As he frequently does, Erik Beck (of the Boston Becks) got me to thinking, this time about the director nom- inations for 1932-33. There were some names that got left off the list that in nearly any other year would have made it easily—Mervyn LeRoy, James Whale, Frank Capra, and others. And you know how I hate to leave anybody out.
Well, there is precedent from the Academy itself for a solution. At the very first Oscars, there were two prizes for best director—one for best director of a drama, one for best director of a comedy. How about, on a one time only basis, two best director trophies? We could throw Whale (The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House), LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933), Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen) and one other name into the drama category with Cooper and Schoedsack (King Kong); and Cukor, Lubitsch, McCarey, Renoir and one other name into the comedy category.
Or are there just too goshdarn many Katie Awards already? You're not going to hurt my feelings.
Any thoughts on the other potential nominees? If you need some suggestions, how about:
Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) (musical/comedy)
* Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) (drama)
Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell) (drama or comedy)
Alexander Korda (The Private Life Of Henry VIII) (drama) (sort of)
* Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) (drama)
Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina) (comedy or drama)
Max Ophüls (Liebelei) (drama)
Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct) (comedy)
... or anybody else who had a picture released between August 1, 1932 and December 31, 1933. [*—previous winner]
Think about it for a couple of days, leave a comment, speak your mind. I wasn't planning to post my essay on the best director of 1932-33 until the end of the week anyway.
Boy, oh, boy! We're finally getting to the heart of what I think of the era of classic movies—and not a moment too soon, I'm sure you're thinking.
Not that I've lacked for great movies to talk about. I've handed out best picture awards to the likes of All Quiet On The Western Front, City Lights and Frankenstein, among others, I've written about legendary sex symbols such as Marlene Dietrich and Clara Bow, and I've shown you comedies from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin that are as funny now as the day they debuted.
But let's face it, many of the stars I've been talking about—Marie Dressler, Anita Page—are virtually unknown today even among film buffs, and the movies themselves—silents such as Sunrise, early talkies like Bulldog Drummond and Hallelujah!—feel alien at times, almost like they're a wholly different medium.
Which is why, as much fun as it's been for me so far, it's a bit of relief to reach a year in film history that I didn't have to research virtually from scratch, and hopefully one that for once won't leave you, my long-suffering readers, scratching your collective heads. As they say in Kathmandu, the ox is slow, but the earth is patient. And you've been very patient indeed.
Although rarely mentioned in the same breath with 1939, I'd suggest 1932-33 was perhaps the greatest year in movie history—well, year and a half, really, since the Oscar season ran from August 1, 1932 to December 31, 1933 as the Academy was bringing its confusing split-year award season in line with the calendar. Clark Gable was now a star, Jean Harlow discovered a flair for comedy, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were at the top of their games. Barbara Stanwyck was taking full advantage of the pre-Code era's permissiveness. And the Marx Brothers were funnier than ever.
Not to mention that Katharine Hepburn not only made her film debut, she won the first (of four) Oscars; Busby Berkeley, that master of wildly flamboyant choreography, was busy reviving the movie musical. And Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together for the first time.
Among my nominees are such classics as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise, Dinner at Eight, Design For Living, Red Dust, Boudu Saved From Drowning, The Invisible Man, Queen Christina, Sons of the Desert, Baby Face, The Bitter Tea of General Yen. And on top of that, Fritz Lang's classic M arrived in the United States in 1933, making it eligible for an award come Oscar time. Boy, what a year!
So how come you don't hear more about 1932-33 when it comes time to talk about the greatest years in movie history?
Well, let's put it this way: of those movies I listed above, how many Oscars did they win between them?
Zero.
Zero? Yeah, zero.
Okay, sure, sometimes the Academy screws up, but how many Oscar nominations did they receive between them?
Zero.
That's right, a baker's dozen of the best movies of all time and as far as the Academy was concerned, they didn't even exist. Still, the Academy did nominate some solid movies, traditional Oscar fare such as I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII, A Farewell To Arms, Lady For A Day, 42nd Street and the like.
So which of these fine movies did the Academy choose as the best picture of the year? Cavalcade.
Whoozitwhatsis?
A starchy, stage-bound adaptation of a Noel Coward play, Cavalcade is not much remembered now and may well be the worst movie to ever win the Oscar for best picture. (Aside: Here's a fun little game to play in your head the next time you're out walking the dog—well, fun, that is, if you're an unhinged film fanatic like me: Name the worst movie ever nominated for best picture, the worst movie to win the Oscar for best picture, and the worst movie to win the Oscar for best picture that nevertheless deserved to win. For me, so far, the answers are The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Cavalcade and possibly The Sound Of Music, but I haven't made up my mind about that last one and I have thirty-two years to think it over.)
It's not just that Cavalcade is slow moving and wholly lacking in action (that's true of a lot of good movies), but it's also repetitive and uninvolving. The story follows an upper-crust British family and their downstairs servants through the first thirty years of the Twentieth Century, certainly a volatile time in world history, yet the characters—two-dimensional ciphers at best—bear only passive witness to the passing parade and if you're not already emotionally invested in such moments as the death of Queen Victoria or Louis Bleriot's flight across the English Channel, nothing that happens on screen is likely to make you care.
I'll give you an example. Two newlyweds on a ship talk about how happy they are and if they were to die that very night, well, so be it, and then they step away from the railing to retreat to their cabin and reveal a life preserver with the name (wait for it) "Titanic" stenciled on it. Fade to black and now we're on a train two years later in 1914, just hours before Britain declares war on Germany, and you just know that in a few scenes, the mother of the enthusiastic boy-soldier next to her will be reading a telegram informing her of his death.
