Opera Parallèle & Cal Performances: La Belle et la Bête

Several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, Opera Parallèle presented Philip Glass's operatic take on Cocteau's magical fairy-tale film from 1946, La Belle et la Bête; I missed that production but fortunately a revised version was given a two-day run in Zellerbach Hall (I saw it last night) under the auspices of Cal Performances. Opera Parallèle has now performed all three of Glass's Cocteau operas (the other two are Orphée & Les Enfants Terribles); La Belle et la Bête is a bit different from the other two in that rather than a stand-alone stage recreation of the film, it is meant to run alongside the original as an alternative soundtrack (& in fact it is available as such on the Criterion blu-ray release of the film).

The Zellerbach stage was set with six different screens, three on top & three below. Their sizes & the line-up were balanced but not symmetrical; the middle screen on the top, the largest of the six, showed Cocteau's film. The smaller screen below usually showed the film as re-shot with OP's personnel (chiefly baritone Hadleigh Adams as the Beast/Prince & Avenant & soprano Chea Kang as Belle). The two screens flanking the top screen showed fragments & close-ups of the Cocteau film & the two flanking screens on the bottom showed other OP performers (chiefly mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis as the stepsisters & baritone Aurelien Mangwa as Belle's father, her brother Ludovic, & the moneylender) or appropriate scenes related to the mood or setting of the scene (such as re-creations of the stone faces with blinking eyes from Beast's castle). The screens each had an ornate frame, as if around an artwork, while the top center screen, the movie screen, had none, making it look like a regular movie screen, while the others with their fancy frames reminded us of the artistic eye & placement guiding everything we were seeing, a note of the artificial & aesthetic which reinforced Cocteau's plea, at the beginning of his film, that we have the conscious sophistication to watch it with the unsophisticated but therefore farther-seeing eyes of a child open to magic.

In addition to the action being shown on the screens, the performers also enacted some of the scenes on stage, often alongside their filmed selves or Cocteau's originals. One of the beauties of the staging was how it reflected the film's intentions; in the scene in which Belle first enters the Beast's castle, in which she floats weightlessly down dim & eerie halls, Kang somehow managed to recreate the effect without camera tricks, moving with incredible dancer-like lightness down the stage along with Josette Day's original on the screen above. The interplay between the original film, the OP re-creations, & the physical performers was so seamlessly done that it seemed inevitable; it's only later, when the inevitable noise & distractions of the after-theater world start to rub away at the enchantment, that you realize how incredibly difficult it must have been to pull all of this off, how much work & organization it takes to get so many different components both mechanical & human (the different sets of films, the lighting, the singers, the orchestra) to click into place with dream-like inevitability.

It has been years since I last heard a recording of this opera or last saw the movie (that happens when you're overloaded with movies & music). I had forgotten how marvelous the score is. As is well known by both those who love & those who dislike this composer (I'm in the former camp, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to this performance, particularly with its ridiculous 8:00 PM start time), his music has a very distinctive & even unmistakable sound; but though the whole opera "sounds like" Philip Glass, each scene reflects an appropriate, often strikingly distinct, mood: uncanny, yearning, threatening, frightening, touching, elevating. The segments of the score move along with cinematic speed, like camera cuts. Certain melodies that are on the border of big Romantic tunes regularly appear & float off before they develop too far, reminding me of the unresolved musical longing in Tristan without ever echoing or parodying that distinctive score. (One of these tunes in particular, one that lent a touch of the "exotic" to the score, reminded me of one of the Borodin tunes used in the musical Kismet). Glass has written a number of fairy-tale chamber operas (The Juniper Tree, The Fall of the House of Usher – the latter is of course based on Poe's "horror" story, but is a sibling of the fairy-tale world) & he is adept at creating memorably unworldly worlds. There is a wide range of moods produced from a relatively small orchestra, one that is mostly keyboards, percussion, & wind instruments (no strings! as a friend in the mezzanine reported to those of us below). The final moments, with the transformation of Beast into Prince, are accompanied by what sounded to me like an organ, offering that instrument's sacred & otherworldly aura for his apotheosis with Belle.

As usual with Opera Parallèle, Nicole Paiement conducted, & as usual, she led a clear & beautifully judged rendition; Brian Staufenbiel was, again as usual for OP, the director & the guiding hand behind the production concept, &, again as usual, thought & care had gone into a visually arresting & creative presentation (aided by the production design & film work by David Murakami). Delphis & Mangwa brought distinctive edge & depth to each of their characters. Kang & Adams were both superb. Her clear & lovely voice echoed & reinforced the distinctively innocent & loving Belle. Adams was a virile & anguished Beast, his voice skillfully softening as Beast is tamed by love or raging up as he is threatened. You realize how insightful & controlled his performance is at the end, when he resumes human form as the Prince, & though the handsome Adams looks appropriately princely there is a very slight, very subtly & astutely judged, sense of self-pleased placidity, a touch of royal entitlement, that reminded me of the story that when Garbo first saw Cocteau's film, she is said to have slumped down in her chair & murmured, "Give me back my Beast."

I also have to note the astonishing work by Sharon Peng & Natalie Barshow in recreating respectively Beast's make-up & his & Belle's sumptuous costumes for the stage & OP film scenes.

The audience . . . they were generally attentive, though I could hear some whispering & someone down the row from me kept pulling out his or her phone & flashing some light (checking the time?). Those were relatively minor things; the opera, done without intermission, was about an hour & forty-five minutes, which is not a long time in a movie theater but which for some reason seems like a long time for people at a live performance (it doesn't help that Zellerbach is an uncomfortable hall). But though the audience seemed appreciative, giving the performers well-deserved & hearty applause at the end, they also seemed, as a whole, & I realize I'm sliding out onto some thinnish ice here, not quite to get the mood & therefore the meaning of the piece. There was quite a bit of laughter at various points that struck me as appreciative but uncomprehending, starting with the scene in which Belle's Father, who has wandered into Beast's castle, sits down to dinner & is unnerved by the disembodied hands that hold the candelabras down the hall & that serve him at the table. Cinematically these are fairly simple tricks, but effective nonetheless, if you enter into the unreal enchantments of the tale. (I will say that I find such tricks, not just from Cocteau but even more so in the films of Méliès, far more beautiful, moving, & effective than the shiny plastic fakery of computer-generated effects in current films.)

