THINGS TO COME - #660

“You’ve got the subtlety of a bullfrog.”

I popped Things to Come into the player expecting to see a quaint vision of modern times as imagined in 1936, fodder for my own fantasies that the here-and-now could, indeed, be better. What I found was something altogether different, and yet also apropos in its own strange way. For this film, Alexander Korda enlisted H.G. Wells to adapt his own novel into a screenplay, and then charged effects man William Cameron Menzies (The Thief of Bagdad [review]; Foreign Correspondent [review]) to direct. Seeing what they came up with, I find myself less concerned with how Things to Come reflects a potential 21st Century, and more fascinated by what it must have looked like to its original audience...and even moreso how they might have been shaken by it just a short while later.

Wells sets his story in the far-flung future of 1940, and the movie opens on Christmas of that year, with England on the brink of a second World War. Amidst pleas to focus on the yuletide, two men debate the prospect of conflict: John Cabal (Raymond Massey, 49th Parallel [review]) sees it as inevitable, while Pippa Passworthy (Edward Chapman, Rembrandt [review]) believes man will not make the same mistake again. Naturally, the more optimistic of the two is wrong, and Britain engages in a decades-long war with their aggressive neighbors.

H.G. Wells, actor Pearl Argyle, and Menzies on the film’s Everytown 2036 set.

Though billed as “Everytown” throughout the film, these opening scenes look distinctly like London, and so the wholesale destruction of the city must have been extremely disconcerting for contemporary British audiences, especially if they had memories of having seen Things To Come when the German raids on England began just a few years later. I imagine it would have been something akin to what we might have felt had aliens come and destroyed the White House after the release of IndependenceDay. Menzies’ attention to detail is still: the images of bodies amongst the rubble of a one-time thriving community deliver a potent anti-war message. And as the battles rage on for the next several decades, only coming to a sort-of end in the mid-1960s, I can’t help but think of the open-ended war America currently finds itself in.

The Everytown scenario ca. 1966 is one of tentative peace. The townspeople are still at war with the hillspeople, and true to Cabal’s predication that war will stifle progress, technology has taken a few steps back. Fuel is scarce, and machines don’t run. Cars are now pulled by horses, just like the carriages they are meant to replace. The remaining citizens have also just come through a zombie-like plague, “The Wandering Sickness,” conquered not by medicine but by brute force. His plan to shoot anyone infected has elevated the Boss (Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol [review]) to a place of leadership. More Donald Trump than Hitler, “the Boss” continues to rule through fear and bullying, mostly content to close Everytown off from the rest of the world rather than expand too far into other pterritories. It’s a successful plan, and he would have gotten away with if if not for an aged Cabal arriving in a high-tech plane, wearing spaceman armor, and touting a new peace under the rubric “Wings of the World.” The Boss naturally distrusts this man from the skies, as any tyrant opposes science and invention that he can’t bend to his will. Cabal promises there are more like him coming, and the future of civilization depends on whether Everytown will join this cultural elite or be crushed by them.

Looking back over the cycle of history, I wouldn’t exactly call H.G. Wells or Things to Come prescient. Mankind is far too predictable for that, it’s more that Wells has correctly identified a tragic cycle. Even so, it’s amazing to see how past generations grappled with their fears of oppression and being left behind by change, and how slow progress really is, war be damned. The key to putting Everytown back on the map is oil, and a battle is waged over a coalmine that will give them enough fuel to best their foes. Keeping the people ignorant is key to the Boss’ continued rule, and while men of skill are bullied into servitude, women’s ideas are still dismissed out of hand.

That Wells seems to be on the right side of these things speaks well for his philosophical character, but the future utopia he offers as an alternative seems ironically shortsighted. When Wings Over the World come in and unseat the Boss, using a “gas of peace” to put the townspeople to sleep, effectively removing their choice of whether to join or resist (and presented as a noble alternative to the poison gas we see in a depressing wartime scene early in Things to Come), it’s hard not to view the new management as more fascistic than what they’ve come to replace, good intentions opening the highway to hell as they do. This is even harder to ignore as we jump ahead in the 2000s and see the utopia that the airmen are ushering in: it’s sterile, impersonal, and referred to as “white” in a way that feels for more loaded than anyone intended, given that there is not one person of color in all of Things to Come. Likewise, the terraforming that makes this new civilization possible looks more like an ecological disaster now than the triumph of industry it must have appeared to be in the ’30s.

That said, the special effects that Menzies achieves, working with such talented people as production designer Vincent Korda (To Be or Not To Be [review]), special effects artist Ned Mann (The Private Life of Don Juan [review]), and director of photography Georges Périnal (The Blood of a Poet), are nothing short of astonishing, including the scenes where gigantic drills destroy an entire mountain. The future world that follows is a self-contained, towering labyrinth--reminiscent of Krypton, all artificial structures and impossible curves, brought to life by a nigh-seamless melding of models, rear projection, and full-size sets. This imaginative future is made all the more believable by the complicated tableau of Everytown. Menzies and his team give as much attention to the city in ruins as they do the world of tomorrow, bringing a realism to Shakespearian drama that essentially gives Things to Come its spine.

