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.