The Invention of the Holy Grail at a ruined abbey
in England.
The absconded beloved in New York, “second
floor back”.
Return of the lover to Fifth Avenue with his prize
(cp. Gilliam’s The Fisher King).
Miraculous healing of the dying girl, effected by a
thief.
Trial and reconciliation.
A rescension of The
Light in the Dark.
The Eagle
The perfect comedy is ideal in its realizations,
scene after scene is virtuosic in the highest degree, the perfection is in the
grasp of every detail as taking place between two volleys of a firing squad at
target practice.
Valentino’s art is precisely conveyed in a
smile at first meeting Mascha, it reappears to confirm the identity of The
Black Eagle.
Russianism finely observed, not least in the
Czarina, a double game of Sortes Biblicæ, Vilma Banky’s charm, the
calm tempo, Brown’s camera, Pushkin on usurpation and vengeance and
service to the Crown.
Flesh and the
Devil
The design of the construction is to have a duel
for love fought twice over the same woman, once against a stranger (the
lady’s husband) and then against a blood brother from childhood (second
husband).
The genteel workings of this elaborate device are
the mainspring of the comedy, a perfect dunking of the femme fatale. A
maiden’s prayers send her across the ice to stop the wintry repeat of the
duel, she falls in, bubbles rise from the deeps.
Anna Christie
The girl in every port who’s a whore when her
sailor’s away, father or husband.
An astounding vitality of composition informs the
work decades ahead of its time.
The “cherished image” dragged behind at
a safe distance as Garbo will “forty years from now” be Dressler,
who gives a perfect performance almost noted by Mordaunt Hall in his New
York Times review.
Bickford plays the Irishman, Brown has
Christopherson from the first theatrical run, also perfect.
The camera rides a rollercoaster with the lovers,
and perches atop a bell rung with two strong arms.
O’Neill filmed correctly.
Wife vs.
Secretary
A magazine publisher sees his advertisers slipping
away to the lower-priced spread, he buys it.
Now the wife is unhappy because he’s up to
his ears in his very efficient secretary, negotiating the deal.
Circumstantial evidence forces the wife’s
hand, she goes home to his mother,
but the secretary isn’t a genius for nothing, she goes home to her soup-slurping family and clerk of a boyfriend.
Loy vs. Harlow (Clark Gable, James Stewart).
“This is the sort of Hollywood superproduction,” the New York Times meant but did not say,
“that gives Gotham a bad name.”
Idiot’s
Delight
The show business as a metaphor, no doubt of it,
and nothing of the kind.
Schlesinger’s Darling and Richardson’s The
Entertainer are very closely related, however remote they appear.
There are even two endings, one for abroad and one
at home, “Abide with Me” and Piccadilly Circus.
The Rains Came
The
scene is laid in Ranchipur at the time of filming, and Brown begins with an
overwhelming visual effect, the slatted screen of George Brent’s verandah
casting long narrow shadows overall. It’s hot, he slingshots a chattering
monkey. Abner Biberman strikes a note of mystery, there’s a statue of
Queen Victoria in the square. It’s peaceful, anyway, as in the days “before
dictators and appeasement.”
Elsewhere, the
social maven of the American Mission does a slow burn at the sight of
bespectacled Jane Darwell sitting on the schoolroom porch, “so Middle
West in front of my guests.”
Lord and Lady
Esketh (Nigel Bruce, Myrna Loy) arrive. Brent shows Loy around the palace at a
formal dinner. “That’s a Rembrandt. That’s a Buddhist prayer
wheel.” It’s a backward place nevertheless, riddled by
superstition, as Dr. Safti (Tyrone Power) explains. “Crops and starvation”
are among the people’s daily concerns, until the monsoons turn
“everything green and alive.” Brent is an old conquest of
Loy’s, but that’s all past. He lights her cigarette. Lightning
fills the screen.
A daughter of the
Mission (Brenda Joyce) decides to leave India and become an actress. She tries
her wiles on Brent, who does a flashing double take. The town at last is seen
through an archway, à la Ford, framing the street and two cows. The
rains come.
Loy sets her
sights on Power, a military man. He is too gallant to slight her. They hear
music together, a song which he translates as it is being improvised.
“Would my lyre were of jade, its strings of purespun gold, that I might
sing with merit of your beauty... in your heart my love has found a home, and
it can never die...”