And on and on like that, hopping from one event to the next with no insight, no character development, just another "Where were you on the morning of November 11, 1918?" sort of thing. Maybe this was a nice catharsis for a London theater audience in 1933, a chance to remember and shed a tear or two without anything on stage getting in the way. But for a 21st Century audience? It's as dry and mystifying as a chatty Christmas newsletter from a complete stranger.
Basically, it's Forrest Gump without Gump, chocolate or a plot.
So why did it win the Oscar for best picture? A lot of reasons, I think. The threat of govern- ment censor- ship, for one. You see a lot of Oscars then (and now) handed out to movies with the stale whiff of "art" about them, and this was especially true during the early sound era when Hollywood was absolutely paranoid about its worth compared to the so-called "legitimate" theater. On display as well was America's insecurity about its young culture compared to Britain's venerable old one. Once America dropped the atomic bomb in 1945, it was never insecure about anything again. But in 1933, we still felt a bit like provincial rubes sitting at the grown-up's table.
Yet another factor may have been labor unrest among the Academy's ranks. Faced with mounting losses during the Depression, the studios had just announced an across-the-board pay cut of 50% for all its employees, a move that prompted the formation of the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild (the latter founded by Frances Marion, Hollywood's top writer who swiftly found herself unemployed in retaliation). Many of the voters simply refused to vote for a Hollywood product and opted for the British Cavalcade instead.
Whatever the reason, what was a popular choice in 1933 is a puzzler now.
(Another aside: one of Oscar's most embarrassing moments resulted from Frank Lloyd's win as best director of Cavalcade. In announcing the win, host Will Rogers said only "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy! Come up and get it, Frank!" Frank Capra, nominated for Lady For A Day, was halfway to the stage before he realized it was Lloyd, not he, who had won. Capra called the trip back to his seat "the longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life." He got the last laugh, though, winning three of the suckers over the next five years.)
The categories for best actor and actress were considered upsets and their winners received only lukewarm applause from the assembled guests. Maybe it was lucky neither winner bothered to attend the ceremony.
As the title character in The Private Life of Henry VIII, Charles Laughton chewed scenery with as much gusto as the king he portrayed chewed on those big turkey legs we always associate him with, and his narrow victory (vote totals were made public) over Paul Muni was not a popular one. The Private Life of Henry VIII is actually a very fine movie, something of a British bedroom farce disguised as a history lesson, and you could just as easily call it a comedy as a drama. But I'm willing to bet it's the least seen of all of Laughton's great performances.
As for the best actress winner, it had taken Katharine Hepburn less than two years to establish a reputation for being a snooty prima donna, and her win over the popular May Robson (Lady For A Day) was a shock. Still, Morning Glory, the story of a naive country girl who takes Broadway by storm, got good reviews, and she was even better in three other movies she made between 1932 and 1933, A Bill Of Divorcement, Christopher Strong, and especially in Little Women, in which she gave not only the definitive interpretation of Louisa Mae Alcott's tomboy heroine, Jo March, but the first indispensable performance of her great and illustrious career.
(Aside number three: On March 16, 1934, when Walt Disney won the award for producing the year's best cartoon short, Three Little Pigs, he thanked the Academy for giving him an "Oscar." This was the first time the term "Oscar" was used in public to refer to an Academy Award. How about that.)
Anyway, 1932-33 was a big year, too big, in fact, to stick with the conventional Oscar awards format I've been following—too much risk of skipping over too many good movies I think you'll want to see. Since we're on the cusp of Hollywood's Golden Age, let's adopt instead the Golden Globes format, with its separate acting and best picture categories for drama and comedy/musical. And let's throw in an award for best foreign-language film, too. The Nazis may have finished off the German film industry in 1933, but the French filmmakers were flourishing and there are a lot of good foreign movies to choose from.
You okay with this set-up? Yes? Good.
Among the actors, there are a lot of first-time nominees here, too many to mention, so I'll say instead that previous Katie winner Marie Dressler gets the third and final nomination of her career (she died a year later), and Miriam Hopkins and Joan Blondell, who also have previously won, each receive their second. Paul Muni, John Barrymore, James Cagney, the Marx Brothers, Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou also receive their second noms.
All of the directors are first-time nominees. [6/1/10 After a an online discussion with my readers, here and here, I likewise split the director nominees in the categories of drama and comedy/musical. Better too many nominees than too few.]
Other than a handful of director-producer types, no one gets nominated in more than one category; thus, you get John Barrymore as supporting actor in Dinner At Eight, his best role that year, rather than for the lead in the less well-known Counsellor-at-Law. Mostly, I wanted to spread the wealth and encourage you to see as many movies as possible—thirty-two (plus one cartoon short) in all.
But to pull that off, I fudged a handful of nominations— Jean Harlow, for one. I've nominated her in the lead actress in a comedy category, based in part on her terrific performance in Bombshell. But of the other two movies I mention, Red Dust is a drama and her role in Dinner At Eight is supporting; still, all three performances are primarily comedic, classically so, and rather than nominate her in three categories or ignore any of her great performances from this period, I lumped them all together under one umbrella.