Maybe the audience laughed because they were expecting Mrs Potts, Lumiere, & Co to launch into Be Our Guest? I don't say this to be dismissive of the wonderful Disney version of the story, but though the animators clearly studied their Cocteau, their film has a different mode & mood. There was also quite a bit of laughter, not quite mocking but also not quite comprehending, of various love-story lines at the end, & I was at a loss to figure out what was supposed to be funny. This is a fairy tale, not a sitcom or a Hallmark "romance". During the scene in which the guileless Belle is led into giving her siblings some of the Beast's magic secrets, a woman in the row in front of me whispered (very loudly whispered) that Belle was . . . she said either stupid, or a fool, or a word to that effect. Reading innocence & trustfulness & guilelessness as stupidity is exactly the attitude Cocteau asks us to consciously though perhaps only temporarily renounce while watching his enchantments. He is very clear in his statement at the beginning of his film that he wants the audience to approach this story with an openness that draws on a purity & innocence usually crushed out by or at least hidden away from the social & adult world. We are certainly meant to appreciate the sophistication of all the artists involved, the silvery cinematography, the lovely surrealist touches, the artificiality of our suspension, which is perhaps only temporary, of our usual civilized skepticism. But it is only by doing so that we can truly grasp the anguish of Beast's dark & deliquescent heart, & the beauty of Beauty coming to love him.

Orinda Theater Classic Movie Matinee: Bell, Book, & Candle

The Orinda Theater's Classic Movie Matinee this past October was 1958's Bell, Book, and Candle, one of those "I married a witch: no, really, a literal witch" stories, which is seasonal for the end of October, of course, but as the film also contains several Christmas scenes, it fits in with my posting month of December as well.

As usual, the Matinee was genially hosted by Matías Bombal, who also chooses the apt shorts, newsreels, cartoons, & coming attractions that accompany each feature (the idea is to recreate an earlier movie-going experience, when you'd get all those things as part of the show).There were a couple of cartoons, including the delirious & delightful Skeleton Dance, one of the early Disney Silly Symphonies (animated by Ub Iwerks). I've seen it many times, but this was my first time seeing it on the big screen, where it is just as marvelous as ever. We also had Bewitched Bunny, in which Bugs Bunny tries to save Hansel & Gretel from Witch Hazel. (I found the children repulsive, though comically so, & would have been happy to let the witch have her snack.) At the cartoon's end, Witch Hazel has transformed herself into a sexy & beautiful young thing, & Bugs leaves with her, but not before turning to the audience & letting us know he knows, says "Ah sure, I know, but aren't they all witches inside?" – a line that drew plenty of audible gasps from the matinee audience, & not necessarily in a disapproving way. After the feature I chatted in the lobby with a group that included several women who didn't come right out & say they identified as witches, but it was pretty clear they were, at least, sympathetic, so maybe they felt Bugs was just acknowledging their power.

I had never seen Bell, Book, & Candle before (the 1950s are not really my movie decade), though I had heard of it vaguely & was curious about it. It's quite delightful, & has quite a cast: Kim Novak as the female lead, with Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, Jack Lemmon, & Ernie Kovacs in supporting roles. The male lead is Jimmy Stewart. I am not a fan, though I found him less grating than usual (in fact, downright acceptable) in this role. And I give him credit for realizing he had aged out of romantic leads; this was the last such role he played. Still, it seemed a stretch for the gorgeous Novak to fall in love with him as he passes her shop (he's a neighbor & her feelings are rooted in his looks, not his personality, as she hasn't actually talked to him yet) & I kept wondering what the part would be like with, say, Montgomery Clift in it. Novak is, as I said, gorgeous, but I was mesmerized by her eyebrows, which were done in some kind of heavy brown paint – obviously something stylish at the time, though a touch bizarre today (though that's not unsuitable for an uncanny character).

Lanchester, as Novak's aunt, is appealingly & reliably loopy, & I found Kovacs, as a writer on witches who knows less than he thinks, & drinks more than he should, actually funny (I know he's supposed to have been a comedy genius, & maybe I just haven't seen the right shows, but when I saw his stuff years ago I didn't find it amusing at all, which might be my fault). Hermione Gingold, as a rival witch, doesn't have all that much to do; I wondered if the part was bigger in the original play, as what was in the film didn't seem to warrant hiring that big a name. But maybe the idea is that she's outsized enough so that she brings weight to a role that doesn't take up much actual screen time & so might get lost in the narrative shuffle. I shouldn't neglect the scene-stealing cat, Pyewacket. When I mention this film to people, the usual response is something about the cat.

Jack Lemmon is Novak's younger brother; he is a warlock who plays bongos, beatnik-style, at the Zodiac Club in Greenwich Village. A friend of mind said he'd heard that Lemmon's character was "gay-coded" but he didn't see it, which I found . . . surprising. This is a 1950s film, & the usual subtexts apply. There most definitely is a gay subtext (I've come to realize that the mere mention of "Greenwich Village" in this period constitutes queer subtext): there's a secret society, a bit dangerous, extremely suspect, feeling themselves a bit superior to as well as set apart from normal society, & these odd, marginal, dangerous people meet in clubs in Greenwich Village, where they listen to weird music. . . . There's also a hint of an "un-American activities" subtext; at one point Stewart asks Novak if she's a Communist (yes, I'm using the names of the actors instead of the characters, but it's easier to keep them straight & visualize them that way).

I was fascinated by the décor of the film, & the role of modern art: not just jazz, but painting. Stewart's fiancée, played by Janice Rule. must, as is the way of the person who is initially engaged to the lead only to get dumped for the headliner, straddle the line between being acceptable as a mate for the lead but abrasive enough so that we don't mind seeing her or him dumped. Rule fills the role well; she's attractive, polished, & cultured enough so that she's plausible as a girlfriend for a publisher like Stewart, but she's also a bit cold, & unpleasantly snobbish & dismissive towards anyone she perceives as different (like Lemmon &, in their college days, Novak). We're not sorry to see her go. But there is a scene in which Stewart tries (briefly & unsuccessfully) to reunite with her, & we see her painting a very Joan Miró-like picture. But the modernist isn't contrasted with a cozier, kitschier "normal" style. Is it just meant to indicate a certain type of person & class? And the walls in everyone's apartments are dark blue or a similar shade, with carefully arranged artworks. The look was mesmerizing. Initially, Novak's character sells African mask (presumably some link to magic traditions is intended). By the end, she has moved to selling fanciful "bouquets" made of seashells. But they also seem a bit strange & mysterious, though we're clearly meant to see that Novak's love has changed her: for one thing, instead of sharply cut black outfits, she's wearing all-white.

Maybe I should issue a spoiler alert, but I've already said this film is from the 1950s, & it has what is meant as a happy ending, so you can guess what happens: by falling in love, Novak has lost her powers, & become a normal woman. She is fine with the change, but given a choice between casting spells on my enemies & a life with Jimmy Stewart, I know which I would take. After the movie ended, as we stood & brushed popcorn off our laps, I turned to my friend & after asking how she liked the movie (she did, very much) I said I did too, except for the unhappy ending. She laughed & I said, "I'm not kidding." I'd be much happier married to someone with magical powers; who wouldn't be? Imagine facing yet another of life's boring, stupid, annoying inconveniences & problems & being able to turn to your extremely hot partner & say, "Honey, can't you cast a spell or something?"

