Wild Oranges (1924)

 
There are moments in Wild Oranges when you wonder what you’re watching. It’s a silent film alright, and it looks like one—but this story of a love affair in a secluded patch of Georgia coast, at times, seems plucked from another period entirely. In form, it’s the early-20s, but in content, often, it feels like something made much later.

A Woman of Paris (1923)

A Woman of Paris is most famous for who isn’t in it. Charlie Chaplin directed the film, a personal project to ensure star Edna Purviance’s lasting success, but aside from an indistinguishable cameo role, he’s nowhere to be found onscreen. History tells us this was a mistake. The movie fared poorly, with audiences showing up to see a Chaplin film and leaving disappointed. A Woman of Paris not only lacks a Tramp; it’s a drama to boot. Though no one who bought a ticket could have claimed to have been duped, their expectations were not met, and that’s what counted in the end.

The Single Standard (1929)

I like a lot of scenes in The Single Standard, but there’s only one I love.

It’s night, it’s raining. Arden Stuart (Great Garbo), in need of a walk, leaves her home anyway. As she joins hundreds of others carrying their umbrellas along a city street, a smiling man sidles up to her and begins to flirt.

“I’m walking alone because I want to walk alone,” she tells him.

He keeps in lockstep with her, still talking. He grabs the stem of her umbrella. And so she simply turns and crosses the street, still in the downpour, leaving him holding it. That is all you need to know about Arden Stuart.

Today's photo: Greta Garbo

Today's Photo: Dorothy Sebastian and Joan Crawford

Today's Photo: Rudolph Valentino

The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927)

When I need my fix of 1920s/early-30s human grotesquerie, I know who to turn to: the Austrians. Films like Greed (1924) and M (1931) aren’t just terrific art, they’re freak-shows: displaying up close and personal some of the supreme low-lifes of the early screen. Some of the men and women in these films are ugly, and some aren’t; but they have a rot deep down inside of them and it isn’t pretty.

Sleeper's Wake (2012)

If your script is tragic enough, it doesn’t need to be good. The audience will still be moved.

Actually, I don’t believe that. Or, I don’t want to believe it. But some members of the audience I was part of yesterday, during a screening of Sleeper’s Wake, made we wonder. I heard gasps and oh no’s—expressions of genuine shock. So one might argue that Sleeper’s Wake is good, for it had these people going. But Sleeper’s Wake is not good. Its moments are shocking not just for their content, but from the fact that they come from nowhere. They’re not built up, not prepared for. Which, in turn, makes them necessary to keep the audience engaged. Confused? At times, so was I.

John Wraith (Lionel Newton) is a South African magazine writer; recent victim of a horrible loss. Due to circumstances never fully explained, the SUV he was driving veered off the road, seriously injuring him and killing his wife and only child. He is naturally distraught, unable to work, and close to the bottle. He eventually leaves his house for a secluded chalet in the woods.

I’ve never suffered a tragedy like Wraith’s, but Newton's portrayal of it seemed real enough to me. His character spends the film looking haggard and thin; on the verge of tears much of the time. His alone-time, what we see of it, is gut-wrenching. I believed in John Wraith.

I did not believe in anyone, or anything else in Sleeper’s Wake. The meat of the story is John’s developing relationship with a troubled 17-year-old named Jackie (Jay Anstey); a beautiful girl with a domineering father and no mom. Her mother, we’re told, through conflicting accounts, died during a brutal break-and-enter not long ago.

Jackie’s father, Roelf (Deon Lotz), is a religious zealot who beats her. Or, he’s simply an overwhelmed man of faith with a temper, and the black eye came from someone else. Either interpretation is credible. I’m not sure why director (and screenwriter) Barry Berk put so much emphasis on Roelf’s Christianity, but I suspect it was to make us dislike him. Since it had no relevance to the plot, I drew no such conclusion.

Anstey, as Jackie, is petulant, volatile, and gorgeous. Over the course of several nude scenes and heart-to-heart talks, she manages to seduce the much older John, whose scruples wax and wane. She also reveals to him her version of the events that destroyed her family, and he reciprocates with his own.

These conversations aren’t particularly well-written; worse, they seem interchangeable. If you switched the scenes in which they take place, they would function much the same—revealing a little bit of a backstory that in no way impacts the main plot. The scenes themselves are contrived. One would think that these woods, and mountains, and beaches that John and Jackie traverse and screw in were only a square kilometer in total—because the couple inevitably run into people they know, at exactly the wrong time for them, but the right time for a fidgeting audience.

