, this one never really warmed up for me.
Dagfin (Joe May, 1926) was another novelty to me, playing in the Rediscoveries strand. This is an odd melodrama, opening in an alpine resort and giving us a story about a hunky ski instructor (Dagfin, played by Paul Richter), his girlfriend Lydia (Marcella Albani), her awful ex-husband and the resort-owner’s daughter who is in love with him. But, even when the ex turns up dead in the snow, these characters cannot compete for our attention with Paul Wegener’s sinister Turkish General, who has his designs on the dead man’s ex-wife – seemingly the husband was amenable to the proposal when he was still alive. SabIR Bey is a truly monstrous man, given to shady dealings and handing his dirty work to his Chinese manservant, played with WegeneR’s distinctively mesmeric air of menace. Dagfin takes the heat for the murder (though we don’t believe he’s guiltu) and Bey begins to make his moves on Lydia… Look, the plot is ludcicrous. Stay, if you are going to stay, for the impressive patchwork restoration made from several sources and Bey’s terrifying flashbacks to his own genocidal atrocities in Armenia, besides which one deadbeat ex-husband is merely a speck of blood in the snow. Ponderous, but stunningly photographed by Karl Drews and Edgar Ziesemer, and given a lift here by Günther Buchwald’s multi-instrumental score, which Jay Weissberg later described as “magnificent” and he was right.
Still, I was looking for a way to invigorate the day, and the perfect opportunity arose in the form of book presentations by two brilliant and charismatic scholars. Yiman Wang has programmed this year’s Anna May Wong strand, and her new monograph To Be An Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World, is a really thoughtful examination of the many layers of meaning, identity, and work in the star’s film and TV career. A timely book, because it is always a good time to watch Anna May Wong, and because so many people are keen on reviving her images these days, in novels, film, TV, Barbie dolls and even the American currency.
You’ve heard tell of this one before I suspect by Maggie Hennefeld’s Death By Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema really is one of the most energisingly wide-ranging and fast-thinking academic books I have read in a long time. Why did US newspapers reprint dubious obituaries of woman who laughed themselves into corpses? What is it like to watch a slapstick comedy while wearing a whalebone corset? If laughter is so deadly, why is it also the “best medicine”? Can mental derangement take the form of laughter, or can laughter beat neurological illness into retreat? And finally, what does it mean for the movies? Why do we love to laugh together, why do women need to laugh at the pictures and how does it feel to see a laughing woman on screen? All this and more, including at least one lethal joke.
Brain thoroughly tested and teased, I was ready for the evening’s entertainment, and on paper tonight’s programme looked to be solid-gold, hands-in-the-air entertainment. It was. First, a Sine Nomine title that was an extended, relentlessly inventive trick film with a man in a white suit running through every page in the Méliès playbook at least twice, as he befuddles and eludes a sleepy policeman. A scant reel of eye-popping joy.
As for the feature, I mean who can resist a film called Saxophon-Susi? Especially one starring Anny Ondra? This was made by her own production company and directed by Karel Lamac, but in Germany in 1928, so the budget is there too. This, like Dagfin, was another brilliant multi-source restoration too. It was fortuitous to have seen Maggie’s presentation just a couple of hours before, as to be part of an audience convulsing at Ondra’s “eccentric dancing” really was the cure for what ails you. Plot: Viennese best friends Tilly (Ondra), a Baron’s daughter who yearns for the nightlife, and Susi, a chorus girl who dreams of a real education. They sail to London, one destined for the Tiller School, the other for some sort of Roedean. Aha, but on the boat they meet some handsome Englishmen, and decide to swap schools. Tilly become Susi, learns to dance and play the sax, and bags herself a titled gent in the process, but of course, mixed identities must be resolved, fathers must be appeased… it all works out, and in the most enjoyable way. Although we never see Tilly again.
This was a showbiz rom-com musical (yes, I know) that didn’t quit, with several dance sequences, including the titular knockout number in a nightclub, and barrels of jokes. One towards the end, a sight gag about how exactly young Ondra’s titled ancestors would react to the family house being filled with Tiller Girls, was priceless (those knights of old pushed up their armoured visors and they leered), and even the final intertitle was a cute metacinematic gag that made me beam. Ondra is pure kicks, all doe-eyes and loose limbs, utterly hilarious. What made it extra fun was the music, which kept up the same high-energy, jazzy spirit as the cast. Plaudits to Neil Brand, Frank Bockius and guesting on the saxophone, Francesco Bearzetti. Now we’ve got a real party on our hands.
Rhyming Intertitle of the Day
“After nights of animal magic, morning regrets are often tragic.”
A hard lesson well learned for Saxophon-Susi. I didn’t quite catch the German text, but I think it rhymed “animalisch” with “moralisch”, so you get the drift.