San Francisco Silent Film Festival: 2025

As the Castro Theater is still closed for renovations, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival took place this year at the Orinda Theater. This is a much better choice than last year's location, the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, which is fine if a bit generic inside as a venue but too difficult to reach via public transportation & too isolated: the Festival tried to make up for that with some food trucks, but in general it was an uphill battle out there. I ended up not seeing many films (in fact, only one) because anything that was first or last on the schedule just didn't work out transit-time-wise for me. The Orinda Theater, by contrast, is easily accessible via BART (& has plenty of parking, if that's your thing) & surrounded by all kinds of restaurants (even more so than the Castro Theater, actually), as well as being large &, as an Art Deco exemplar, close to period appropriate. Even so, I only made it to a few programs this year, for a number of reasons (none having to do with the quality of the films),. This is what I saw:

The Wreck of the Hesperus

1927; directed by Elmer Clifton

This recently rediscovered & restored film is based on a poem by Longfellow about young lovers separated by her father, a ship's captain who bears a romantic grudge against the young man's uncle, but that drama is topped by the final storm at sea & the wreck of the captain's vessel. It's quite beautiful to look at & very well cast. I was particularly impressed with Ethel Wales as the captain's sister, assigned by him with looking after his stubbornly lovelorn daughter; it's a very small role, but you immediately see that she is not the sort of moony spinster who is going to sympathize with young love. Nor is she a dragon guarding the treasure, or a fussy old maid; she's just a sort of fretful & annoyed person who seems to wish everyone would just behave, or at least leave her alone, though she does of course her duty. 

The film was intended as a step towards stardom for the young romantic leads, Virginia Bradford & Frank Marion, though, according to the SFSFF's always richly detailed (& free!) program book, neither one took off with the public. I found this quite surprising, as both are very appealing. She is, not surprisingly, a beauty, with long dark curls & a demeanor earthy enough to make her convincing as the daughter of a flinty New England sea captain but with a touch enough of the fey so that she seems a bit out of the ordinary. He, too, is a curly-haired beauty, & as the movie was illustrated in both brochure & program book with a dreamy close-up of him, I'm apparently not the only one who thought so. The close-up comes from his first scene, when he is found adrift on the sea, the only survivor of a shipwreck (not the one of the title); once he recovers, we find that he has an engaging presence & a killer smile, so once again I am left befuddled by the taste or lack of it of the American public.

The storm & shipwreck scenes are quite spectacular, & though you can try to parse which shots are done with models, which with sets, & which with who knows what, it's all cut together seamlessly & with verve, so that you get caught up in the events rather than the technique, & it's all so much more convincing & more beautiful to look at than the computer-generated fakery, with its false pixel sheen, that we get these days. Our young hero, in a stylish & visually helpful ruffled white shirt (which helps him stand out against the dark lashing waves, the ruffles echoing both the waves & his curls) rushes towards the sinking ship to save his beloved, who is tied to the mast. It's an exciting & satisfying film. It was new to me (I'd never even heard of it), so I was very glad to have seen it. If it's ever released, I'd buy a copy.

KoKo!

a series of Fleischer Cartoons: Jumping Beans (1922), It's the Cats (1926), KoKo at the Circus (1926), KoKo in 1999 (1927), KoKo's Kane (1927), KoKo's Klock (1927), KoKo's Kink (1928), KoKo's Earth Control (1928)

The early Fleischer Brother cartoons are always delights of homegrown surrealism. This batch, only a few of which I'd seen before, features KoKo, the Out of the Inkwell clown maybe best remembered now as an occasional sidekick of the inimitable Betty Boop, a star of later Fleischer cartoons. It's nice to see him in his early days as a headliner. I read somewhere long ago that the Fleischer Brothers used to say, "If it could really happen, it's not animation" & that's a guiding principle here, as what's going on up on the screen stretches & shapes & contorts & changes from scene to scene, hung on the thinnest of storylines. That's a good thing. I also love the strongly blocked black-against-white designs of the cartoons. I'm going to continue my above dismissal of contemporary computer-generated films by contrasting these evergreen shorts with today's animation, most of which seems to be filmed on location in the Uncanny Valley. I'm not a big fan of the Pixar films (the only one I've really loved is Luca, about the boys who are sea serpents, though in fairness I will also admit I have not seen a lot of the more highly regarded Pixar films), & a lot of that is their look: they labor to make things look "realistic", but if it's that important to you to get hair so accurate you'd think it's real, why not just film real hair? Anyway this was a delightful set.

Song

1928; directed by Richard Eichberg

In a complete change of mood & aesthetic, the KoKo shorts were followed by Song (original title: Die Liebe eines armen Menschenkindes, which is, according to Google Translate, The Love of a Poor Child). This was Anna May Wong's first European film, when she felt her American film career was stalled & mired in stereotypical secondary roles. Earlier this year I read an excellent book on Wong (Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang) so I couldn't remember if I'd actually seen this film or only read a description of it. It turns out I had not seen it. I gather it's sometimes spoken of a bit dismissively but I thought it was extremely good. Wong is, as most people know by now, just luminous, & subtle & convincing in her portrayal of a lonely young woman who falls in love with a circus performer, a knife thrower, (Heinrich George) who rescues her from an attempted rape by two men on the beach. He is not interested in her, though, as he is smitten with his former lover, a dancer (Mary Kid) who thought he had died & who has moved on anyway (she's an appealing character, not shown as bad or scheming or bitchy: just someone who's over someone who isn't over her). As is often the case, plot summaries make the film sound thinner & more melodramatic than it is; as portrayed by the actors & staged by the director, it's a moving portrait of a roundelay of misguided loves. Wong is naturally the big draw these days, & the theater was quite full for this one, but it has many good points in addition to its star.

Kohlhiesel's Daughters

1920; directed by Ernst Lubitsch

This is one of Lubitsch's early German films, though unlike many of those it's not an historical epic but a comedy, based (very loosely) on The Taming of the Shrew. It was one of his biggest hits in Germany but is little known here, apparently not even receiving a theatrical release at the time (which was too close to the end of World War I, when the boycott of German films continued in the USA). Even now, when Lubitsch is a presiding deity of Sophisticated Cinema, & many (most?) of his early films are easily available, this one isn't (Kino, where art thou?). Not surprisingly, it's a lot of fun. It's set in the Bavarian mountains & involves two sisters (both played by Henny Porten), the elder a foul-tempered frump & the younger a prettier & more conventional sweetie. As in Shrew, the father insists the elder sister must be married (& taken off his hands) before the younger one can choose among her suitors. Emil Jannings is the sort-of Petruchio, who ends up with the elder sister. It's all very good-humored; you never feel that the elder sister is being vilified or mocked, & her rampages are more comical than anything else. Porten gets laughs as the younger sister as well, which is more of a challenge than with the over-the-top older sister. As I said, lots of fun, &, again, as with all these movies, if it's released, I'd buy a copy.

