What I Watched: January 2024

This entry is sort of analogous to What I Read, only monthly rather than annual. I hesitated before writing this, as though I watch movies almost every night, my viewing habits are, like so many things in life, far from optimal. One thing that happened to me during the pandemic was that without evening performances to go to, I reverted to my natural state as a morning person. I mentioned this to a friend of mine & there was an awkward pause until she finally said that I didn't really seem like a morning person. So I will clarify that I'm not bright, chipper, & rarin' to go before sunrise; that just tends to be when I wake up, often feeling more tired than when I went to bed. A result of early rising, or at least waking, is that I tend to fall asleep fairly early. I lie in bed, turn off the lights, & turn on the movie, & nature takes its course. It can take me three days to watch a film that's barely 90 minutes. (This has nothing to do with whether I'm interested in what I'm watching; the body does what it wants & I am just a temporary dweller in this meat-house.) This fragmented viewing works better for some films than others. But I realized years ago that if I were going to watch movies, I would need to watch them in parts. Not ideal, but reality seldom is. There are some films where it makes a difference, & some I try to watch in one sitting, but that requires a lot of planning.

I usually realize when I'm drifting off & can stop the disc or go back & re-watch what I missed, which is sometimes much more substantial than I thought. It reminds me of something I read years ago by Joyce Carol Oates, about how a novelist carefully plots out significant details & hones her sentences & does, in general, deep work on her narrative & its expression, only to have it end up in the slippery grasp of a drowsy reader whose eyes may skim over these labored-for beauties as exhaustion takes over.

So on we go. . . .

During one of my unending & usually vain attempts to clean & organize, I moved a lot of DVDs & came across some Gilbert & Sullivan operas from Opera Australia that I had not seen in many years. I watched their HMS Pinafore on New Year's Eve & it was so much fun that I decided to start the new year with Pirates of Penzance, which was perhaps less fun. I mean, it was certainly enough fun. I'm always very happy to hear Gilbert & Sullivan, though neither Pinafore nor Pirates is one of my favorites. Anthony Warlow as the Pirate King seems to be doing a Johnny-Depp-as-Captain-Jack-Sparrow thing that for me at least hasn't aged all that well. David Hobson is very good as Frederic. Taryn Fiebig as Mabel, John Bolton-Wood as the model of a modern major general, & Suzanne Johnston as Ruth are all appealing. For some reason they interpolate the patter trio from Ruddygore (My Eyes Are Fully Open to my Awful Situation), which mostly made me wish I were watching Ruddygore.

Next I had been thinking about A Florida Enchantment from 1915, which I had seen many years ago. I wanted to refresh my memory. It was included as part of a set (possibly now out of print) titled The Origins of Film, issued jointly by the Smithsonian & the Library of Congress (a major though perhaps surprising repository of early American film; they were stored there in the form of photographs on paper rolls as part of the copyright process). One disc has African-American Cinema I & II, the second America's First Women Filmmakers & Origins of the Gangster Film, but it was the third disc I was after, with Origins of American Animation & Origins of the Fantasy Feature.

Of course I had to watch the cartoons first (by the way, my viewing of Thunderbean's recent complete Flip the Frog, on which I spent most of last November, is a bit out of the purview of this monthly survey but I recommend it highly). The LOC/Smithsonian disc contains 21 animated shorts plus two fragments, which cover the wide, weird, & wonderful world of early animation, from classics by Winsor McKay & George Herriman to period pieces like the Katzenjammer Kids as well as stop-motion animation & silhouette work. I could watch them all again now, & maybe I will.

