shadowplay

Two films with Baby Peggy, two with Harry Gribbon. All @HippFest.

Baby P (Diana Serra Cary) is only around for the first ten minutes of APRIL FOOL (1926) because it’s one of those inefficient movies that opens fifteen years too early. But there is some benefit to this — firstly, we get the luminous baby Peggy, where otherwise we’d only get Duane Thomson as the adult version of the character. Secondly, the emotion built around Jewish umbrella salesman Alexander Carr and his much-delayed romance with Mary Alden gains from SEEING how long their love affair has been on hold. It’s like Big Ed and Norma in Twin Peaks.

A major strike against the film was when I realized the screenplay, adapted from a stage play, was by Zion Myers, one of the chumps who wrecked Buster Keaton’s career at MGM. Though Myers was less responsible than the execs who positioned him as a writer and director with charge of Keaton. And APRIL FOOL’s intertitles are crammed with godawful puns and would-be witticisms, while its action is basically lacking in comedy. So it’s an instructive case study — the mismatch of ZM and BK is total.

One of Myers’ main comedic weapons is malapropisms or Goldwynisms, and as this is a Jewish comedy he finds he can cram them anywhere — ALL the male characters perpetrate them. None of the female characters get any comedy at all. Still, in a sense I’d rather a Jewish writer did these jokes than, say, Leo McCarey, who doubtless meant no harm but who makes me uncomfortable when he strays outside Irish stereotypes. Myers at least has a perfect right to find humour in his own people.

Luckily for the film, the play provides an emotional grounding which Myers can’t entirely smother, so I rather enjoyed it. Added bonus, a whole lot of Snitz Edwards (right). A little Snitz goes a long way, and I’m now fully Snitzed-up through 2030.

Baby P. again showed up in a far more substantial title role in CAPTAIN JANUARY, which is basically THE KID in a lighthouse, and none the worse for that. It’s also an excuse for our Peggy to model an endless rack of adorable costumes. More costume changes than Liz Taylor in CLEOPATRA, at least if you adjust for running time. One, as I’ve already pointed out, sees her dressed as a CLOCKWORK ORANGE droog. Viddy well!

Eddie Cline directed, which brings us neatly to Buster Keaton. THE CAMERAMAN was inevitably enjoyable, even though Fiona finds it saddening because as the first MGM Keaton, it’s the beginning of a steep decline. Spotted some new things on this rewatch. The gangly chap Keaton is photographing by tintype at the film’s start is the same chap he’s photographing at the end. That bloke never does get his tintype.

I always wondered if Keaton’s baseball mime being interrupted by a groundskeeper was the inspiration for the irate man who shows up in the field at the end of the Can’t Buy Me Love sequence in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. Given Keaton’s primacy as a Richard Lester influence, I now think it’s a certainty. Even the costume is eerily similar.

I find Harry Gribbon a bit charmless as Buster’s cop nemesis in this. A former Keystone Klown, for my money he overdoes the mugging — rare to see such an error in a Keaton joint. But a cop turning up during a romantic trance in the rain is a marked rhyme with SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. Fiona points out that Gene Kelly admired Keaton and played baseball with him, and also MGM used to show THE CAMERAMAN to their writers as a perfect example of a romantic comedy until the print fell to bits, so maybe Comden & Green took in a screening before wear and tear intervened.

Gribbon gurns again as a dumb flatfoot in THE BAT, and I liked him better in this. Either he’s toned down the schtick, or the fact that everyone else is furiously hamming it up makes him look more restrained. On the big screen with Stephen Horne multi-instrumenting away, this was a banger. And the first time I’d seen Ben Model’s lovely restoration. William Cameron Menzies’ sets and Arthur Edeson’s photography shone with renewed lustre.

Fiona bailed on Dr. Fanck’s THE MOUNTAIN OF DESTINY, which was both gribbonless and unpeggied. Her attitude being something like “I have had it with these motherfuckin’ Germans on this motherfuckin’ mountain.” I stayed for the scenery, for Gunter Buchwald and Frank Bockius’ swoony live score, and for the weird sense of incipient National Socialism. Not to turn into Siegfried Kracauer on you, but in my reading the death of the father on the titular peak = WWI. The son’s eventual triumph on that same rockface = the next war, and how much of a stunning victory it’s going to turn out to be. Well, you can’t be right all the time.

Fanck, incidentally, refused to join the Nazi party and his career suffered for it, so if he was acting as a zeitgeist-antenna it wasn’t consciously fascistic.

I seem to recall Leni Riefenstahl angrily denounced “Dr. Fanck, that devil!” in Brownlow & Winterbottom’s Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, for tipping an avalanche on her head during the filming of his later THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. Well, you can’t help but admire anyone who tips an avalanche on Leni Riefenstahl, even though this would be, in 1926, the very definition of premature antifascism. Well, in TMOD he tips one on Erna Morena. So this is evidently something of a trademark. I’d like to see Fanck do a musical, a romcom, or a kammerspiel and maintain this approach, swamping swank nightclubs, boarding houses and beer cellars under a ton of snow. If that doesn’t make you an auteur, nothing would.