The Song of the Scarlet Flower

1919; directed by Mauritz Stiller

Lars Hanson stars in this Swedish film, based on a 1905 Finnish novel (Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta by Johannes Linnankoski), which was popular enough to be filmed several times after this initial version. It's the tale of the headstrong son of wealthy farmers, who ends up leaving his family home in anger & working in a logging camp, before eventually maturing & marrying the proud daughter of another wealthy landowner. It's maybe less tidy than this makes it sound, as she falls for him, & her father opposes him, without knowing his privileged background, which he has kept from them; before he ends up in this class-appropriate coupling, we see the tragic effect he's had on a lower-class serving girl on his parents' farm. What most viewers are going to carry away, though, is the memory of his log-rolling towards dangerous river rapids, a bit of bravado made all the more striking (to continue a leitmotif of this post) because it's not faked with computer imaging as it would be nowadays. It's an emotionally satisfying film, full of beautiful vistas, though maybe a little more conventional than I was hoping for. A friend of mine thought that Hanson occasionally overdid the stalwart manliness, but I thought that was just who the character was, & it provided an interesting contrast with some of Hanson's more tortured roles (The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Scarlet Letter, & let's not forget his anguish in Flesh & the Devil). Again, I'd buy a release!

The next festival will be back at the Castro Theater, from 6 to 10 May 2026. Before that, there will be a special Festival screening at the Castro on 22 March of Clara Bow in It, with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. See you there!

Orinda Theater Classic Movie Matinee: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T

The Castro Theater renovations are stretching on, so when the SF Silent Film Festival announced that this year's edition, slated for November, will be at the Orinda Theater, I went to check it out.

Last year's substitute location, the Palace of Fine Arts, though lovely, was in a tricky location for most people, particularly non-drivers (I realized I couldn't go to the first or last movies of the day, as getting to & from the venue took so much time). There were also very few food options, though the Festival did bring in some food trucks. The Orinda Theater, it turns out, is a very brief & convenient walk from the Orinda BART station; you don't even have to cross a street! (I have to change trains to get there from where I live, & it's supposed to be a timed transfer but hahaha, I usually have to wait ten to fifteen minutes for the transfer train but it's still easier than the Palace) There's food available in the theater itself, & their popcorn is like what we used to get at the Castro, before the new owners wrecked the snack bar, & there are lots of different restaurants immediately around the theater, with the usual options (Indian, Japanese, Vietnamese, bistro, Greek, pizza, hamburgers). The main auditorium of the theater is quite large, & the whole building is period-appropriate Art Deco-ish. I think it's a good choice. My one concern is about the restrooms. I felt that at the Castro they should have stuck some port-a-potties outside, & they'll need to do the same here. That's one thing I'll give the Palace of Fine Arts – the interior of their theater is pretty non-descript, but they had generous restroom arrangements.

When I took my little field trip to scout the theater, I was only able to walk around outside & in the general vicinity. But I learned they have a Classic Movie Matinee the last Tuesday of every month. The selection for June was The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T, which I had never seen. I had a vague sense that Dr Seuss was connected to it. Indeed he was! He came up with the story, wrote the script, & wrote the lyrics (it's a musical). It was such a box-office bomb that he turned his back on Hollywood, & vice versa. But in the way of such things, what the movie-going public of 1953 couldn't stomach was very much to the taste of a smaller but vociferous group of fans who came across it on TV, & a cult was born.

The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer, & the combination of Stanley Kramer & Dr Seuss is not even the most improbable thing about this movie. It concerns a boy, Bartholomew Collins, who takes piano lessons from the acerbic Dr Terwilliger, who berates him for not practicing enough. There's also the boy's widowed mother, & a friendly plumber. The boy falls asleep & most of the movie is an Oz-like (referring to the 1939 film, not the books) dream that reflects the boy's life & worries back in distorted (but maybe basically accurate) form.

Before we saw the movie, though, we were treated to selected short subjects, old-school-movie-going-style. There was a newsreel from the 1960s (President Johnson was calling for a national day of prayers & recollection over America's racial strife – the never-ending story). There were some astutely chosen cartoons: a Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies adaptation of Seuss's Horton Hatches the Egg, a Puppetoons short of Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,  &, to tie in with the piano theme, a short of a very young Liberace (billed as "Walter Liberace") playing the Tiger Rag while the camera occasionally cut to two young women standing around the piano, grinning at us vacantly & bopping uneasily. Then film critic & program curator Matías Bombal came out, wearing a dazzling robe that turned out to be one of the original costumes for Dr Terwilliger, to introduce the film. His comments were pleasantly chatty but to the point, giving us a brief history of the film & its troubles & eventual emergence into the select company of cult classics. He also told us that we were about to see a new restoration, with the Technicolor at its most resplendent.

The movie is indeed fantastic to look at, & utterly bizarre. Hollywood gets slated a lot for its lack of originality, but sometimes it produces something so strange you have to wonder what they were thinking (well, what the money people were thinking; the creative people were just being creative). Dr Terwilliger hates all musical instruments that aren't pianos, & has a dungeon in which he keeps them & their players, leading to an extended & wonderful musical number, with many Seussian-style instruments played by greenish, mostly shirtless male dancers, that seems like a collaboration between Busby Berkeley & Bosch. The Doctor has invented a gigantic piano that will be played simultaneously by Bartholomew & 499 other boys (500 boys, ten fingers each, hence Dr T's 5,000 fingers). This musical triumph will somehow ensure the success of Dr Terwilliger's "happy fingers" institute as well as the continued devotion to the doctor of Bart's widowed mother. I'll stop the plot summary there, because while the plot is entertaining enough, the look of the film is what really grabs the attention.

The colors are saturated & glowing. I recollect lots of dark purples, golden shades of orange, teetering skyscrapers, curved scarlet ladders that go nowhere, pickle juice that sparkles in its pale green. The musical numbers are quite delightful; it's too bad that after the initial previews the studio cut several of them (if you're making a crazy musical, there's no point in trimming it back to half crazy). Seuss's lyrics are, as you might expect, clever & witty, & the music by Frederick Hollander & Morris Stoloff is catchy & charming (despite its financial failure, the movie was remembered at Oscar time with a nomination for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture; it lost to Alfred Newman for Call Me Madam).

The movie is also very well cast. Tommy Rettig as Bartholomew manages the tricky task of representing what is supposed to be a "typical American boy" while not being repulsive (usually that type, particularly from the mid-century – think of any Disney live-action show from the 1950s or 1960s – just creeps me out, but Rettig is very appealing). Hans Conried is menacing but amusing, even a bit endearing, as Dr Terwilliger. Peter Lind Hayes is both dry & warm as the plumber, Mr Zabladowski, & Mary Healy is winsome as the widowed mother. But it's the whole look of the film, the wildness of its conceptions, the wit of its performance, that really carry the day.

