1938: A Day at the Movies
I'm taking a brief hiatus from the only-one-film-per-year Film of the Year standard and spending most of the month submerged in cinema titles from 1938 submitted by my friendly neighborhood film bloggers. Today I set up a 1938 fantasy movie theatre: a short feature, a cartoon, a foreign-language film and a Hollywood feature. I'll write something about all of them after I've watched the whole lot, but will focus on only one in particular. I"m not sure which one I'll write about yet 'cause I have to see 'em first. If we don't meet in the lobby during intermission I'll see you after the show . . .
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Artie Shaw and His Orchestra (1938)
Directed by Roy Mack
10 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono
I think it was Brian who suggested that I keep up with shorts produced in this era so, thanks to TCM, I started the day with this swinging jazz short, sort of an extended music video circa 1938.
Big band swing music was the thing in the 1930s and 1940s. This Warners-Vitaphone short, and the more ambitious Symphony of Swing made the following year, feature clarinetist Artie Shaw and his Orchestra tearing through a few of the reasons why. Fueled by a range of influences including "hot jazz", symphonic music, and the show bands of the 1920s, the big bands doubled, tripled, quadrupled the number of musicians in the act (hence the term, big band), and used to resulting power to drive a jumping beat that just makes you want to move.
The numbers here include Artie Shaw and his Orchestra's 1938 chart topper "Begin the Beguine," but my favorite track is Shaw's definitely un-swinging theme song, the wailing blues "Nightmare." On first listen I couldn't figure out why it sounded so familiar. For some reason I thought it was the song played at the beach party at San Simeon Xanadu in Citizen Kane (1941). Wrong. I searched around and re-discovered that it had been used to reinforce Howard Hughes' declining mental state in the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's bio-pic The Aviator (2006)
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Ferdinand the Bull (1938)
Directed by Dick Rickard
8 min.; U.S.A.; Color; Mono
Mike suggested I view this Academy Award winner for Best Short Subject from Disney and I'm glad that he did because it's a beautifully drawn story with a strong moral to boot. The animation is fluid, particularly of Ferdinand and his mother. The human figures appear to represent the greatest challenge to animators Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, Hamilton Luske and Art Babbitt, but they overcome any complications involved in realistically recreating the male form (a problem that dogged Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) by exaggerating the matadaor, the mounted picadores and the banderilleros for comedic affect. According to this useful site on Disney shorts, these were caricatures of Disney artists including Walt himself as the matador.
The poignant story is adapted from the 1936 book by Munro Leaf with illustrations by Robert Lawson. The Disney version stays very true to the original text though the exuberance in narrator Don Wilson's reading belies the more complex messages underlying this seemingly simple tale. Ferdinand is a bull living in "sunny Spain" who is taken to a bullring in Madrid, but refuses to fight the matador no matter how viciously taunted or provoked, preferring to sit in the shade of a cork tree and smell flowers. It can be read as an allegory for individualism, and in light of the fact that a civil war had broken out in Spain the year the story was published, a paean to pacifism as well. It might seem ironic that a cartoon intended to entertain children produces thoughts about the political and historical context in which it was made, but since this post is concerned with 1938 I can't help but notice the peculiar tragedy that Leaf and Lawson's noble ideas would be rendered moot when the totalitarian governments in Europe and Asia not only provoked their neighbors but invaded them shortly after the story was written, and much of the world involved in World War II months after this pacifist ode was released.
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Le Quai des brumes
(1938)aka Port of Shadows
Directed by Marcel Carné
90 min.; France; Black and White; Mono
It rained earlier today and the misty morning formed a succulent tableau in which to lose myself in the one flick recommended for 1938 more than any other, Marcel Carné's melancholy drama Le Quai des brumes (1938). This is my first experience with a film directed by Carné, a French filmmaker whose career appears to be deeply intertwined with a particular trend in filmmaking, and my first time (at least knowingly) watching a film in that trend, a style termed Poetic Realism. My previous experience with French cinema in the 1930s has been limited to films by Rene Clair (the musical comedy Le Million (1932)), Marc Allégret (the Berkley-inspired musical drama Zou Zou (1934)), and Jean Renoir. Two of Renoir's pictures from the period rank among my all-time favorites: La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Régle de jeu (1939); each captures and explores characters of a dying aristocratic class before and during the first World War. Carné's film is similarly dark, but more personal, and fatalistic. My thanks to those bloggers who recommended it because Le Quai des brumes is an essential film that subtly satisfies the objectives of both narrative and non-narrative cinema in a hybrid poetic-realist style.
