by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie called Hiding
that I’d recorded off Lifetime over the weekend. The way the Lifetime promos
ballyhooed it, it sounded like a brand-new film having its “world premiere,”
but apparently it had — or at least was meant to have — at least something of a
theatrical release in 2012. It’s the sort of frustrating movie that takes an
intriguing premise and gets far less out of it than one could imagine — what
happens to a high-school girl when she’s suddenly relocated into witness protection
and moved from New York City to Longview, Montana after her family is massacred
by a crime syndicate and, though she’s survived, the crooks think she’s dead
and so do all her old friends? Directed by Thomas J. Wright from a script by
Brian Hurwitz, Hiding is an
interesting fusion of gangster movie and high-school coming-of-age drama. The
survivor, Alicia Torres (played by Ana Villafañe, a singer whom I’d previously
not heard of, though she doesn’t get to sing here), is forced to adopt the
white-bread identity “Jo Russo” and is told by her handler, FBI Agent Noah
Carter (Dan Payne, who not surprisingly is older but considerably hotter than
any of the guys playing male Longview High School students!), to avoid anything connected with her past life. Accordingly, she’s
been outfitted with a cover story that she’s from Seattle and she’s been
solemnly told never to do anything she was known to have been interested in
before, including painting (her former hobby), and she’s also told not to let
on that she speaks Spanish — which makes it rather odd that she takes a Spanish
class but never utters a word of it while there even though she aces the
written tests. Like Kristen Stewart’s character in the first Twilight (a precursor I kept hearkening back to even though Hiding contains no supernatural element), instead of being
shunned by everybody Jo is instantly popular, particularly among two young men
in school, Brett (Jeremy Sumpter, the star swimmer led down the primrose path
by Internet porn in the Lifetime film cyber seduction: His Secret
Life, here playing a self-confident
B.M.O.C. instead of a nerdy guy whose only distinction is his prowess in the
pool) and Jesse (Tyler Blackburn), who hung out in the art lab, was working on
a mural painting of the New York cityscape, and thereby represented danger for
Jo because hanging around him was likely to “out” her as a New Yorker and an
artist. (I liked Jesse a lot
better than Brett — perhaps because he reminded me of me in my own high-school
days — and was rooting for him and Jo to get together at the end, but alas
writer Hurwitz had other ideas.)
But the main threats to Jo’s incognito are Zoë
(Kelcie Stranahan, who was the nice girl the boy in Dirty Teacher was dating until his hot, sexy teacher seduced him
instead), who’s jealous of Jo for taking Brett away from her and retaliates by
researching her background and finding that she has something to hide; and a mysterious hit man, Ostrog (Dean
Armstrong, who played Blake on the Showtime series Queer as Folk), who’s tracing Jo because the gang has realized
she’s alive after all and is being kept on ice by the feds so she can testify
against them when needed. Ostrog is tall, rather gangly, clearly Anglo and not
at all the sort of person one expects to see playing a hit man in a film these
days, but Armstrong’s performance is effectively sinister, especially in the
scene in which he wheedles the address of Jo’s “abuela” (the word literally
means grandmother, but the woman is simply a much older person who befriended
Jo and a lot of her fellow teenage girls back in New York), then visits her in
the nursing home and sees the card on a bouquet of flowers Jo sent her, which
leads him to Longview and a climax that takes place seemingly just because the
film has to end sometime: Jo is
about to borrow Brett’s truck to get away, but just before she gets in Ostrog
sneaks up behind her, chloroforms her and kidnaps her, then calls the gang and
tells them that he’s ready to kill her but only if they agree to pay him twice
the agreed-upon price for the deed. The cops manage to trace her via Brett’s
cell phone, which she also borrowed (one of the rules of witness protection, at
least as applied to Jo, was that she wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone), only
Ostrog is so good an assassin he instantly blows away the two pathetic Montana
cops who try to arrest him and wounds Carter, then goes tearing through the
woods to hunt down Jo, who’s running away from him, and he catches up with her
and is about to do the dirty deed when Carter, fortunately wounded but far from
dead, kills him.
It’s a
fascinating concept for a movie — what do you do when you’re a high-school kid
and the difficulties of adjusting to a new school and the internal politics of
its student body are compounded by the fact that your life is literally at stake if you disclose, intentionally or
accidentally, anything about who you really are and what your background has
been — but alas director Wright and writer Hurwitz miss as many opportunities
as they grab, sometimes portraying Jo’s dilemma sensitively and sometimes just
losing it, especially in the awkwardly cut-in flashback sequences that are
supposed to represent her PTSD-inducing memories of the crime; still, it was
better than the usual Lifetime fare even though it was far from their best (Speak, a high-school story based on an acknowledged
classic young-adult novel and starring the real Kristen Stewart just before she did Twilight, was considerably better), and Ana Villafañe is a
reasonably powerful screen presence and helps hold the film together.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Tim McGraw and Friends (Academy of Country Music/CBS-TV, May 19, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was a special sponsored by the Academy of Country Music featuring Tim McGraw in an all-star presentation also including Faith Hill (Mrs. Tim McGraw to you), Taylor Swift (whom I’m liking better the more I hear of her — not coincidentally this show had been immediately preceded by a 60 Minutes segment run on her), Keith Urban, Jason Aldean, (at least I think that’s his name), Lady Antebellum, a band called Florida Georgia Line, rappers Nelly (and given the way he was dressed that wasn’t at all an inappropriate pseudonym!) and Pitbull (who I think is Latino, if only because he doesn’t look Black and his rap included a few bits of Spanish), Ne-Yo (a haunting-voiced Black singer — judging from his ethnicity and his stage name I’d assumed he’d be another rapper, but instead he sang, and while the timbre of his voice is a bit on the whiny side he sang quite well), someone identified only as Newell, and Brantley Gilbert (whose song, “Country Must Be Countrywide,” was actually one of the best things in the program, the only one that lyrically mentioned the country greats of yesteryear: Hank, Johnny, Willie and Waylon — do you really need their last names?). The finale featured John Fogerty leading the rest of the singers in a joint version of “Born on the Bayou,” and that was yet another example of a 1960’s veteran coming on with such power and authority he made the rest of the cast members seem like amateurs by comparison. The big problem with this show is that most of the music sounded pretty much alike — the so-called “country” sound of today is actually what in the 1970’s was called “Southern rock,” and McGraw and his (male) guests owed a lot more to Lynyrd Skynyrd than they did to Hank Williams or Johnny Cash — aside from a possible pedal steel guitar in Gilbert’s song, very low in the mix, there was no evidence of this once-paradigmatic country instrument, nor were there any violins, either bluegrass fiddles or the big string sections that backed the country-pop artists of the 1950’s like Eddy Arnold or Hank Snow. Instead the songs were all driven by power chords and basic rock rhythms; as Charles joked, “Lose the hats and they’re just another band.”
Not that the show was entirely unentertaining; the sight of all those hot, slender young men in skin-tight jeans had a certain aesthetic appeal (I remember buying at least one recent country CD at Auntie Helen’s thrift store simply because I thought the guy on the cover was hot!) and within the limits of the genre some of the songs were pretty good — though the editing of the show obviously assumed that anyone watching it would know who these people were and what songs they were singing already, so they didn’t trouble to identify them. Another problem with the show was the strong XY-centricity of the guest list: the only women on the program were Taylor Swift, Faith Hill and the female members of Lady Antebellum and The Band Perry — an oddly named group because they’re composed entirely of a family named Perry, with Kimberly Perry as their lead singer and her brothers Reid and Neil playing bass and drums, respectively. As things turned out, Kimberly Perry was by far the strongest singer on the program (next to John Fogerty, and one expects that kind of authority from him!); singing the Band Perry’s latest single, “Done” — a typical goodbye-and-good-riddance song addressed to a former relationship partner — she turned out to have a great voice, powerful, bitterly emotional, encompassing both the anger and the sympathy one would want from a breakup song. Taylor Swift sang exquisitely on the song “Half the Way Home,” which she recorded as a duet with McGraw and was performed that way last night (with Keith Urban supplying a quite good guitar solo), but she didn’t get a solo number. Lady Antebellum’s female singer, Hillary Scott, wasn’t showcased because they chose to perform a song, “Nothing but a Goodbye Town,” on which their male singer, Charles Kelley, sang lead (and he’s a good pop-country singer but their strongest records have been the ones that featured her).
As for Faith Hill, her husband did her no favors by introducing her as a combination of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin and Brigitte Bardot, and while the all-in-one black leather suit she wore on stage emphasized her sexiness (for all the welcome beefcake on this show, Faith Hill’s was about the only segment of this show that would have made a straight guy cream!), her song choice was spectacularly ill-advised: “Piece of My Heart,” a piece with not only Joplin but also Franklin connections (the first record of it, in 1967, was made by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister). The result sucked: Faith Hill has a spectacular voice but this was not the kind of song she should have gone near; Janis Joplin’s voice may have been more ragged and less conventionally “beautiful,” but it not only gave this song its wrenching power but Joplin was even more technically secure on it: time and again Faith Hill had to rewrite the melody to duck the killer high notes Joplin nailed on her version. (Then again, if she were still alive Joplin would probably have to rewrite the song similarly, the way Stevie Nicks can no longer sing “Rhiannon” the way she wrote it originally because she doesn’t have those high notes anymore.) It wasn’t always easy to tell the various tall, skinny men in tight jeans apart from each other, particularly since they all had pretty similar voices and approaches to music, and aside from the songs by the Band Perry (why didn’t they just call themselves “The Perry Family” à la The Carter Family?) and Brantley Gilbert, there wasn’t anything on the program that would make me want to run out and buy their CD (of course today all the “running” you do to buy music is to wherever your computer is to order it online, now that the brick-and-mortar record store has gone the way of the brick-and-mortar bookstore!).
The show was a special sponsored by the Academy of Country Music featuring Tim McGraw in an all-star presentation also including Faith Hill (Mrs. Tim McGraw to you), Taylor Swift (whom I’m liking better the more I hear of her — not coincidentally this show had been immediately preceded by a 60 Minutes segment run on her), Keith Urban, Jason Aldean, (at least I think that’s his name), Lady Antebellum, a band called Florida Georgia Line, rappers Nelly (and given the way he was dressed that wasn’t at all an inappropriate pseudonym!) and Pitbull (who I think is Latino, if only because he doesn’t look Black and his rap included a few bits of Spanish), Ne-Yo (a haunting-voiced Black singer — judging from his ethnicity and his stage name I’d assumed he’d be another rapper, but instead he sang, and while the timbre of his voice is a bit on the whiny side he sang quite well), someone identified only as Newell, and Brantley Gilbert (whose song, “Country Must Be Countrywide,” was actually one of the best things in the program, the only one that lyrically mentioned the country greats of yesteryear: Hank, Johnny, Willie and Waylon — do you really need their last names?). The finale featured John Fogerty leading the rest of the singers in a joint version of “Born on the Bayou,” and that was yet another example of a 1960’s veteran coming on with such power and authority he made the rest of the cast members seem like amateurs by comparison. The big problem with this show is that most of the music sounded pretty much alike — the so-called “country” sound of today is actually what in the 1970’s was called “Southern rock,” and McGraw and his (male) guests owed a lot more to Lynyrd Skynyrd than they did to Hank Williams or Johnny Cash — aside from a possible pedal steel guitar in Gilbert’s song, very low in the mix, there was no evidence of this once-paradigmatic country instrument, nor were there any violins, either bluegrass fiddles or the big string sections that backed the country-pop artists of the 1950’s like Eddy Arnold or Hank Snow. Instead the songs were all driven by power chords and basic rock rhythms; as Charles joked, “Lose the hats and they’re just another band.”
