We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
She was indeed.
I am of an age that my first introduction to Jane Russell was during her stint as a foundation undergarment spokesperson "for us full-figured gals," as she put it. I was a little too young to understand what part of her figure she was referring to. Later I figured it out. Hubba hubba.
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
"They held up The Outlaw for five years," she said later. "And Howard Hughes had me doing publicity for it every day, five days a week for five years."
Russell didn't appear in another film until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
I know everybody remembers Marilyn Monroe's signature performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," but personally, give me Jane Russell.
In case you're having trouble remembering where you've seen May Robson before, here's another picture of her, in this case from Bringing Up Baby. She played Katharine Hepburn's Aunt Elizabeth.
That's little-known actor Cary Grant on the left ...
Picture:Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) Actor: Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) Actress: Norma Shearer (Private Lives) Director: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté) Supporting Actor: Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel) Supporting Actress: Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) Screenplay: Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)
Special Awards:À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) (Best Picture-Comedy/Musical);Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge) (Best Actress-Drama); The Music Box (Best Short Subject); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Best Actors-Comedy and Career Achievement); Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter (Frankenstein) (Special Achievement In the Use Of Sound); Charles D. Hall and Kenneth Strickfaden (Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells (Frankenstein) (Makeup); Wally Westmore (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (Special Effects)
Must-See and Recommended:À Nous La Liberté; The Champ; Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde; Emma; Five Star Final; Frankenstein; Freaks; Grand Hotel; The Guardsman; I Was Born, But ...; Mädchen In Uniform; Marius; Monkey Business; The Music Box; One Hour With You; Private Lives; Scarface; Shanghai Express; Skyscraper Souls; The Smiling Lieutenant; Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas; Waterloo Bridge; What Price Hollywood?
As you can see from the list of winners and must-see movies, the year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 was a great one for horror films. Frankenstein, Freaks and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all hit the big screen during the year (albeit, Freaks only briefly—it was withdrawn from circulation just days after its premiere and didn't surface again until the 1960s). Throw in Dracula, another 1931 horror film released in the previous awards cycle, and you can see that what we think of as the horror genre was pretty much defined during this time period.
Of the four of them, Frankenstein is the most indispensable. As I wrote recently, not only was it the top grossing film of the year, "it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about" and more than any other film released during 1931 or 1932, be it horror or otherwise, Frankenstein "is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well."
You don't want to miss Freaks, though, which while a cult movie that for years was more spoken of than seen, is perhaps the most modern of all the movies that was released during the year. Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks." Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.
Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin—or anyway, it got under mine.
On a wholly different note, the year also gave us some fine comedies, including René Clair's À Nous La Liberté (the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award); Ernst Lubitsch's naughty pre-Code musical, The Smiling Lieutenant; a good Norma Shearer movie, Private Lives; and Laurel and Hardy in the Oscar-winning short, The Music Box.
As was usually the case during the early sound era, the best comedy of the year starred the Marx Brothers. The story of four stowaways who wreak havoc during an ocean voyage, Monkey Business represents the Brothers at their most transgressive—if you can use a word like "transgressive" when referring to a man wearing a grease-paint moustache. Instead of playing a hotel owner, college president, petty dictator or some other reputable scion of society, Groucho is an out-and-out bum who happily hires himself out as a gunman for a mobster, and his brothers are even worse, stealing, chasing women and making everyone around them miserable simply because they can.
In other words, it's great stuff.
The plot of Monkey Business is mercifully slight, and the shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another. But that's true of every Marx Brothers movie—the good ones anyway—and the audience only suffers when the focus turns to irrelevant matters, such as story and motivation. In fact, given that the appeal of the Marx Brothers is the subversive anarchy of their caustic wit and arbitrary actions, plot and motivation only undercut what they're trying to do. Of all their movies, Monkey Business came the closest to their vaudeville roots (the wonderful Maurice Chevalier bit, for example, was a variation on a routine that the Brothers had performed years before) and was the first to shed the trappings of the Broadway musical, freeing them for even greater efforts—Horse Feathers and Duck Soup—in the eighteen months that followed.