Likewise, Kay Francis receives a nomination in the drama category for a pair of little-seen but really-good movies she did with William Powell, Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage. The latter is a romantic weeper—Powell and Francis fall in love on an ocean voyage from Hong Kong to San Francisco, neither knowing the other hasn't long to live, she because of a terminal illness, he because he faces execution for murder—but the former is more a crime-caper-comedy-romance than strictly a drama. (Powell is a suave jewel thief who plays classical music and forces his victims to smoke marijuana while he robs them; during the movie's first robbery, Francis is so taken with him, she encourages a repeat performance.) One Way Passage is the indispensable one, so into the drama category her nomination goes, but you don't want to miss Jewel Robbery if you can find it.
And then, a couple of comedy acts—Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers—I treated as single entities for the purposes of best comedy actor nominations. This may strike movie fans, who aren't primed for ensemble awards, as odd, but music fans, I think, readily grasp, for example, that the Beatles as a group is a different animal from John, Paul, George and Ringo as individual solo acts—and if you don't believe me, compare "A Day in the Life" to, say, "Ebony and Ivory." The Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy are teams and I've nominated them as teams. So there.
Finally, there's the problem of when to nominate Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic, Vampyr, which was filmed in 1930, first premiered in Berlin in May 1932, then after scathing reviews was substantially reworked and re-premiered in Paris in September 1932. I can't say for sure when it showed up in America (under the title Castle Of Doom) but my guess it that it was some time after that. I probably could have chosen just about any year to nominate it for a Katie Award, but I went for 1932-33 on the theory that the version Dreyer wanted the world to see was released during that time frame.
If you would have handled these issues differently, I for one won't say you're wrong.
PICTURE (Drama) The Bitter Tea Of General Yen (prod. Frank Capra) I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (prod. Hal B. Wallis) The Invisible Man (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) King Kong (prod. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) Red Dust (prod. Hunt Stromberg and Irving Thalberg)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) Dinner At Eight (prod. David O. Selznick) Duck Soup (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz) 42nd Street (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck) Gold Diggers Of 1933 (prod. Jack L. Warner and Robert Lord) Trouble In Paradise (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) Boudu Saved From Drowning (prod. Michel Simon) Liebelei (prod. Herman Millakowsky) The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (prod. Fritz Lang and Seymour Nebenzal) Vampyr (prod. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Julian West) Zero For Conduct (prod. Jean Vigo)
ACTOR (Drama) Nils Asther (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen) Charles Laughton (The Old Dark House, Island Of Lost Souls and The Private Life Of Henry VIII) Paul Muni (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang) Claude Rains (The Invisible Man) Paul Robeson (The Emperor Jones)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) James Cagney (Footlight Parade) Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Sons Of The Desert) Herbert Marshall (Trouble In Paradise) The Marx Brothers (Horse Feathers and Duck Soup) Michel Simon (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
ACTRESS (Drama) Kay Francis (Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage) Greta Garbo (Queen Christina) Katharine Hepburn (Little Women) Barbara Stanwyck (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face) Fay Wray (The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) Joan Blondell (The Gold Diggers Of 1933) Jean Harlow (Red Dust, Dinner At Eight and Bombshell) Miriam Hopkins (Trouble in Paradise and Design For Living) May Robson (Lady For A Day) Mae West (I'm No Angel)
DIRECTOR (Drama) Frank Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Lady For A Day) Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (King Kong) Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) Mervyn LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933) Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina) James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) George Cukor (Dinner At Eight and Little Women) Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell) Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living) Leo McCarey (Duck Soup) Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved From Drowning) Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct) SUPPORTING ACTOR John Barrymore (Dinner At Eight) Edward Everett Horton (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living) Edgar Kennedy (Duck Soup) Guy Kibbee (Gold Diggers of 1933, Lady For A Day and Footlight Parade) Adolphe Menjou (A Farewell To Arms)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS Billie Burke (Dinner At Eight) Marie Dressler (Dinner At Eight) Margaret Dumont (Duck Soup) Elsa Lanchester (The Private Life of Henry VIII) Una O'Connor (The Invisible Man)
SCREENPLAY Jean Renoir and Albert Valentin; from a play by René Fauchois (Boudu Saved From Drowning) Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz; additional dialogue Donald Ogden Stewart; from a play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber (Dinner At Eight) Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin (Duck Soup) Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes, from the autobiography by Robert E. Burns (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang) Grover Jones and Samson Raphelson; from a play by Aladar Laszlo (Trouble In Paradise)
BEST SONG (Reader Voted) "Forty-Second Street" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (42nd Street) "The Gold Diggers Song (We're In The Money)" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933) "Isn't It Romantic" music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart (Love Me Tonight) "Remember My Forgotten Man" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933) "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf" music and lyrics by Frank Church and Ted Sears (Three Little Pigs)
Personally, I hate putting labels on movies. Terms like "chick flick" and "fun-stupid," while useful to lazy critics and unimaginative marketing departments, are more often than not designed to say to the ticket-buying public (or Oscar voters) "it's safe to skip this one." Plus, a label like "gay cinema" creates certain story expectations that, in the case of Mädchen in Uniform at least, have nothing much to do with what's on the screen.
I could just as accurately label Mädchen in Uniform "boarding school cinema" and lump it in with Diary of a Lost Girl and Dead Poets Society. But failing to note that a movie made in 1931 treated the subject of homosexuality with seriousness and sensitivity would be like an archeologist failing to note that he found a television set buried in King Tut's tomb.
Images of gays in the movies of the early sound era were few and far between; and positive ones? Forget it. One of Clara Bow's last films, 1932's Call Her Savage, included a scene in a gay bar, the first and last such scene in a Hollywood movie until Otto Preminger's 1962 movie, Advise and Consent, but otherwise gay men existed at best as foppish creatures of ambiguous sexuality and at worst as "sissies" subject to ridicule and broad comedy.