Not that the show was entirely unentertaining; the sight of all those hot, slender young men in skin-tight jeans had a certain aesthetic appeal (I remember buying at least one recent country CD at Auntie Helen’s thrift store simply because I thought the guy on the cover was hot!) and within the limits of the genre some of the songs were pretty good — though the editing of the show obviously assumed that anyone watching it would know who these people were and what songs they were singing already, so they didn’t trouble to identify them. Another problem with the show was the strong XY-centricity of the guest list: the only women on the program were Taylor Swift, Faith Hill and the female members of Lady Antebellum and The Band Perry — an oddly named group because they’re composed entirely of a family named Perry, with Kimberly Perry as their lead singer and her brothers Reid and Neil playing bass and drums, respectively. As things turned out, Kimberly Perry was by far the strongest singer on the program (next to John Fogerty, and one expects that kind of authority from him!); singing the Band Perry’s latest single, “Done” — a typical goodbye-and-good-riddance song addressed to a former relationship partner — she turned out to have a great voice, powerful, bitterly emotional, encompassing both the anger and the sympathy one would want from a breakup song. Taylor Swift sang exquisitely on the song “Half the Way Home,” which she recorded as a duet with McGraw and was performed that way last night (with Keith Urban supplying a quite good guitar solo), but she didn’t get a solo number. Lady Antebellum’s female singer, Hillary Scott, wasn’t showcased because they chose to perform a song, “Nothing but a Goodbye Town,” on which their male singer, Charles Kelley, sang lead (and he’s a good pop-country singer but their strongest records have been the ones that featured her).
As for Faith Hill, her husband did her no favors by introducing her as a combination of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin and Brigitte Bardot, and while the all-in-one black leather suit she wore on stage emphasized her sexiness (for all the welcome beefcake on this show, Faith Hill’s was about the only segment of this show that would have made a straight guy cream!), her song choice was spectacularly ill-advised: “Piece of My Heart,” a piece with not only Joplin but also Franklin connections (the first record of it, in 1967, was made by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister). The result sucked: Faith Hill has a spectacular voice but this was not the kind of song she should have gone near; Janis Joplin’s voice may have been more ragged and less conventionally “beautiful,” but it not only gave this song its wrenching power but Joplin was even more technically secure on it: time and again Faith Hill had to rewrite the melody to duck the killer high notes Joplin nailed on her version. (Then again, if she were still alive Joplin would probably have to rewrite the song similarly, the way Stevie Nicks can no longer sing “Rhiannon” the way she wrote it originally because she doesn’t have those high notes anymore.) It wasn’t always easy to tell the various tall, skinny men in tight jeans apart from each other, particularly since they all had pretty similar voices and approaches to music, and aside from the songs by the Band Perry (why didn’t they just call themselves “The Perry Family” à la The Carter Family?) and Brantley Gilbert, there wasn’t anything on the program that would make me want to run out and buy their CD (of course today all the “running” you do to buy music is to wherever your computer is to order it online, now that the brick-and-mortar record store has gone the way of the brick-and-mortar bookstore!).
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Mars et Avril [March and April/Mars and April] (EMA Films, Mars et Avril, Productions du 8e art, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually did get out and we went to the Mars film screening in Golden Hill — which was a bit too long because the person in charge of it insists on showing at least an hour’s worth of trailers for other movies, home-grown videos from the Internet (including an absolutely hilarious one showing a kids’ musical version of the original Star Trek) and episodes of a serial — in this case the next-to-last one of a film called Project One, which despite a piss-poor budget is a quite effective tale in which a Russian family during the 1980’s (when the Soviet Union was still a going concern) was sent to Mars by a secret rocket program, lived there for over two decades and then sent back their son, whose spacecraft crash-landed in Canada and was scooped up by the Canadian air force, which in collaboration with the U.S. put a quarantine around the base while they were waiting for the man to come to — and also put out a cover story about the incident that blamed it on a terrorist attack. As a result I was already feeling pretty worn down by the time the feature started, which turned out to be an interesting and quirky movie even though I found it rather uneven. It was called Mars et Avril — the title is a double pun because Mars in French means both the planet Mars and the month March (a pun that was also made in last month’s Mars movie!) — and though I had had the impression going in that the movie had been made in France, it was really a Canadian production, though it seemed like a French movie, not only because all the dialogue was in French but because the plot had the sort of refreshing frankness about people’s sexual needs and drives one gets in French movies and almost never in U.S. ones.
The film, written as well as directed by Martin Villenueve, is set in 2154 and centers around German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s notion that the universe was musical — something he wrote about in his book Harmonie der Welt (“The Harmonies of the World”) — and an elderly but still popular musician named Jacob Obus (Jacques Languiraud) who leads a band that specializes in a sort of jazz-trance music featuring specially built instruments designed by Eugène Spaak (his head is played by Robert Lepage — yes, the same person who designed and directed that weird Ring cycle currently being played at the Met — and his body is played by Jean Asselin, because part of the plot gimmick is he’s rendered himself immortal by having himself changed into a holographic head on top of a robot body) and his (normally living) son Arthur (Paul Ahmarani, a kind of dorky-looking guy with a nice head of helmet-shaped hair, the sort of actor who gets cast in movies like this and then is replaced by a drop-dead gorgeous movie-star type if the film is remade in the U.S., much the way homely but decent-looking Donatas Banionis, the leading man of the marvelous Russian Solaris from 1972, was replaced by George Clooney in the far inferior Hollywood remake). The story centers around the rivalry between Jacob Obus and Arthur Spaak over the love of Avril (Caroline Dhavemas), which happens to be going on while the world space authority is launching a spacecraft to travel from humanity’s already well-established base on the moon to Mars. In a weirdly quirky scene in a movie that is full of weirdly quirky scenes, Avril insists on photographing Jacob Obus’s group with an old-style press camera, then agrees to go home with Arthur and model for the band’s latest lead instrument (they’re all designed in the images of actual people and one gets the impression that the band needs a new lead instrument for every gig they perform) as long as he agrees to be photographed by her first — and she makes him stand naked in front of her camera (she has him strip even though all she’s going to photograph is his face) for hours while she does a run-out to Obus’s latest concert.
The film was based on a graphic novel (i.e., a full-length comic book, though the French credits list it as a “photo-roman,” which could mean a long-form comic or one of those stories in which the plot is told in photos with word balloons and descriptions added), whose model for Avril, Marie-Josée Croze, was originally supposed to do the movie as well but left due to scheduling conflicts. It reaches its high point plot-wise when Jacob and Avril get into a teleportation booth together — this is one of those quirky views of the future in which some aspects are indeed well advanced from today’s technology (like teleportation machines being part of Montreal’s public transit system — indeed, the filmmaker got the same person who actually recorded the announcements for Montreal’s subways, Khanh Hua, to record the announcements for the teleporter) while others are well behind (the characters listen to music on LP’s and make phone calls on hard-wired landline phones) — despite the solemn warnings that only one person is supposed to use it at a time. As a result, Jacob and Avril get separated and he ends up where he intended to go — the Champ de Mars station near the club where he was supposed to play — while she ends up on the planet Mars, where the three “Marsonautes” (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, Pierre Leblanc and Richard Robitaille, who at least to my mind bore a remarkable resemblance to the Three Stooges) have just built a teleporter in order that scientists from their mission control center can visit them on the planet. (If they could put a teleporter on Mars, why did they need a rocket to go there in the first place, one wonders — only it turns out that the teleporter can only be operated from outside, meaning that as long as there’s a person on the outside to push the switch it will function, so it can be used to go anywhere humans already live but not to boldly go where no one has gone before. But that still doesn’t answer how ordinary humans are able to work the teleporter from inside it to go from one Earth destination to another.)
At one point Villenueve throws us a ringer — the three Marsonautes tell Avril (and us) that they never went to Mars at all; they’re still on earth and the footage shown internationally on TV of them on their way and actually on the Red Planet was all faked in a studio (a bit of paranoia a lot of people believe about the U.S. space program!) — but it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to believe that, especially since the ending involves all three of the principals turning up on Mars after Jacob and Arthur have got there by following a stream of wind moving through the cosmos powering the musical instrument that is the universe, at least according to Kepler’s theories. Mars et Avril is one of those maddening movies that runs so totally against audience expectations from the get-go that it can’t offer any real sense of surprise, and yet I liked it better than I like most such films because at least it had real characterizations (though exactly what attracts Avril to a man three times her age is never quite spelled out — and one genuine surprise that is moving is when Jacob tells her, and us, that though he’s talked about a wide swath of female conquests he’s never actually had sex in his life before until their first time together), we actually care about the fate of the characters, and the whole thing is well done from that standpoint even though there are the usual lacunae in which one gets the impression things are happening in this movie simply because the plot is so free-form literally anything can happen. I suspect I would have liked this movie better if I had got to see it in a better-resolution image (either film or high-def digital video), since Villenueve’s visual virtuosity is the most entertaining part of the film and it would be nice to see it in something better than an ordinary DVD run through a projector and onto a screen big enough where you really could see the finite elements. As it was, it was refreshing, a bit ponderous at times and not quite as clever as Villenueve and his colleagues clearly thought it was — but it’s still worth seeing and a lot of fun, and I’m certainly going to respect a movie that’s trying so hard to be “different” even if it doesn’t always succeed. And I’m also going to respect a film that is so honest about human sexuality!
Charles and I eventually did get out and we went to the Mars film screening in Golden Hill — which was a bit too long because the person in charge of it insists on showing at least an hour’s worth of trailers for other movies, home-grown videos from the Internet (including an absolutely hilarious one showing a kids’ musical version of the original Star Trek) and episodes of a serial — in this case the next-to-last one of a film called Project One, which despite a piss-poor budget is a quite effective tale in which a Russian family during the 1980’s (when the Soviet Union was still a going concern) was sent to Mars by a secret rocket program, lived there for over two decades and then sent back their son, whose spacecraft crash-landed in Canada and was scooped up by the Canadian air force, which in collaboration with the U.S. put a quarantine around the base while they were waiting for the man to come to — and also put out a cover story about the incident that blamed it on a terrorist attack. As a result I was already feeling pretty worn down by the time the feature started, which turned out to be an interesting and quirky movie even though I found it rather uneven. It was called Mars et Avril — the title is a double pun because Mars in French means both the planet Mars and the month March (a pun that was also made in last month’s Mars movie!) — and though I had had the impression going in that the movie had been made in France, it was really a Canadian production, though it seemed like a French movie, not only because all the dialogue was in French but because the plot had the sort of refreshing frankness about people’s sexual needs and drives one gets in French movies and almost never in U.S. ones.
The film, written as well as directed by Martin Villenueve, is set in 2154 and centers around German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s notion that the universe was musical — something he wrote about in his book Harmonie der Welt (“The Harmonies of the World”) — and an elderly but still popular musician named Jacob Obus (Jacques Languiraud) who leads a band that specializes in a sort of jazz-trance music featuring specially built instruments designed by Eugène Spaak (his head is played by Robert Lepage — yes, the same person who designed and directed that weird Ring cycle currently being played at the Met — and his body is played by Jean Asselin, because part of the plot gimmick is he’s rendered himself immortal by having himself changed into a holographic head on top of a robot body) and his (normally living) son Arthur (Paul Ahmarani, a kind of dorky-looking guy with a nice head of helmet-shaped hair, the sort of actor who gets cast in movies like this and then is replaced by a drop-dead gorgeous movie-star type if the film is remade in the U.S., much the way homely but decent-looking Donatas Banionis, the leading man of the marvelous Russian Solaris from 1972, was replaced by George Clooney in the far inferior Hollywood remake). The story centers around the rivalry between Jacob Obus and Arthur Spaak over the love of Avril (Caroline Dhavemas), which happens to be going on while the world space authority is launching a spacecraft to travel from humanity’s already well-established base on the moon to Mars. In a weirdly quirky scene in a movie that is full of weirdly quirky scenes, Avril insists on photographing Jacob Obus’s group with an old-style press camera, then agrees to go home with Arthur and model for the band’s latest lead instrument (they’re all designed in the images of actual people and one gets the impression that the band needs a new lead instrument for every gig they perform) as long as he agrees to be photographed by her first — and she makes him stand naked in front of her camera (she has him strip even though all she’s going to photograph is his face) for hours while she does a run-out to Obus’s latest concert.