I don’t demand realism for its own sake. But just as great abstract painters can paint in a realistic way, but choose not to, great screenwriters must ground themselves in what is true, then build upon that. Berk does not. I can believe that a lonely, older man like John, faced with the sight of naked Jay before him, would succumb. I can also believe that John, widowed and once a father of a girl himself, would resist. But I do not believe that he would say no, then proceed to re-clothe the girl, as she stands stock-still, then literally shove her out the door. This makes for a memorable scene, but it’s not real life. It’s not good filmmaking. And it’s typical of Sleeper’s Wake.

Sleeper’s Wake screened Sunday afternoon, August 10, 2012, at Toronto’s Jackman Hall; part of the Toronto International Film Festival.
 

Tabu (2012)

Tabu is two films, linked by memory. Or maybe fantasy. The two people doing the remembering are elderly, and in one case, demented; the past they recall is fogged by years and distorted, perhaps, by guilt and grief. But it is theirs. They own it. In the present, they own very little. 

Yesterday I heard director Miguel Gomes describe the two halves of his film as being “in opposition.” They are, in form and style, so different that I take his description literally. Part One of Tabu is set in the present day, in Lisbon; though filmed in black and white, it is a thoroughly modern-looking film about Pilar (Teresa Madruga); a Catholic woman of great social conscience, who frets for the well-being of her aged next-door neighbour, Aurora (Laura Soveral), and Aurora’s illiterate live-in housekeeper, Santa (Isabel Cardoso). 

Part Two, also in black-and-white, is set in Colonial Africa, 50 years before. It follows a torrid love-affair between young Aurora (Ana Moreira) and Ventura (Carlotto Cotta), a scoundrel who loves her at least as much as her husband does, and whom she loves more than anyone else. Part Two sweeps away the foggy everyday of modern Lisbon for the expanse of the savannah; everything is sunny and wild. And, it is silent. 

I don’t mean silent in the literal sense; I mean it in the sense that readers of this blog think of ‘silent’—a film in which people talk, are seen to talk, but no words are heard. There are plenty of sounds in Part Two. Lots of music; sounds of nature; we even hear Ventura’s voice on tape, as part of a song he sings with his band. But we never hear the lovers speak, we only see them. 

I’ve watched a lot of films that mix the sound and silent aesthetic this way. Most of them were early-talkies—transitional films from around 1929 that were mostly silent, but included a sound sequence to cash in on the new craze. Most of these films don’t work, because going from sound to silence feels smothering. But Gomes maintains enough of a soundscape in Part Two that we don’t feel robbed. It is only the words he doesn’t want us to hear, not the rest of the world. 

There are other silent touches. Ventura, a handsome drifter with a pencil-thin moustache, looks very much like a silent archetype of the man he really is. The film is shot in 4:3, a squarish frame dominant in the Silent Era. And of course, the film shares its title with F.W. Murnau’s famous quasi-documentary, Tabu (1931), though the connection is otherwise tenuous. 

You may be surprised to learn that I liked Part One more. Madruga’s Pilar, a devout and lonely woman with firm convictions, who despairs at her inability to do even more good, seemed to me the kind of hero that the movies should highlight more. I’d gladly watch a whole film just about her. Her relationships with Aurora—failing, confused—and Santa—taciturn, undervalued, possibly resentful—are rich in emotional truth. Part Two, also good, interested me more as a technical exercise. I suspect that Gomes felt the same way. 

Tabu is an easy recommendation for me, for many more reasons than its silence. This is a film I will remember—I predict—for many years. We’ll see, when I do revisit it, how it stands up to the memory I’ve built.

Tabu screened Saturday afternoon, August 9, 2012, at Toronto's Jackman Hall; part of the Toronto International Film Festival.

It Happened One Night (1934)

Note: It Happened One Night screens this Wednesday night, part of TIFF in the Park 2012…


****

How many men dreamed, in 1934, of reading Claudette Colbert’s mind? In It Happened One Night, I think she let them. Or Frank Capra did. Their little dance—in which Capra’s lens holds fast to Colbert’s face, and that magnificent face delivers, wordlessly, what bubbles behind it—is the stuff of truth. And it elevates what could have been a tedious and silly film to something legendary. 

It Happened One Night stars Colbert as a spoiled socialite, Ellie Andrews; recently eloped, and now on the run from her domineering father (Walter Connolly), who has vowed to have her marriage annulled. Clark Gable plays Peter Warne, a boozing reporter in between jobs and in need of a scoop. They meet in a bus station—Ellie on her way to New York City to meet her husband; and Peter, seemingly, on the way to nowhere. 