The films stars ruggedly handsome Jean Gabin as the world-weary Jean, an emotionally scarred deserter from the Troupes Coloniale (I'm guessing based on his khakis, his mention of serving in Tonkin, and the anchor badge on his kepi). Tired, hungry, on the run (though we never find out what terrible thing happened in the French colony that caused Jean to flee), without money or friends to help him, Jean hitchhikes to Le Havre, a mist shrouded port city on the estuary of the Seine in the northernmost part of Normandy, in hopes of finding a way aboard one of the transatlantic ships departing from there. Along the way Jean saves the life of a little white dog, and his luck begins to change. In La Havre he's led by a drunk nicknamed Quart Vittel (Raymond Aimos) to Panama's, a ramshackle hideout where Jean meets a host of lost souls. It's through these new found friends that Jean acquires new clothes, money, a passport, and a new identity. He also becomes involved with the alluring Nelly (Michéle Morgan), a nightclub dancer under the thumb of a half-assed wiseguy (Pierre Brasseur) and her lecherous old guardian (Michel Simon, who's good at playing characters we despise—check out his performance in Renoir's Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932)). Their star-crossed romance is intense, but brief. Jean buys passage on a ship bound for Venezuela but, before he can leave both his past and his devotion to Nelly drag him to his ultimate doom. C'est la vie.
So what is Poetic Realism? A supplemental on the Criterion DVD I watched defines it as "the invisible poetry found in everyday life." One scene in Le Quai des brumes is crucial to my understanding of the style (at least as interpreted by Carné and crew). It takes place at Panama's hideout early in the movie. Jean and his fellow lost souls ask Michel (Robert Le Vigan), a suicidal painter, why he doesn't paint the beautiful things in life. Passionately expounding his fatalist philosophy, the artist nails the doomed outlook of this film and, perhaps, all of Poetic Realism in one expressive line of dialogue: "I can't help painting what's hidden behind things," he says. "To me, a swimmer is already a drowned man." These ideas reflect concepts Carné wrote about in his 1934 essay, "Quand le cinéma descendra-t-il dans la rue?" in which he advocates a style that would "seize the hidden spirit under the familiar facade of the streets."
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But, how do you achieve this on film? Everything that I've read about this movie praises the sets designed by Alexandre Trauner, and I couldn't agree more because in a way similar to the expressionist films of the 1920s, though more subtly, the settings here reflect the characters' internal emotions. Trauner, who trained as a painter at the École des Beaux Arts in Budapest before entering the French film industry and working for acclaimed designer Lazare Meerson, creates a stylized but realistic urban setting dominated by fog and long shadows. Look at the screencap on the left from a scene in which Quart Vittel offers to help Jean avoid the military police, and they depart for Panama's hideout. The wet cobblestone street, shadowy doorways, and an empty car dominate the foreground, a bored doorman stands in front of a dim nightclub (filled with gangsters introduced in the previous scene), and the two silhouettes of Jean and Quart Vittel recede into the distance. The seedy urban mise-en-scéne rivals the gritty realism of the best gangster and social problem cycles from Warner Bros., but there's something more expressive about it, something that helps us, in the words of Trauner, "have an immediate grasp on the character's psychology." Early in the film Jean compares the mist of the port town to a fog that clouds his own mind since he deserted Tonkin. The gray mist and darkened streets reflect Jean's inner sense of entrapment, loss, and bitterness.
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The street in La Havre is crafted in the studio, but Carné also takes advantage of location shooting. Look at the frame on the right in which Jean wanders a real quayside with his four-legged companion, glancing up at the massive transatlantic ship that would be his salvation if only he could find a way aboard. There you have the poetry of everyday life. Take away this setting and Gabin would be forced to act out his character's emotional state more elaborately; we'd see a very different sort of motion picture on the screen.