And then there are a couple of movies, Shanghai Express and Waterloo Bridge, that critics, Academy voters and fans of the Saturday night fun-stupid movie might dismiss as "women's pictures," "three-hanky weepers" or "chick flicks," but which we here at the Monkey refer to as stylish, well-acted romances that get right to the heart of the only thing that's really important in this crazy, mixed-up world—love. Marlene Dietrich never looked better in the former, and in the latter, Mae Clarke gave the best performance of her criminally-overlooked career. I highly recommend both and I wouldn't say that lightly.
Among the movies I've listed as must-see, three are must must-see movies—Frankenstein, Scarface and Grand Hotel. Frankenstein, I've just mentioned. Of the other two, Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks (more about him in the coming years), was the best gangster movie of the decade, which is saying something considering James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart all made their mark in the genre during the 1930s. I consider it indispensable, though, not just because it's a great movie, but because it influenced so much that came after it.
Similarly, Grand Hotel may be a bit dated by modern standards but it boasted the first all-star cast and without it, there may well have been no Dinner At Eight, no Stagecoach, no Airport, or any of the other big cast potboilers, good and bad, that have imitated Grand Hotel over the years. As with Scarface and Frankenstein, I consider Grand Hotel indispensable not just because I think it's good, but because so much of what we think of as the Hollywood movie flows from it.
Besides, it gives you a chance to see Joan Crawford at her loveliest and, dare I say it, sweetest before her face hardened into that kabuki mask of unbridled ambition and paranoid rage we so often associate her with.
Coming up next are my nominations for the movie year 1932-33. Because the Academy was preparing to abandon the crazy split-year format it followed for the first six years of the Oscars, the next award season covered seventeen months rather than the usual twelve, with everything released between August 1, 1932 and December 31, 1933 being eligible.
And what a great year it was, too. Not only did such classic movies as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise and Dinner at Eight premiere during these seventeen months, but Katharine Hepburn broke into pictures (and won her first Oscar), Busby Berkeley revived and redefined the movie musical, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together for the first time. It was a big year for movies, ranking with 1939 as one of the greatest "years" in film history.
Too big, in fact, for the standard Oscar format I've been following to cover it all. But that's a subject for my next post.
Any one of the Mythical nominees for best picture of the awards year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 would be a good one—Grand Hotel was the first movie to boast an all-star cast, Freaks is a genuinely disturbing horror flick that holds up even by the standards of today, and Scarface, directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, is the best gangster movie of an era characterized by great gangster movies.
But only one film can boast both of being the top grossing film of the year, a sensation that spawned countless sequels, spoofs and remakes, and of being so influential that it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about—the only movie of 1931-32 that can make that claim.
That it's also a great movie makes Frankenstein my choice for best picture of the year.
I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here to say that Frankenstein contains more iconic images than all the year's other nominees for best picture combined, so many, in fact, I could probably name the scenes in order and you could skip the picture altogether—grave robbing, brain stealing, thunderstorms and monster making, "It's alive," the monster's first appearance, fire, the tragic death of the little girl, the villagers with torches and pitchforks. These scenes were so well established in our collective consciousness, in fact, that more than forty years later Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder could spoof it in Young Frankenstein without having to stop and explain anything to their audience.
What movie from 1967 (which like Frankenstein in 1974 is now forty-three years in our rearview mirror) could you spoof in a full-length feature without leaving your audience scratching its collective heads—The Graduate, maybe, but what fun would that be?
The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation had its genesis in the ghost stories nineteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, her lover and soon to be husband Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron told each other while vacationing together in Switzerland. In 1818, Wollstonecraft, now Mary Shelley, turned one of these stories, a combination of a nightmare she had about a lab experiment gone awry and conversations Shelley and Byron had about the origins of life, into her first novel, Frankenstein.
