What did
Picabia, the demure and mysterious, the huckster and hermetic, the grand
artist, indicate by a ballet titled No Performance in two acts with this
film as Interlude? The absurd scandal prevents us from seeing the ballet (we
have Parade).
The collaboration
with René Clair is comparable to and precedes Un Chien Andalou. Among
other things, the Dalí-Buñuel scenario presents images of impeded movement.
Picabia’s argument is accelerating movement to no purpose. One ends in
marriage, the other in resurrection.
The Crazy Ray
Paris qui dort
Clair’s
comic masterpiece begins on a moonlit night in Paris, the attendant who dwells
at the top of the Eiffel Tower wakes to find the city devoid of people save for
some few here or there, in an all-night café for instance, alive but frozen in
attitudes as though stopped in time.
A party of air
passengers from Marseilles are unaffected. They all escaped whatever befell the
city at 3:25 a.m. because he was in his room on the Tower and they were in the
air, so they reason. They spend the night crammed on his little bed, gradually
realize the world is their oyster, rifle it, quarrel over the one woman in
their midst, and then a voice is heard on the radio, summoning any who can hear
to No. 2, Rue Croissy.
This is the
laboratory of Dr. Crase, whose ray has stopped the world. The speaker is his
niece. He is persuaded to undo the mischief, the attendant and the niece fall
in love.
These are the
outlines. The passengers are “a lady of means traveling for
pleasure”, an “international thief” (who proposes they empty
the banks), an undercover police detective, a businessman visiting his mistress
(he finds her hand being kissed), and the pilot.
The young couple
try the ray one more time, they need money to marry. Crase undoes their plan
(he never even thought of a way to start time moving again) when a colleague
insists.
All the wakeful
party are jailed and put in a padded cell, until they wisely forgo telling
tales of their experience. Boredom had been their greatest bane, perched in the
beams of the Eiffel Tower high above Paris. All that remains of their wealth is
a ring for the engagement.
Exceptionally
fine views of the Eiffel Tower and the spiral-staircase descent (Crichton’s
The Lavender Hill Mob).
Incomparable views of Paris. The superb situation, emulated in its various
degrees by The Twilight Zone (“Where Is Everybody?”.
“Elegy”, “The Mind and the Matter”, “A Kind of a
Stopwatch”, etc.), Godard (“Le Nouveau monde”),
Kramer’s On the Beach, MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh
and the Devil, Holland’s The Langoliers, etc. Serling picks up
the moon theme at the beginning and develops his pilot episode, then follows
Rawlins’ Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome for the grand pilferage. Buñuel’s El Ángel exterminador is a variant, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (Cocteau)
a model.
Le Voyage imaginaire
Two reels of
superb comedy followed by a bank-clerk’s dream, asleep at his desk,
love-struck, in three parts.
The realm of the
fairies, who are old hags no-one believes in anymore, kissed they become rare
beauties and bring his idol to him.
Atop a tower of
Notre Dame, his two rivals pursue him and, by a stratagem involving a magic
ring, turn him into a bulldog, then fight over the ring along the roof.
At the Musée
Grevin, the celebrated and historical wax figures with their painted eyes
awaken, a revolutionary tribunal sends the bulldog to a small guillotine, the
kid from The Kid brings Charlie Chaplin to the rescue.
He wakes up, a
curtain-ring and a forged note on his desk, he remembers the dream and is
emboldened by it.
A key statement
of themes and purposes throughout Clair’s films. Le Million has
the love scene with falling leaves, The Ghost Goes West, La Beauté du
diable, Les Belles de nuit, etc.
There is a
particular influence on Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz,
perhaps.
La Tour
An absolute work
of genius, so is the film, taking a proper analytical view of the thing from
the ground up in one magnificent reel.
A certain Resnais
tempo, to coin a phrase, will be noticed.
The Italian Straw Hat
Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie
The champion
wedding comedy on an article of ladies’ attire the bridegroom’s
horse swallows while the wearer has an assignation with a military man in the
Bois de Vincennes en route to the
“nuptial blessing”, partly. Perhaps “damages” is the
word.
“Madame is
a married woman sir! She cannot possibly go home without an exactly similar
hat. Go! You must find one!”
This is properly
surreal, of course, and in its 1895 trappings is rather like one of Max
Ernst’s surrealist mysteries, to be sure.