The first film on the Fantasy disc is 1914's Patchwork Girl of Oz, written & produced by the entrepreneurial & energetic L Frank Baum himself, based on his own novel. Scraps (the Patchwork Girl, here played by the Frenchman Pierre Couderc, who was, according to the set's booklet, 17 at the time) is a lively character & one of the most beloved  denizens in Oz. Ojo, the Munchkin boy who helped make her who she is by surreptitiously adding certain magical powders, particularly Cleverness, to what was designed to be a mostly mindless servant for the wife of the magician Dr Pipt, is played by Violet MacMillan. There's no real reason why a teenage boy is being played by a teenage girl, except it was sort of a stage convention, possibly having to do with the marketability of showing young women in tight trousers. (I have heard there was also, for similar reasons, a stage convention of having troops of soldiers played by young women, which, I've seen suggested, was one of Baum's inspirations for General Jinjur's female army in The Land of Oz.) MacMillan, in both build & behavior, is completely unconvincing as a teenage boy, but then, given her incessant grinning & overly broad gestures, she isn't particularly convincing as an actual girl, either. She has the kind of round-faced, curly-haired looks that were desirable then but now just look fairly banal & uninteresting (you can see why someone at the time thought she should go on stage, but I doubt anyone would think that now). The film is clever & you get to see the Wookie, among other improbable creatures, & it remains fun to watch.

A Florida Enchantment, like the Patchwork Girl, is part of the movement from very short films to ones that are feature-length (about an hour each). Both were based on novels & Enchantment was also a stage play. One of the characters is a stereotypical Southern Colonel, with the extravagant white moustache & the pointed goatee & spotless white suit, & I suspect the source had a lot of material about the "new South" that had to be eliminated, which is probably just as well, as though there are a number of fairly prominent Black roles, they are all servants & all played by white performers in blackface who amp up the stereotypical gestures & attitudes. The continuing source of interest in this film is not race but gender. This is the "fantasy" part: the plot involves some magic seeds that turn women into men & men into women, without changing their outward appearance too much. Our leading lady, Lillian Travers (played by Edith Storey, who is the best thing in the movie), is frustrated by her flirtatious fiancé, Dr Cassadene. She discovers the magic seeds in a box in the Florida house where she's staying, & swallows one. Here's where Storey, & the story, shine. She is very sharp & amusing, hilarious & provocative, as a man in a woman's body. Eventually she cuts her hair short & puts on male attire, as does her Black servant, who has also eaten one of the seeds, & they come back to town under different names. It's not entirely clear why she needs to switch to a male appearance, as all the attractive young women seem extremely pleased by her forceful but charming attentions while she's still dressed as a woman. But dressing as the man she now is inside allows her to become engaged to one of the young women (though one of the unresolved questions of the plot is: she presumably hasn't acquired male genitals, so what happens on the wedding night when her bride discovers that? I'm not saying a happy ending wouldn't be in store for them, just that it wasn't clear quite what was happening there.)

S/he reveals the secret of the seeds to Dr Cassadene, who tests them himself. Only he behaves not quite as a woman but as a stereotypically effeminate man, with swaying hips & limp wrists & flowing garments (eventually he goes into full-on female drag – though is it really drag if he's now a woman inside?). Contrary to his fiancée's social success, he is now an outcast, mostly laughed at & mocked both behind his back & to his face, until he's abruptly under police surveillance & in physical danger from a pursuing mob. I could not remember how this plot ended, which is one of the reasons I wanted to rewatch it, so (OK, spoiler alert for a film that is over a century old) this Gordian knot is untied with that Freudian-era deus ex machina, "it was all a dream!"

Cassadene is played by Sidney Drew, & his performance is a drawback to the film. For one thing, he is way too old for the part, looking more like Lillian's father than her fiancé. Someone like Cary Grant would be believable there, but Drew is not; he is not very attractive & resembles a young but even plainer version of Edward Everett Horton. I could not figure out why he was cast until I read the set's booklet & discovered what I should have been able to figure out, given the way the world works: he was also the film's director. (& he was also uncle to Lionel, John, & Ethel Barrymore, & had a long stage career, often playing sparring spouses with his real-life wife.) The film is interesting if a bit unsatisfying; its exploration of gendered ways of being still gives it interest, even if it's a bit more conventional in its underlying attitudes than we might like these days.