Here Theotocopulos looks more like an imposing fascist than what he opposes.

Even with all that to appreciate, though, it’s hard to tell what message Wells is trying to convey with his future society, and whether or not this brave new world is as difficult to maintain as other fictions have led us to believe. Things to Come creates a dissenting voice in Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke, Richard III), a man that asks if there has been enough progress, if we should not focus on the society that already exists, and the initial debate from the 1940 scenes is reignited via Cabal and Passworthy’s grandchildren (played again by Massey and Chapman). Yet, there is something sinister in Cabal’s dismissing of Theotocopulos as merely representing “artists” whose work will be made small by his scientific accomplishments, especially when Cabal wins, successfully launching a rocket around the moon with his “space gun.” In his closing speech, Cabal declares that mankind cannot be stopped, nor should they. “All the universe or nothing,” he tells Passworthy, his face in profile, framed by the universe in all its sparkly glory. Is Wells not merely trading an ignorant tyrant for an intelligent one? Hitler and Mussolini dethroned in favor of Gore Vidal and Neal Degrasse Tyson. (And is this not what Superman’s parents warned us about?!)

With nothing really to balance that ending out, we can only presume that Wells believed some of what he preached, even if his cohorts in Things to Come merely wanted to make a timely motion picture with some pretty cool special effects. Their speculative fable was likely a rousing glimpse of better times that would become much needed in their immediate lifetime. Now it is an inadvertent time capsule, not of history as it was, but as it could have been. It’s also no less a meaningful parable all these years up the road, if perhaps a bit more complicated and in need of a more nuanced interpretation.

THE MARSEILLE TRILOGY: CESAR - #884

Though only made a few years after its predecessors, César moves The Marseille Trilogy forward nearly twenty years. Marcel Pagnol takes full control this time, both writing the original screenplay and directing. The results put the film somewhat at odds with itself. Of the three movies, César is the most comfortable in its own skin, yet so much so, it’s also a little too easy with itself and thus less realized, and at times even borders on self-parody when Pagnol is clearly pushing to deliver more of what everyone liked about Marius and Fanny [review].

The primary cast returns for this go-around, including Fernard Charpin as Panisse, the older sail maker who married Fanny (Orane Demazis) and accepted her son with Marius (Pierre Fresnay), Césariot, as his own. André Fouché (Playtime [review]) joins the film as the grown-up Césariot, and we are introduced to the boy as he returns home to visit Panisse on his deathbed. At the urging of the local priest (Thommeray), Fanny tells her son the truth about his parentage, stoking a curiosity in him. Who is this Marius, and why has he hardly been spoken of? And why doesn’t he have a relationship with his father, César (Raimu), who has been Césariot’s godfather this whole time?

Choice is an important driver in The Marseille Trilogy, and the choices made in Marius and Fanny come to consequence in César. Marius is justifiably upset by decisions that were made without his being kept in mind, but he also has to reckon with his willingness to go along. We find out that he and César fell out, and the older man has to wrestle with his decision to put his grandson ahead of his own child. And Fanny has to answer to Césariot for the years of deception. Not to mention Marius’ broken heart.

As is to be expected, Pagnol’s script really shines when it focuses on his principle characters in deep conversation. The past is scoured and hurt feelings exposed, and there is something compelling about listening to adults dig into actual emotions this way. They are unreliable and inconsistent in their expression, as most people are, and the flaws make them all the more real. Far less natural are the light-hearted scenes of César and his friends spending idle time together; a highlight of the first two films, they feel a little forced here.

Pagnol’s direction suffers from some of the stiffness of the early sound era, despite freeing his narrative from the stage origins of the first two films. His framing and the staging can be a little obvious, and the camera movements occasionally clumsy. Pagnol inherits less of the smooth hand of Marius-director Alexander Korda, and more of the realism of Fanny’s Marc Allégret. In fact, in a lot of ways, César feels like early Neorealism, with the film having an overall natural look and making use of the seaside locations to an even greater extent than Fanny.* It makes for an interesting mix, since much of the plot here, with Césariot visiting his father incognito and Marius’ business partner filling the boy with lies about their supposed life of crime, borrows from traditional comedies of error. This juxtaposition works incredibly well, with the tone being reminiscent of some of Jean Renoir’s best work.

Smartly, the auteur leans into the lighter side for his ending, making César a fine cap to the lengthy trilogy.

