Silent film fans, this one included, have a great affection for Lonesome. It’s as sweet a movie as they come. I remember the first time I saw it, three years ago, in Syracuse, New York. I left the theatre feeling startled by how genuine and fresh it was. I was confident I could it show to anyone.
Of course, that would have been hard to do at the time. Until recently, Lonesome was festival film, difficult to see. And when you did see it, what you got was a rather rough-looking print. That has now changed, thanks to the gods at Criterion, who’ve seen fit to bless us with a Blu-ray release of the film. Now, finally, I’ve been able to give Lonesome a second look. But that second look is causing me to question its appeal.
Minutes into the screening of The Gold Rush—a film I’d seen before, but not for years—I realized something was wrong. The Tramp: lost and alone in The Yukon’s white wastes, in search of his vein of gold, wasn’t wearing a proper jacket. He would freeze.
It’s a joke, of course; one of dozens in Charlie Chaplin’s third full-length directorial effort. And it’s a strange one. Chaplin’s Tramp, a globally famous character, wore the same beat up, baggy, repurposed clothes in nearly every film, but most of those films were set in warm urban environments, where being underdressed is forgivable, and occasionally wise. Up in the mountains, it’s real dumb. And the Tramp isn’t dumb.
The Rules of the Game is the longest film I’ve ever seen. Not in duration, but in the dimensions of the spaces it depicts. Shot after deep-focus shot shows us figures rushing, fussing, and scurrying thirty feet in the distance—figures who matter just as much as those in the foreground, and who may, at any moment, make an impact just as great. And those tracking shots—director Jean Renoir following his actors as they traverse lengthy hallways in a fabulous mansion, other men and women appearing and disappearing through doorways and around corners all along the way—they’re remarkable.
We get a sense of a place, or time, that could go on forever. And of the immensity of the place itself; and of the puniness, by contrast, of the people who occupy it. The Rules of the Game is a comedy, but a mean one: zeroing in on a collection of men and women too rich, too idle, and too complacent to realize how little meaning their lives have, and suggesting, not so subtly, that the problem doesn’t begin and end with them.
The Docks of New York got me thinking about smoke and fog, and what they represent.
The movie’s filled with these things. Its protagonist, Bill Roberts (George Bancroft) makes his living shoveling coal into a ship’s boiler, causing stacks above him to belch smoke while he and his grimy mates puff away on cigarettes below. When he and his pal Steve (Clyde Cook) are given one night’s shore-leave, they exit the ship to a dock, shrouded in mist.
If I told you this film felt slow, what would you think of me?
Would you question my patience? Even my taste? An Inn in Tokyo’s an Ozu film, after all; part of a body of work famed for its stately pacing. Ozu never, ever rushed. Part of any true film fan’s maturation is discovering his work, falling in sync with its gentle rhythms, and learning to love the way its images unfold. You don’t make time for Ozu movies; they give you time.
And Ozu’s best films make the waiting worth it. But An Inn in Tokyo, one of the master director’s lesser-known silents, doesn’t always do that.