The efforts by Carné, Trauner, Gabin, et al are ably assisted by Maurice Jaubert's diaphanous score which coaxes us into the gloomy dew of Le Havre. The epic sweep of the opening theme reinforces the moody atmosphere but my favorite piece is a more playful theme that introduces a little dog who adopts Jean early in the film and tenaciously follows him around much to Jean's chagrin. The one bright contrast in the film, the white dog is a beacon of hope among the dark realities of the port town, the good luck charm Jean initially accepts but ultimately abandons for Nelly, and this lilting theme establishes the dog's character masterfully.
On release in France, Le Quai des brumes was a top seller at the box office (though it was outperformed by the greatest success of the year, Walt Disney's Snow White). Carné received the Prix Louis Delluc for his direction. In the U.S. the picture opened at the Capitol Theater in New York when that venue converted to showing first-run French films in October 1939. Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times praised it as "one of the most engrossing and provocative films of the season" but the paper didn't include it among the ten best films of the year. The National Board of Review, however, lauded it as the best foreign language film of 1939. Carné collaborated with Jaubert, Trauner, Prévert and Gabin again on Le Jour se léve (1939), and after experiencing this film I'm going to hunt that one down too.
The Film History Box Waaay back in the earliest days of this blog I watched a number of films from the 19th century by two French companies, the Lumiéres and the George Mélies Company that, according to François Truffaut, rather broadly divide cinema into two separate traditions. Along with the Edison company, and other very early producers, the Lumiére brothers helped to found a tradition of capturing an event or succession of events that told a story; the very first inkling of narrative cinema. George Mélies, on the other hand, manipulated motion pictures as a magician's tool; his exploration of camera tricks and editing effects introduced what we think of as the fantastic, non-narrative and avant-garde cinema traditions. Now, let's make a logical leap to the 1920s when narrative cinema has expanded and developed into the conventions best reflected in the classic Hollywood style—following a protagonist through a cause-and-effect chain of events from beginning to end, generally speaking—and the experiments of non-narrative cinema led to the work of German Expressionist filmmakers, F.W. Muranu, Robert Weine, Frtiz Lang, etc., and French Impressionist filmmakers (and the surrealists, and so on...). Impressionists, such as Marcel L'Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Abel Gance searched for a visual language that could express psychological and emotional states. To this end they employed flashbacks and leaps in time, distorted images, partially blurred frame, superimposed images, subjective camera, rapid cutting, and other technical effects. Though effective at relating what was going on inside of the characters, this tradition led to extreme stylization and experimentation at the expense of acting or story. With the advent of sound, the most popular genres of French cinema in the early 1930s were musicals and filmed theatre, operettas that feature familiar songs, routines and stars. Around the same time a number of directors working in France, Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Jacques Feyder, for example, recognized the narrative limitations of the Impressionist school and sought to make motion pictures along the lines of the American directors; films with a more linear sequence of events that clearly tell a story; they used technical innovation when it served their purposes but were less concerned with visually expressing internal realities. To paraphrase Gance, theirs was a cinema of action instead of feelings. Soon darker melodramatic genres emerged including a pessimistic narrative mode based on realist novels that feature doomed protagonists in working-class settings. Dubbed Poetic Realism, this tendency tells stories among lyrical but realistic urban settings that reflect the internal struggles of the characters. It was in this mode that Marcel Carné and his team created Le Quai des brumes. Whew! We made it. |
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The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley
102 min.; U.S.A.; Color; Mono
As mentioned at the beginning of the post I'm watching a number of films from '38 suggested by bloggers. As a result, I experienced one of the stranger juxtapositions in double feature history today when I followed Carné's masterwork with Warner Bros.' prestige picture The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The fantasy adventure presents the exploits of the plucky titular hero played by dashing-but-he's-no-Douglas Fairbanks Errol Flynn. When the King of England is kidnapped en route from crusading in the Holy Land, Robin Hood fights to save the Saxons from the oppressive rule of usurper Prince John (Claude Rains) and rescue Maid Marian (Kael's "improbably pretty" Olivia de Havilland) from the clutches of the villainous Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone). It's classic Hollywood, perhaps perfect Hollywood filmmaking for the era. It's in full color Technicolor, brimming with action sequences and swordplay, it takes place in very romanticized version of 12th century England, and it ends with every plot thread tied up and a wedding for Marian and Robin commanded by the King himself. A truly wonderful film, and today it serves as a bright, happy corrective to the sombre gloom filling my home theater after the unforgettable Le Quai des brumes. However, experiencing these two films back to back was a bit like having sugar and salt in the mouth at the same time — not recommended. Yet despite being so dynamically opposed in style each picture is superb in its own way; I cheered for Robin and Marian as much as I suffered tragedy with Jean and Nelly. Recalling all four of the films I've seen today I have to marvel at the amazing flexibility of our favorite art form because it can encompass creations as vastly different as all of these great films.