The film was based on a graphic novel (i.e., a full-length comic book, though the French credits list it as a “photo-roman,” which could mean a long-form comic or one of those stories in which the plot is told in photos with word balloons and descriptions added), whose model for Avril, Marie-Josée Croze, was originally supposed to do the movie as well but left due to scheduling conflicts. It reaches its high point plot-wise when Jacob and Avril get into a teleportation booth together — this is one of those quirky views of the future in which some aspects are indeed well advanced from today’s technology (like teleportation machines being part of Montreal’s public transit system — indeed, the filmmaker got the same person who actually recorded the announcements for Montreal’s subways, Khanh Hua, to record the announcements for the teleporter) while others are well behind (the characters listen to music on LP’s and make phone calls on hard-wired landline phones) — despite the solemn warnings that only one person is supposed to use it at a time. As a result, Jacob and Avril get separated and he ends up where he intended to go — the Champ de Mars station near the club where he was supposed to play — while she ends up on the planet Mars, where the three “Marsonautes” (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, Pierre Leblanc and Richard Robitaille, who at least to my mind bore a remarkable resemblance to the Three Stooges) have just built a teleporter in order that scientists from their mission control center can visit them on the planet. (If they could put a teleporter on Mars, why did they need a rocket to go there in the first place, one wonders — only it turns out that the teleporter can only be operated from outside, meaning that as long as there’s a person on the outside to push the switch it will function, so it can be used to go anywhere humans already live but not to boldly go where no one has gone before. But that still doesn’t answer how ordinary humans are able to work the teleporter from inside it to go from one Earth destination to another.)
At one point Villenueve throws us a ringer — the three Marsonautes tell Avril (and us) that they never went to Mars at all; they’re still on earth and the footage shown internationally on TV of them on their way and actually on the Red Planet was all faked in a studio (a bit of paranoia a lot of people believe about the U.S. space program!) — but it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to believe that, especially since the ending involves all three of the principals turning up on Mars after Jacob and Arthur have got there by following a stream of wind moving through the cosmos powering the musical instrument that is the universe, at least according to Kepler’s theories. Mars et Avril is one of those maddening movies that runs so totally against audience expectations from the get-go that it can’t offer any real sense of surprise, and yet I liked it better than I like most such films because at least it had real characterizations (though exactly what attracts Avril to a man three times her age is never quite spelled out — and one genuine surprise that is moving is when Jacob tells her, and us, that though he’s talked about a wide swath of female conquests he’s never actually had sex in his life before until their first time together), we actually care about the fate of the characters, and the whole thing is well done from that standpoint even though there are the usual lacunae in which one gets the impression things are happening in this movie simply because the plot is so free-form literally anything can happen. I suspect I would have liked this movie better if I had got to see it in a better-resolution image (either film or high-def digital video), since Villenueve’s visual virtuosity is the most entertaining part of the film and it would be nice to see it in something better than an ordinary DVD run through a projector and onto a screen big enough where you really could see the finite elements. As it was, it was refreshing, a bit ponderous at times and not quite as clever as Villenueve and his colleagues clearly thought it was — but it’s still worth seeing and a lot of fun, and I’m certainly going to respect a movie that’s trying so hard to be “different” even if it doesn’t always succeed. And I’m also going to respect a film that is so honest about human sexuality!
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Captain Hates the Sea (Columbia, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Captain Hates the Sea, a 1934 Columbia production that turned out to be the final film by John Gilbert, who’s become axiomatic of the great silent stars who were supposedly undone by the talkies. It’s true that Gilbert’s career did a big nosedive when sound came in — his first starring feature with sound, His Glorious Night, was a major flop and it got ridiculed both when it was new and later (it’s the movie that’s being parodied in Singin’ in the Rain in the scene in which Gene Kelly kisses his way up Jean Hagen’s arm saying nothing but, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” over and over and over) — but from the Gilbert talkies I’ve seen it’s also clear that his failure had nothing to do with his voice per se. The problem seems to have been that Gilbert didn’t know how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. In his book The Shattered Silents (which argued that Gilbert flopped in the talkies while Ronald Colman succeeded because Colman and his producer, Sam Goldwyn, realized that he’d have to cultivate a different image and shifted him from romantic melodrama to comedy, while Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg put Gilbert into a talkie debut all too similar to his heavy-breathing silents), Alexander Walker quoted a contemporary reviewer of His Glorious Night, Frank Daugherty of the trade paper Film Spectator, as saying that Gilbert’s “supposedly fiery speeches have all the amorous passion of an assistant director asking another … to stake him to a lunch at Henry’s.” Gilbert’s MGM contract (negotiated by MGM president Nicholas Schenck behind Mayer’s and Thalberg’s backs) finally ran out in 1933 with a Warnersesque drama called Fast Workers, directed by Tod Browning (of all people!), which cast him and Robert Armstrong as construction workers in love with the same girl (Mae Clarke).
Then Greta Garbo asked for him as her leading man in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 masterpiece Queen Christina after the studio decided that their first choice, John Barrymore, was too great a risk due to his alcoholism and memory problems; and the second choice, Laurence Olivier, tested but Garbo decided he couldn’t hold his own against her. In that film Gilbert wore way too much makeup — as if he were still thinking in terms of the slow and insensitive films used in the early 1920’s — but turned in a perfectly acceptable if hardly incandescent performance that doesn’t get in the way of what’s otherwise a great movie. Gilbert then fell into the hands of Harry Cohn, president of plucky little Columbia Pictures, who took great joy on the rare occasions when he could one-up MGM: in 1934 he signed opera singer Grace Moore after MGM had dropped her for being overweight, and made a movie called One Night of Love that despite its rather phony story (aspiring opera singer Moore hates her ruthlessly authoritarian voice teacher, Tullio Carminati, but eventually falls in love with him and they literally make beautiful music together) became a blockbuster hit, the most popular opera film to that time and for 17 years thereafter (until The Great Caruso). Cohn was evidently hoping that lightning would strike twice and he’d be able to give Gilbert a great comeback role — at least that’s how the director of The Captain Hates the Sea, Lewis Milestone, recalled it later when Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg interviewed him for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse: “Cohn … welcomed Gilbert’s prospective rehabilitation and promised him star treatment, provided he behaved properly. But unfortunately Jack was a little too far gone. For a week he’d be perfect, and then he started drinking. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been for the fact that if he drank one day he couldn’t work the next, because by then he had ulcers and would vomit blood and be very ill.”
The legend is that Milestone thought that by casting Gilbert in a film that took place largely at sea — on an ocean liner which takes a cruise from New York to South America and then back — he could isolate him from all sources of alcohol and thereby keep him sober, but he didn’t reckon with the other members of the cast, including such celebrated imbibers as Victor McLaglen, Walter Connolly (who plays the titular captain that hates the sea), Leon Errol (who actually owned a bar in real life), Walter Catlett, and Alison Skipworth, who brought their own liquor supplies and cheerily shared them with Gilbert. In Bob Thomas’s biography Harry Cohn, there’s a story that Cohn got worried when Milestone’s ship sailed and remained at sea for weeks with no rushes back at the studio to show for it, and he sent a radiogram to Milestone reading, “Hurry up. The cost is staggering,” to which Milestone replied, “So is the cast.” What made the actual film seem bizarre in light of those legends is that if the intent was to give John Gilbert a script that would isolate him from booze and keep him clean, sober and on the way to both personal and professional recovery, The Captain Hates the Sea is about the last story Cohn and Milestone should have picked, because the whole movie is about drinking! Gilbert plays, essentially, himself — he’s called “Steve Bramley” and he’s just bombed out of a career in Hollywood (though as a writer, not an actor), and as his part begins he’s in a taxi being taken to the dock by his fiancée Gerta “Gert” Klangi (Tala Birell). He’s breaking their engagement while assuring her that he’s sober and is going to stay that way. Meanwhile, on board the ship former police officer turned private detective Junius P. Schulte (Victor McLaglen) greets his old friend, ship’s steward Mr. Layton (Leon Errol), and needless to say the first thing they and a third acquaintance of theirs do once they get on the ship is share a bottle! Steve shows up at their stateroom and the moment they offer him some Scotch, he makes a brief show of refusal but then pours himself a big tumbler — and he just keeps getting drunker and drunker all movie. About his only connection with reality is a phonograph record of Gert which she recorded and sneaked into his trunk (along with a pull-out phonograph to play it on), which fortunately keeps him from getting too deeply embroiled with the multiple vamps on ship.
The main vamp is supposed Boston librarian Janet Grayson (Helen Vinson), girlfriend of embezzler Danny Checkett (Fred Keating), who comes aboard the ship, using the name “Farraday,” with $250,000 in stolen bonds which he inexplicably gives her to hold for him even though she’s a crook herself — her aliases include Blanche Dilworthy and “Michigan Red.” There’s also a well-to-do couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jeddock (John Wray and Wynne Gibson), who seem to be happy, only he’s abusive and she’s a former prostitute who’s “outed” by Steve when he recognizes her as someone who serviced him professionally. And if that weren’t enough, there’s also a wealthy and aggressive widow, Mrs. Yolanda Magruder (Alison Skipworth, coming off here as even more of a distaff version of W. C. Fields than she did in their films together!), who’s after Schulte, while Schulte is after Janet, which is just fine with Danny because that presumably means she can seduce him into leaving them alone. There’s also a plot line involving a South American general, Salazaro (Akim Tamiroff), who’s going to his native country to foment a revolution — only as soon as he arrives he’s caught by the authorities and killed by a firing squad, a rather jarring plot twist that just sits in the middle of this movie and never gets resolved. In fact, the most bizarre thing about The Captain Hates the Sea is its sheer plotlessness: in the era in which most screenwriters took pride in their ability to “plant” the ending throughout the movie and give audiences clues along the way to how it was going to turn out, writer Wallace Smith — adapting his own novel — seems to revel in the unpredictability of his plot lines and his skill at keeping multiple story strands going, even though there’s almost no resolution of any of them. Indeed, The Captain Hates the Sea seems so much like a Robert Altman movie four or five decades early — the multiple plot lines, the ensemble cast (for something that was supposedly intended as a comeback vehicle for John Gilbert it’s surprising that he’s only billed fourth — after McLaglen, Gibson and Skipworth, in that order), the lack of conventional resolutions and the sense that the film doesn’t end so much as it just stops — it’s a wonder Altman didn’t remake it.
It’s also filled with marvelous character vignettes and some offbeat casting, including Walter Catlett as the seen-it-all bartender (once, when Gilbert gets into a fight with John Wray and Wray knocks him down, Catlett opens a trap door at the bottom of his bar and hands Gilbert a drink, which revives him and enables him to knock Wray out) whose rotating sign — announcing variously that the bar will close at midnight and will open at 8:30 (presumably a.m., the way these people drink!) — practically becomes a character in the movie itself. There’s also a weird cameo by the Three Stooges (Greta Garbo and the Three Stooges: one degree of separation!), who in 1934 were also MGM rejects who had just signed with Columbia for the long series of comedy shorts for which they’re best remembered, and who appear here as the ship’s band — Moe plays sax (either alto or C-melody, I wasn’t sure which), Larry plays piano and Curly plays drums (later for a more sedate sort of shipboard music Moe switches to violin and Curly to cello!) — and their presence is welcome even though they don’t get to do any slapstick and Larry is the only one who speaks. It ends with Steve and Gert getting back together even though he’s neither sobered up nor written the novel he had promised her he would write; Schulte pairing up with Janet, though it’s not clear whether he’s interested in her or the bonds (ya remember the bonds?); Danny setting off after Mrs. Magruder and her $7 million; and Captain Helquist wearily readying himself for the ship’s next voyage even though he hates the sea, thanks to his father and his father’s long beard (there’s a weird story about that I’m not even going to try to synopsize, though on the voyage there’s been a man with a long beard — Donald Meek, whom we’re used to seeing clean-shaven and here wears so patently phony a fake beard it reminded me of the hilarious scene in Buster Keaton’s Spite Marriage in which, as an aspiring but untalented actor, he desperately tries to get the hang of gluing false whiskers to his face with spirit gum — who supposedly reminds McLaglen of his long-hated dad), while any 1934 audiences who stumbled into theatres that were playing this film probably left scratching their heads and wondering, “What the hell was that?” It’s a film you want to like, partly because it’s generally well acted (though John Gilbert seems all too clearly to be playing himself!) and partly because it’s trying so hard to be sophisticated and “different” — and because much of the droll humor is actually genuinely funny — but it ends up a sporadically entertaining and engaging mess.