Then I moved on to a couple of Marx Brothers' movies. Their first five films, for Paramount, are my favorites, which is a pretty standard opinion (many of the wildest films of the early 1930s seem to come from Paramount; I'd love to read more about that studio). A lot of people really love their first post- Paramount film, A Night at the Opera; I am not one of them. It's fine, but seems like a watered down version of their earlier material, & I'm not really convinced by their benevolent interest in the uninteresting young lovers (Zeppo should have stuck around). A Day at the Races I have not seen in so long that I have no comment on it. I should also take another look at their later films. But for now I stuck with a revisit of their first movie, The Cocoanuts (I don't know why they spell it that way, but they do).

The thing that is often criticized about The Cocoanuts is the reason I love it: as a filmed version of their stage show, & as an early sound film (when it required an ingenious director to replicate some of the fluidity of silent cinema with the bulky early sound cameras), it is very stage-bound. I love being able to see something that is similar to what my grandparents would have seen on the stage (this is literal: my maternal grandparents saw the Marx Brothers on Broadway). I love the clunky musical numbers, & period things like having the hotel bellboys played by young women (as with the casting in The Patchwork Girl, producers at the time seemed to seize any opportunity to feature young women in tight male garments). Even the plot, which involves, among other things, shady real estate dealings in Florida, as well as high-society thieves (including a sharp Kay Francis) & standard young lovers (including aspiring architect Bob Adams, played with high-pitched blandness by the unattractive Oscar Shaw) are so much of their time as to acquire a patina of antiquated charm. Harpo's hair is still pinkish, as it was on stage; it was in their next film, Animal Crackers, that it was switched to the more visually striking blond. Harpo is an odd combination of cherub & satyr; he doesn't seem dishonest & lecherous, though he is both those things, because he is so strangely ethereal in his affect. Chico is one of the few visible remnants of the long often ignoble American tradition of ethnic comedy. Groucho's riffs are by now as well known as scripture, I can admire his delivery & internally appreciate the comedy, but I don't really laugh at them. It's strange that a troupe celebrated for anarchy & improvisation is now, for us, set in cinematic stone.

Then, from the same set of the Marx Brothers' Paramount films, I watched Monkey Business. I had wanted to watch this a few months ago, while I was lying in bed with COVID, but couldn't locate the set. I guess I hadn't watched this one as recently as The Cocoanuts, because I had forgotten quite a bit of it so, yes, this time I did laugh outwardly as well in inwardly. It's a sharp film, mostly on shipboard (the Brothers are stowaways on a liner) but ending in a gangster's mansion. Thelma Todd has a memorable role; her unfortunate early death came just a few years later.

The month ended with a re-watch of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, a serial made up of five films released in 1913 - 1914. It was hugely influential on subsequent gangster / espionage cinema (my Kino set, featuring the restoration by Jacques Champreaux, has an interesting commentary track by film historian David Kalat, exploring the history & influence of the films). If you've seen Feuillade's Les Vampires, you know what to expect: masterful & enigmatic criminals, severed body parts appearing suddenly in trunks or valises or behind plaster walls that suddenly start to bleed; semi-surreal crimes that seem less about the loot (usually some jewels) than demonstrating an overarching & invisible power; a criminal structure seething just below the world of bourgeois respectability. If you've seen other serials of this time, you can really appreciate Feuillade's achievement in sustaining his enigmatic mood, lending plausibility to bizarre & far-fetched crimes & coincidences. The films are consistently absorbing & entertaining over their 5+ hours, & the views of Parisian streets & interiors from over a century ago are fascinating both visually & historically. I did not like the soundtrack to this edition, which is credited to Sonimage. It's mostly a compilation, but varies wildly in tone & effectiveness; often it is overly emotional, insistent & intrusive. The thing I dislike about it the most, though, & I have seen this occasionally with other silent films, is that they add some "realistic" sound effects: not dialogue, but birds chirping, horse hooves clopping, theater audiences murmuring & applauding. I find these effects jarring. It's easy enough to get absorbed in the world of a silent film, to accept without demur that the only sound we'll hear is music; it seems weirdly intrusive to include traffic sounds or whatnot, a violation of the oneiric sound world of silent cinema.