Among
Brown’s considerable single shots is one of Esketh ailing in bed, a
window to the left on the night sky, the bed to the right in three-quarter view
with a lamp behind shining through the mosquito netting.
George Brent is
among those actors who, like Cary Grant and Clint Eastwood, are diffident in
some respects with varying directors. Here you see him at his best, sometimes
looking like Pedro Armendariz, sometimes like Emilio Fernandez.
He is asked by
Loy, “you sober enough to take me to the party?” He answers her as
he takes a drink, “almost.” Later she admonishes him. “Some
night you’re going to fall flat on your face and people will begin to
suspect you drink.”
Myrna Loy is, as
the Oxford don said of his mistress Florence Nightingale, “very
violent” in this part. She wears a matron’s Græco-Roman hair and
white dress, and goes great guns from Brown’s first searching close-up.
The good doctor has bested her, she resolves to leave Ranchipur sadder but
wiser. Then there is an earthquake, a tremor really, followed by a dambusting
cataclysm that floods the town (complex, difficult work for the matte artists).
And this is where Brown’s utter contempt for the niceties stamps itself
on the film in a characteristic revelatory brief scene. Esketh’s butler
advances upon him. “Fifteen years, yes m’lord, no m’lord, now
you’re afraid.” Both are obliterated. Queen Victoria is up to her
diddies in floodwater.
The would-be
actress rows exhaustedly to Brent’s rescue, he has been a gentleman and
she loves him. He puts her to bed, rows out and loses the boat. “Steady
old girl,” he says to the statue he clings to, as he clears away the
flotsam. He returns and collapses beside the girl.
The Maharajah
(H.B. Warner) dies in bed, his last words are “I know I can count on you
to help your queen.” The Maharani (Maria Ouspenskaya) is sage and astute
as he, and a poker player to boot. She declares a state of emergency, bids her
staff do their utmost, asks Brent for a cigarette, makes him aide-de-camp.
There is plague, doctors and nurses are wanting, Loy volunteers, weary of her
own jadedness and inspired somehow by the doctor’s loyalty. She is put to
cleaning floors, but he orders head nurse Miss MacDaid to train her quickly,
“she’s an intelligent woman.” So they work side by side in
the plague ward.
You will observe
that this is material propounded in Jezebel and advanced in Doctor
Zhivago (and A Passage to India), but delicately pointed here as
well. As aide-de-camp, with the girl clerking beside him, Brent is a regular
Joseph. The viceroy sends his condolences and a plane, with an offer of
assistance. The Maharani wants Loy out, the doctor “must remain devoted
to his cause.” Loy loves Power at last, for the first time, and
won’t go. In a marvelously-filmed scene, she gives water to a patient,
sits alone in the ward at night, the squatting man who pulls the fan-cord
topples over, he’s put to bed, she pours herself a glass of water,
realizes it’s the same one...
The doctor
remembers her at the Summer Palace, “shiny, glossy, crafty.” To
have submitted to her then “would have been like taking a counterfeit
instead of the real coin.” He doesn’t know she’s ill. She
collapses, and is put to bed. Miss MacDaid, who never liked her, sits down at
the ward desk and amends the list of critical and dying patients, adding a new
number to the latter column with a bitter smile, then crumples up the sheet and
buries her face in her arms (another of Brown’s cruel aperçus).
“Think of
the Maharani and your duty,” counsels Brent. Loy gives away her jewels,
and bids remembrance of “a shameless wench called Lady Esketh, who died
in Ranchipur during the great disaster of 1938.” The doctor promises to
take her to the Spice Islands, Coral Islands, but she dies open-eyed as he
speaks (Emilio Fernandez repeats the scene in Rio Escondido).
There is a
victory. Brent and the girl are united, the doctor receives honors at a formal
ceremony. He marches to it with an impassive look.
One should like
to point out that TV Guide mistook several details (malaria for plague,
etc.) and then accused Philip Dunne and Brown of eliding the realities.
Edison, the Man
Golden
Jubilee of Light. Recollections of the inventor.
In a cubbyhole at
Menlo Park sound asleep to avoid a writ of replevin goes lock stock and barrel
into Asquith’s The Yellow
Rolls-Royce.
And that is how
Edison received inspiration, “very important, you know. You have to have
it, you can’t invent it.”
Necessity is a
mother bear in a frozen world.
Discovery
of the phonograph.
Laborious
invention of the light bulb. Electricity, vacuum, filament. “I told you we had to
leave science behind.”