* A year before César, Marcel Pagnol also produced a short musical documentary called Marseille, showcasing the city and its culture. This short is included on the César disc.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

THE MARSEILLE TRILOGY: MARIUS/FANNY - #s 882-883

The Marseille Trilogy comes with a lot of history. These early French talkies are adaptations of Marcel Pagnol’s stage plays, helmed initially by other directors, but overseen by the writer, who would go on to direct the final entry himself (the only one not taken from a play). A successful film career for Pagnol followed, only for him to fall out of fashion in the 1950s until Francois Truffaut resurrected his reputation. At least amongst cinephiles. I remember seeing The Marseille Trilogy on the shelf at the video store where I worked, its boxes faded and dusty, their old-fashioned look perhaps contributing to their never being rented. I was another of the philistines who kept passing Pagnol by.

Then again, in the DVD age, one also couldn’t be blamed for sitting back and waiting with at least some fair confidence that a restoration was on its way. Wait long enough and all these things will come back around again, right? And there is plenty to watch in the meantime.

It’s funny to put it that way now, and also to consider that, in the intervening years (more than a decade at this point), I sometimes thought about those boxes. I can see them in my head--mostly white with pinkish lettering and black-and-white photos giving very little information about who Marius and Fanny and César might be--and every once in a while, perhaps when I’d see Pagnol or the trilogy mentioned, I’d wonder what maybe I’d missed.

Luckily, I was right and these things do come around, and Criterion has a new The Marseille Trilogy boxed set struck from 4K restorations that should look light years better than those old versions, and I can make up for lost time watching them in a state that represents how Pagnol and his collaborators intended. (In his video intro on the Marius disc, director Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de torchon) reflects on the damaged prints that were all that were available back in the day.) And I must say, it was worth the wait. The Marseille Trilogy is something extraordinary, an entirely human drama, arguably more novelistic than theatrical, wide in scope but careful in focus.

The first two movies in The Marseille Trilogy, Marius and Fanny cover about a two-year span, with the biggest time jump taking place in Fanny, its beginning overlapping with the conclusion of Marius, every bit the chapter 2 of a much longer narrative.

1932’s Marius, directed by Alexander Korda (That Hamilton Woman [review]), introduces us to our cast. Bar owner César (Raimu, The Pearls of the Crown [review]) and his son Marius (Pierre Fresnay, The Man Who Knew Too Much [review]); Marius’ childhood friend, Fanny (Orane Demazis, Les misérables [review]), a street vendor; the merchant Panisse (Fernard Charpin, Pépé le moko); and many more, a colorful gathering of different peoples brought together at the port in Marseille. Marius and Fanny have grown up to fall in love, though neither would admit it. Recently widowed, Panisse is looking to marry Fanny as a way to bring some happiness back to his home, something that will end up forcing the issue between the two younger people. The only hiccup is Marius’ wanderlust. He’s not interested in running his dad’s tavern, he wants to see the world.

What follows from this set-up is a very human drama, with people both acting in their own self-interests and then rejecting the same when it means someone else maybe deserves a better turn. Fanny ends up being the one ready to give up the most: she’ll let Marius chase his passion even if it means letting him go for several years. She’d rather miss him while he explores far-off lands than be responsible for his always wondering what else is out there.

Marius ends with Marius leaving for Australia, and Fanny explores what happens once he’s gone. Released a year later and directed by Marc Allégret, Fanny takes us deeper into the characters Marius has left behind, exposing their different sides, and revealing them not to be entirely what we originally expected. Perhaps most notable is the relationship between César and Panisse, a friendship that dates back to their days in school. In Marius, we saw them bicker harmlessly the way such old friends do; in Fanny, longer-held resentments surface from that bickering, but so too do we see how generous a nature they really have. Our allegiances shift more than once, but then, life often changes that way, doesn’t it?

“Life” is a key word here. Pagnol is a writer who lets his characters truly live. Though directed by others, Pagnol is really the author of these films, casting the actors and running the rehearsals and generally setting the course for how they would go. You can see the theatrical roots showing at times, particularly with Marius, where action is mostly confined to one location (most often, the bar) and driven by dialogue. Pagnol is not afraid to let scenes run long, to let conversations follow their natural course, long enough for characters to equivocate, expose their true feelings, and double-back on them. We get to know everyone in The Marseille Trilogy by spending time with them. For Pagnol, character is plot, and what each character does in relation to another is how he builds his story. The Marseille Trilogy is a great family epic, one that grapples with time and growth, rather than focusing on one driving narrative device. If it were a TV show, it would be a soap opera. Who loves whom and why, and what will they betray to make that person they love happy?

Not that The Marseille Trilogy is cliché or hokey (and not that soap operas have to be, despite the hokey clichés about them); rather, our investment in the participants means the drama is riveting. Any cliché turn Pagnol might take is less a fault of the material and more years of cinema and television that have come since preparing us for certain twists in this kind of material. It doesn’t really matter if you can see ahead to evident developments, though, as the getting there is always surprising.