Lesbians fared a little better—think of Marlene Dietrich kissing a woman in Morocco (1930) or Greta Garbo proclaiming she'd "die a bachelor" in Queen Christina (1933)—but a lesbian relationship was never front and center in a Hollywood movie. More often, Hollywood simply pretended that gays and lesbians didn't exist, for example, turning the lesbian relationship at the heart of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour into the heterosexual triangle of These Three.
That's why seeing a movie like Mädchen in Uniform feels so much like stepping into a time warp—there wouldn't be another movie like it for decades. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that it came from Germany; film critic Ruby Rich in talking about the film, noted that Berlin under the Weimar Republic was remarkably open to gays and lesbians such as Christa Winsloe who wrote both the script and the stage play it was based on, and Leontine Sagan who directed both versions of the story. The movie "comes to us directly from that era," Rich said, "and shows us the kind of scene that flourished there."
Mädchen in Uniform is the story of a fourteen year old orphan girl, Manuela (Hertha Thiele in her film debut), the niece of a wealthy aristocrat who warehouses her at a prestigious boarding school. The school's elderly headmistress (Emilia Unda) is the proud daughter of a Prussian officer and modeling her school on that military tradition, is regimented, authoritarian and cruel.
"Through discipline and hunger we will become great again," she says as she dismisses student complaints of malnutrition and mistreatment, "or not at all!" The movie was filmed just two years before Hitler took power in Germany and the school and its principal were swipes at the rising Nazi tide and its threat to a free society. At this school, books outside the classroom are forbidden, letters are censored and the girls' striped uniforms bear an uncomfortable similarity to those later worn by concentration camp inmates.
Indeed, life at the school is so regimented, the only warmth its students know is a nightly kiss on the forehead bestowed by their favorite teacher, Fraulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck). "Don't fall in love!" one of the girls teases Manuela when she arrives. "All the girls are crazy about Fraulein von Bernburg."
Manuela sees in her teacher a substitute for the mother she lost many years before and as she is overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions—loneliness, homesickness, her own budding sexuality—she develops a crush on Bernburg so palpable her feelings are soon obvious to everyone. Manuela's story, that of a lonely girl searching for something, is the film's strength—loneliness, ironically, being one of the chief traits all human beings share.
Fraulein von Bernburg's feelings are more ambiguous —she expresses concern for Manuela and the girls, displays maternal affection, and yet the first time she lays eyes on Manuela descending a staircase, the look is as frank as Rhett Butler's as he pictures Scarlett O'Hara without her shimmy on. And indeed, the first night, as Bernburg kisses each girl on the forehead, Manuela impulsively throws her arms around her teacher—and Bernburg responds by kissing the girl on the lips.
"What you call sin, Frau Principal," Bernburg says, "I call love which has thousands of forms."
Later, when an act of kindness is misconstrued, the simmering tension between the authoritarian principal and the compassionate teacher comes to a boil.
The film's ending, in stark contrast to that of the play, is hopeful. Whether Winsloe and Sagan settled on the changes for artistic reasons or to appease German censors, I can't say, but at least, as Ruby Rich put it, they spared us the cliche of "lesbian suicide."
The film also spares us the cliche (or is it the reality?) of Mean Girls-style conflict between the students. The girls here are refreshingly supportive of one another and rather than turning on each other in the face of oppression, they rally together. Indeed, they are seen as Germany's greatest hope to avoid the coming disaster. In light of what soon after transpired in Germany, however, the filmmakers' optimism proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking.
Mädchen in Uniform premiered in Germany on November 27, 1931. It was initially banned in the United States until Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, interceded on its behalf and in September 1932, it played briefly in New York City. While audiences of the time—and certainly censors—were shocked at the film's subject matter, I'm not sure a modern audience would react any differently today. While we may now be open to the characters' sexual orientation, I suspect most of us would look askance at the hints of pedophilia, an issue the filmmakers seemed blind to.
As with every other director of quality in Germany in the early Thirties, there was no place for director Leontine Sagan in Hitler's new regime. Unlike the case of directors such as Fritz Lang (whose own M would make an interesting double feature with Mädchen in Uniform), there was no room for Sagan in Hollywood either. She directed only two more movies, both for Alexander Korda in England, then moved to South Africa where she founded the National Theater of Johannesburg.
Playwright and screenwriter Christa Winsloe also left Germany when the Nazis took power and joined the French Resistance during the war. On June 10, 1944, four Frenchmen mistook her for a spy and shot her; they were later acquitted of her murder.
Dorothea Wieck made a couple of Hollywood films, neither a success, then returned to Germany where she continued to work in supporting roles for another forty years. Hertha Thiele resisted offers by the Nazi party to perform in propaganda films and in 1937 emigrated to Switzerland where it took her five years to find work. After the war, she worked in East Germany as a nursing assistant before returning to acting in the mid-1960s.
As for the subject matter itself, with enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, portrayals of gays and lesbians were driven even further underground. Gays and lesbians would have to be satisfied with the occasional Mrs. Danvers or Joel Cairo, characters ambiguous enough to slip past the censors, if not audiences. Not for another thirty years would Hollywood again openly address the issue.
Postscript: Unfortunately, Mädchen in Uniform is not available on DVD. It pops up periodically on cable (I taped it off the Sundance Channel years ago), or if you don't mind watching it on YouTube, you can see it here.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part One," click here. To read Part Two, click here. To read Part Three, click here.]