The film was The Captain Hates the Sea, a 1934 Columbia production that turned out to be the final film by John Gilbert, who’s become axiomatic of the great silent stars who were supposedly undone by the talkies. It’s true that Gilbert’s career did a big nosedive when sound came in — his first starring feature with sound, His Glorious Night, was a major flop and it got ridiculed both when it was new and later (it’s the movie that’s being parodied in Singin’ in the Rain in the scene in which Gene Kelly kisses his way up Jean Hagen’s arm saying nothing but, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” over and over and over) — but from the Gilbert talkies I’ve seen it’s also clear that his failure had nothing to do with his voice per se. The problem seems to have been that Gilbert didn’t know how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. In his book The Shattered Silents (which argued that Gilbert flopped in the talkies while Ronald Colman succeeded because Colman and his producer, Sam Goldwyn, realized that he’d have to cultivate a different image and shifted him from romantic melodrama to comedy, while Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg put Gilbert into a talkie debut all too similar to his heavy-breathing silents), Alexander Walker quoted a contemporary reviewer of His Glorious Night, Frank Daugherty of the trade paper Film Spectator, as saying that Gilbert’s “supposedly fiery speeches have all the amorous passion of an assistant director asking another … to stake him to a lunch at Henry’s.” Gilbert’s MGM contract (negotiated by MGM president Nicholas Schenck behind Mayer’s and Thalberg’s backs) finally ran out in 1933 with a Warnersesque drama called Fast Workers, directed by Tod Browning (of all people!), which cast him and Robert Armstrong as construction workers in love with the same girl (Mae Clarke).
Then Greta Garbo asked for him as her leading man in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 masterpiece Queen Christina after the studio decided that their first choice, John Barrymore, was too great a risk due to his alcoholism and memory problems; and the second choice, Laurence Olivier, tested but Garbo decided he couldn’t hold his own against her. In that film Gilbert wore way too much makeup — as if he were still thinking in terms of the slow and insensitive films used in the early 1920’s — but turned in a perfectly acceptable if hardly incandescent performance that doesn’t get in the way of what’s otherwise a great movie. Gilbert then fell into the hands of Harry Cohn, president of plucky little Columbia Pictures, who took great joy on the rare occasions when he could one-up MGM: in 1934 he signed opera singer Grace Moore after MGM had dropped her for being overweight, and made a movie called One Night of Love that despite its rather phony story (aspiring opera singer Moore hates her ruthlessly authoritarian voice teacher, Tullio Carminati, but eventually falls in love with him and they literally make beautiful music together) became a blockbuster hit, the most popular opera film to that time and for 17 years thereafter (until The Great Caruso). Cohn was evidently hoping that lightning would strike twice and he’d be able to give Gilbert a great comeback role — at least that’s how the director of The Captain Hates the Sea, Lewis Milestone, recalled it later when Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg interviewed him for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse: “Cohn … welcomed Gilbert’s prospective rehabilitation and promised him star treatment, provided he behaved properly. But unfortunately Jack was a little too far gone. For a week he’d be perfect, and then he started drinking. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been for the fact that if he drank one day he couldn’t work the next, because by then he had ulcers and would vomit blood and be very ill.”
The legend is that Milestone thought that by casting Gilbert in a film that took place largely at sea — on an ocean liner which takes a cruise from New York to South America and then back — he could isolate him from all sources of alcohol and thereby keep him sober, but he didn’t reckon with the other members of the cast, including such celebrated imbibers as Victor McLaglen, Walter Connolly (who plays the titular captain that hates the sea), Leon Errol (who actually owned a bar in real life), Walter Catlett, and Alison Skipworth, who brought their own liquor supplies and cheerily shared them with Gilbert. In Bob Thomas’s biography Harry Cohn, there’s a story that Cohn got worried when Milestone’s ship sailed and remained at sea for weeks with no rushes back at the studio to show for it, and he sent a radiogram to Milestone reading, “Hurry up. The cost is staggering,” to which Milestone replied, “So is the cast.” What made the actual film seem bizarre in light of those legends is that if the intent was to give John Gilbert a script that would isolate him from booze and keep him clean, sober and on the way to both personal and professional recovery, The Captain Hates the Sea is about the last story Cohn and Milestone should have picked, because the whole movie is about drinking! Gilbert plays, essentially, himself — he’s called “Steve Bramley” and he’s just bombed out of a career in Hollywood (though as a writer, not an actor), and as his part begins he’s in a taxi being taken to the dock by his fiancée Gerta “Gert” Klangi (Tala Birell). He’s breaking their engagement while assuring her that he’s sober and is going to stay that way. Meanwhile, on board the ship former police officer turned private detective Junius P. Schulte (Victor McLaglen) greets his old friend, ship’s steward Mr. Layton (Leon Errol), and needless to say the first thing they and a third acquaintance of theirs do once they get on the ship is share a bottle! Steve shows up at their stateroom and the moment they offer him some Scotch, he makes a brief show of refusal but then pours himself a big tumbler — and he just keeps getting drunker and drunker all movie. About his only connection with reality is a phonograph record of Gert which she recorded and sneaked into his trunk (along with a pull-out phonograph to play it on), which fortunately keeps him from getting too deeply embroiled with the multiple vamps on ship.
The main vamp is supposed Boston librarian Janet Grayson (Helen Vinson), girlfriend of embezzler Danny Checkett (Fred Keating), who comes aboard the ship, using the name “Farraday,” with $250,000 in stolen bonds which he inexplicably gives her to hold for him even though she’s a crook herself — her aliases include Blanche Dilworthy and “Michigan Red.” There’s also a well-to-do couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jeddock (John Wray and Wynne Gibson), who seem to be happy, only he’s abusive and she’s a former prostitute who’s “outed” by Steve when he recognizes her as someone who serviced him professionally. And if that weren’t enough, there’s also a wealthy and aggressive widow, Mrs. Yolanda Magruder (Alison Skipworth, coming off here as even more of a distaff version of W. C. Fields than she did in their films together!), who’s after Schulte, while Schulte is after Janet, which is just fine with Danny because that presumably means she can seduce him into leaving them alone. There’s also a plot line involving a South American general, Salazaro (Akim Tamiroff), who’s going to his native country to foment a revolution — only as soon as he arrives he’s caught by the authorities and killed by a firing squad, a rather jarring plot twist that just sits in the middle of this movie and never gets resolved. In fact, the most bizarre thing about The Captain Hates the Sea is its sheer plotlessness: in the era in which most screenwriters took pride in their ability to “plant” the ending throughout the movie and give audiences clues along the way to how it was going to turn out, writer Wallace Smith — adapting his own novel — seems to revel in the unpredictability of his plot lines and his skill at keeping multiple story strands going, even though there’s almost no resolution of any of them. Indeed, The Captain Hates the Sea seems so much like a Robert Altman movie four or five decades early — the multiple plot lines, the ensemble cast (for something that was supposedly intended as a comeback vehicle for John Gilbert it’s surprising that he’s only billed fourth — after McLaglen, Gibson and Skipworth, in that order), the lack of conventional resolutions and the sense that the film doesn’t end so much as it just stops — it’s a wonder Altman didn’t remake it.
It’s also filled with marvelous character vignettes and some offbeat casting, including Walter Catlett as the seen-it-all bartender (once, when Gilbert gets into a fight with John Wray and Wray knocks him down, Catlett opens a trap door at the bottom of his bar and hands Gilbert a drink, which revives him and enables him to knock Wray out) whose rotating sign — announcing variously that the bar will close at midnight and will open at 8:30 (presumably a.m., the way these people drink!) — practically becomes a character in the movie itself. There’s also a weird cameo by the Three Stooges (Greta Garbo and the Three Stooges: one degree of separation!), who in 1934 were also MGM rejects who had just signed with Columbia for the long series of comedy shorts for which they’re best remembered, and who appear here as the ship’s band — Moe plays sax (either alto or C-melody, I wasn’t sure which), Larry plays piano and Curly plays drums (later for a more sedate sort of shipboard music Moe switches to violin and Curly to cello!) — and their presence is welcome even though they don’t get to do any slapstick and Larry is the only one who speaks. It ends with Steve and Gert getting back together even though he’s neither sobered up nor written the novel he had promised her he would write; Schulte pairing up with Janet, though it’s not clear whether he’s interested in her or the bonds (ya remember the bonds?); Danny setting off after Mrs. Magruder and her $7 million; and Captain Helquist wearily readying himself for the ship’s next voyage even though he hates the sea, thanks to his father and his father’s long beard (there’s a weird story about that I’m not even going to try to synopsize, though on the voyage there’s been a man with a long beard — Donald Meek, whom we’re used to seeing clean-shaven and here wears so patently phony a fake beard it reminded me of the hilarious scene in Buster Keaton’s Spite Marriage in which, as an aspiring but untalented actor, he desperately tries to get the hang of gluing false whiskers to his face with spirit gum — who supposedly reminds McLaglen of his long-hated dad), while any 1934 audiences who stumbled into theatres that were playing this film probably left scratching their heads and wondering, “What the hell was that?” It’s a film you want to like, partly because it’s generally well acted (though John Gilbert seems all too clearly to be playing himself!) and partly because it’s trying so hard to be sophisticated and “different” — and because much of the droll humor is actually genuinely funny — but it ends up a sporadically entertaining and engaging mess.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera (Met, 12/8/12)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched another Live from the Met broadcast that was being re-run on PBS after having previously been shown closed-circuit in movie theatres: Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, originally performed at the Met on December 8, 2012 in a new production by David Alden that the announcer explained relocated the opera to “a dream vision of early 20th century Scandinavia.” When I heard that I immediately feared the worst: a nonsensical “modern” production along the lines of the Met’s current Traviata and Parsifal, one of those excessive Regietheatre things that cheerily ignores when and where the opera’s creators intended it to take place and substitutes ideas of the director’s own (and ones that often don’t make much — or any — sense to anyone else). Not that Un Ballo in Maschera didn’t raise weird issues of locale even when it was new: Verdi and his librettist, Antonio Somma, had been engaged by the opera company in Naples to do one of Verdi’s long-time dream projects, an opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Unfortunately, Verdi had a specific soprano, Maria Piccolomini, in mind for the key female role in Lear — Lear’s daughter, Cordelia — and the Naples opera was unwilling to guarantee that she would be part of the contract. So Verdi and Somma looked for another story and found it in an old play by French author Eugène Scribe had written called Gustave III, ou Le Bal Masqué, which had already been turned into an opera by French composer Daniel Auber in 1833. It was more or less based on a true story: in 1792, King Gustav III of Sweden had been shot by his political enemies while attending a masked ball. He actually survived for 13 days before expiring. The real Gustav III’s murder was motivated exclusively by politics, but in writing the play Scribe invented two key characters: Count von Anckerström, the king’s principal advisor; and Amélie, Anckerström’s wife. Anckerström is solidly on the king’s side until he learns that the king and Amélie are having an affair, whereupon he joins and, indeed, takes charge of the plot to kill the king for revenge.
Verdi and Somma started work on the project but soon got derailed by the Neapolitan censors, who demanded — as their predecessors in Venice had with Verdi’s Rigoletto in 1851 — that the character of the lecherous king be taken down a few status points. Somma’s new version of the libretto retitled it Un Vendetta in Domino and set the story in the German principality of Pomerania, where Gustav III became the ruling Duke and Anckerström became Renato, his best friend. Unfortunately, a real-life assassination attempt against a ruling monarch — an attack against Emperor Louis Napoleon of France by three Italians on January 14, 1858 — led the Neapolitan censors to demand even further changes. Verdi refused, and the Teatro San Carlo management sued him for breaking his contract (and Verdi countersued), so Verdi presented the opera to Rome and agreed to the further changes demanded by their censors. This involved yet another location change — to, of all places, pre-Revolutionary Boston (marking Ballo as the only opera Verdi ever wrote that takes place in the United States, though there’s also one, the little-known Alzira, that is set in South America), in which the king became the colonial governor Riccardo. While Rigoletto has generally been left where Verdi ultimately put it, in Mantua, Italy (though the Met’s current production moved it to Las Vegas c. 1960 to surprisingly good effect), more recent productions of Ballo (following a precedent begun in Copenhagen in 1935) have sometimes moved the story back to Sweden, turned Riccardo back into King Gustav, and imposed the somewhat awkward-sounding Swedish names on the singers.