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," Robert Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched the first atomic bomb explode on the testing grounds of the New Mexico desert, and after the Second World War, a generations of science fiction writers made a cottage industry out of the question of whether we as human beings have the right to monkey around with things that before the advances of science had been the sole provence of God, and what moral culpability do we owe when our experiments go horribly awry—or worse, don't.
But Mary Shelley asked the question first and asked it so well that the phrase "Frankenstein's monster" has become shorthand for "unintended consequences."
The novel was an immediate sensation and spawned dozens of stage adaptations over the years. The earliest of these, Richard Peake's 1823 stageplay Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (read it here) introduced elements such as the elaborate creation scene, the mute monster and a lab assistant named Fritz that became as much a part of Frankenstein's literary tradition as the key elements of Shelley's original novel. Peggy Webling's 1927 stage version (credited as a source in the movie's titles) telescoped the time frame of the story, eliminated the Arctic chase that bookended the novel and, in the third act, added a bride for Frankenstein's monster which became the basis of the 1935 movie sequel. (Webling also, for the first time, named the monster itself "Frankenstein" after its creator.)
The success of Webling's stageplay caught the attention of Carl Laemmle, Jr., the head of production at Universal Studios and he bought the film rights for $20,000. The head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Sr., wasn't keen to do Frankenstein, but Junior, who had been in charge of production since 1929, was enthusiastic and given the successes of All Quiet On The Western Front and Dracula, which he had previously produced, the father was inclined to give the son free reign. It was a good decision. The cycle of Universal horror movies that had begun with Lon Chaney during the silent era and which continues even to the present day with the studio's recent remake of The Wolfman, owes much to the enormous success of Frankenstein, which proved once and for all that the horror genre was viable box office.
James Whale, fresh off his successful screen adaptation of the play Waterloo Bridge, was slated to direct. For a man who had real reservations about the horror genre, he soon became its master—arguably the greatest director of horror in movie history.
In directing Frankenstein, Whale cast his gaze both to the past and to the future, drawing the movie's look from the German Expressionism of the 1920s—for example, in the graveyard sequence that opens the film—but using sound to generate fear and in the process, inventing many of the cliches of the horror genre we now take for granted. As British film historian David Thomson pointed out recently, Tod Browning's Dracula showed the potential that sound had for generating fear—"the wind in the trees, the wolves howling in the distance ... the women screaming in their sleep ... Lugosi's forbidding welcome, 'I am Drac-u-la'"—and then Whale took the ball and ran with it, giving us thunderstorms, shrieking laboratory equipment, groaning monsters, and a screaming Mae Clarke, that combine to keep the hair standing up on the back of our necks for an hour and ten minutes.
Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the oppor- tunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.
Whale also broke the rules of the early cinema with the introduction of Frankenstein's fiancee Elizabeth and the secondary character Victor. In this early scene, Whale shows us a series of quick close-ups and only then cuts to an establishing shot of the room, rather than the traditional approach which would have made clear where we were, that there were people in the room, and finally providing close-ups to introduce the characters, an effective bit of editing that further distances the film from the staginess of its contemporaries.
But the most effective sequence in the movie is the build-up to the introduction of the monster.
We're so familiar now with the look of Frankenstein's creation—the flat head, the hooded eyes, the bolts in his neck—that it's easy to forget that an audience in 1931 had no clear idea what the monster would look like and the final choice, which was critical to the movie's success, could have gone in any number of directions. The 1910 silent movie version of Frankenstein, a fifteen minute short which may have been the first horror movie ever made, presented the monster as a sort of Mr. Hyde to Frankenstein's Jekyll. On stage, the creature was a shaggy hunchback. And as conceived by the film's initial star, Bela Lugosi, the monster had a featureless face and wore a bushy fright wig. (Lugosi dropped out of the project shortly after the test footage was shot. Laemmle, Jr. thought Lugosi's choice of makeup, based on the clay monster in the 1920 silent film Der Golem was ridiculous and in any event Lugosi wasn't interested in playing a mute—and in the early versions of the script, wholly unsympathetic—monster.)