The Perfect, Problematic Ending Of City Lights (Spoilers Ahead) It's a truism when I tell you that it's easier to analyze a flawed work of art than a perfect one. In the former, you can see the man behind the curtain, what levers he pulls, what illusions he's trying to create; in the latter, the artist and his intentions are hidden, the machinery underneath so seamlessly integrated into the final product that you're left with the finished work of art and nothing else.
I remember reading an article in the Washington Post some years ago, the reporter reminiscing about his days as a graduate student and a course he took from William Faulkner. Trying to impress the master, the student asked, in regard to Faulkner's story "The Bear," whether the bear was a positive nature symbol, a negative nature symbol or both a positive and negative nature symbol.
Faulkner thought for a while, then said, "That's a story about a bear."
Even the artist himself doesn't quite know what the finished work means as the alchemy of the creative process turns the dross of his intentions into the gold of art.
And of all the movies that I have written about over the course of the last year, no scene has left me more moved and more bereft of words to describe it or analytical skills even to understand it, than the final scene of Charles Chaplin's City Lights.
Here is the scene in question. (My recommendation is that if you haven't seen the entire movie, see it here first. Better yet, rent it from Netflix ...)
It's such a simple scene, just a man and a woman reunited after a long while, a flower exchanged, and then a look of recognition, a smile and fade to black. The appeal of the movie rests on these final moments; indeed, it was this scene Chaplin had in mind when he first began to work on City Lights. I've watched this scene so many times, sometimes in the context of the movie as whole, oftentimes not, just watching it again to feel the entire movie reduced to a couple of minutes. It's one of the most perfect moments in movie history.
But what exactly does it mean? What does the action imply about what's going to happen to these two people even five minutes later? Nobody quite knows, least of all me.
Roger Ebert sees it as a scene of pure joy, with no ambiguity. "She sees," he has written, "and yet still smiles at him, and accepts him. The Tramp guessed correctly: She has a good heart, and is able to accept him as himself."
James Berardinelli sees it the same way. "The most touching thing about his relationship with the Flower Girl is that, because she is blind, she cannot see his shabby appearance and does not judge him the way others do. ... And, when her sightlessness has been lifted, her attitude does not change. Her new eyes see past the hobo's clothing."
Yet Daniel Eagan in his essay on the movie for America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide To The Landmark Movies In The National Film Registry calls the final scene "a delicate, open-ended encounter that forces the two main characters to erase their dreams, step out of their fantasies, and face up to an unforgiving reality."
Leslie Halliwell, in awarding one of the few four-star ratings in his wonderfully idiosyncratic film guide, noted "Nothing [Chaplin] did before, or after, compared to the closing moments here, a brilliant moment of recognition and loss ..."
And after noting that the girl accepts the Tramp for who he is, Tim Dirks, in his essay for The Greatest Films website, writes "A question arises: How can she possibly love him, now that she can see him? Their social roles are now reversed in this face-to-face encounter—his identity has changed from a benevolent millionaire to a vagabond, impoverished Tramp. She has turned from a poor, Blind Girl into a prosperous beautiful woman."
Me, I've seen it both ways. The eternal pessimist in me thinks, Yes, she's grateful, loyal, no doubt ready to return the favor of financial aid, but you can also see the dream of marrying a millionaire dying in her eyes and it's a painful death. Which the Tramp knew would happen, and he paid to restore the girl's sight knowing that to do so would end his pretense of wealth and with it, any possibility of romance. Yet he restored her sight anyway.
And yet I watched the scene again last night—I don't know how many times I'd seen it already—and thought, "Well, maybe Ebert is right." But if he is, it's not because of the expression on Virginia Cherrill's face, it's the one on Chaplin's, the shy, happy smile as the camera fades to black. If anything can be interpreted in that scene as the flower girl accepting the Tramp for who he is, it's the Tramp's look of joy—presumably because of what he thinks he sees in her eyes. But I don't know since what I see in her eyes is something different. I'm sure the next time I see City Lights, I'll have yet another opinion.
Maybe your reading of the ending depends on who you think is the "light" of the movie's title. Is it the girl, kind, generous, innocent? Or is it the self-sacrificing Tramp? Me, I'm inclined to judge deeds not motives and it's the Tramp's deeds that make the difference in people's lives. He is the city's light.
But does that explain the ending?
As he often did, James Agee, the legendary critic and screenwriter, probably wrote best about the moment: "The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplin's work. He could probably pantomime Bryce's The American Commonwealth without ever blurring a syllable and make it paralyzingly funny into the bargain. At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies."
I think above all, the end of City Lights works like the best music, evoking pure emotion that springs from a place within us beyond the centers of reason. And trying to affix words to a pure emotion is like trying pin a medal on a balloon; the act of doing so destroys the very thing you're trying to celebrate.
Chaplin himself, who was always loathe to discuss his methods and the meaning of his films, concluded only, "It's a beautiful scene, beautiful, and because it isn’t over-acted."
If you've seen City Lights, you no doubt have an opinion, and I would love to know what you think. And if you haven't seen it, maybe it's time to, if only to teach the Monkey a thing or two about the movies.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part One," click here. To read Part Two, click here.]
The Film's Legacy—And The Filmmaker's In reviewing City Lights for his Great Movies series, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote "If only one of Charles Chaplin's films could be preserved, City Lights (1931) would come the closest to representing all the different notes of his genius. It contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp—the character said, at one time, to be the most famous image on earth."
I would go farther than that. City Lights is not only Chaplin's most representative work, it's also his best, which is saying something considering he also gave us The Kid, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and many other wonderful movies. City Lights was, for me, the best movie of 1931, and arguably the best silent movie ever made, one of two I would recommend to you if you've never seen a silent movie (along with Buster Keaton's The General). It's also on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.