Also, the acting is so good, you might find yourself wishing this were an ongoing series. Some of the best moments in both Marius and Fanny have nothing to do with the central story, but instead are sidebar instances where other characters are just spending time together. An hilarious card game with César, Panisse, and their friends in Marius is one of the most charming things you’ll see this, or any, year. Raimu shows himself a master of gesture, and he has an easy chemistry with all of his co-stars that will make you glad when Pagnol inserts other such scenes into Fanny. Special mention should also be made of Pierre Fresnay, whose Marius returns almost two years after he originally left, and though he has been transformed by his adventures, the actor merely matures the performance rather than making a hard shift into a different gear. We can believe that the confident, hardened Marius in Fanny is the same as the anxious and often capricious young Marius we saw in his own movie. The cinematography opens up, too, breaking out of the confines of interior locations, showing more of the seaside town.

Which makes me all the more interested to see where these characters end up in César, the final installment of The Marseille Trilogy, when Marcel Pagnol takes charge of the camera himself. But that’s something for its own review...

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

GILDA - #795

A friend of mine once proposed a game. Pick three classical Hollywood actresses that, when combined, form your perfect woman. My answer? Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and...Rita Hayworth. (Note: We played it with men, too.)

There’s a pretty good chance that Rita Hayworth was my first femme fatale.

I’m not sure what first drew me to Gilda. My memory suggests I saw a clip of her famous onscreen arrival in some documentary about cinema, or maybe I saw a photo from the film in a book about film noir. I had an image of Jane Greer on my bedroom wall, photocopied from one of those books, a year or two before I ever saw Out of thePast. It’s also possible I found Gilda completely by accident, one of those odd movies I discovered by scouring the TV guide every week, studying every station that was known to show old films, and programming my VCR accordingly. For years I’d cart those VHS tapes around, 3 movies per, recorded at SLP.

Regardless, it was a significant moment. My sudden obsession with Hayworth was not like my fascination with Marilyn Monroe, which was fueled by the industry behind her persona; nor would it be like my discovery of Audrey Hepburn, who was never a sexpot or dangerous, but was more of an aspirational Cinderella, someone to emulate more than desire. Bacall came as part of the Bogie & Bacall package, and I wanted to be him in as much as I wanted to deserve her. Rita Hayworth felt like my own discovery. Surely no one else knew about her. Otherwise they’d all be talking about her! (Fittingly, my next Hayworth score was Cover Girl, a movie of a much different kind, and a quick lesson that she wasn’t always “bad.”)

Despite its Hayes Code-inspired “crime doesn’t pay ending,” Gilda still manages to be a fairly salacious movie, working with the imposed restrictions as a positive rather than a negative. Rita stripping off one elbow-length glove in the big “striptease” scene is the greatest argument for censorship you’ll ever see. It’s sexy and sensual and suggestive in a way a more explicit version would have never been. Because it’s also about character, and in context, it’s a spectacle that can be viewed as more sad that seductive.

Which is the real trick of Charles Vidor’s 1946 noir drama. Gilda is a bundle of conflicted emotions. It’s a film where the characters all insist that they make their own luck, but then proceed to consistently act against their best interests. Loyalty can be bought, but grudges are never forgotten. The past is something to be shed, yet it’s always present. “I was born last night,” Glenn Ford’s Johnny Farrell tells his new boss, Balin Mundson (George Macready, Paths of Glory [review]), moments after the man saves him from being robbed. Balin then invites him to leave his low-rent gambling for something more high-class--namely, Galin’s casino--and a chance to make himself over. Of course, this is not true, there is no tabula rasa or hard reboot. Both men bring baggage with them. World War II may have just ended, but another more personal war is about to begin. And it has Nazis, too!

What Johnny isn’t prepared for is Balin taking a wife, and for that wife to be Gilda (Hayworth), the woman who broke Johnny’s heart, unmooring him, and leading him to wander to Buenos Aires, where this action all takes place. A woman coming between two men who have a friendship or partnership of some kind is an old trope, but it very nearly transcends gender here. (Balin, at one point, says, “My wife does not come under the category of women.”) It’s a triangle where each person wants to be favored over the other, while also wishing, in a weird way, that the other two will choose each other so the odd man out can watch. Balin, in particular, looks longingly at Johnny while practically pushing him and Gilda together. Love and hate are interchangeable, and a relationship is a deal to be made. “Do you want me to like him?” Gilda queries, not long before she declares “Let’s hate her!” in sympathy of Johnny’s terrible past.

Of course, the woman she is willing to hate is herself. She has made a bad deal, and now she is a kept woman for a man who is incapable of love and sees her as an object. What gives the famous song-and-dance scene its undercurrent of sadness is it’s Gilda acting out in the only way that brings her approval. In our introduction to the character, she gives a private performance to her husband and lover; in the nightclub, she does it for anyone who will watch, riling up the men in the crowd, but more importantly, getting a rise out of Johnny who, deep down, does not want to share her. The song she sings, “Put the Blame on Mame,” has an ironic, almost meta slant, celebrating the misdeeds of famous femme fatales who caused elemental shifts in the world around them, including starting a deadly fire. The irony is that Gilda doesn’t really cause all that much trouble herself, her efforts are thwarted by men who are too caught up in being angry to actually do much about it.