Here is a situation pregnant with comic potential. And given the principles, and the time period, you might expect any number of screwball happenings to commence, and yet, they don’t. Peter explains to Ellie early on that she—or rather, her scandal—is his meal-ticket. She’s broke. Either she rides with him to NYC, giving him access to her thoughts, trials and tribulations every step of the way, or he rats her out to her dad. This is blackmail, and an obvious plot-device, but little is made of it. 

Ellie, we figure, is a fish out of water; a pampered rich-kid unable to cope with crowded bus-rides or line-ups for the communal shower or anything else money can’t immediately bypass. That’s how Peter sees her, anyway. He nicknames her “brat”. Presumably, this is something she has to overcome, and not on her own. But what we see instead is a quick adapter. Told she has to wait at the back of the shower line, she does so. Out of money, she’s willing to beg. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, the sing-a-long aboard the bus, she proves unaware of the words to “The Man on the Flying Trapeze”; but, by the second verse, she’s singing right along with the rest. Ellie is no hothouse flower. 

This is not a film about Peter learning to love or Ellie learning to survive. Both have these talents in abundance, right from the start. They just haven’t been forced to use them. What it’s really about is letting go: learning to recognize those needless boundaries by which they limit themselves, then dropping them. 

Capra’s symbol for this is the “Wall of Jericho”: a blanket, slung over a clothesline, bisecting every room Peter and Ellie share along their trip. This barrier exists for more than modesty’s sake. Breachable in an instant, its continuation proves that neither Peter nor Ellie have given in to their growing attraction. Were Ellie a loose woman, she could slink beneath or around this wall and into the opposite bed. Were Peter a villain, he could tug that blanket off that line and get to seducing, or worse. But up it stays. 

Nowadays, a script would have put these two in the sack before the half-way mark. Ellie’s marital status, which the film seems fairly ambivalent about, even by mid-30s standards, would scarcely matter at all today. That the marriage is unhappy, or unconsummated, or ill-advised (it is presumably all three) would be enough to dispense with it. I’m glad for the restriction here, actually, since it makes the film more interesting. But it speaks to the film’s weaknesses, too.

It Happened One Night can feel old-fashioned. And the moments when it does are jarring, because they occur within a film that, at other times, feels progressive, offering an unusually strong, capable, and unconventional female lead. Knowing that the typical Gable character is an assertive brute doesn’t make it any easier to watch him spanking Colbert, or any less tiresome to see tough-minded Ellie burst into hysterics when Peter wanders away to find food. As a fan of very old movies, I can appreciate that standards change, and that a truly sensitive viewer must be an adaptable one. However, these scenes seem to undercut the character Colbert and Capra were knowingly creating at the time. They’re a sop to the mainstream, and unnecessary.

I enjoy Gable more as a personality than an actor anyway—and so it is here. His Peter Warnes is a typical Gable alpha-male, whose feelings are in doubt only until he declares them. His charisma is, of course, gigantic. Both Gable’s and Peter’s, I mean. They are no different. 

Colbert is more interesting. She knows Ellie through and through. She is not fooled by lines on a page. Early on, Ellie uses high language to address Peter: calling him “young man”, even though he’s clearly older than her. In a lesser comedy, this would be a literal expression of her state of mind. But Colbert, in this film, makes it clear that Ellie speaks this way to mask her fear. Capra lets the camera linger on her after she talks, and then we see it: her despair. Other times, this technique reveals other emotions: good humor, after she’s kicked to the back of the shower line; and lust, after she wishes Peter a chaste goodnight. Peter says what he’s thinking; Ellie, almost never. 

In a film that promises comic reversals then provides us practically none, Colbert’s performance makes us forget why we ever expected those reversals—or would’ve wanted them. We let go of what we thought we needed. We glory in what we’ve got. 

Just like Ellie. 

Where to see It Happened One Night: 
It Happened One Night, winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, will be screened outdoors this Wednesday, August 29, at about 8:30 pm—the last of this year’s TIFF in the Park: Screwball Comedies features. 

TIFF in the Park 2012, a co-production of the Toronto International Film Festival and the Toronto Entertainment District BIA, takes place at David Pecaut Square, directly west of Roy Thomson Hall, in Toronto.

It Happened One Night is also available on DVD, through Sony Pictures.