Charles and I watched another Live from the Met broadcast that was being re-run on PBS after having previously been shown closed-circuit in movie theatres: Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, originally performed at the Met on December 8, 2012 in a new production by David Alden that the announcer explained relocated the opera to “a dream vision of early 20th century Scandinavia.” When I heard that I immediately feared the worst: a nonsensical “modern” production along the lines of the Met’s current Traviata and Parsifal, one of those excessive Regietheatre things that cheerily ignores when and where the opera’s creators intended it to take place and substitutes ideas of the director’s own (and ones that often don’t make much — or any — sense to anyone else). Not that Un Ballo in Maschera didn’t raise weird issues of locale even when it was new: Verdi and his librettist, Antonio Somma, had been engaged by the opera company in Naples to do one of Verdi’s long-time dream projects, an opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Unfortunately, Verdi had a specific soprano, Maria Piccolomini, in mind for the key female role in Lear — Lear’s daughter, Cordelia — and the Naples opera was unwilling to guarantee that she would be part of the contract. So Verdi and Somma looked for another story and found it in an old play by French author Eugène Scribe had written called Gustave III, ou Le Bal Masqué, which had already been turned into an opera by French composer Daniel Auber in 1833. It was more or less based on a true story: in 1792, King Gustav III of Sweden had been shot by his political enemies while attending a masked ball. He actually survived for 13 days before expiring. The real Gustav III’s murder was motivated exclusively by politics, but in writing the play Scribe invented two key characters: Count von Anckerström, the king’s principal advisor; and Amélie, Anckerström’s wife. Anckerström is solidly on the king’s side until he learns that the king and Amélie are having an affair, whereupon he joins and, indeed, takes charge of the plot to kill the king for revenge.
Verdi and Somma started work on the project but soon got derailed by the Neapolitan censors, who demanded — as their predecessors in Venice had with Verdi’s Rigoletto in 1851 — that the character of the lecherous king be taken down a few status points. Somma’s new version of the libretto retitled it Un Vendetta in Domino and set the story in the German principality of Pomerania, where Gustav III became the ruling Duke and Anckerström became Renato, his best friend. Unfortunately, a real-life assassination attempt against a ruling monarch — an attack against Emperor Louis Napoleon of France by three Italians on January 14, 1858 — led the Neapolitan censors to demand even further changes. Verdi refused, and the Teatro San Carlo management sued him for breaking his contract (and Verdi countersued), so Verdi presented the opera to Rome and agreed to the further changes demanded by their censors. This involved yet another location change — to, of all places, pre-Revolutionary Boston (marking Ballo as the only opera Verdi ever wrote that takes place in the United States, though there’s also one, the little-known Alzira, that is set in South America), in which the king became the colonial governor Riccardo. While Rigoletto has generally been left where Verdi ultimately put it, in Mantua, Italy (though the Met’s current production moved it to Las Vegas c. 1960 to surprisingly good effect), more recent productions of Ballo (following a precedent begun in Copenhagen in 1935) have sometimes moved the story back to Sweden, turned Riccardo back into King Gustav, and imposed the somewhat awkward-sounding Swedish names on the singers.
David Alden
used the Swedish names but placed it in a setting that looks vaguely early 20th
century, though since the action hardly ever leaves the palace and gardens of
King Gustav there aren’t any cars or other indications of modernity and only
the clothes and the metallic walls and office furniture (which in the first act
is being shoved around on-stage, an expedient one can forgive a small-budget
community theatre but just looks ridiculous and illusion-destroying at a big
operation like the Met) give away that whenever this is supposed to be taking
place, it isn’t 1792. Fortunately, Alden’s production, while sometimes
pointless, is at least not gratuitously offensive or silly like most Regietheatre today; if it doesn’t really add anything to Verdi’s
(and Somma’s) story, it at least doesn’t detract much and one can enjoy the
opera for what Verdi wrote without being offended by the stage trappings. The
story is pretty simple: in Act I, we meet Riccardo/Gustav (Marcello Álvarez)
planning his upcoming masked ball and reviewing the list of guests; he sees
Amelia’s (Sondra Radvanovsky) name on the list and immediately starts singing
of how much he loves her and how much joy he’s going to derive from her
presence even though she’s married to his best friend and the two of them have
had a son (whom we never see but who becomes an important, though offstage, presence
in the last act). The king/duke/governor or whatever he is gets a complaint
about a fortune-teller, Ulrica (Stephanie Blythe), who’s working outside the
palace. The king’s head judge wants her operation shut down but Riccardo
decides to disguise himself as a sailor and check her out for himself. When a real sailor shows up and Ulrica says he’s soon going to
bet a raise and a promotion, Riccardo secretly slips money and a signed order
promoting him into his pocket, thereby convincing the crowd that Ulrica is the
real deal. Ulrica tells Riccardo he will be killed by a friend, freaking him
out, but he laughs it off and “outs” himself to the crowd.
In the second act
(though the Met presented the first two acts without intermission, making for a
very long 90-minute first act) we
finally meet Amelia, looking in
the palace garden for an herb Ulrica has told her to find, singing an aria in
which she says she loves Riccardo but wishes she didn’t. Then Riccardo himself
shows up and they sing a rather edgy duet, “Teco io sto!” Then Anckerström
(Dmitri Hvorotovsky) shows up to warn the king that the assassins have traced
him to the garden and are about to kill him if he doesn’t exit, pronto.
Riccardo gets away but Anckerström is left in the garden with a veiled woman he
doesn’t realize is his own wife (yeah, right … ), and when she unveils herself so the assassins
will leave her alone, Anckerström finally realizes that his wife and his best friend the king have been having
an affair, which causes him to switch sides and first threaten to kill his wife
— she talks him out of it in the famous aria “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” in
which she pleads to see their son one last time before she dies — and then join
the plot to assassinate the king. Along with two (real-life) figures, Count Von
Ribbing and Count Van Horn (who in the American version of the opera became
“Sam” and “Tom”!), Renato draws lots to see who’s going to commit the actual
murder, and of course Renato gets the nod. Briefed by Riccardo’s page Oscar (a
“trouser” role for coloratura soprano, here sung by Kathleen Kim — this seems
to have been Verdi following in the footsteps of Mozart after the success of The
Marriage of Figaro, whose perky teenage
page boy sung by a woman in drag seems to have launched a whole lot of similar
characters over the next several generations of opera) what costume Riccardo
will be wearing to the costume party (the weakest part of Alden’s direction: he
has the walls of the palace close in at oblique angles à la The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and totally misses
the point that the murder is supposed to take place against a backdrop of empty
gaiety), and Renato shoots him. With his dying breaths (for once a character in
opera takes less time to expire
than his real-life counterpart did!) Riccardo forgives and pardons all the
participants in the plot against him, assures Renato that though he wanted to have sex with Renato’s wife they never actually
did so, and the opera ends.
The Met’s production suffered from some longueurs, but it was at least well conducted (by the Met’s
current music director, Fabio Luisi, who’s developing into a much stronger
conductor than the one that plodded through Wagner a few years ago) and
decently sung. Marcelo Álvarez is basically a Pavarotti-style tenor (when the
Met telecast this opera in 1980 Pavarotti sang Riccardo, beautifully); he isn’t
quite as overwhelming either in his charisma or his bulk, but he basically has
the same sort of voice and the same approach to the role. Sondra Radvanovsky
has been hailed as the greatest currently active Verdi soprano; I don’t think
she’s that fabulous (frankly, I
think Angela Meade — who took over from an indisposed Radvanovsky in Ernani and inherited that soprano role — is better) but
she’s certainly quite good; her voice comes off as a mix between Callas and
Leontyne Price and is at least reassuring to those who think Callas’s death and
Price’s retirement killed off the true Verdi soprano voice. Dmitri Hvorotovsky
wears snow-white hair, apparently in a desperate attempt to keep him from being
sexier than the tenor (in the Met’s last Traviata he looked both younger and hotter than the tenor
supposedly playing his son!). Stephanie Blythe came across, praise be, as a
real contralto instead of the pulled-down mezzo that usually gets plugged into
roles like this, though in a weird way it was disappointing to see a white
performer as Ulrica — not only because this was the part in which Marian
Anderson became the first African-American of either gender to sing at the Met
(on January 1, 1955) but because my own view of how to stage Ballo would be to set it in ante-bellum New Orleans (in
the pre-Civil War South the idea of a big masked ball would make sense, where
it wouldn’t have in Puritan
Boston!), to set the scene with Ulrica in Congo Square and pattern her on the
legendary Marie Laveau. Kathleen Kim sang her rather silly coloratura part
quite well — though I think her makeup people overdid the fake facial hair in a
foredoomed attempt to make her look “male” — and overall this Ballo was a reasonably good interpretation of a
second-tier Verdi opera, not as much fun as it could have been but also well
conducted, well sung, and with a production that didn’t add much to the
original but fortunately didn’t get in the way either!
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Looper (Endgame Entertainment, DMG Entertainment, FilmDistrict, TriStar, 2012)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Looper, a 2012 sci-fi film written and directed by Rian Johnson — whose first feature, Brick (2005), I’d quite liked, so both Charles and I were looking forward to this one. It was a major disappointment, a surprisingly dull sci-fi thriller set in Kansas in the year 2044. As the narrator and central character, Joe (Brick star Joseph Gordon-Levitt), economically explains to us at the start, time travel hasn’t been invented in 2044 but by 2074, 30 years into the future, it has been. Unfortunately, because of the obvious dangers involved in having people rooting around the past and changing things in the future, it was outlawed almost as soon as it was invented, so today the only people doing time travel are the criminal syndicates which essentially govern the U.S. (and, one gets the impression, the world — Rian Johnson isn’t especially interested in backstory but the future in this movie is a typical modern-day dystopian one in which civilization has essentially broken down, technological development has stopped, and the law of the jungle rules again). In order to eliminate their enemies without a trace, they send their victims back 30 years, where they are killed, and their bodies incinerated, by “Loopers” — hired contract killers who off them and then dump their bodies down a shaft to a waiting fire, which consumes them. Thus, to the world of 2074, these people just disappear and the syndicates who ordered their murders don’t have to be worried about any tell-tale physical evidence linking them to the killings (though just what outside authority they’d have to worry about anyway is one of the many aspects of Johnson’s story that remains ambiguous).
The catch in being a Looper is that eventually the syndicate is going to decide to eliminate you, so they send back your 30-years-older incarnation from 2074 and you’re supposed to shoot yourself, then live out the rest of your life on the gold pieces you’ve been paid, one for each previous hit (the gold bars in the film are engraved with Chinese symbols — courtesy of a weird production deal Johnson’s producers cut with the Chinese government to film a flashback scene in Shanghai so the movie would be considered a Chinese film, entitled to preferential distribution in China), until you reach the end of the “loop” — the time you were sent back 30 years so you could kill yourself. The plan starts to go awry when one Looper, Seth (Paul Dano, too fine an actor to be wasted in so small a part), fails to kill his older incarnation when he’s supposed to do so and is therefore marked for death himself. Joe tries to hide him out, and later when Joe’s own older incarnation (Bruce Willis) is sent back he can’t kill him, either. From a confrontation scene at a local café where the 2044 version of Joe is a regular (and where he practices French to a long-suffering waitress, Beatrix [Tracie Thoms], even though his older version says he’d be better off learning Mandarin instead — given China’s increasing importance to the world economy, he probably would be, too), young Joe learns from old Joe that the world of 2074 has been taken over by a mysterious man called the “Rainmaker” who’s sending all the Loopers back to be executed by their younger selves: he’s also managed to get the largest five cities remaining in the U.S. under his control, and he somehow was able to do that entirely on his own without any other people in his gang.