A friend of mine who had seen the movie many years ago & was less entertained than I was texted to me, "Aren't you supposed to be able to read all sorts of Freudian & Cold War subtext into it?" Yes indeed, I can certainly see that. There's a lot of mid-century-movie-Freudianism about the boy & his mother (who is pretty much the only woman in the entire film) & his search for a father figure (the plumber rather than Dr Terwilliger). I have to say, for 1950s Hollywood Freud the handling is fairly light, certainly when compared to some of Hitchcock's films. And for the Cold War, there is the fight against a somewhat ludicrous but genuinely threatening authoritarian, one who stifles dissent & insists on having his rules obeyed endlessly & automatically, as well as a device that switches the balance of power & which gets referred to as "atomic". But I would be surprised if there weren't also theories about a queer (male) subtext: the dreams of our all-American lad seem to involve more partly nude men than you usually see in a 1950s musical, he seems very determined to have his mother marry the plumber, mostly so he & his new Dad can have a homosocial relationship (fishing together, like something out of The Wind in the Willows), &, as mentioned, the only female around is the boy's mother. And of course the whole impetus of the film is about expressing your individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist, & unaccepting authority.

I'm not thrilled that the rebellion takes the form of refusing to practice the piano. The value of music is too obvious to need my insistence, & you get there by practicing. The suggestion that "normal" children, particularly boys, don't like practicing piano is a toxic cliché. But I can look past that annoyance, which is sort of the key that unlocks the wildness of the film. I'm ready to join the cult.

Next up, on 29 July, is The Asphalt Jungle, which I also have never seen.

What I Watched: February 2024

Before January ended I started re-watching Disc 1 of Edison: The Invention of the Movies, a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art & the Library of Congress issued by Kino sometime in (I think) the early 2000s, but going through the disc took me into February; the films are short but there are quite a few of them. The first disc goes from 1889 to 1903. Sometimes people tell me they're watching "an old movie" & it turns out to be from 1964 or suchlike. I laugh! "An old movie" means pre-1915.

This is a wonderful collection. There's always a fascination in old movies in seeing not just a vanished world but a vanished way of looking at the world. The commentators on this set are very useful in this regard, pointing out, for example, that Edison had a keen eye for what would sell & tended to promote basically sex & violence (contrasted with the Lumière Brothers in France, who were more likely to show domestic family scenes, rather than belly-dancers, or factory workers rather than boxers). Sometimes you need the context pointed out to realize what's really going on: there's one film showing a Black woman washing a Black child. I assumed this was one of those "actualities", a scene from daily life. It turns out that it's actually a comedy film, as no matter how much she washes that baby . . . he's still going to be Black! Horrifying, yet revealing. This is not the only such film; there's another "comedy" short showing an "old maid" (played by a man in drag; it was his vaudeville specialty) having her picture taken, only she's so homely (hence her old-maid status!) that the camera cracks. Comedy gold, obviously. There's a current fad now for "honoring the ancestors" & whenever someone trots out that number I always think of things like these films.

Some of these films take on a different resonance for us, in our very different era: there's the famous film with the clinical-sounding title Dickson Experimental Sound Film, one of the first (possibly the first) attempt to synchronize sound with image. A man plays a tune on a violin while two other men slowly dance around him. We tend to see this as a homoerotic image, though it wasn't necessarily intended as or perceived as such in its own time. It is rather mesmerizing & dreamlike, either way, & of course you can put your own interpretation on what is essentially an unmediated image.

These films are very old & summon up a vanished time, but also can reverberate in surprisingly contemporary ways. There are quite a few shots of "serpentine dances" & Eugene Sandow, posing in skimpy briefs, ripples his muscles at us aesthetically; you can see surprisingly similar dance-based short films on Instagram & TikTok; & there's a minor industry on those platforms of young men acting as Fitness Influencers who are basically doing what Sandow did, & in the way he did it (he sold fitness instruction books the way our contemporaries sell on-line personal training).

There are a number of famous films on this disc, including The Great Train Robbery, but for me the somewhat disturbing highlight is one of the most memorable films I've ever seen, Electrocuting an Elephant from 1903. I first saw it decades ago, when I lived in Boston, in a program at the Museum of Fine Arts. I have no idea what the theme of the program was & I can't remember anything else that was on it. I'm not sure I realized this particular short was from Edison & my recollection is that it was played in ahistorical silence. But there was definitely a change in the atmosphere of the auditorium as the film unrolled in its misty shades of oneiric grays. An elephant, wearing some sort of harness, is walked over to a stand. After a moment, smoke starts to curl up from the bottom of her feet. Slowly, slowly, she lists to the left & then falls on her side. She twitches slightly. A man walks in front of her, between us & the camera; the closeness of his torso is unexpected in a film this early, & almost is like an iris-wipe of the screen.

It's all slow & silent & gray, like a nightmare image that you can't shake even in the brightest hours of your waking day. I was amazed to rediscover it when I first watched this set. It turns out Topsy was an elephant who had killed people: one (according to Wikipedia) was a drunken spectator who burnt her trunk with a lit cigar; according to the notes on the set, he was an employee of the circus who fed her a lit cigarette, & in either case I say he got what he deserved, but as is sadly the usual case, the poor animal had to suffer for the stupidity of people. It was filmed for commercial exploitation but is an unsettling piece of found poetry. Rest in power, Topsy.

Then I watched the Criterion DVD of King of Jazz from 1930. I bought it when I was transitioning from DVD to Blu-Ray, & I wish I had bought the Blu-Ray, but oh well. This is an early Technicolor film, using their two-strip method, so it is strong (very strong) on red & green & not so much on blue. The colors are used deliberately; the whole thing is very designed in a fascinating way. The titular king is Paul Whiteman, best remembered now for commissioning & premiering Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, but at the time a general leader in popular music, including his version of jazz. Sadly but typically, the Black contributions to jazz (which of course means most of jazz) are overlooked here. Nonetheless it's a very enjoyable film; the musical numbers are interspersed with little pre-Code comedy bits which, almost surprisingly, are still pretty snappy. This is a Criterion release so of course there are lots of fascinating ancillary materials. There were attempts to come up with a narrative, but the chubby bald Whiteman was too unlikely as a romantic lead (on film, at least; I make no judgments about how he would succeed in life) so we have just a series of numbers, a random succession of scenes which holds up better than most narratives would. There is an overriding "here's Paul Whiteman's scrapbook" idea which loosely, very loosely, links things together. There are early sound cartoons interpolated in (including offensive racial stereotypes of "African natives"). Revealing period limitations aside, quite an enjoyable film.

Next up was The Midnight Girl from 1925. Describing the plot, which is already slipping from my memory, would make it sound more fun than it actually was: rival singers, tempestuous divas, a philandering father (played by a goateed & alarmingly sexy Bela Lugosi) & a simp son both in love with the same woman, a refugee from the dread Bolsheviks who has to work as a nightclub singer. . . . I couldn't help thinking that a director other than Wildred Noy (whom I'd never heard of, apparently for good reason) might have made something more striking out of all this. (Where is Louis Feuillade when you need him?) It all gets tied up in an improbably happy ending, with marital love & fidelity established even among the unlikeliest pairs. How disappointing.

