Rushfield Babylon

Criterion Caravan: #25 La Bete Humaine (1938) Dir: Jean Renoir

So we come in our journey through the Criterion catalog to 1938. Good ol’ France is still churning out thrillers, not daring to believe the darkness that is going to fall over it just two years down the line.  With 20/20 hindsight, one is tempted to say that accounts for the tense, almost hysterical attitude in Bete Humaine, but that is probably reading too much.

The production history on the wikipedia page for this film begins, “Jean Gabin wanted to star in a film about locomotives ” Frankly, that’s good enough for me.  Anytime Jean Gabin wants to make a train film, count me in. And frankly the first and last scenes of this film, which are just long minutes showing Gabin driving a train as it races down a track, communicating in signs with his fireman over the screech of the engine, are the best things about the film, and the best fast moving train footage I’ve ever seen.  Take your breath away they really do.

Unfortunately, I can’t say as much for the plot of this film. Renoir as always creates some incredibly taught scenes in which every shot tells you a novel’s worth of stories. But the characters in this are just a little too off-putting to take seriously, or to know how to read during the film. It tells of a triangle consisting of Gabin’s character, a good-natured engineer who now and then just has to do terrible things, a flirtatious young woman who eggs her lovers on to do terrible things, and her frumpy station master husband who is driven to terrible things by his need to control.  Lots of metaphors for the railway system!  So if railway system metaphors aren’t your cup of tea, stand clear.  

And in the midst of the tension between these fairly off-putting characters, it’s a bit of a weird muddle through it, everyone constantly on edge about to pop for reasons you can’t quite buy.

Jean Gabin also looks much puffier than he did in Pepe Le Moko, just a year before. Super-stardom is agreeing with him apparently, but while he remains a formidable screen presence, one misses that easy charm.

An interesting film. Plenty to look at but ultimately lesser than Renoir’s Grand Illusion. Come for the train driving scenes though. Those you will not forget.

CRITERION CARAVAN #20: A Story of Floating Weeds
Dir: Yashijuro Ozu  (1934)

Here I am at last, making my way chronologically through all the Criterions available streaming online for some insane reason, and finally I have come to the end of the silent era. I said that once before, but it turned out there was still one more waiting for me, but this time, this is it.

So Ozu we know is perhaps the greatest humanist director of all time. He takes these very just mundane stories and you’re sitting there and watching it and saying, well, this seems a lot of fuss about a couple going to visit their kids for a weekend,  and you get fed up and start saying, can we get on with it already, and then all of a sudden you’re bawling like a two-year old because its so sad, these people are just longing for this human connection and just want to be with their family and they can’t for all sorts of dumb reasons.

ASOFW is one of those too. The ne'er do well head of a touring kabuki troop comes back to the town where he left behind his mistress and son, who thinks he’s just an uncle. Kabuki masters are a fickle lot. They can’t be tied down you know, being artists and subject to so much temptation you know. But now he sees his son has grown into a fine young man and feels left out, even if he gets to take him fishing now and then.  He doesn’t seem to miss the mistress much, but it’s hard to go around with your son thinking you’re his uncle.

That’s pretty much it and it ambles along a little tediously until it becomes incredibly poignant and heartbreaking. The stuff of workaday tragedy and all.

Ozu liked the story so much that he remade it 20 years later as a talkie. You might like that one better.  I can’t say because it will probably be 20 years at this pace until I get there on my Criterion Caravan. But if you’re in the mood to go silent, frankly, it’s such a touching, simple film that you won’t even remember that they weren’t talking during it. Besides that they wouldn’t’ve been speaking english anyway.

Criterion Caravan #8: Le Million by Rene Clair (1931)

When last we met old Rene Clair a couple films back, he was busy trying to invent the musical before sound was quite up to speed yet.  Two years later we meet back with him and technology has caught up.

Standing on its own, apart from its history, Le Million holds up as a light, engaging musical comedy built around the fluffiest of plots - a search for a missing lottery ticket.  But watching it, one can feel Clair’s exuberance at getting to take this new toy for a spin.  The film features a singing chorus barking replies to the main characters, and light as it is, is completely even across the divide of 80 years, completely infectious with its joy for the medium.  The madcap musical antics seem very much to have influenced the Marx Brothers and their main sequence from Night at the Opera seems to have been lifted from an onstage at the opera chase here.   The jokes are not ones you’re going to be telling at the dinner table, but all the same, it was a shocking amount of fun to find in so early a film. 

Interesting side note about the depiction of infidelity in film.  In a movie these days, if someone gets caught cheating on someone, pretty much the rest of the movie has to be pure suffering in the aftermath before the ultimate reconciliation or dissolution.  In Le Million, as in many films of the time, the man gets caught.  The wife/fiance gets upset.  Then they sit down and he says, what are you getting so worked up about, and she says, aww, okay.  And that’s that. I’m not saying this was a better world.  It was always the guy cheating and the woman shrugging and forgiving for starters.  But it certainly made screenwriting easier.