I'm not alone in my assessment. Orson Welles called it his favorite film. Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky included it in their personal top five. James Agee in 1949 called Chaplin's performance the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid."
In choosing it as the best picture of 1930-31, Danny Peary (whose book Alternate Oscars inspired this blog in the first place) called City Lights "a masterpiece" and "Chaplin's greatest film." Leonard Maltin, James Berardinelli, Tim Dirks, and many others, rank it as one of the hundred best films of all time. The American Film Institute includes it on no less than seven different lists honoring different film genres and performances—including the number one spot among romantic comedies. It has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. And on and on.
Charles Chaplin was without a doubt the most independent filmmaker in history, directing, producing, financing, writing, scoring, editing and starring in his own movies. After he formed United Artists to distribute his films, he was answerable to no one. If he could have played all the parts in his movies, I imagine he would have—certainly he didn't hesitate to tell his co-stars how to play their parts, choreographing their every move, gesture and expression.
When you look at the dictionary definition of an auteur—"a filmmaker whose individual style and complete control over all elements of production give a film its personal and unique stamp"—Chaplin's picture would serve as a prime, if unreproducible, illustration.
But in assessing Chaplin's strengths and weaknesses, though, where does one role leave off and another begin? As a director, in the sense that we now think of a director—as the master of a three-ring circus, as an innovative storyteller, as an acting coach, as glorified cinematographer— Chaplin was actually fairly maddening. He cast an amateur actress as his lead on a whim; his camera work was if anything more stripped down than it was ten years before; and he took three years to make City Lights, shooting hundreds of takes, drafting the story as he went along, nearly going bankrupt in the process.
Nobody films that way today, of course; you couldn't afford to. Yet perhaps Chaplin's perfectionism was the essential ingredient that made the finished product look so effortless. Maybe that's why we don't often wind up with films as sublime as City Lights.
That said, I think Chaplin's strengths are primarily three-fold. First, as I've discussed here and here, I think he was one of the greatest actors in movie history, and his performance in City Lights is no exception. Two, he was also one of the greatest film editors ever, a much underappreciated art that as much as anything a director or actor does determines the pace and structure of the story. Certainly sifting through the mountains of film he had exposed to find just the right take of a given scene must have been a monumental task.
And three, and maybe most importantly, Chaplin understood his audience, how to please it, how to challenge it, and above all, how to move it to feel what he wanted it to feel. For some, a director who pleases his audience, who creates a work that is "merely" entertaining, is not a director to be taken seriously, as if producing a movie that can entertain all kinds of audiences over the course of decades is hack work. Alfred Hitchcock, thanks in part to the persistent advocacy of directors and historians such as Francois Truffaut, finally managed to shed that ridiculous label; Steven Spielberg, despite two Oscars, largely has not.
No one quite has the temerity to suggest Chaplin was "merely" anything. Instead, he's "sentimental," the worst sin a filmmaker can commit in a cynical age. It means the same thing, though. We now prefer the more modern Keaton, who worked so hard to make you think he didn't care.
But questions like "Chaplin or Keaton" are, for a movie fan, self-defeating in the long run. The question, of course, is not Chaplin or Keaton, it's Chaplin and Keaton and who else?
And while movies, even timeless classics, go in and out of fashion, circumstances inevitably arise to bring them back to the public's attention and remind us why we loved these films in the first place. Maybe now, during this seemingly endless recession and as breakthroughs in communications (such as this blog, ironically) leave us ever more isolated, it's time to rediscover and reassess City Lights in particular and Chaplin in general, and remember what it was like to care so passionately about society's lowest figure while also laughing so loudly at his trials and travails.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part Four," click here.]
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part One," click here.]
A Comedy Romance In Pantomime City Lights premiered in Los Angeles on January 30, 1931, more than three years after Chaplin began production. Although Chaplin did make some concessions to the sound era—he wrote a score and added sound effects, the first of which serves as his comment on sound movies themselves, speechifying dignitaries who squawk like Charlie Brown's teacher—City Lights was for all practical purposes the last silent movie every produced by a major Hollywood studio.
Chaplin subtitled the movie "A Comedy Romance in Pantomime," which pretty much says it all.
The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp has purchased from the girl and carries around with him through- out the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Between the initial meeting (which I wrote about here) and the famous final scene, which I will write about in Part Three of this essay, there are just four other scenes with the girl, mostly brief expository sequences where the Tramp tries to maintain the facade of the millionaire she presumes him to be, first by flaunting wealth he doesn't possess then by helping her first to pay her bills then regain her sight. The Tramp's love is a mere whim—a "comedy romance," if you will—based more on a desire to do the girl the sort of kindness no one has ever done him than on the physical longing or meeting of the minds we ordinarily think of the essential characteristic of romance, but it's a heartfelt whim, one that drives the otherwise episodic narrative.
I think it's this aspect of City Lights, and for that matter the body of Chaplin's work, that is most often criticized as "sentimental." Personally, I don't find it sentimental at all, in the sense that the word implies something false. Indeed, jumping through hoops for someone you've just met is nearly universal human behavior. But the movie does make you feel the giddy, foolish, bittersweet exhilaration of first love, especially an impossible love, one of the most intense emotions we can experience, and the presentation of it here and the necessary response to it is almost purely emotional, perhaps not a way of viewing a film to every one's taste. Me, I like to feel when I watch a movie. If I wanted a primarily intellectual experience, I'd go to the library. (Note: I often go to the library and just finished reading a history of the Mexican revolution if you're worried that I'm an anti-intellectual. But on some fundamental level, I am also a big animal with pants on and feeling comes with the territory.)
Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot.
The highlight of the movie's comedic set pieces is a boxing match between the Tramp, trying to earn money to pay the girl's rent, and a much larger opponent that turns into a ballet of running away.
Chaplin had experimented with boxing as a vehicle for comedy as long ago as 1915, in a rather raw Essanay short called The Champion (readily available on the Internet). By the time he directed City Lights, he had stripped away every wasted motion until nothing was left but a masterpiece of comic timing and invention.
The remainder of the comedy (as well as the movie) centers around the film's third lead character, billed as "an Eccentric Millionaire" (veteran silent film actor-director Harry Myers) whom the Tramp rescues from attempted suicide. Like the flower girl, the millionaire is also blind—blind drunk, that is. He befriends the Tramp and promises him cars, women and money only to forget him again when he sobers up. Aside from the hilarious suicide scene itself (where the Tramp does most of the suffering), there's a night on the town at a swanky nightclub where the Tramp mistakes streamers for spaghetti, a party, a robbery and sight gags involving touring cars, bottles of brandy that wind up down the Tramp's pants, and much more.
Despite the privations of his youth, Chaplin wasn't bitter at those with money; neither did his childhood leave him in awe of wealth or abashed in its presence. In his films at least, he treated the rich as what they are in life—lucky but otherwise unremarkable people no happier for their good fortune, beyond the freedom from need of the common necessaries, than even the lowliest homeless tramp.
Which brings me to the final blindness central to the movie, that of society itself which blind enough to the misery around it that it can congratulate itself at the height of the Depression with a statue named Peace and Prosperity. And blind certainly to the Tramp, not just to his goodness but to his humanity, even to his existence, in that sense reminding me of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, invisible simply because people refuse to see him.
Much like Charles Dickens, Chaplin saw a society that professed to care about it's poor, it's tired, it's huddled masses, but in fact stacked the deck against them while frittering away its time and money on the frivolous, the material, the ephemeral—in America's case, on jazz, booze and fast cars. And like Dickens, Chaplin could be both funny and scathing about this inequity, with much of his comedy, particularly in City Lights, deriving from the Tramp's accidental admission into the orbit of the wealthy, making a shambles of their ordered lives, and in the process revealing how thin the veneer of civilization really is.
Much to Chaplin's relief, City Lights' combination of comedy and romance was a smash hit, grossing over $4 million in its initial domestic run (the fourth highest total of the year), and was equally successful overseas. Despite critical and commercial acclaim, the Academy bestowed no Oscar nominations on City Lights.
Chaplin's next movie, the equally brilliant Modern Times, wouldn't arrive in theaters until 1936.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part Three," click here.]
Released more than three years after the premiere of The Jazz Singer ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. It's also my choice for the best picture of 1930-31.
(Because this essay is likely to run four thousand words or more, Katie-Bar-The-Door suggested I post it in pieces. Part Two will follow as soon as it's ready.)
Introduction: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Born in London in 1889 to a pair of music hall performers, Chaplin's parents separated when he was an infant and, after his mother was institutionalized, Chaplin and his brother Sydney, like characters in a Dickens novel, were packed off first to a workhouse and then an orphanage. Amazingly, the experience did not leave Chaplin angry or bitter, but it did leave him with an abiding sympathy for the downtrodden, a sympathy that became a hallmark of his movies and was one of the keys to his astounding world-wide popularity between 1914 and 1931—that, and his sublime technique as a comedian, mime, actor, writer, director, producer, you name it.
Chaplin first performed on stage at the age of five, singing the popular tune "Jack Jones" to calm a hall full of drunken customers who had just booed his mother off stage. In 1910, he toured the U.S. with Fred Karno and his "army," a troupe of comedians that included not only Chaplin and his brother Sydney but also Stan Laurel and which (according to the infallible Wikipedia) invented the pie-in-the-face gag.
Legendary comedy director Mack Sennett, he of the Keystone Kops and many others, spotted Chaplin while he was performing with Karno and signed him to a movie contract. While working for Sennett, Chaplin developed the character of the Tramp, not only the single most recognizable figure of the silent film era but perhaps of all movie history. Rising from obscurity to stardom in less than a year, Chaplin departed for Essanay Studios in 1915 where he directed fourteen shorts, then for Mutual a year later where, working with complete artistic freedom, he made twelve of the greatest comedy shorts of the silent era, including One A.M., The Cure and The Immigrant.
Chaplin later called the Mutual period the happiest time of his life and his success there led to a million dollar contract with First National, where he had not only artistic control of filming and editing but also for the first time control over the pace at which his films would be released, freeing him to work on more expansive projects such as Shoulder Arms, The Pilgrim and, most importantly, The Kid, which I would call one of the four best movies Chaplin ever made (along with The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times).
In 1919, Chaplin teamed with three of the biggest names in Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, to form United Artists, an independent film distribution company designed to put more money in the pockets of the people audiences were paying to see and giving those stars more artistic freedom in the process. Chaplin directed three movies for United Artists—A Woman of Paris, a drama starring longtime co-star Edna Purviance; The Gold Rush, one of the greatest comedies of the silent or any other era; and The Circus, in the words of Daniel Eagan a "delightful, unassuming film" which won an honorary award for Chaplin at the first Oscar ceremony—before turning to his next and perhaps greatest project, City Lights.