That was followed by Something for Everyone, the feature-film directorial debut of Hal Prince, starring Michael York & Angela Lansbury. I had been curious about this film for a long time, maybe only because I remembered the summary by (I assume) Pauline Kael back in the day, in the New Yorker movie listings: "Nothing much for anyone, really. . . ." It turns out I don't disagree. York plays an outsider who comes to a small town ruled socially by an impoverished aristocrat (Lansbury). He proceeds to insinuate himself into the household's graces, mostly through seduction & murder, & as with The Midnight Girl, that makes the film sound more fun than it actually is. It's all weirdly unfocused: except for Lansbury, the aristocrats are dead-minded & conventional (&, improbably, opposed to any Nazis still lingering in the countryside) but we also seem meant to admire them, or maybe just her. There is a nouveau-riche couple with a marriageable daughter who are screeching social-climbing horrors. Why caricature them like that unless you're siding with the so-called aristocracy, but why side with the aristocracy? What do I care if they get to move back into their traditional home, a fancy castle? It's called a black comedy, but it doesn't cut very deep, & doesn't seem very black or very comic. The film seems too pleased with its own sense of daring, though it's not really shocking at all. In fairness, it probably was more daring in 1970, when it was released, as there is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of an affair between York & the Countess's son. (York is also sleeping with a number of others, including the daughter of the nouveau riche couple, so, you know, complications ensue.) I was reminded vaguely of Pasolini's Teorema, also about a handsome stranger who seduces & upsets a household, but I saw that film so many years ago that I can't make a more specific comparison. Time to re-watch that, I  guess.

Next up was Robert Altman's A Wedding, one of my legacy Netflix films. Netflix told us just to keep whatever discs we had when they shut down their disc rental service. They also said they might send us up to 10 discs from our queue once the service ended; presumably they found other ways to get rid of their inventory, as I never received any additional discs. May I just say I was increasingly annoyed with them as the end approached? They made a decision based purely on greed (disc rental is still a viable business, just not as profitable as it once was; there was an implication that only clueless old people were still renting discs, but actually it was mostly movie fans who wanted a more diverse selection than streaming gives you). But they kept marketing "Hey, didn't we have some great times?" It's like someone breaking up with you who insists on getting together to talk about how great things used to be. And . . . you're breaking up with me, just go away!

Anyway. I had not seen Altman's film since its release in 1978. I think it suffered a bit at the time from comparisons to its great predecessor, Nashville. This movie also involves numerous story lines that weave in & out, but it's smaller in scope & implication than Nashville. Nonetheless it's a wonderful film, & I even managed to watch it all in one night. Lillian Gish makes one of her last film appearances, as a family matriarch who dies quietly upstairs while the family is at the church. She hovers beatifically over the film, or such was my recollection; it turns out, on a re-viewing, that her character is more ambiguous than I had remembered. She is a gracious old lady, but also, in her gentle way, sternly controlling & hypocritically attentive to outward proprieties; early on, she has an affectionate scene with one of the family's Black employees, in which she gently tells him that during the wedding reception he should remain distant with her daughter – the one whom, as she knows, he's having an affair with; she also let another daughter marry an Italian man on the condition that his family never come to the house. There are lots of storylines that are only hinted at, or given us by implication. Things are unexpected. There is a fiery car crash (which I had completely forgotten), but the victims are not who we thought they were. There is a scene in which a gay classmate is trying to sober up the groom by hauling him into the shower; it looks like a seduction, but it's not. And the gay classmate is wearing the standard baggy white boxer shorts, while the straight groom is wearing colored briefs of a type that were, at the time, not usual with straight men. The film is full of unexpected twists like that, even in the details. Carol Burnett has a major role as the mother of the bride, a woman in a dead-end marriage; she brings to it her Chaplinesque depth of pathos.

Next up was The Silent Enemy, a late (1930) silent film, filmed in Canada, telling a story of the Ojibwe people before Europeans arrived on this continent. The film, directed by HP Carver & produced by W Douglas Burden & William C Chanler, inspired by Merian Cooper's Chang, is clearly a labor of love, an attempt to tell a native story in an authentic & respectful way. The set carefully notes, though, that it is a product of its time & needs to be taken as such; the implication that the Indian nations are vanishing is one assumption that no longer holds. And though all the performers are indigenous peoples, they are not all of the Ojibwe nation (the distinguished-looking man who plays the Chief, who has a brief spoken prologue in an otherwise silent film, is Sioux), & the driving forces behind the camera are white. I had seen the film years ago, but I don't remember its being as beautiful to look at as it is in the Flicker Alley blu-ray, which is what I watched this time. Scene after scene is just gorgeous; you could print & frame many of the shots (the cinematography is by Marcel Le Picard). The scenes of animals in the wild are stunning. The story is fairly standard: there is an elderly Chief, with an attractive daughter, & there are two main rivals for both her affection & leadership in the community: a studly hunter & a nefarious medicine man (the villain in these tales is so often the medicine man, or the high priest, or some similar religious functionary). Winter is coming & the group must deal with imminent starvation (the "silent enemy" of the title). But you don't really watch this for the storyline; it's more about the native performers (rather than the characters they're playing), & for the stunning images. FlickerAlley, as usual, did a beautiful job with the set; there are two different musical scores, including a new one from the Monte Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, & a commentary track in the form of a recorded conversation between the great Kevin Brownlow & W Douglas Burden about the making of the film.

Now that Netflix has abandoned film lovers, I have turned to my local library as a source of movie rentals, & I ended the month watching Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated feature starring the Beatles & some of their songs. I had seen it many, many years ago on TV. The animation is striking, with vivid use of color, & those colors are absolutely glowing. The look is very reminiscent of its time (the iconic year 1968, to be exact) but also manages to look still fresh rather than dated. The general attitude is also of the period, with a sort of optimism & cheer (All you need is love!) that can leave us, in our time, feeling either wistful or incredulous. The storyline is piffle, but it's not really about the story, which is mostly an excuse for striking visuals & the songs. I'm an odd age for the Beatles; I was too young to be a fan at the time, so I came to them in later, in bits & pieces (I would still say I am far from a maven of their music, though I like it). The film does a striking segment featuring my favorite song by them, Eleanor Rigby, which I've been singing to myself, & sometimes out loud, for days now. \Ah, look at all the lonely people. . . .

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.

SF Silent Film Festival: A Day of Silents

Continuing a wrap-up of last year with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's A Day of Silents:

The annual Day of Silents was held at the period-appropriate, gloriously ornate Castro Theater, & as in a few weeks the venue is being shut down for about a year & a half by its new owners in order to undertake extensive renovations (possibly, it has been suggested by many, ruinations), there was a nostalgic feeling in the air (though you will have one more chance to experience the Castro as a purely cinematic palace when the Festival presents Dreyer's Vampyr, with their signature live musical accompaniment, on 12 January).