The monster as we know it was a collaboration between makeup expert Jack Pierce and the English actor chosen to replace Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Depending on who you believe, Whale cast Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) either after seeing Karloff brooding over lunch at the Universal commissary or at the suggestion of Whale's companion, David Lewis, who had seen Karloff in Howard Hawks's prison drama The Criminal Code. Either way, the choice was inspired. Karloff's tall, lean build (along with some very clunky shoes) allowed the monster to loom over the rest of the cast and Karloff accentuate his already thin features by removing a bridge of molars from the right side of his mouth and then sucking in his cheek. He also suggested the heavy eyelids made of wax that gave the creature a look of dim confusion.
"We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull," Karloff said, "inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing."
It took three hours every day to put the makeup on and almost as long at the end of the day to take it off.
After an elaborate creation scene (Mary Shelley had summed up the entire creation sequence in a single paragraph) which Whale felt was essential to convincing the audience of the monster's reality, he then delays Karloff's first appearance until the moment just after Frankenstein learns for the first time that he's gifted his creation with a defective "criminal" brain (which along with the opening grave robbing scene was an addition of the screenplay). As Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his colleague Dr. Waldman (Edward van Sloan) talk, we hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stair—an early example of the role sound plays in horror—the characters at last react to the approaching footsteps and we know something important is about to happen. The door to the lab opens, the monster backs into the room, then turns, and at the speed of a tripping heartbeat, a pair of axial cuts—a jump cut directly along the line from the camera toward its subject—brings us eye to eye with the monster for the first time.
Thirty-one minutes into the picture, it's one of the greatest entrances in movie history, up there with that dolly shot that zooms in on John Wayne in 1939's Stagecoach.
Audiences of the time were completely sold. Frankenstein premiered on November 21, 1931, and immediately set box office records. Shot in thirty-five days at a cost of $291,000, Frankenstein grossed over $5 million in its initial run, despite hitting theaters at the depths of the Depression. The critical reception was just as enthusiastic and the movie made the New York Times top ten list for the year.
"Whale and I both saw the character of the monster as an innocent one," Karloff later said. "This was a pathetic creature who, like us all, had neither the wish nor the say in his creation, and certainly did not wish upon itself the hideous image which automatically terrified humans whom it tried to befriend."
And therein lies the lasting appeal of Mary Shelley's story, I think, and why we feel such empathy for the monster, because it dares to ask the question "Why, oh Lord, did you make us, as Frankenstein did his monster, so poor, so ugly and so ill-equipped to face a world that is so unforgiving of all but the rich, the beautiful and the talented?" It's a question many of us ask on a daily basis, whether we're a starving refuge in the war-torn Sudan or simply a befuddled suburbanite wondering why Kate Gosselin is on television and we're not.
I've been re-reading Mary Shelley recently, and I think she was asking, albeit surreptitiously, a question even more fundamental than that of what duty scientists owe humanity, which is to say, What duty does the creator, i.e., God, owe his creation, us. That's a question religion doesn't usually ask; religions primarily concern themselves with the duties a man owes his god. To even ask the question the other way around (forget trying to formulate an answer) would have for centuries been to invite the stake as the penalty for blasphemy, and even in the nineteenth century such speculation meant financial ruin and social exile—afterall, Mary's own husband, Percy Shelley, was expelled from Oxford and became estranged from his family for touting atheism.
So I ask you, what duty does the creator owe his creation? Because let's face it, if I neglected my dog, say, the way God has neglected the earth, the SPCA would be on me so fast my head would swim.
But I digress.
Frankenstein was a huge hit but, of course, received no Oscar nominations. Admittedly, there were few technical awards in those days—no awards for special effects, costumes or makeup— but it was overlooked even in the categories of sound and set decoration, never mind screenplay, acting, directing and best picture. So I say let's give Katie Awards to the key figures behind the production of this classic movie: Charles D. Hall for interior decoration, what is now known as art direction-set decoration, and Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed the electronic gear in the laboratory out of odds and ends he collected from radios, airplane motors and industrial machinery; Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells for their iconic makeup job; and to C. Roy Hunter for sound.