Next up: We take a step backwards in time, back to the golden days of 1929 to GW Padst’s Pandora’s Box, which we somehow skipped when we passed through ‘29 the first time.

Criterion Caravan #7: City Lights (1931) by Charlie Chaplin. 

Continuing my chronological journey through the Criterion Collection as available on VOD.

When we last visited with Mr. Chaplin at the start of this journey, I discussed my preference for Buster Keaton over Chaplin and my outrage that Chaplin’s star has eclipsed his with film nabobs.  Returning to him for City Lights, perhaps his most loved (if not studied) film did nothing to change my mind.

I’m sorry. I recognize he is brilliant with the physical comedy, and that his later films he did the world some kind of great service by littering them with hamfisted dollops of schoolboy Marxism.  But I just find him overly mannered, prim, prissy and too absorbed in the antics of his own movements.  Unlike Keaton, whose physical comedy is soaked in pathos, Chaplin is “clever” and amusing, but emotionally barren.

I will say this however: for a bit it seemed like City Lights was leading up to the most horrifying tragic denouement history would have seen.   While it seemed it was going that way I was in awe and delight.   Spoiler recap:  The tramp saved a drunk rich man from killing himself.  When they went back to the millionaire’s house, he said - still drunk - how can I thank you.  The Tramp asked for money so the blind girl he was in love with could get an operation to not be blind any more.  The millionaire handed it over.  But then there was a break in and the police came.  The millionaire sobered up and didn’t remember giving the tramp money.  The tramp fled to the blind girl and handed the money over to her to get her operation and then turned himself in.  Months later, the tramp is released from prison, a shell of the tramp he once was.  Such a mess that boys kick him in the street.  He passes a shop window and sees the blind girl at work.  Only now she can see.  But she sees him and mocks the desheveled wreck of a tramp in the street.  Oh the irony.  And if it had ended there it would have been the most wonderfully cruel ending since Esmerelda rode off and left Quasimodo talking to the stones, since Angela got in the car with Jordan and left Brian Crakow standing in the street.  If it had ended just one shot earlier City Lights would have joined those ranks.  But it didn’t and instead gave us a very last second happy ending, which as much as one would like to pretend the film did end a half second earlier, you just can’t unsee.  

And so the film ends up another whimsical Chaplin titterer.  Which if that’s your thing, you will love.  I’m sticking with Keaton and from here on I will exercise the Caravan driver’s prerogative to not skip over the rest of a director’s entries after I have seen two of his films.  I know they are all important and historic.  But we’re still only 1931 and have miles to go before we sleep.

Next up: Another visit with Rene Clair for his “lyrical masterpiece” Le Million.

CRITERION CARAVAN: HAXAN

Continuing my journey through the Criterion collection. Stop #3: Haxan, a 1922 Danish silent docudrama about witchcraft through the ages.

Well, there’s not much not to like about a movie that has perhaps the best black mass ever put to film - silent or otherwise - presided over by the devil himself.   The film is a lecture by the director on witchcraft through the ages. Armed with a pencil-tip pointer he takes us through a tour of witchcraft and demonology as depicted in art before bringing it to life in dramatized footage.

His point is basically that superstition and fears led to people believing in witches and burning them at the stake and seeing devils behind every doorway.  He’s entitled to his opinion, although I’ve known a few witches in my time who would disagree with him.  And don’t believe the hype about “hurt no one” and “everything you do comes back to you five times over.”  That’s the PR but you won’t find a self-respecting witch who doesn’t have a few spells of destruction in her arsenal, just in case.  

So while director Christensen may not believe in witches and devils, his film creates some of the most vivid images of them you’ll ever see.  With shocking frankness for the time - such as the scene where the witches line up to kiss the devils behind.

The devil I must say, however, comes off as terrifying looking what with his horns and forked tongue, but ultimately a somewhat buffoonish figure in this, more given to boisterous partying then actual evildoing.  I guess that is because Christensen doesn’t actually believe in him.  But his debunking would carry more weight if he could take on the full force of Satan, the Purveyor of Destruction, and not just Satan the lounge lizard.    But that said, with black masses as vivid as this, one really can’t complain that it’s not precisely the Satan you would have cast.  

And if that weren’t enough, the film contains some of the most cretinous evil monks ever seen.  There is a dissertation waiting to be written on how in silent films bad teeth were used to indicate villainy in a way that has since gone out of fashion.  But this monastic order in particular is home to some of the worst dental hygiene in Christendom.  And it tells a story!

It’s a lot to sit through, all in all.  The lecture parts when the director is pointing a pencil tip at paintings are interesting curiosities but it was starting to lose me by the time it got to the black masses.  But once Satan makes an appearance, I promise you’ll be hooked, so stick it out.

NOTE: Why not join me on this great - somewhat selective - caravan through the Criterion collection.  Give Haxan a watch and send me your thoughts and I’ll feature them here.   Next up: Carl Dreyer’s 1925 Danish silent comedy Master of the House.