HippFest was thronging with eager punters on Sunday for its last day of this go-round, including the closing gala of King Vidor’s THE CROWD. Here are my programme notes for that one, and here are all the rest of this year’s notes, and a fine bunch they are, from such notables as Frtzi Kramer (Movies, Silently), Pamela Hutchinson (Silent London), Bryony Dixon (the BFI) and Jay Weissberg (Pordenone).
It was an honour to be asked to write about this one, and also an honour when John Sweeney, who was about to play the accompaniment, asked my advice on how to treat the ending. I was touched and flabbergasted and very little help. “I’ve got to decide what emotion to go for. I find it horrifying!” And horrifying is one way to go. The trouble is, Vidor was going for a more ambivalent feeling, which probably doesn’t translate into musical notes. Generally it’s better to make a strong choice and go for it. John in the end used the song which is played on a phonograph in the preceding scenes and then brought in the darker tones he’d associated with the crowd throughout the film. I thought it was excellent and it sounded like the Hippodrome’s own crowd agreed.
Fiona hadn’t seen the film since she was a teenager, at which age the ending seemed happy — boy gets girl, at least tentatively. This time, she was struck by the manchild mood swings of Johnny Sims (James Murray) and felt that quite frankly Mary (Eleanor Boardman) could have done better. And also, the crowd itself swallowing them up is sort of horrific in itself. Vidor goes further than just booming up and back to show the audience another audience, in which the main characters are planted, he ever-so-briefly mixes in an overhead shot of an even vaster crowd, who are just little fluttering puppets. A foretaste of a particular trick he pulls off in WAR AND PEACE, which I’ve mentioned before here.
I don’t often write on Letterboxd but Hippfest encouraged attendees to do so, so here’s a little rave about THE BAT.
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.
THE PHANTOM (1931) is a cheap knock-off of THE BAT and its ilk. There’s a big house riddled with secret passages, a master criminal swathed in black, and a whole cran of red herrings, which photograph grey.
It’s excitingly terrible stuff. One of the few movies where the actors actually fluff their lines and the flubs are right there in the finished film. The only “stars” are Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, who does add a dash of professionalism, and Keystone alumnus Bobby Dunn, who doesn’t, quite. Though it’s nice to see a man in a talking picture express alarm by seizing his hat with both hands, raising it up, then clapping it back down on his scalp.
The sets are quite impressive, and the camerawork is in focus and reasonably well-composed. But performances, direction and editing are glorious in their ineptitude.
There’s a brief thrill sequence seemingly pilfered from an anonymous silent, where a tiny stuntman scales an impossible wall and then leaps half a mile onto a moving locomotive while boldly violating the left-to-right rule. He’s then collected from the train by a biplane with a rope ladder, which made me worry I was about to see a man killed, since a similar stunt, ending in a fatality, is recounted in the Brownlow & Gill Hollywood series. It is, to use Yakima Canutt’s phrase, “a gag that could easily get you rubbed out.”
The skulking villain reminds me of the connection between the spooky house genre and the earlier Clutching Hand school of villainy — this line first got blurred, I think, when DW Griffith made ONE EXCITING NIGHT, his attempt at cashing in on the Broadway hits The Bat and The Cat and the Canary. He included a hunched, limping, black-draped villain, a throwback to an earlier school of screen melodrama (THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE to be specific) and this dated trope may have contributed to his film’s failure. Hard to imagine that 1931 audiences found it any less outmoded.
Nevertheless, modern audiences could learn a lot from THE PHANTOM. Not so much in terms of what not to do, but certainly in terms of what not to even consider doing.
This scene features some overlapping dialogue, produced by sloppy sound editing and an actor who doesn’t know his cues. If there was a better take, it didn’t survive the attentions of the laboratory.
Joyous!
This sequence showcases the film’s almost nouvelle vague editing style, which bravely jettisons continuity and clarity in favour of violent disjunction and bewilderment.
This movie beats Ed Wood hands down, except that it’s a comedy thriller which rather impedes one’s ability to laugh. One wants to laugh AT it, not with it, but when the “comics” are onscreen it’s hard to do either. Still, the crumminess is of a high order, not something you can see in just any film. Almost a feature-length blooper reel.
Director Alan James made 78 other films, so I can see I’m going to be busy.
shadowplay 