Asquith has Quiet Wedding on the English side.
A
supernal document on this subject.
Later, Bergman can be relied upon for a thoroughgoing understanding when
it’s needed, in such a mélange of styles (here, Entr’acte has an obvious relation). An
amazingly prodigious comedy, as diligent as the valet collecting all the
wedding presents once and for all.
“Clair’s
talent would not long survive into the coming of sound,” Dave Kehr predicted (Chicago
Reader). Halliwell’s Film Guide
cites high praise and reckons it “very influential”, also
“still amusing”, what is more.
Sous les toits
de Paris
The
girl who said yes.
Well, there was a
monk once, and one day a woman of the town gave her child to him, because it
was his, and later she took it back, because it wasn’t. His stoicism is
considered admirable.
Clair
doesn’t really care about such things, not very much. The street-singer
and the hood and the pals and the gang and the girl, they’re movie stuff
and not without interest, yes, and much more interesting is the last image of
two old chimney pots upon the roofs of Paris, after so much has happened.
Mordaunt Hall of
the New York Times couldn’t follow it.
Jacques Becker
tells the story from another angle in Casque d’or, with the knife
fight and Modot.
Le Million
Prosperity is the
test of a man, a light yoke, yes, but certain things come to light when it
dawns as it does here.
The mistress who
isn’t delicate, really, the friend who really couldn’t care less,
the Roi des Occasions (which must have charmed Beckett) who gives up filthy
lucre for a debt of honor, the Opèra Lyrique that really is lyrical, despite
all, the creditors who vouch for one with the police, a comedy of one’s
ship coming in, admired by Welles and the Marx Brothers (from Harold Lloyd et
al.) and everybody else, and Beatrice excuses the critics for imagining
it’s all an effect of style.
À Nous la liberté
The Beckettian
equation (Act Without Words II), all the efforts and all the deference in
the world come out the same in the end.
The Brechtian
division of labor among thieves (“exception and rule”).
That a factory is
a prison with the chance of getting sacked.
When machines
produce machines, the Industrial Revolution will be fulfilled.
A
musical by Clair and Auric, infinitely droll.
Le Dernier milliardaire
The Last Billionaire left his native land, the Kingdom of Casinario, fifty years since, there’s not a penny in
the place, the nation is on strike because nobody’s
been paid, even the casino takes barter for bets, the principal source of income.
He is therefore sought out for assistance, the Queen’s granddaughter is
thrown into the bargain, the Princess loves the young
conductor of the palace orchestra.
Homage
to Stroheim. M. Banco assumes control of the government off his own bat,
taking the title of Administrateur Général. Les Fêtes Galantes...
Marriage might
teach him who’s boss, the royal argument.
Parliamentarians set out to frighten the usurper away. The conductor has a mind
to make him dance. The general administrator’s bodyguard is the redoubtable
M. Brown (Carpentier had just played the unwilling
angel in Siodmak’s La Crise est
finie), whose investigations render M. Banco inadvertently hors
de combat, quite gaga, humming his own royal anthem.
The type of
lunacy exhibited is subsequently that of Woody Allen’s Bananas. Marcel Ophuls has given a
picture of the facts as they very soon came to transpire in France (Le Chagrin et la pitié).
Andre Sennwald of the New
York Times, “since it has managed to get itself banned in Germany and
Italy, it wears the accolade of triumph... but the film is long and talkative,
and it lacks the luxuriance of comic invention that makes his best work unparalleled
for consistent excellence.” Time Out, “turning his patrician gaze for a moment on the
real world... feeble as satire, and only occasionally amusing.” TV Guide, “worth seeing for a
number of funny scenes”. Hal Erickson (Rovi), “a
sheer delight”. Halliwell’s
Film Guide, “rather too determined to be satirical” etc.,
citing Variety on “rioting
every night” in Paris but good prospects for “American specialized
houses”.
Thus, according
to the newsreel Casinario Magazine, “the most important
reform of his regime... henceforth all citizens shall wear beards and, whatever
their age, on Sundays and holidays short pants... de l’audace, toujours
de l’audace!” On
all fours, barking mad, literally (cf.
Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety).