Johnny is a weird character. He takes the existential noir code a bit too far. Midway through Gilda, when Balin is believed dead, Johnny steps into his shoes, entering into a faux marriage with Gilda that puts him in the role of protector. Rather than be with her because he loves and desires her, however, he is doing it to preserve their commitments to Balin. Johnny will make Gilda the dutiful wife she never was for her husband. Johnny will guard the man’s “things.” He is honoring his pact with the dead man, staying faithful because that’s what Balin paid him for.

Despite my undying love for this film, I can admit it’s a bit lopsided. Both Macready and Ford give fairly one-note performances. Johnny can be a bit of an uptight bore, to such a degree that when he finally unclenches--almost quite literally--in the final scene, it feels like a relief, like we can relax ourselves. His hunched shoulders and ours drop simultaneously. Which might be why that ending works despite seeming a bit tacked on. It’s a rather bright conclusion for a noir, but Gilda is kind of a bright noir in general. The casino setting means just about everything is lit up, and what shadows there are exist to hide dirty, ugly things (those Nazis!). Johnny starts in the darkness, it’s where Balin rescues him from. The cinematography here is by Rudolph Maté, who also shot Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent [review] and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be [review]. Though perhaps more apropos to this, he shot Alexander Korda’s That Hamilton Woman [review], another film about a love triangle and denied emotions, though one where the separation of  the lovers is due to other circumstances than any personal kinks. Still, compare Maté’s use of big set pieces there to his work here.

Gilda needs these big stages because all the better to showcase Hayworth. One could say she is as much the film’s object as she is Balin’s, she is there for the audience to watch alongside the men in her film. Yet, one could never consider Hayworth to be a passive performer or remotely contained. The moxie she gives Gilda makes her male co-stars appear all the more dull, they can’t measure up. Hayworth is fierce and bold here, with only hints of the world-weary pallor she would put to good use in later films like The Lady From Shanghai. She would revisit this fierceness in 1953 in Miss Sadie Thompson [review], which treads some of the same ground as Gilda, except with an older and more steady Hayworth at the center of the screen.

But, as they say, there’s still nothing like the first time. Gilda wasn’t Hayworth’s film debut, but it often feels like it. At least for my film-going experience, it was when she arrived, and with such spectacular style, she made sure I’d never let her go.

PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: REMBRANDT - ECLIPSE SERIES 16

"Shadows, darkness, and confusion..."

I'm halfway tempted to forego writing a review of Alexander Korda's 1936 biography of Rembrandt and instead cut and paste my review of Bent Hamer's Charles Bukowski biopic Factotum [second review]. In Korda's hands, and as performed by Charles Laughton, the 17th-century Dutch painter is not dissimilar to the 20th-century poet. Both were passionate men with particular appetites, ahead of their time and underappreciated during it, and often too realistic in their manner of relating the seedier aspects of human existence. Laughton's Rembrandt is a bit of a bad boy, railing against authority, iconoclastic, an artist in every sense of the word.

Rembrandt is the last movie in the Eclipse box Alexander Korda's Private Lives, and it's a good note to close on. It manages the right balance of seriousness and irreverence, building a convincing facsimile of history while also managing to allow for personality. The devil is in the details, to be sure, but Rembrandt is himself a devil, and there lies the joy of this picture.

Carl Zuckmayer and June Head's script opens with a personal and professional failure. Though revered for his skills, Rembrandt has been avoiding taking paid commissions, preferring instead to paint his wife Saskia. The Civic Guard, a governing body of soldiers and politicians, ply Rembrandt with drink, money, and flattery, and so he takes on the job of a group portrait. It's ill timed, however; Saskia succumbs to a long-term illness. Worse, the painter's efforts to show the men as they are only brings disdain. The big commission--the now revered painting The Night Watch--is a failure.

Fast forward several years, and Rembrandt is struggling. His home is now run by his opportunist housekeeper (Gertrude Lawrence), and his wife's final will ties up most of the family money with their son (John Bryning). Rembrandt feels lost, and only a visit to the farm where he grew up and a new romance with Hendrickje (Elsa Lanchester), a young maid who believes in him, revives his lust for life. The rest of Rembrandt shows their struggles, another rise and fall, ending with a final act that illustrates the despair of a wayward artistic life.

The movie becomes a bit of a bummer in that last 15 minutes, but given the undulating pattern of Rembrandt's life, it makes sense. He was a man who loved deeply and who didn't recover from loss easily. Laughton digs into the role with his expected vigor, rendering both the artist's outgoing highs and his introspective shallows with equal insight. The actor had a special skill for understanding oversized personalities, and the extremes that came with them. The summation of the painter's life in the last scenes could have had a mawkish gravitas if portrayed by a lesser performer; Laughton carries the weight with ease.