The
gas monopoly.
The
Edison Illuminating Company. A sweep of inventions. “Ingenuity
and humanity.”
Bosley Crowther of the New
York Times,
“has the quality of an inspirational document... gets sort of obvious...
smooth and workmanlike”. The Catholic News Service Media Review Office, “Tracy’s
performance is what makes it worth watching. Its picture of science in the
service of humanity as well as the virtues of dedication and hard work will not
be lost on the young.” Geoff Andrew (Time Out), “glossily polished
biopic... something of a whitewash job” (Halliwell’s Film Guide likewise).
The White Cliffs of Dover
The reasoning
behind Brown’s direction is very neat and in its way as elegant as
Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver, the rather brutal nature of the subject is
the long nightmare of history leading up to the present horrors. It would be
possible to make the thing work a hundred thousand times better, and that with
ease, yet Brown takes every bump in the road and grinding gear, it
doesn’t really work at all, this view of England from an American perspective,
for all its decency and rationality and ineffable whatnot. Brown wants a deus
ex machina and gets one to serve his turn. The terrible misunderstanding,
if it is one, has no solution whatsoever, far from it. No, not a hope, and so
be it, except that one’s American mother has the most awful love of the
place, England, and such jolly good reasons for it, along with others that one
knows not of, and there it is.
National Velvet
“A Clarence
Brown Production” in which the mastery of form consists of a tacit inner
structure built on casting and makeup, with the conscious participation of the
actors. Young Velvet Brown strongly resembles her father, her mother lends her
freckle-face to little Donald, the sisters are a spectrum in between, so that
the real drama takes place in the romantic obsession of Velvet as an expression
of her father’s unconscious spirit, he the butcher, and her
mother’s sagacious encouragement as housewife and keeper of accounts but
former Channel swimmer, whose imaginative nature and household economy are both
reflected in Donald’s “stories” and insect-bottle.
This mainspring
seems to have served Phil Karlson in Kansas City Confidential, which
prefigures Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes.
Apart from this,
there is Sewel in Sussex viewed from the perspective of American small-town
life as quaint and kindred and therefore absolutely authentic, contrasted with
the high view of the seacoast from the Brighton road, and of course the Grand
National, which is filmed excitingly. Under Brown’s direction, the animal
performers are as good as the children. Horses in the steeplechase prefigure
the leaping deer of The Yearling.
The significance
of Brown’s formal study is, among other things, that it is even more
essentially cinematic than Anna Karenina, and shows the range of art
available to a director with the presence of mind to read a screenplay and
discern its actual workings.
The Yearling
Brown's formal
mastery is richly observed in the sleight-of-hand he imposes on the scene of
Mrs. Miniver discovering the bullet holes in the car roof, which in The Yearling is signally transformed
into Jody's discovery of the fawn behind the shrubbery.
Intruder in the Dust
The cinematic
equivalent of Faulkner’s prose is Oxford, Miss., where Brown films
“almost wholly”. Faulkner has his horrors, they are here in a
double exhumation. The literary note is thus doubly and trebly secured, the
basis of the anecdote is understood as akin to It’s a Wonderful Life
among films and (to return among literary models) The Adventure of
Huckleberry Finn figures as a close reading.
A double tragedy,
the first is that of a man whose brother steals lumber from their sawmill, then
kills him and frames a witness to the theft.
The witness (who
has seen nothing) comes fairly near to being lynched, but is freed on discovery
of concealed evidence. The second tragedy occurs before these events, the
witness is belittled by a persistent and thoughtless boy who learns a lesson
thereby, but the man’s wife dies.
Plymouth Adventure
Conditions of the
departure, business dealings, return of the Speedwell.
Conditions of the
voyage, Atlantic storm, animosity of the captain and crew.
Conditions at New
Plymouth, partial conversion of the captain, crops planted.
Brown could have
perfected this, if he had wished. He plays it to the quick.
The adventure is
of a kind not adjustable to a sailor’s mind, he sees the end of all
things, Lot’s wife, the promised land.
“The
production,” said Variety, “ably executed, puts more
emphasis on the voyage itself and the attendant dangers than on developing the
characters into flesh-and-blood people.”
“Hokey
history”, said the Catholic News Service.
“Those
Pilgrims were almost as clever as the people at M-G-M,” said Bosley
Crowther of the New York Times.
Halliwell’s
Film Guide says, “totally
unconvincing and very dull”.