When the Queen persuades her son to take up arms in the palace, it might be
Granny and Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies subduing Shug
Fisher, the result is that M. Banco is cured of his folie de grandeur, too late to save his
fortune.
M. Brown, “eh
bien, Madame. En ma qualité de chef de la Sûreté
de Casinario, je m’arrête moi-même au crime de lèse-majesté.” The Queen’s blessing on the newlyweds is
bestowed the following year on Larry, Moe and Curly in Restless Knights (dir. Charles Lamont). The million-dollar question
is put by M. Banco in the end, “didn’t you
know?”
The Ghost Goes West
It is easy to see
a variant of Le Million, or for that matter Le Dernier milliardaire, though Andre Sennwald of the New York Times in an appreciative
review denied any connection with Clair’s style or themes.
The very title of
Keaton’s Go West supplies an antecedent.
Such films as De
Sica’s Teresa Venerdi, Seaton’s Miracle on 34th
Street, Mackendrick’s The Maggie, and Crichton’s The
Battle of the Sexes are influenced in one way or another.
The Flame of New Orleans
The phonybaloney countess
from St. Petersburg who leaves behind a promising conquest to take ship with a
sea captain.
The mercenary or
logical aspect of love confounded, thrown to the winds, etc.
It opens on the
opera stage of Le Million, Mae West has a lot to do with it, Lubitsch
and Wilder are at either hand.
For T.S. of the New
York Times, “a feeble effort from one of the finest comic directors
of our time,” and there is a consensus.
Wood’s Saratoga
Trunk and Kane’s Flame of Barbary Coast pick up the note here
and there, but the banker and the girl with “a trick of fainting”
in the old French town that ain’t Paris, nor London, nor
“Vienny” are strictly from Clair.
The great
analysis by Chaplin in A Countess from Hong Kong has also met with a
consensus.
I Married a Witch
The witches
strike back at a Puritan ass and his descendants, the weapon is bad wiving down
two-and-a-half centuries until a candidate for high office is set to wed the
shrewish daughter of a publishing magnate.
The vengeful
witch drinks her own love potion, her father has immortal retribution in view
for the man whose ancestor burned them both.
Thus the conceit
and the satire. Fire strikes the Pilgrim Hotel to effect a corporeal
appearance, the scheduled wedding never comes off, candidate and witch flee across
the state line and marry, he wins a unanimous vote anyway and settles down to
married life with a powerless witch and her pickled father.
Forever and a Day
The destruction
of a house at No. 6, Pomfret Street, in a Nazi air raid on London during the night
of March 8th, 1941.
The house is a
hundred and forty years old, a descendant of the builder recounts its history
to an American newspaperman whose father has agreed to sell it.
A work of art on
which more hands worked than any other in Hollywood, gratis, legendarily.
Bosley Crowther
thought it was nonsense (New York Times), James Agate that it was
“one of the poorest pictures” he had ever seen (cited in Halliwell’s
Film Guide, which does not find the film so bad).
Clair in place of
Hitchcock is credited first, followed by Goulding, Hardwicke, Lloyd, Saville,
Stevenson and Wilcox.
It is the endless
war of the Trimbles and the Pomfrets, those who think “a house is more
than bricks and mortar”, and those who think it is not, and there is more
than this behind the “blazing row”, which has something to do with The
Barretts of Wimpole Street (dir.
Sidney Franklin).
And they marry,
from time to time, down the years.
The illumination
on these points is all that might be asked.
Variety opined that Claude Rains “does not
impress” as the principal Pomfret. Charles Laughton is an early avatar of
The Servant (dir. Joseph Losey),
if you will. Crowther objected to the Hitchcock-Clair sequence as
“patronizing snobbery,” he was an awful ass. The death of the
aviator is an effect emulated by Hitchcock in Rope.
The “below
decks” of the house that Admiral Trimble built are in service as a public
air raid shelter, where the story is told.
It Happened Tomorrow
A man who marries
sees his whole future before him, and so does his wife.
For critics this
is a fantasy, and thus Clair’s reputation amongst them dwindled.
An absolute
wonder.
And Then There Were None
The Irish judge
stands condemned by his own account, a fact not evident to English reviewers
who have lately devalued this supernal example of the filmmaker’s art.