Korda's direction has certainly grown more confident since The Private Lives of Henry VIII [review], and he and Laughton have a clear rapport. They know how to work a scene together, when the actor needs to really go for it, and when he should hang back. There are lots of memorable scenes in Rembrandt--the dark pallor that hangs over his conflict with the Civic Guard, the tensely funny barroom brawl with the peasants in the artist's hometown, the sweet courtship of Hendrickje--scenes that fuse performance with material in a way that only cinema can. As per usual, the sets by Vincent Korda, who of course had Rembrandt's paintings to use as inspiration, create an essential component of the film, establishing an authentic world for the rest of the crew to lose themselves in. This makes Rembrandt the best of the historical pictures represented in Alexander Korda's Private Lives, in addition to being the last. It's a big finish in every sense of the phrase.

PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN - ECLIPSE SERIES 16

"What is romantic about spending your life telling women they are everything they are not?"

The jocular tone of Alexander Korda's 1934 film The Private Life of Don Juan is evident from the get-go, as is its sexual undercurrents. Or should I say overcurrents? The movie opens on a fountain spraying high into the air as a minstrel sings the ballad of the titular lover, the unseen Don Juan, desired by wives, hated by husbands. Women all across Seville are forlorn because their love lives have dwindled since the famous ladies man departed, only to have their spirits lifted as a mysterious figure, appearing to us only as a shadow, arrives beneath their despondent balconies to toss them a flower. Could it be that Don Juan has returned to woo them anew? Passion erupts, just like that fountain, rising up and going...well, nowhere.

The Private Life of Don Juan isn't so much a romantic comedy as it is a comedy of romance. Korda and writers Frederick Lonsdale and Lajos Biro (a regular on Korda movies, but who also wrote von Sternberg's The Last Command [review]), working from a play by Henri Bataille, aren't interested in the legend of Don Juan, except to skewer and deflate it. Screen legend Douglas Fairbanks, here in a rare talkie and also starring in his final feature, leads the film as the heroic lover. He has snuck back home under a veil of secrecy, hoping to avoid being jailed for debts that his angry wife, Doña Dolores (Benita Hume), has purchased in order to lord them over his head. Don Juan has seen better days. He is older and tired, maybe a little like the aging actor who plays him, not as ready to perform as in the old days, and also finding that he is being replaced. The man handing out flowers wasn't Don Juan, though now the whole town thinks it was. It's a new casanova looking to follow in the Don's footsteps.

Opportunity strikes when Don Juan leaves his wife waiting yet again, choosing instead to woo the pretty dancer Antonita (Merle Oberon). While he makes love to her, his doppelganger is straining his back to climb a balcony in another part of town. When the fake Don Juan is run through with an angry husband's sword, the real deal sees a way to sneak off, avoiding handcuffs by playing dead until he can save up enough to buy his way out of jail. Only, once Don Juan has gone, a new industry springs up around his memory. A scandalous, exaggerated biography becomes a best seller, and an opportunistic playwright crafts a stage production celebrating his alleged exploits. Fearing his legacy has gotten beyond his control, Don Juan returns to Seville to announce he is alive.

And here is where the true sting comes. No one will believe this middle-aged man is the real Don Juan. Antonita remembers him as younger, with a different mouth and blue eyes. The theatre audience laughs at the legendary lothario when he interrupts the play. There is no way for the man to live up to the mythology that exists around him. The truth is not important. When the play's author asks the audience which they'd prefer, a Don Juan who is just a man or the one who is a heroic phantom, they choose the phantom.

It's a fairly prescient depiction of the downfalls of fame. Old Hollywood and its stars had a particular knack for creating actors to fit a predetermined image. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was known for his stunt work and his suave persona, and he must have more than once been in a situation where the truth couldn't live up to the publicity. One has to respect his lack of ego for poking fun at himself here. He's still very charming on screen, smiling and laughing, even as the Don Juan act falters. In the film's final scene, his usual lines are turned down, the woman he says them to has already heard them. Don Juan has no defense. That gambit is all he has. It's a revelation both mirthful and mournful. The old soul is accepting his new position. The myth is learning to be fine with being just a man.

Jim Jarmusch fans will likely recognize the funeral scene in The Private Life of Don Juan from Broken Flowers, the indie director's own film about the twilight of a ladies man. It's the movie that Bill Murray's character, also named Don, is watching early in the film, as he realizes how alone he really is. Jarmusch has picked this section for a reason. Korda's scene has a lot of emotional subtext. Here is the man, believed dead, standing amongst a legion of black-clad women who have come to mourn his passing--and he knows not a one of them. These aren't his actual lovers, these are women who believed in the fantasy, who are crying over something they never had. In reality, for all his conquests, Don Juan is alone. Sure, he is amused to be cut loose, but then frustrated that he can't reclaim his identity. Don Juan has to shed everything to learn what's truly important. He has to understand his biggest fib is not his practiced rap, but everything he pretended to be. People believe the lies because there was no other truth.