My thanks to all of my blogger friends for making 1938 a year to remember.
References
Dudley Andrew, "French Cinema in the 1930s," in European Cinema ed. Elizabeth Ezra (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 105-112.
Ronald H. Blumer, "The Camera as Snowball: France 1918-1927," Cinema Journal 9.2 (Spring 1970), 31-39.
Frank S. Nugent, "The Screen," New York Times (30 October 1939), 13.
Ginette Vincendeau, "The Popular Art of French Cinema," in The Oxford History of World Cinema ed.Geoffrey Nowell-Smth (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 344-348.
This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved
Watching Carné's film I was guessing "this is proto-film noir, or maybe a French school of film noir?" I'll have to see what elements distinguish the two styles when I reach an "official" noir from the next decade.
Posted by: Thom | 25 July 2007 at 01:11 PM
Very nice. Two features, two shorts, two black-and-white, two Technicolor, two I've seen before, two I haven't yet...
I knew I wanted to see Le Quai des brumes, but now I know I must see it...and ASAP!
I love the "Film History Box." French film history context is something I'm lacking, though I've seen several films by directors like Vigo, Clair, Duvivier, etc. (no Feyder, Carne, or Gremillon from this decade yet though) And of course Renoir. I'm planning on seeing one of his 1938 films soon: La Marsellaise plays the theatre at SFMOMA tomorrow.
One thing though: do we really despise Boudu? There must be a better word. Sure, I might not want him as a housemate, but he's delightful to watch.
Posted by: Brian | 25 July 2007 at 02:57 PM
Brian - It's gratifying to know that something I've written inspires someone else to see a movie I truly enjoyed. You've done that for me more times that I can count so I'm happy to return the favor.
As for Boudu, despise might be too strong a word...wait a minute, though, if I recall correctly, didn't he rape the wife in that film? In which case despise is not a strong enough word. But, if I'm mistaken how about: "like to dislike"? Either way, Simon is excellent playing those kinds of roles.
I haven't seen La Marsellaise either. Let me know if you're going to write something about it. Love to read your take on it.
Posted by: Thom | 25 July 2007 at 03:09 PM
It does look a lot like rape, Thom. Eric Henderson put it well, I think: "Though the otherwise icy Mrs. Lestingois' trembling, giggly post-coital thaw after a scene that seems to imply rape indicates that her façade of honor is only really in place with the anticipation of being toppled." We can call this depiction of women's sexuality dangerously outmoded or worse, and despise the chauvinism of Renoir (and probably Boudu playwright Rene Fauchois as well) all we want for including it. But according to the (acceptable in its day) logic of the narrative, Boudu's lecherous behavior is appreciated by Madame Lestingois, if nothing else than as a form of payback for her husband's lack of romantic interest in her. I find it hard to despise the character Boudu for this.
Posted by: Brian | 26 July 2007 at 04:08 PM
Brian - I appreciate your opinon. Could be that Henderson's interpretation is correct. I should see the flick again (been a while). In spite of that let's agree that Simon is an actor extraordinaire, particularly when playing "likeable unlikeables" (my new term)?
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Not to change the subject or end the conversation, but I also want to reply to your nice comment about the "Film History Box." Up until now it's been my modus operandi to include film history within the text of the post. This time I separated it into its own box. I'm curious, do you prefer the history separated out or integrated into the main body?
Posted by: Thom | 26 July 2007 at 05:00 PM