Forecasting With His Heart When Chaplin began work on his next film project, the sound era was already a year old. Chaplin publicly stated that the new medium—for sound was not just a new technology but a new medium—was nothing more than a passing fancy and would be forgotten within three years. As Danny Peary put it in the book that inspired this blog in the first place, Alternate Oscars, Chaplin was "forecasting with his heart," never a good idea when money is on the line. In fact, as we now know, by the end of 1928 sound had but drowned out silent movies and by the time of City Lights' release in 1931, only a handful of directors—Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, Yasujiro Ozu—were still standing firm against the new medium.
Chaplin's choice to film another silent picture was not born so much of arrogance or nostalgia as of anxiety. He was convinced, rightly I think, that the Little Tramp couldn't survive the transition to sound. Once the Tramp began to speak, he would no longer be an Italian or a New Yorker or a Jew or whoever else was sitting in the theater, but would become what in fact he was, a somewhat fussy Londoner with a polished stage actor's accent. Not to mention that Chaplin was largely a pantomimist, his character existing on some impossible ethereal plane. To have the Tramp speak would be to ground him too firmly in the real world, a place he could never actually exist. So Chaplin set out to make his next feature a celluloid monument to the art of pantomime, the future be damned. If he was going out, he was going out on his own terms.
Chaplin decided the new movie would center on the theme of "blindness," initially toying with the idea of a blind clown before settling on the idea of a blind flower girl. The last scene, which I will discuss below after a "Spoiler" warning, came first in Chaplin's conception, one of the greatest final scenes in movie history. The problem though was not the ending but how to arrive there. The journey would take him over three years.
The first task was to cast the flower girl. As he often did, Chaplin cast his lead actress on impulse, choosing Virginia Cherrill on a whim after spotting her at a boxing match. Although Cherrill protested she was not an actress—aside from City Lights, she's best remembered now as Cary Grant's first wife—an amateur was exactly what Chaplin wanted, preferring to mold his co-star's performance without her having to unlearn someone else's methods.
Indeed, Chaplin preferred to mold everyone's performance in his movies, right down to the expressions of the extras in the background, acting out everyone's part and then shooting the scene over and over until everyone had copied him to his satisfaction.
Nor did Chaplin work from a script, preferring instead to draft the story on the set, using film the way another artist might use a scratchpad, to doodle ideas, taking dozens, sometimes hundreds of takes of a scene as he worked out the precise action. Whether measured by today's standards or those of the time, Chaplin's work methods were borderline insane, taking months and even years to complete a movie and spending what for the time was an enormous amount of money. These methods might have made sense when, for example, he was spending First National's money to produce The Kid and was all but certain of a blockbuster hit; when he was shooting City Lights, he was spending his own money—some $2 million—with no guarantee the finished product would ever find an audience. It was a tremendous risk.
The first meeting between Chaplin's Tramp and Cherrill's flower girl was the key to the movie. Crossing the street, the Tramp cuts through a parked limousine where the Girl sits on a park wall. She hears the slamming of the door as Chaplin gets out and mistaking him for the limousine's owner, asks him to buy a flower. If anything, the Tramp is annoyed but he can't resist her smile and gives her his last dime, not realizing until he knocks the flower from her hand that she is blind. When the real millionaire climbs into the limo, the girl mistakes the slamming door for her customer's exit and in order to preserve the illusion—for the girl's sake, rather than his own—the Tramp sneaks away to watch her from a distance. He's hopelessly smitten and the unfolding love story provides the narrative backbone upon which Chaplin would hang some of the best comedy bits of his career.
It's a sweet, simple scene and in the finished film, takes up just under three minutes of screen time. In reality, the sequence took 342 takes spread out over two years as Chaplin struggled to find the right device by which the blind flower girl would mistake the Tramp for a millionaire.
Using outtakes from Chaplin's own archive in their documentary Unknown Chaplin, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill show the director trying first one trick, then another—perhaps something with a watch chain, maybe a second flower, maybe more comedy, perhaps more feeling—Chaplin becoming visibly frustrated as he fails to work out a satisfactory solution. Chaplin kept the crew and cast hanging around the studio for months on end, Cherrill saying later she sat in her dressing room alone reading day after day, as he waited for inspiration to strike.
Cherrill had never made a movie before and made no effort to hide her boredom with the process—for example, leaving the set one day to have her hair done. Her indifference dismayed Chaplin and he eventually fired her, replacing her with Georgia Hale, his co-star from The Gold Rush. Eventually, however, Chaplin reluctantly rehired Cherrill. Not only had he shot too much footage with her to start over, he also realized that Hale (or any other actress he could have cast) was too professional and couldn't help but give the role of the flower girl a third dimension, making her a fully-fleshed human being when what the part called for was a fantasy figure.
That Chaplin concluded this reveals (to my mind, at least) that the audience is seeing the flower girl not as she is but as the Tramp sees her. Both characters are blinded in their own way, she by a physical impairment, he by sentimentality, and both proceed to act based on assumptions that have no basis in reality. This is what I meant in my essay on Chaplin the actor when I said that there's a difference between Chaplin the artist being sentimental and Chaplin the actor playing the Tramp as a sentimentalist. The Tramp may be blind to reality but Chaplin always saw the world as it was.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part Two: A Comedy Romance In Pantomime," click here.]
As he frequently does, Erik Beck (of the Boston Becks) got me to thinking, this time about the director nom- inations for 1932-33. There were some names that got left off the list that in nearly any other year would have made it easily—Mervyn LeRoy, James Whale, Frank Capra, and others. And you know how I hate to leave anybody out.
Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) (musical/comedy)