The Private Life of Don Juan has a heavy meaning, but it's not a heavy movie. Far from it. It's the lightest of the Alexander Korda pictures in the Eclipse set. The episodic script moves quickly from one scenario to the next, a series of quick comic bursts, some of them schticky, some of them sensual, sometimes both. The culmination is probably when the exiled Don tries to show a barmaid (Binnie Barnes) that he can be everything his biography claims him to be, but it takes a couple of tries to deliver the "hot lava." Korda is having fun peeling back the curtains to peek into the bedroom, to show the construct behind the myth. Just as Flora Robson stole The Rise of Catherine the Great [review] in her showy supporting role as the Empress, The Private Life of Don Juan is taken over by Melville Cooper, playing Leporello, the long-suffering organizer of Don Juan's life. He's the one who makes sure Don Juan eats the right food to stay in shape, and who organizes his social engagements. Cooper is like the 1930s equivalent of F. Murray Abraham, blustery and forceful and very funny. The biggest laugh comes midway through the film when he cuts one of Don's hostesses to the quick, saying his favorite meal is a gabby old woman's tongue. And not while it's still in her mouth.

What really makes The Private Life of Don Juan work, though, is that Korda doesn't sacrifice that glib tone in order to make his point. Don Juan settles down and expresses his lesson learned, but he delivers his epiphany with the same blithe manner as he has said everything leading up to it. It's a new seduction, you see, one that is about allowing himself to be seduced as much as he is doing the seducing. He's falling in love with life in a whole new way.

PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: THE RISE OF CATHERINE THE GREAT - ECLIPSE SERIES 16

The Private Life of Henry VIII [review] was a great success for Alexander Korda, and so it only made sense that he would continue in this vein as both a filmmaker and a producer. For his next historical feature, Korda handed the directorial reins to Paul Czinner, who had recently left Germany with his wife, the actress Elizabeth Bergner, to escape persecution from the rising Nazi powers. Czinner and Korda settled on Catherine the Great as a suitable starring vehicle for Bergner. Though Catherine had a long reign as Empress of Russia, one full of scandal and rumor, the pair decided to focus on her early life for The Rise of Catherine the Great, and her move from her home country of Germany to the court of St. Petersburg--a situation that Bergner could likely identify with.

At the start of the picture, the Empress Elisabeth (Flora Robson, the Basil Dearden-directed Saraband for Dead Lovers) is on the throne. Lacking both an Emperor and a direct heir, Elisabeth is trying to position her nephew, Grand Duke Peter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Little Caesar, The Prisoner of Zenda), to take over and carry on the bloodline. In classic fashion, the young monarch is not as interested in affairs of state as he is in affairs of the heart and also those of the body. Being a ladies man and a scoundrel, the idea of marrying a German princess he's never seen doesn't really appeal to the dandy. His mind changes, however, when he meets Catherine and she charms him with her naïveté and devotion.

Only, his mind is to change just as quickly on their wedding day when a valet (Gerald du Maurier) plants a doubt in his head: what if she is not as naïve as he originally believed? Feeling royally played, Peter approaches his new marriage as if it were a game. Can he carry on as he was and keep his wife in her place? He'll push her to see how clever she really is!

These early portions of The Rise of Catherine the Great are the best parts, with Peter acting the rake and Catherine trying to outmaneuver him, sometimes advised by Empress Elisabeth herself. Flora Robson pulls a coup on her castmates, completely dominating The Rise of Catherine the Great each and every time she appears on screen. (Hell, even Criterion chose to put her on the menu screen rather than the movie's titular star.) The actress reminds me of Helen Mirren, both in attitude and appearance. Hers is by far the most colorful role. She gets to shout and throw tantrums and even gives one of her ministers a black eye. Her showing "Little Catherine" the ropes has echoes of Choderlos de Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses. The innocent is being trained to disarm the cad. Peter is fueled more by pride and jealousy than he is desire, and Fairbanks handles the wounded ego angle with aplomb.

Unfortunately, The Rise of Catherine the Great nearly skids to a halt when Elisabeth eventually passes on. Peter rules Russia with the same shortcomings that make him such a bad husband, and he quickly fears Catherine's popularity and her keen instincts for fair rule. Or should I say her alleged instincts. The script, which was cobbled together by three writers, gives pretty thin examples of Catherine's decision-making skills, and for most of this part of the film, she appears far from great. The political machinations are a pale replacement for the more swarthy bedroom negotiations, and Catherine is shown as weak willed and easily bested, a wilting flower beholden to a rotten man. She is only convinced to make the right choice and seize power when his insults become too much to bear. Czinner wishes to paint Catherine as the mother of the country who will fight for her children, but that portrait doesn't fit in the frame, not when, for the bulk of the picture, she is too busy pining for her sweetheart to make the bold moves to get rid of him.