The nostalgia was for the beloved & historic venue; there is surprisingly little nostalgia involved in seeing the films, some of which are well past the century mark in age. Perhaps nostalgia is limited to the remembered creations & moments from one's youth, & there can be few people still around who experienced silent film in its original moment. The six programs, which as usual with the Festival were wide-ranging & varied, could be seen & appreciated directly as art.

The first program, Of Mice & Men (& Cats & Clowns), with musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker & Nicholas White, was all animation, covering Émile Cohl's 1908 Fantasmagorie to Pat Sullivan's 1928 Felix the Cat in Sure-Locked Homes. Obviously Felix is the Cat referenced in the title; the clown is the Fleischer Brothers' Koko, who made an Out of the Inkwell appearance in A Trip to Mars & Vacation, both from 1924. I guess Koko was a star until he turned into a sidekick in the early sound era for the incandescent Betty Boop. Anyway, the films on the program contained an amazing level of technical innovation (mixing animation & live action, right from the start!), surreal wit, filmic cleverness, & impressive amounts of sheer though submerged labor (some of the earliest cartoons, including Winsor McKay's disturbing How a Mosquito Operates from 1912, required the artist to produce thousands of individual drawings). The designs tend to be much simpler than in the richly drawn cartoons of the 1930s. These cartoons are not the worse for that; there is a graphic boldness to them that looks clean & classic. I much prefer it to the Uncanny Valley of today's computer-produced, realism-driven works.

The second program was Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat from 1921, starring Pola Negri, with musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. I thought before going in that I had seen this film, but afterwards I was pretty sure I had not, as I can't imagine forgetting such a wild & fanciful foray. The set design alone (Ernst Stern & Max Gronau), with its swirling fortress in the snowy Bavarian Alps, is something that would stick in the memory. I loved the way many shots were framed so that we're mostly seeing things under arches or through circles or in some other eccentric configuration. Negri as the powerful daughter of the Chief of the mountain brigands assailing the fortress is as expected a vital & appealing force. Even if I had seen the movie before, I would would be happy to see it again: it's full of wild moments & surprises.

Next up was The Eagle from 1925, directed by Clarence Brown & starring Rudolph Valentino & Vilma Banky, with musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker. This was a lovely print & an excellent showcase for Valentino, who displays not only his graceful almost feline sexual charm but also great skill at light-comedy moments. It's based on an unfinished story by Pushkin & involves a son (Valentino) who seeks revenge on the ignoble Nobleman who has cheated his father out of his country estate. There's also Louise Dresser as a delightfully lusty Catherine the Great (someone should put together a film series of the cinematic Catherines; there's Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress & Elisabeth Bergner in the Korda-produced Rise of Catherine the Great & I'm sure there are others). She, like the audience, is drawn to the handsome young soldier. He is resistant, possibly because he's already seen golden-haired Vilma Banky, but honestly . . . Catherine is certainly older than he is, but not by that much, & she's quite attractive, &, you know, why not? But the plot requires him to flee her attentions. The sets for this one were also quite striking; designed by William Cameron Menzies, they reminded me of his elegant work for the Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad. There are certainly striking dramatic moments, particularly when Valentino is undercover in the house of the evil Nobleman (who turns out to be the father of Vilma Banky), & some striking cinematic moments, including a famous tracking shot down a banquet table that brought applause from our audience. These things, & the appeal of the characters, more than made up for some loose ends in the plot (the family estate never really does seem returned & the father avenged, but otherwise there is a happy ending all around).

Fourth was Pavement Butterfly, a German/British collaboration from 1929, directed by Richard Eichberg & starring Anna May Wong, with musical accompaniment by the Sascha Jacobsen Ensemble. Wong is receiving some long overdue recognition, & the theater was packed for this one (a friend of mine who came only to this program told me he had some trouble finding a seat). The audience included some members of Wong's family (she was a California native). Butterfly in the title might lead you to expect a story along the lines of Puccini's great opera, but though there is a lover who moves on while she stays faithful, the story is complicated in other ways & she does not die at the end – my recollection of the translation of her farewell subtitle in the film is that it was "I don't belong with you", but the article in the program book gives it as "I don't belong to you", which is something different. (The original words are Ich gehöre nicht zu euch & Google Translate agrees with the program book.) The setting is the Parisian / Monte Carlo demimonde of artists & wealthy patrons. As you might expect from a late-period silent film from Germany, the photography is stunning & the whole film is gorgeous to look at (I believe the film has only recently been restored). Wong is a subtle performer & an incandescent presence.

Since I mentioned the program book, I should emphasize that the Festival always does a wonderful job with them. They are substantial publications, with interesting articles on the programs & many attractive photographs. & the Festival doesn't charge for them!

I left after Pavement Butterfly. That had been my plan all along, as the fifth program was Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! & the final program, a melodrama titled Forgotten Faces, started late enough so that I didn't want to stick around before the MUNI/BART return to the east bay. I had some regrets about skipping Faces. The Lloyd I have seen before & if you have any sort of feelings about heights, it is difficult to watch. The first time I saw it was at the Pacific Film Archive when I was a student at Berkeley. By the time the film ended I was drenched in sweat. The second time I saw it was during the pandemic, when I finally watched the boxed set of Lloyd films I had bought years before. & though I admired Lloyd's ingenuity, & the impressive physical feat represented by the film (done though he was missing a thumb & forefinger! & those shoes he's wearing – those are regular dress shoes, with no traction on the soles!), I decided I didn't need to see the movie again. Since this is its centennial year, it made sense to have it headline the festival, but . . . not for me. When I read in the program book that when Lloyd came across the actual "human fly" who inspired the film, his "heart was in [his] throat" & he had to keep looking away. I felt considerable relief, as I was starting to feel a bit candy-ass about my inability to watch the film. I like Lloyd (though I prefer Chaplin & Keaton), but I'll stick to something like The Kid Brother.

Mae West: Night After Night

 Kino Lorber recently released on Blu-Ray the nine films Mae West made between 1932 and 1940; she did make a few others (notably a couple as late as the 1970s), but these nine movies are what she is mostly remembered for. The first of them is Night After Night.

As with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, supporting players in 1933's Flying Down to Rio whose one big dance number led to their beloved series of starring vehicles, West has only a small role here, but it launched her in her own series of tailor-made films, a series so successful that the first, She Done Him Wrong, was credited with saving Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy. She was a writer as well as actor, and already in Night After Night she was given a free hand to rework her scenes. The disc's informative commentary track, by film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson, gives the background: the film's official star, George Raft, knew West from their days on the New York stage and in the New York demimonde and recommended her for the role of Maudie Triplett, an ex-girlfriend to his character, the Everymanly-named Joe, a bootlegger/gangster trying to make good as a night-club owner. West came out to Paramount and after several weeks received a draft script; when she told the producers that they could get anyone to play the part as written, they told her she could rewrite her scenes.