Just how that happened isn’t explained until the end of the film — though Johnson is a good enough screenwriter, with a well-developed enough knowledge of classic Hollywood and its strategies, to have “planted” a clue. It seems that some people in this dystopian future have developed what’s called the “TK Mutation,” an ability to practice telekinesis which whatever authorities still existed (at times in Johnson’s story the U.S. of 2044 seems to have a functioning government, at other times it doesn’t) were hoping would lead to the development of real-life super-heroes. Unfortunately, as far as anybody knew, the telekinesis properties of the TK mutants were so limited that the mutation basically turned into a gimmick horny TK straight guys used to pick up women: they would cause quarters to float in mid-air about six inches above their hands and hope this impressed their targets enough so they’d get laid. Young Joe ends up hiding out on a farm owned by a butch woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) who’s by far the most interesting character in the dramatis personae (and Blunt plays her with an authority that eludes most of the males in the cast). We meet her carrying a long gun and threatening to shoot Joe, saying she’s already shot and killed three vagrants trying to trespass on her property — the impression we get is that without much of a functioning economy in this dystopian nightmare of a future, there are a lot of vagrants running around and anybody who does own property is going to have to defend it with firearms (though if there isn’t an economy and a manufacturing infrastructure, where are they getting the bullets from?) — though eventually young Joe talks her into hiding him out. She has a son named Cid (Pierce Gagnon) — that’s how the first name is spelled in the cast list on the film’s imdb.com page — whose age is variously described as five or 10 (he looked about 8 to me; Pierce Gagnon’s imdb.com page doesn’t mention his real age but his first credit was in 2010) and who may be her natural child or who may be her late sister’s child. When Cid was born Sara was leading a dissolute life full of drugs and casual sex (meaning she has no idea who Cid’s father was) and she placed the baby with her sister, who raised him until she was murdered, at least according to the version of Cid’s origins we’re apparently supposed to believe — though Cid is convinced that the sister was his real mother and it’s Sara who’s just a foster parent.
With both Joes alive and running around the world of 2044, the Rainmaker back in 2074 organizes a hit squad led by Abe (Jeff Daniels) to go back to 2044 and take them both out, while the old Joe has hatched a plot of his own: now that he’s back in 2044 he wants to find the Rainmaker and eliminate him while he’s still a child so he never lives to take power and condemn all the Loopers to death by their own hands. Old Joe has traced three children who may become the Rainmaker when (if) they grow up, and Cid is one of them; in a spectacular action scene old Joe takes out Abe’s entire hit squad — both Charles and I said at that point, “Now it looks like a Bruce Willis movie!” — and the climax occurs at Sara’s farm, where it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Cid has the super-version of the TK mutation that was being hoped for way back when in that other plot strand. The film turns into Carrie meets The Omen as Cid vanquishes the remaining people who are trying to kill him by raising great waves of soil and agricultural debris — and old Joe tries to shoot Cid but Sara steps in front of him and takes the bullet himself. Then we learn that the last minute or so is a precognition of events in the mind of young Joe, who decides to short-circuit the future by shooting himself, thereby making old Joe disappear (reminding us of the movie The Sixth Sense, another Bruce Willis film in which the famous surprise gimmick was that Willis’s character had died at the beginning and thereafter existed only in the mind of the kid played by Haley Joel Osment, who “saw dead people”) and allowing Sara and Cid to get away, hopefully avoiding subjecting Cid to the bitter traumas that send his mind off the rails and turned him into the Rainmaker. (Yeah, right.) It seemed odd that not long after we had watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Manxman — another movie in which a powerful director’s talents were wasted on a formulaic and rather silly story — we’d be watching another movie in which a powerful director’s talents were wasted on a formulaic and more than a bit silly story, though in this case (as I’m fond of saying whenever I’m disappointed by a film in which the writer and director were the same person), the director was also the writer and therefore had no one to blame but himself.
Looper has some of the characteristics that made me like Brick so much — including the love of picturesque incomprehensibility (Looper makes me even more convinced than Brick did that Blue Sunshine and Repo Man are Rian Johnson’s all-time favorite films!) and references to old movies that for once add richness to the tale instead of calling attention to the writer-director’s cleverness (the club at which the Loopers watch strippers and do a drug that’s administered as eyedrops is called La Belle Aurore — also the name of the nightclub Humphrey Bogart’s character was running in Paris in the flashback sequence of Casablanca, which he fled with his piano player Sam [Dooley Wilson] before waiting in vain for his girlfriend, Ingrid Bergman, to meet him at the train leaving the Nazi-occupied city — and Emily Blunt’s character is clearly inspired by Sally Field’s role in Places in the Heart), as well as the sexual role reversal (in one scene Sara summons young Joe with the alarm system — two toy frogs that croak when one of their bodies is pressed — they’ve rigged up in case they’re in danger, only she calls him not because she’s in danger but because she’s horny and wants him to fuck her) — but all too much of it is dull and routine. Johnson’s love of powerful visuals and his disinclination to make his movie make sense combine to produce an impressively atmospheric movie but also a surprisingly staid one; for all the surprises (especially at the end) a lot of the sequences are awfully predictable, and as much as I like Johnson’s style the impression I get from Looper is perhaps it’s time for him to try directing a movie based on a script he hasn’t written. It also doesn’t help that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was plastered with prosthetic makeup in a vain attempt to make him look more like the young Bruce Willis; he was a marvelously expressive actor in Brick (even though the plot of Brick, even more than that of Looper, required him to do little more than suffer) but here he seems trying to fight his way through all the rubber on his face to communicate any emotions at all.
What’s most interesting about Looper is less its aesthetic quality as a movie than its status as a window into the Zeitgeist: it’s one more story of the future that basically describes it as a sinister, brutal place, one more indication that Americans have at least unconsciously accepted that things aren’t going to get any better in this country and the future is going to be very much like the present, only more so: an ever-shrinking gang of ultra-rich people at the top (though we never see any physical evidence of their existence) lording it over an ever more impoverished mass population (if there were an Occupy movement in Looper’s version of 2044 its slogan would probably be, “We Are the 99.9 Percent”), and the ever more impoverished masses basically accepting the fact that they’re on their own, no government or social movement is going to save them, and all they have to protect themselves against predators both above and below them on the socioeconomic scale is their grit, determination and (especially) guns. It’s an odd vision of the future for a country historically known for its optimism, though it’s congenial both to the Left and the Right — you can read it as the rich oppressing everyone else or as the final confirmation of the radical-Right message that everyone’s on their own and they can’t afford to trust anybody, especially people below them with their hands out — and it’s one that seems to dominate popular entertainment these days, especially when popular entertainment bothers to consider what the future will be like at all. The Hunger Games was a much better movie than Looper (and its novel was even better than the film!) but it and Wall-E come from the same place — as does Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s new movie (and a career boost for him after the deserved flop of his Jack Reacher film, for which Christopher Meloni would have been perfect and Cruise was totally miscast): a dank, depressing, despairing vision of the future that rules out both belief in and support of the status quo and any hope that it could ever get any better or that any movements for change have any hope of improving things at all.
The film was Looper, a 2012 sci-fi film written and directed by Rian Johnson — whose first feature, Brick (2005), I’d quite liked, so both Charles and I were looking forward to this one. It was a major disappointment, a surprisingly dull sci-fi thriller set in Kansas in the year 2044. As the narrator and central character, Joe (Brick star Joseph Gordon-Levitt), economically explains to us at the start, time travel hasn’t been invented in 2044 but by 2074, 30 years into the future, it has been. Unfortunately, because of the obvious dangers involved in having people rooting around the past and changing things in the future, it was outlawed almost as soon as it was invented, so today the only people doing time travel are the criminal syndicates which essentially govern the U.S. (and, one gets the impression, the world — Rian Johnson isn’t especially interested in backstory but the future in this movie is a typical modern-day dystopian one in which civilization has essentially broken down, technological development has stopped, and the law of the jungle rules again). In order to eliminate their enemies without a trace, they send their victims back 30 years, where they are killed, and their bodies incinerated, by “Loopers” — hired contract killers who off them and then dump their bodies down a shaft to a waiting fire, which consumes them. Thus, to the world of 2074, these people just disappear and the syndicates who ordered their murders don’t have to be worried about any tell-tale physical evidence linking them to the killings (though just what outside authority they’d have to worry about anyway is one of the many aspects of Johnson’s story that remains ambiguous).
The catch in being a Looper is that eventually the syndicate is going to decide to eliminate you, so they send back your 30-years-older incarnation from 2074 and you’re supposed to shoot yourself, then live out the rest of your life on the gold pieces you’ve been paid, one for each previous hit (the gold bars in the film are engraved with Chinese symbols — courtesy of a weird production deal Johnson’s producers cut with the Chinese government to film a flashback scene in Shanghai so the movie would be considered a Chinese film, entitled to preferential distribution in China), until you reach the end of the “loop” — the time you were sent back 30 years so you could kill yourself. The plan starts to go awry when one Looper, Seth (Paul Dano, too fine an actor to be wasted in so small a part), fails to kill his older incarnation when he’s supposed to do so and is therefore marked for death himself. Joe tries to hide him out, and later when Joe’s own older incarnation (Bruce Willis) is sent back he can’t kill him, either. From a confrontation scene at a local café where the 2044 version of Joe is a regular (and where he practices French to a long-suffering waitress, Beatrix [Tracie Thoms], even though his older version says he’d be better off learning Mandarin instead — given China’s increasing importance to the world economy, he probably would be, too), young Joe learns from old Joe that the world of 2074 has been taken over by a mysterious man called the “Rainmaker” who’s sending all the Loopers back to be executed by their younger selves: he’s also managed to get the largest five cities remaining in the U.S. under his control, and he somehow was able to do that entirely on his own without any other people in his gang.
Just how that happened isn’t explained until the end of the film — though Johnson is a good enough screenwriter, with a well-developed enough knowledge of classic Hollywood and its strategies, to have “planted” a clue. It seems that some people in this dystopian future have developed what’s called the “TK Mutation,” an ability to practice telekinesis which whatever authorities still existed (at times in Johnson’s story the U.S. of 2044 seems to have a functioning government, at other times it doesn’t) were hoping would lead to the development of real-life super-heroes. Unfortunately, as far as anybody knew, the telekinesis properties of the TK mutants were so limited that the mutation basically turned into a gimmick horny TK straight guys used to pick up women: they would cause quarters to float in mid-air about six inches above their hands and hope this impressed their targets enough so they’d get laid. Young Joe ends up hiding out on a farm owned by a butch woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) who’s by far the most interesting character in the dramatis personae (and Blunt plays her with an authority that eludes most of the males in the cast). We meet her carrying a long gun and threatening to shoot Joe, saying she’s already shot and killed three vagrants trying to trespass on her property — the impression we get is that without much of a functioning economy in this dystopian nightmare of a future, there are a lot of vagrants running around and anybody who does own property is going to have to defend it with firearms (though if there isn’t an economy and a manufacturing infrastructure, where are they getting the bullets from?) — though eventually young Joe talks her into hiding him out. She has a son named Cid (Pierce Gagnon) — that’s how the first name is spelled in the cast list on the film’s imdb.com page — whose age is variously described as five or 10 (he looked about 8 to me; Pierce Gagnon’s imdb.com page doesn’t mention his real age but his first credit was in 2010) and who may be her natural child or who may be her late sister’s child. When Cid was born Sara was leading a dissolute life full of drugs and casual sex (meaning she has no idea who Cid’s father was) and she placed the baby with her sister, who raised him until she was murdered, at least according to the version of Cid’s origins we’re apparently supposed to believe — though Cid is convinced that the sister was his real mother and it’s Sara who’s just a foster parent.
With both Joes alive and running around the world of 2044, the Rainmaker back in 2074 organizes a hit squad led by Abe (Jeff Daniels) to go back to 2044 and take them both out, while the old Joe has hatched a plot of his own: now that he’s back in 2044 he wants to find the Rainmaker and eliminate him while he’s still a child so he never lives to take power and condemn all the Loopers to death by their own hands. Old Joe has traced three children who may become the Rainmaker when (if) they grow up, and Cid is one of them; in a spectacular action scene old Joe takes out Abe’s entire hit squad — both Charles and I said at that point, “Now it looks like a Bruce Willis movie!” — and the climax occurs at Sara’s farm, where it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Cid has the super-version of the TK mutation that was being hoped for way back when in that other plot strand. The film turns into Carrie meets The Omen as Cid vanquishes the remaining people who are trying to kill him by raising great waves of soil and agricultural debris — and old Joe tries to shoot Cid but Sara steps in front of him and takes the bullet himself. Then we learn that the last minute or so is a precognition of events in the mind of young Joe, who decides to short-circuit the future by shooting himself, thereby making old Joe disappear (reminding us of the movie The Sixth Sense, another Bruce Willis film in which the famous surprise gimmick was that Willis’s character had died at the beginning and thereafter existed only in the mind of the kid played by Haley Joel Osment, who “saw dead people”) and allowing Sara and Cid to get away, hopefully avoiding subjecting Cid to the bitter traumas that send his mind off the rails and turned him into the Rainmaker. (Yeah, right.) It seemed odd that not long after we had watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Manxman — another movie in which a powerful director’s talents were wasted on a formulaic and rather silly story — we’d be watching another movie in which a powerful director’s talents were wasted on a formulaic and more than a bit silly story, though in this case (as I’m fond of saying whenever I’m disappointed by a film in which the writer and director were the same person), the director was also the writer and therefore had no one to blame but himself.