While the script clearly goes wrong in sticking Catherine in the backseat for The Rise of Catherine the Great's final act, some blame must also be placed with Bergner. She's not much of an actress, and she also lacks any special screen presence. Just like Peter, the camera doesn't really love her, it's more okay with her. Even surrounded by Vincent Korda's impressive set designs and decked out in John Armstrong's costumes, Bergner can't quite marshal the charisma to make her character believable. A film about a woman coming into her own and taking control of an empire requires a much stronger personality to bring it to life.

But then that's the problem. As a whole, Paul Czinner's directorial style lacks the vitality of even Korda's, who himself wasn't exactly the most vivacious. The Rise of Catherine the Great also lacks the sheer force of a performer like Charles Laughton, or the more lusty aspects of the Henry VIII story. When the gossip and the whispers take over The Rise of Catherine the Great, one can't help but think all that cattiness is much ado about nothing at all. Maybe they were saving all the salacious details for a possible sequel? Too bad the Korda franchise was soon to go elsewhere.

PRIVATE LIVES OF ALEXANDER KORDA: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII - ECLIPSE SERIES 16

"Six wives, and the best of them's the worst."

It's an older, weary, yet unflappable Henry VIII who drops that chestnut on us at the conclusion of The Private Life of Henry VIII. Charles Laughton plays the notorious king in the irreverent 1933 film. He is big and loud and boisterous and he enjoys his game hens--all the things we have come to expect from our knowledge of the marriage-prone monarch. It's a high-wire act of a performance, pitching ever so slightly toward comedy, yet at the same time avoiding being a one-note cartoon version of the historical figure. Far from the evil Dr. Moreau the actor played the year before in Island of Lost Souls [review], and not nearly as bullish as the Hobson who would make his choice in twenty years time [review], this fully built portrait fits nicely somewhere in the middle. It is a spirited portrayal full of nuance, capturing the character's dark currents while also being sympathetic to his loneliness.

The Private Life of Henry VIII, part of the Eclipse boxed set Alexander Korda's Private Lives, opens on the day that Anne Boleyn (Merle Oberon), Henry's second wife, is to be executed as a punishment for her serial adultery. Once the beheading is complete, Henry will marry his third wife, Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie). The duality of sad and happy is established from the get-go, as is the cheeky humor of the piece. The ladies of the court who are tasked with removing Anne's initial from the sheets on the marriage bed and adding a J for "Jane" gossip and titter wondering what it must be like to sleep next to the corpulent ruler. In a move similar to the one Sofia Coppola would take decades later in her fantastic biopic Marie Antoinette [review], director Alexander Korda is examining the king as a celebrity, every bit as desired and maligned and pawed over as movie stars would eventually be. His Henry is bawdy and sometimes buffoonish, a man of many desires who has every way of getting what he wants. Two of the funniest scenes in the movie are when the king discovers the league of barbers spends their meetings talking about his conjugal prospects. You know, instead of talking about cutting hair.

The movie charts wives 2 through 6, and the many reasons why the union to each failed. Henry goes from being pushed into one marriage, and then jumping into another because he's convinced he found love. Henry keeps thinking he's correcting his past mistakes--if Anne was too clever, then Jane was better because she was not, for instance--but then new faults arise and the man is never happy. My favorite of the wives is #4, Anne of Cleves, played by the very funny Elsa Lanchester (who was married to her co-star in real life, and later wed another monster, albeit a fictional one, as Bride of Frankenstein). The German princess has heard enough stories about Henry, she knows any union with him is a ticking clock. On their first night together, she wins a divorce in a card game. Fittingly, she also comes back later to give Henry advice on why he keeps getting it wrong, choosing the sixth wife (Everley Gregg), the one who will get him into old age, on his behalf. She is very funny, mugging for the camera, making silly faces in the mirror trying to decide whether or not she is attractive. (Lanchester was, but Korda dresses her frumpily, isolating her face in order to play up her exaggerated features.) She strives for self-awareness, whereas Henry VIII lacks it completely. The entirety of the pop culture endurance of this Tudor emanates from the scene in Private Life where Henry scolds his court for the decline of manners in the kingdom, all the while slurping on ale and eating a cooked bird, tossing bones and sinews over his shoulder without a second thought.

Korda's film is fancy without being flashy. The director's brother Vincent designed the sets, making them spacious and sturdy, mimicking the look of a real stone castle. He built alcoves for Georges Perinal's camera to peer down from, and corners suitable for cheating scoundrels to hide around, but also where spies like us could peek. In a way, we are like time traveling paparazzi, catching glimpses of the royal life from a peeping tom's distance. If The Private Life of Henry VIII were made today, it would probably be a mockumentary. It's only a matter for time before some British royal gets a reality show, don't you think? The sad thing is, you know they would end up being more loathsome than even a man who had his second wife's head chopped off. Because they'd have to play themselves, and there'd be no Charles Laughton to buff the edges.