West had by then had several plays in New York that were hits despite or because of censorship attempts by groups such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice, giving her a reputation as a bad woman, at least in prudish eyes, and as a daring and provocative performer among people who weren't all that committed to repressing the Society's idea of vice. Her first scene in Night After Night shows her considerable skill in stagecraft: we first see her outside the door of the night club – actually, we don't see her, exactly; we know she's there, as we can hear her distinctive voice (an effective use of the still relatively new technology of talking pictures); what we see is the tuxedoed backs of a number of young swells, who (this comparison comes from Heller-Nicholas on the commentary track) form a curtain of men, parting to reveal her. She is clearly a force as she goes into the night club, ignoring with great good humor the attempts of Joe's loyal aide to pretend he's not there at the moment. And within minutes of her entrance we get one of her all-time classic lines: the friendly hat check girl, who can't help noticing her dazzling jewels, exclaims, "Goodness! what beautiful diamonds!" And she responds, of course, again with great good humor, "Dearie, goodness had nothing to do with it." What really marks her out as an actor who knows what she's doing is that while she clearly knows this is a great line – her dialogue flashes in this first brief scene, with this line exploding like the final big effect on fireworks night at the ballpark – she also knows she doesn't need to milk it, or even bask in it, because she's letting us know there're plenty more where that came from – she just delivers it and moves off confidently, as no topper is possible, and the camera agrees, as it cuts right away.

Years ago when Desperately Seeking Susan was new I read a review announcing that we just can't take our eyes off Madonna and, on the contrary, I always found it very easy to do so (oddly Madonna is mentioned a few times in the commentary track; the reference seems a bit dated to me, but then Madonna. like Michael Jackson, Keith Haring, and Ronald Reagan, is one of those 1980's cultural icons whose appeal I never understood, even in the 1980s). But you really can't take your eyes off West when she's on screen (Madonna, by contrast, was just a poor imitation, with a few other stars like Dietrich thrown in occasionally to vary the tune). 

West (for our purposes, the character she's playing is always "Mae West", regardless of the particular avatar she appears under in each film) is headed to the table where Joe is trying to impress Miss Healy (Constance Cummings) a young society woman, whom he has noticed for several nights visiting his night club solo – it turns out the building was her formerly wealthy family's residence, lost in the stock-market crash of 1929. There is already a third party at their table, as Raft had earlier invited Mabel (Alison Skipworth), the stout and refined middle-aged woman who is tutoring him in the ways of the haut monde, to join them for dinner and, as part of her Henry Higgins duties, help him impress the upper-crust beauty (just the fact that she's inevitably referred to as "Miss Healy" tells you all about her status) by guiding the conversation so he can impress her with the opinions he's been told to have on Important Subjects like global politics.

Mabel is quite delighted to be asked to the dinner, as she has never been in a night club, or, you suspect, in any romantic relationships. It's an interesting light on her character, and the first hint that she's not like Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers' films, or some snooty dragon-guard of the sort you might expect in a '30s film about crossing social boundaries; we realize her status is liminal, as she has the manners and knowledge of the educated classes, but not much life experience or, as we discover later, income. West orders a waiter to bring her a chair and plops herself down, quipping all the way, and, again contrary to what you might expect in a movie like this, not only are Mabel and West not antagonists, after a few drinks they hit it off quite splendidly and end up sleeping it off in one of the nightclub's guest rooms, and not only in the same room, but in the same bed.

On the commentary track Heller-Nicholas in particular is thrilled with this scene and its (her term) queer-friendly nature. Sure, but I'm not as convinced as she is that we're meant to see that as the inescapable subtext – it's certainly possible, but the very openness of the arrangement makes me think it was just not that unusual in that period for people to share beds non-sexually in a boarding-house – if it had been, more would have been made of it, both in the film and in its reception. You could make more of a case for the queering of Mabel, who, as Maude keeps giving her liquor, asks her if she believes in love at first sight ("I don't know but it certainly saves time" West responds) and then asks if she thinks it really would be possible to lose her inhibitions. But I don't think we're meant to see the two women as even potential romantic partners – it's more to the point that the upper-crust tutor and the cheery broad end up having a lot in common. The two end up helping each other: there's some amusing dialogue at cross-purposes in which West proposes that Mabel join her business, which Mabel assumes is prostitution. It turns out to be a chain of beauty salons, and West could use a high-class woman to act as a manager. In short, the point here is more homosocial than homoerotic; it's women helping each other financially and socially, by owning a stake in an industry, female beautification, that plays a double-edged role in controlling and empowering women.

There are a couple of overt queer references that the commentary track didn't cover. One is when Raft, showing out some equally elegant gangsters who have come to muscle in on his business, is asked by them what flowers he prefers (the implication is for his funeral, if he doesn't cooperate) and he genially replies, "Oh, anything at all but pansies", and so much for queer-friendly. The other moment is in a montage of people partying at the night-club: among the revelers, there's a shot of two women in close-up: one who looks a bit older and has dark hair, cut very short and slicked back like a man's, smiling insinuatingly at a younger blond woman as she offers her a cigarette, which the blond, after a split-second hesitation, takes, breaking into a big smile. I watched the preview for this film, included on the disc as one of the extras, and I noticed it contains that montage, only with the close-up of the two women removed, suggesting that the lesbian reference was clear enough so that it was considered best to slip it in during the film rather than highlight it during a preview. But is this queer-positive, or titillation, or maybe a bit of both? It's interesting that the one reference to male homosexuals is a negative joke, but there is an at least potentially more positive undercurrent of lesbianism.

There is also an implication in that close-up that, as most at the time would have described it, the older woman is "recruiting"/"corrupting" the younger – well, such things happen in the big cities, where the champagne flows and the morals fly! (Again: approval, or titillation?) There's always the temptation with pre-Code films to assume that their openness would be the same as ours, and that openness is acceptance. Inevitably we're reminded that things change. The society girl here clearly loves it when the gangster stops trying to play the country-club boy and grabs her roughly, speaking to her even more roughly – in fact, all along she's clearly been excited by what she experiences as slumming. When West shows up at the dinner table, Miss Healy stops smiling with condescending amusement at the efforts to impress her, and obviously delights (eyes sparkling, lips slightly parted) in Maude's tales of saloon brawls and fights with the police. I doubt a movie these days would be as open about this woman's desire to be overpowered by a man, particularly one of a lower class: here, it's presented as a natural thing, leading rather abruptly to the film's happy ending.

The women (particularly West, of course) are the main attraction here, but I have to mention how impressed I was with George Raft. I haven't seen that much of him, except for his bit part as Spats Columbo in Some Like It Hot, in which his casting is an in-joke about his career as Hollywood's go-to gangster in the 1930s. But he's really impressive here, not only good-looking enough to put one in mind of Valentino, but managing to be convincingly and seamlessly hard as a gangster, suave as a night-club owner, and boyish as a wooer. This is an interesting film, even apart from its fame for West's first appearance on screen, and it looks great in the Kino Blu-ray's luscious black-and-white.