From a dream to a
hallucination to an open boat on the sea, the opening pays tribute to
Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. He returns the favor in Spellbound
only a month later (from Clair’s giant keyholes) and Rope (the
breakaway set for the camera) and The Trouble with Harry (discovery of
Rogers). The Lodger is also cited by Clair, a consummate scholar.
The film’s
influence is properly incalculable, but there is Huston’s Beat the
Devil at one point, his Prizzi’s Honor at another, and
Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers elsewhere.
Le Silence est d’or
Position of the
director, between producer (propriétaire) and actor and actress, a
habitué of the show business.
He effectively
runs the Atelier du Cinématographe Fortuna like a sultan, under these express
conditions.
La Beauté du diable
A very refined
Faust as the dilemma of le monde et le pantalon, on a basis of alchemy
and the grand œuvre, with a happy foreglimpse of Bergman’s The
Seventh Seal.
The same joke
makes up the incomparably bitter substance of Herzog’s Fata Morgana.
A.W. of the New
York Times found it nothing “vitally new” and nevertheless
“philosophy for sophisticates”.
“A turgidly
literary cocktail of escapist fantasy and Sartrean engagement” (Time
Out Film Guide).
“Insanely
pretentious... a prime example of intellectual kitsch” (Dave Kehr, Chicago
Reader).
Les Belles de Nuit
The Opèra, where
they can’t play everybody’s, keeps a young composer on tenterhooks,
he seeks refuge from the caterwauling world in dreams.
The beautiful
young mother of a little girl to whom he is teaching the piano propels him into
la Belle Époque and grand success, the beautiful cashier at the café is
an Algerian conquest, the beautiful daughter of the garage mechanic next door
is condemned to death by the Revolution (and he a Revolutionary).
The dreams turn
to opposition and hatred (a husband, two brothers, the guillotine), he seeks
refuge in wakefulness.
Borges famously
described his youthful mind compared with later in terms not entirely
dissimilar, at any rate the Opèra finally summons the provincial music teacher
to Paris for its judgment.
A great work, a
masterpiece six times over. “Let us console ourselves with the great
masters,” says Mendelssohn, “who after all had it no better than
we.”
Bosley Crowther (New
York Times) gave it the Gotham ave et vale, right hand raised in
greeting, left hand holding the sharpened stick. Tom Milne (Time Out Film
Guide) did not understand the ending, construed by him as “the
trouble with the film.”
Les Grandes Manœuvres
Clair leaves no
doubt where his Dragoon lieutenant is concerned by directly likening him in the
stable scene to a horse’s ass (Clair is a great admirer of American
cartoons), the wager on winning any woman at all chosen at random in the
provincial town is lost, the Dragoons ride out for the title exercise in
summer, and that’s all.
And there has
been a duel over nothing, the dignity of an officer’s wooing, without
result.
A widow, modiste,
mistress, peeps out between her curtains as the lieutenant departs.
Truffaut places
it among what he calls “the ‘best’ French films” (Le
Rouge et le Noir, Diabolique), which he does not consider praise.
Porte des Lilas
Ne’er-do-wells
have a wanted man billeted on them by chance, agreeably enough. He gives one a
piece of fancy neckwear, he’s a flashy sort, les flics are a
nuisance, anyway.
The foie gras gag
goes into Gene Kelly’s Gigot.
There’s a
girl in the picture.
The cat-and-cave
gag goes into Joseph McGrath’s Rising Damp.
“A slight,
fragile pic” (Variety).
“A genial
and wistful film” (Bosley Crowther, New York Times).
“Very
little to smile at” (Halliwell’s Film Guide).
“The
absolute last gasp of French poetic realism” (Time Out Film Guide).
Les Fêtes Galantes
A siege that
starves an army is like the princess in the castle forbidden the man she loves.
Her count, a
musician, is off to Jerusalem for solitary devotion, thus the besieging army of
his father, who nevertheless requires him to fill out the orchestra at the
harpsichord for a performance of Le Sultan amoureux in which the father
is to play the title role, and the leading actress on the stage his Christian
slave (this lady loves a marquis whose life was saved in battle by a certain
Jolicœur of the besieged who, having affronted the disguised princess
during her attempt to cross the lines, must redeem himself).
A certain peasant
whose pig has been appropriated by the besieged is pressed into service and
nearly hanged by both armies in turn, he is ignored by History, which has the
last word.