Looper has some of the characteristics that made me like Brick so much — including the love of picturesque incomprehensibility (Looper makes me even more convinced than Brick did that Blue Sunshine and Repo Man are Rian Johnson’s all-time favorite films!) and references to old movies that for once add richness to the tale instead of calling attention to the writer-director’s cleverness (the club at which the Loopers watch strippers and do a drug that’s administered as eyedrops is called La Belle Aurore — also the name of the nightclub Humphrey Bogart’s character was running in Paris in the flashback sequence of Casablanca, which he fled with his piano player Sam [Dooley Wilson] before waiting in vain for his girlfriend, Ingrid Bergman, to meet him at the train leaving the Nazi-occupied city — and Emily Blunt’s character is clearly inspired by Sally Field’s role in Places in the Heart), as well as the sexual role reversal (in one scene Sara summons young Joe with the alarm system — two toy frogs that croak when one of their bodies is pressed — they’ve rigged up in case they’re in danger, only she calls him not because she’s in danger but because she’s horny and wants him to fuck her) — but all too much of it is dull and routine. Johnson’s love of powerful visuals and his disinclination to make his movie make sense combine to produce an impressively atmospheric movie but also a surprisingly staid one; for all the surprises (especially at the end) a lot of the sequences are awfully predictable, and as much as I like Johnson’s style the impression I get from Looper is perhaps it’s time for him to try directing a movie based on a script he hasn’t written. It also doesn’t help that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was plastered with prosthetic makeup in a vain attempt to make him look more like the young Bruce Willis; he was a marvelously expressive actor in Brick (even though the plot of Brick, even more than that of Looper, required him to do little more than suffer) but here he seems trying to fight his way through all the rubber on his face to communicate any emotions at all.
What’s most interesting about Looper is less its aesthetic quality as a movie than its status as a window into the Zeitgeist: it’s one more story of the future that basically describes it as a sinister, brutal place, one more indication that Americans have at least unconsciously accepted that things aren’t going to get any better in this country and the future is going to be very much like the present, only more so: an ever-shrinking gang of ultra-rich people at the top (though we never see any physical evidence of their existence) lording it over an ever more impoverished mass population (if there were an Occupy movement in Looper’s version of 2044 its slogan would probably be, “We Are the 99.9 Percent”), and the ever more impoverished masses basically accepting the fact that they’re on their own, no government or social movement is going to save them, and all they have to protect themselves against predators both above and below them on the socioeconomic scale is their grit, determination and (especially) guns. It’s an odd vision of the future for a country historically known for its optimism, though it’s congenial both to the Left and the Right — you can read it as the rich oppressing everyone else or as the final confirmation of the radical-Right message that everyone’s on their own and they can’t afford to trust anybody, especially people below them with their hands out — and it’s one that seems to dominate popular entertainment these days, especially when popular entertainment bothers to consider what the future will be like at all. The Hunger Games was a much better movie than Looper (and its novel was even better than the film!) but it and Wall-E come from the same place — as does Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s new movie (and a career boost for him after the deserved flop of his Jack Reacher film, for which Christopher Meloni would have been perfect and Cruise was totally miscast): a dank, depressing, despairing vision of the future that rules out both belief in and support of the status quo and any hope that it could ever get any better or that any movements for change have any hope of improving things at all.
Friday, May 10, 2013
The Manxman (British International, 1928)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Manxman, a 1928 production (though imdb.com dates it a year later) from John Maxwell’s British International Pictures of a famous 1894 novel by Sir Hall Caine, and I chose to screen this now because Charles had been doing Web searches for early novels with intimations of homosexuality and Hall Caine’s name had come up. He asked me if I’d ever heard of Hall Caine and I said, “Yes, Alfred Hitchcock filmed one of his novels, The Manxman, as his last silent film in 1928.” I got this movie as part of a boxed set of 20 Hitchcock items, mostly feature films from his British years, both silent (The Lodger, Easy Virtue, The Ring, The Farmer’s Wife, Champagne and The Manxman) and sound (Blackmail, Juno and the Paycock, The Skin Game, Rich and Strange, Number Seventeen, The Man Who Knew Too Much — first version — The Thirty-Nine Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn), along with two episodes from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show, “The Cheney Vase” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Needless to say, I was most interested in the more unusual items, including all four of the silent films Hitchcock made for British International after Maxwell hired him away from Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures in 1927 (though I’d still like to see some of the more obscure films from Hitchcock’s British years, including Elstree Calling — an all-star musical for which Hitchcock shot only some framing scenes, not enough for him to put it on his official résumé — and the one full-dress musical Hitchcock ever made, Waltzes from Vienna, with Jessie Matthews featured in a biopic of Johann Strauss, Jr.). I’d seen one of them before — The Farmer’s Wife, a dreadfully unfunny romantic comedy in which a widower scours his small village looking for a woman to marry, only to realize in the final reel (about four reels after we realized it) that the person he’s really in love with, and would make him a good mate, is his maid. When I watched that one I commented, “There are a few touches in this film that prefigure the later Hitchcock but you really have to be watching with an eagle eye to spot them: Sam’s courtship of one of his would-be brides on horseback as they ride down a path with their backs to the camera (a shot Hitch duplicated 18 years later with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in Notorious), another sequence in which the maid is slicing bread with a prominently photographed bread knife when the doorbell rings (a year later Hitch would do this famously in a far more sinister, suspenseful and ‘Hitchcockian’ context in Blackmail — and given that the two films were made at the same studio just a year apart it’s probably the same bread knife and the same stock shot of a doorbell ringing) and a nice bit of what Hitch later called ‘negative acting’ on the part of the long-suffering Lillian Hall Davis.”
The Manxman is a romantic melodrama rather than a romantic comedy, and while not the sort of suspense thriller Hitchcock would become identified with (as Maurice Yacowar pointed out in his book on Hitchcock’s British years, of his first 17 feature films only four were thrillers), it’s quite a remarkable movie, showing that Hitchcock’s directorial chops were already fully formed. The problem is the film’s plot: it’s set on the Isle of Man (as you might guess from the title — at least if you were British or had otherwise learned that a “Manxman” is what the Brits call someone from the Isle of Man) and it starts out as what would now be called a “bromance.” Two young men, aspiring attorney Philip Christian (Malcolm Keen) and fisherman Pete Quilliam (Carl Brisson, the Danish entertainer who had already acted for Hitchcock in The Ring and in 1934 would come to the U.S. to play the male lead in the musical Murder at the Vanities; he wouldn’t establish a permanent career in the U.S. but his son, Frederick Brisson, would: Brisson fils became a stage producer and married actress Rosalind Russell), have become fast friends — only, this being a movie (and a silent movie at that), a woman has come between them. The woman is barmaid Kate Cregeen (Polish-born German actress Anny Ondra, seen here without the handicap of a voice double that dogged her in her next Hitchcock film, Blackmail, where she had to play her sound scenes lip-synching to a British actress, Joan Barry, delivering her lines into an off-camera mike: the reason was Ondra was supposed to be playing the daughter of a London grocer and her German accent would have been unbelievable in the role), daughter of Caesar Cregeen (Randle Ayrton), the man who owns the bar where she works. Both men are in love with Kate, but Philip doesn’t want to marry her because tying himself to a mere barmaid would interfere with his ability to follow in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps and become a deemster (a footnote to one of the titles helpfully explains that a “deemster” is what they call a judge on the Isle of Man, whose legal system is sufficiently different from that of the mainland U.K. that Caine’s novel explains that Christian had to get two legal licenses, one to practice in the rest of Britain and one specifically for the Isle of Man), while Caesar vetoes Pete’s proposal to his daughter because Pete’s nothing but a penniless fisherman and Caesar wants Kate to “marry up.”
So Pete decides to leave for South Africa (a plot twist that’s a bit dated — in 1894, when Caine wrote the novel, there was a gold rush under way in South Africa and a lot of poor Brits were heading out there, but by 1928 that bit of history was long since over) and he returns having made his fortune. In the meantime, though, he had asked Christian to “look after” Kate, and “looking after” had involved taking her on long walks and … With the typical reticence of a 1928 movie, especially one which had to get past the British Board of Film Censors, the “and” is merely hinted at, but in a typically preposterous plot complication Christian and Kate receive word that Pete has died in South Africa and therefore they feel free to pursue their affair. They evidently pursue it at least as far as the bedroom because, when Pete comes back — having made his fortune and not died at all (a “surprise” that won’t be at all surprising to anybody who’s seen more than two movies in their life) — he and Kate are married, and then Kate has to tell first Christian and then Pete that she’s going to have Christian’s baby. (Charles noticed that Anny Ondra’s lips could clearly be seen forming the word “baby” even though the titles didn’t say that — but then in the silent era a lot of moviegoers got good at reading lips and noting that what the actors really were saying wasn’t always what the title cards said they were saying, and in 1926 Fox got nasty letters from filmgoers who had seen What Price Glory? and lip-read the actors speaking the dirty words from Laurence Stallings’ play even though the titles had bowdlerized Stallings’ lines.) The baby is born, a girl, and Pete and Kate raise her as their own — but they’re miserable about it and Kate is now in love with Christian instead of her husband. But without Kate to tie him down Christian now is appointed deemster — only the first case he’s assigned to hear is Kate’s attempted suicide, which leads him to Confess All in open court. In the end Christian and Kate leave the Isle of Man with the baby, which Pete reluctantly gives up to the two people who are, after all, her biological parents, and Pete sets forth on another fishing trip — though the titles said he made money in South Africa, he doesn’t seem to be living any better when he returns than he did before he left. The Manxman is an unusually class-conscious story, especially for a director like Hitchcock who usually didn’t give a damn about class, and much of it turns on the conflict between the aristocracy (even the small-time Isle of Man aristocracy represented by the Christian family) and the rest of us.
Hitchcock lavishes all his future trademarks on a story that really doesn’t accommodate them very well — dark, shadowy lighting, oblique camera angles, symbolic shots, quick cuts and an overall atmosphere of picturesque doom — and shows what a great director he would become when he started making films whose plots lent themselves to his style. He also gets a marvelous performance from Anny Ondra, who burns up the screen and dominates each scene in which she appears (her work here makes me want to see the silent version of Blackmail sometime) even though her performance seems strikingly reminiscent of Greta Garbo’s work in Flesh and the Devil (another “bromance” in which a woman comes between the two male leads — though it ends considerably more homoerotically than The Manxman; in Flesh and the Devil Garbo’s character dies and the two men, John Gilbert and Lars Hanson, are arm-in-arm at the fadeout!) — indeed it occurred to me that John Maxwell picked this story not only because Hall Caine was a well-remembered author whose name would draw audiences but also because he picked up on the Flesh and the Devil connection and figured he could have as big a hit with a similar story. Ondra is great both in the early scenes, in which her emotions are so explosive it looks like the screen can barely contain her, and in the final courtroom confrontation, where she looks genuinely penitent and her acting is restrained in the manner of later Hitchcock heroines. The two men are simply not as well cast as Ondra: Carl Brisson essentially lets his good looks do his acting for him, and Malcolm Keen as Christian manages exactly one expression — a mild queasiness — through the whole film. I’m not sure whether the problem was with Keen himself, Hitchcock’s direction of him, or the character. When I looked up Caine’s novel on line and read Christian described thusly — “Peter was little and almost misshapen, with a pair of shoulders that seemed to be trying to meet over a hollow chest and limbs that splayed away into vacancy” — I could only think that Hitchcock and his casting director probably thought, “Lots of luck finding an actor who looks like that — and even more luck finding an actor who looks like that whom audiences will actually pay to see!” And given how much religious and moral angst is involved in this story (Caine’s chapter titles are, in order, “Boys Together,” “Boy and Girl,” “Man and Woman,” “Man and Wife,” “Man and Man,” and “Man and God”), one gets the impression that the right director for a sound remake would have been Ingmar Bergman.
Throughout The Manxman one’s struck by the contrast between the trite, obvious story and the cinematic dexterity with which Hitchcock was directing it, the stunning rightness of virtually all his framing, angling and cutting decisions. He actually shot the exteriors on location on the Isle of Man (not that he had to go that far — it wasn’t like the film was actually set in Spain, like Flesh and the Devil!) and there’s one incredible scene (which I’d seen before in stills — incidentally the still photographer on this movie was a future director, Michael Powell) of Anny Ondra walking along the beach among these incredible rock formations that seem to loom over her and seal her fate. There are plenty of visual motifs that anticipate Hitchcock’s later (and better known) movies, and if you watch The Manxman in the right frame of mind you can get a feel for Hitchcock’s sense of morbidity and doom even while lamenting the ordinariness and “movieness” of the story — even though it pre-dates all but the first and crudest films, Hall Caine’s novel all too perfectly anticipates the combination of titillation and surface “morality” of many subsequent movie plots, including the “redemption through suffering” the U.S. Production Code decreed as the fate that should befall an adulterous couple in a film. The version we were seeing was badly framed — it looked like a film soundtrack had been crudely put on it and the left-hand one-ninth of the screen had been cut off, though what we were actually listening to on the soundtrack was a collection of classical LP’s from the 1950’s, muddily re-recorded and with a bad scratching noise clearly audible at one point. It was O.K. as a background for the film — at least it reinforced the dire atmosphere — though apparently there’s a new score as part of a 2005 restoration. Still, The Manxman is an interesting movie even though its appeal is much more as a forerunner of the later Hitchcock masterpieces (the first film of his I’d call a masterpiece is his marvelous 1931 movie Rich and Strange, even though it isn’t a thriller: it was a personal project Hitchcock developed and actually wanted to do, which was far from true of most of his British International assignments!) than any intrinsic qualities of its own other than Anny Ondra’s amazing acting.
The film was The Manxman, a 1928 production (though imdb.com dates it a year later) from John Maxwell’s British International Pictures of a famous 1894 novel by Sir Hall Caine, and I chose to screen this now because Charles had been doing Web searches for early novels with intimations of homosexuality and Hall Caine’s name had come up. He asked me if I’d ever heard of Hall Caine and I said, “Yes, Alfred Hitchcock filmed one of his novels, The Manxman, as his last silent film in 1928.” I got this movie as part of a boxed set of 20 Hitchcock items, mostly feature films from his British years, both silent (The Lodger, Easy Virtue, The Ring, The Farmer’s Wife, Champagne and The Manxman) and sound (Blackmail, Juno and the Paycock, The Skin Game, Rich and Strange, Number Seventeen, The Man Who Knew Too Much — first version — The Thirty-Nine Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn), along with two episodes from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show, “The Cheney Vase” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Needless to say, I was most interested in the more unusual items, including all four of the silent films Hitchcock made for British International after Maxwell hired him away from Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures in 1927 (though I’d still like to see some of the more obscure films from Hitchcock’s British years, including Elstree Calling — an all-star musical for which Hitchcock shot only some framing scenes, not enough for him to put it on his official résumé — and the one full-dress musical Hitchcock ever made, Waltzes from Vienna, with Jessie Matthews featured in a biopic of Johann Strauss, Jr.). I’d seen one of them before — The Farmer’s Wife, a dreadfully unfunny romantic comedy in which a widower scours his small village looking for a woman to marry, only to realize in the final reel (about four reels after we realized it) that the person he’s really in love with, and would make him a good mate, is his maid. When I watched that one I commented, “There are a few touches in this film that prefigure the later Hitchcock but you really have to be watching with an eagle eye to spot them: Sam’s courtship of one of his would-be brides on horseback as they ride down a path with their backs to the camera (a shot Hitch duplicated 18 years later with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in Notorious), another sequence in which the maid is slicing bread with a prominently photographed bread knife when the doorbell rings (a year later Hitch would do this famously in a far more sinister, suspenseful and ‘Hitchcockian’ context in Blackmail — and given that the two films were made at the same studio just a year apart it’s probably the same bread knife and the same stock shot of a doorbell ringing) and a nice bit of what Hitch later called ‘negative acting’ on the part of the long-suffering Lillian Hall Davis.”
The Manxman is a romantic melodrama rather than a romantic comedy, and while not the sort of suspense thriller Hitchcock would become identified with (as Maurice Yacowar pointed out in his book on Hitchcock’s British years, of his first 17 feature films only four were thrillers), it’s quite a remarkable movie, showing that Hitchcock’s directorial chops were already fully formed. The problem is the film’s plot: it’s set on the Isle of Man (as you might guess from the title — at least if you were British or had otherwise learned that a “Manxman” is what the Brits call someone from the Isle of Man) and it starts out as what would now be called a “bromance.” Two young men, aspiring attorney Philip Christian (Malcolm Keen) and fisherman Pete Quilliam (Carl Brisson, the Danish entertainer who had already acted for Hitchcock in The Ring and in 1934 would come to the U.S. to play the male lead in the musical Murder at the Vanities; he wouldn’t establish a permanent career in the U.S. but his son, Frederick Brisson, would: Brisson fils became a stage producer and married actress Rosalind Russell), have become fast friends — only, this being a movie (and a silent movie at that), a woman has come between them. The woman is barmaid Kate Cregeen (Polish-born German actress Anny Ondra, seen here without the handicap of a voice double that dogged her in her next Hitchcock film, Blackmail, where she had to play her sound scenes lip-synching to a British actress, Joan Barry, delivering her lines into an off-camera mike: the reason was Ondra was supposed to be playing the daughter of a London grocer and her German accent would have been unbelievable in the role), daughter of Caesar Cregeen (Randle Ayrton), the man who owns the bar where she works. Both men are in love with Kate, but Philip doesn’t want to marry her because tying himself to a mere barmaid would interfere with his ability to follow in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps and become a deemster (a footnote to one of the titles helpfully explains that a “deemster” is what they call a judge on the Isle of Man, whose legal system is sufficiently different from that of the mainland U.K. that Caine’s novel explains that Christian had to get two legal licenses, one to practice in the rest of Britain and one specifically for the Isle of Man), while Caesar vetoes Pete’s proposal to his daughter because Pete’s nothing but a penniless fisherman and Caesar wants Kate to “marry up.”
So Pete decides to leave for South Africa (a plot twist that’s a bit dated — in 1894, when Caine wrote the novel, there was a gold rush under way in South Africa and a lot of poor Brits were heading out there, but by 1928 that bit of history was long since over) and he returns having made his fortune. In the meantime, though, he had asked Christian to “look after” Kate, and “looking after” had involved taking her on long walks and … With the typical reticence of a 1928 movie, especially one which had to get past the British Board of Film Censors, the “and” is merely hinted at, but in a typically preposterous plot complication Christian and Kate receive word that Pete has died in South Africa and therefore they feel free to pursue their affair. They evidently pursue it at least as far as the bedroom because, when Pete comes back — having made his fortune and not died at all (a “surprise” that won’t be at all surprising to anybody who’s seen more than two movies in their life) — he and Kate are married, and then Kate has to tell first Christian and then Pete that she’s going to have Christian’s baby. (Charles noticed that Anny Ondra’s lips could clearly be seen forming the word “baby” even though the titles didn’t say that — but then in the silent era a lot of moviegoers got good at reading lips and noting that what the actors really were saying wasn’t always what the title cards said they were saying, and in 1926 Fox got nasty letters from filmgoers who had seen What Price Glory? and lip-read the actors speaking the dirty words from Laurence Stallings’ play even though the titles had bowdlerized Stallings’ lines.) The baby is born, a girl, and Pete and Kate raise her as their own — but they’re miserable about it and Kate is now in love with Christian instead of her husband. But without Kate to tie him down Christian now is appointed deemster — only the first case he’s assigned to hear is Kate’s attempted suicide, which leads him to Confess All in open court. In the end Christian and Kate leave the Isle of Man with the baby, which Pete reluctantly gives up to the two people who are, after all, her biological parents, and Pete sets forth on another fishing trip — though the titles said he made money in South Africa, he doesn’t seem to be living any better when he returns than he did before he left. The Manxman is an unusually class-conscious story, especially for a director like Hitchcock who usually didn’t give a damn about class, and much of it turns on the conflict between the aristocracy (even the small-time Isle of Man aristocracy represented by the Christian family) and the rest of us.
Hitchcock lavishes all his future trademarks on a story that really doesn’t accommodate them very well — dark, shadowy lighting, oblique camera angles, symbolic shots, quick cuts and an overall atmosphere of picturesque doom — and shows what a great director he would become when he started making films whose plots lent themselves to his style. He also gets a marvelous performance from Anny Ondra, who burns up the screen and dominates each scene in which she appears (her work here makes me want to see the silent version of Blackmail sometime) even though her performance seems strikingly reminiscent of Greta Garbo’s work in Flesh and the Devil (another “bromance” in which a woman comes between the two male leads — though it ends considerably more homoerotically than The Manxman; in Flesh and the Devil Garbo’s character dies and the two men, John Gilbert and Lars Hanson, are arm-in-arm at the fadeout!) — indeed it occurred to me that John Maxwell picked this story not only because Hall Caine was a well-remembered author whose name would draw audiences but also because he picked up on the Flesh and the Devil connection and figured he could have as big a hit with a similar story. Ondra is great both in the early scenes, in which her emotions are so explosive it looks like the screen can barely contain her, and in the final courtroom confrontation, where she looks genuinely penitent and her acting is restrained in the manner of later Hitchcock heroines. The two men are simply not as well cast as Ondra: Carl Brisson essentially lets his good looks do his acting for him, and Malcolm Keen as Christian manages exactly one expression — a mild queasiness — through the whole film. I’m not sure whether the problem was with Keen himself, Hitchcock’s direction of him, or the character. When I looked up Caine’s novel on line and read Christian described thusly — “Peter was little and almost misshapen, with a pair of shoulders that seemed to be trying to meet over a hollow chest and limbs that splayed away into vacancy” — I could only think that Hitchcock and his casting director probably thought, “Lots of luck finding an actor who looks like that — and even more luck finding an actor who looks like that whom audiences will actually pay to see!” And given how much religious and moral angst is involved in this story (Caine’s chapter titles are, in order, “Boys Together,” “Boy and Girl,” “Man and Woman,” “Man and Wife,” “Man and Man,” and “Man and God”), one gets the impression that the right director for a sound remake would have been Ingmar Bergman.
Throughout The Manxman one’s struck by the contrast between the trite, obvious story and the cinematic dexterity with which Hitchcock was directing it, the stunning rightness of virtually all his framing, angling and cutting decisions. He actually shot the exteriors on location on the Isle of Man (not that he had to go that far — it wasn’t like the film was actually set in Spain, like Flesh and the Devil!) and there’s one incredible scene (which I’d seen before in stills — incidentally the still photographer on this movie was a future director, Michael Powell) of Anny Ondra walking along the beach among these incredible rock formations that seem to loom over her and seal her fate. There are plenty of visual motifs that anticipate Hitchcock’s later (and better known) movies, and if you watch The Manxman in the right frame of mind you can get a feel for Hitchcock’s sense of morbidity and doom even while lamenting the ordinariness and “movieness” of the story — even though it pre-dates all but the first and crudest films, Hall Caine’s novel all too perfectly anticipates the combination of titillation and surface “morality” of many subsequent movie plots, including the “redemption through suffering” the U.S. Production Code decreed as the fate that should befall an adulterous couple in a film. The version we were seeing was badly framed — it looked like a film soundtrack had been crudely put on it and the left-hand one-ninth of the screen had been cut off, though what we were actually listening to on the soundtrack was a collection of classical LP’s from the 1950’s, muddily re-recorded and with a bad scratching noise clearly audible at one point. It was O.K. as a background for the film — at least it reinforced the dire atmosphere — though apparently there’s a new score as part of a 2005 restoration. Still, The Manxman is an interesting movie even though its appeal is much more as a forerunner of the later Hitchcock masterpieces (the first film of his I’d call a masterpiece is his marvelous 1931 movie Rich and Strange, even though it isn’t a thriller: it was a personal project Hitchcock developed and actually wanted to do, which was far from true of most of his British International assignments!) than any intrinsic qualities of its own other than Anny Ondra’s amazing acting.
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