And now for what I suspect is a key question for many: will Frankenstein scare you? Probably not, to be honest, but then again that depends on what scares you. I happened to catch a goodly chunk of some cable network's Saw marathon a few weekends ago (while Katie-Bar-The-Door was working ungodly hours keeping America safe for democracy) and to be honest with you, I wasn't just not scared, I was bored most of the time. For me, anyway, a good horror movie has to do more than simply test your gag reflex or your autonomic reactions to cats-jumping-out-of-closets kind of shocks, otherwise you might as well head on over to the supermarket and watch the butcher chop meat. Frankenstein is stylish, exciting, has a few genuinely disturbing moments, such as when the monster accidentally kills the little girl, and raises some fundamental questions about our role in the universe. For me, that's just about all I could ever want out of a horror movie—or any other kind of movie, for that matter.
In the end, I chose Frankenstein as best picture from among the dozen or so must-see movies released between August 1, 1931, and July 31, 1932, because more than the others, it is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well.
[To read part one of this essay, click here. To read part two, click here.]
III. And The Winner Is... ... René Clair for À Nous La Liberté.
That's not the name I expected to see on my computer screen when I put my fingers on the keyboard. I fully expected to type "Howard Hawks for Scarface"—after all, Scarface is the best gangster movie of a decade characterized by great gangster movies, and it may well be the best gangster movie made before The Godfather—but in the end my heart decided that Scarface contained too many compromises to appease the censors, too much clumsy footage filmed by assistant director Richard Rosson, to make me comfortable telling you that this is the movie you want to see when you go exploring the films of Howard Hawks. And given the lack of so many signature Hawks elements—male comradery, strong women, fast dialogue, slow songs—giving Hawks the award for Scarface felt a little like giving Alfred Hitchcock an award for a screwball comedy; yes, he directed one, but it's not really what I'd think of a Hitchcock movie.
The other choice I strongly considered was James Whale who directed what I think is the most iconographic picture of the year, Frankenstein, which along with its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (also directed by Whale), is the best of Universal Picture's cycle of horror pictures that began earlier in 1931 with Dracula and runs right up to this year's remake of The Mummy. The imagery of Frankenstein is so unforgettable that I could probably describe the movie to you in terms of its key scenes—the graveyard, the laboratory, the electrical storm, the tragedy of the little girl—and you could picture the movie in your head (and not just because Mel Brooks spoofed it so well in Young Frankenstein). Plus, Boris Karloff as the monster is easily the most recognizable creation in the long history of horror movies. But let's face it, there are aspects of Frankenstein that are pretty creaky by modern standards, and while I won't hold that against the finished product come best picture time, it is just enough to separate Whale from my choice, René Clair.
And why Clair? It's not just because he was Katie-Bar-The-Door's choice in the recent poll I conducted on the question—although any eighty year old movie that can make your wife's eyes light up deserves some sort of award—it's mostly because of all the movies that came out during the year in question, À Nous La Liberté comes the closest to being what I'd call a perfect little film, entertaining, inventive, insightful and without a false step. Plus in 1931 Clair also wrote and directed Le Million, another classic little comedy, making him one of the very few directors to have ever produced two must-see classics in the same calendar year. In the end, those factors were just too great to ignore.
À Nous La Liberté begins in prison where the inmates work at an assembly line making toys to earn their keep. The joke is that one of the inmates (Henri Marchand) escapes and winds up running a factory with an assembly line he models on his prison experience. His cellmate (Raymond Cordy), who was not so lucky during the escape attempt, winds up working at his friend's factory after his release. When the two meet, conflict is inevitable—but not the kind you'd expect, things like blackmail, scandal or any of those garden variety complications. No, the threat come from the anarchy that a true free spirit can unleash on the established order if he infects his fellow workers with his indifference to the inducements of materialism.
The result is a quirky blend of slapstick comedy and social criticism that has delighted audiences and influenced filmmakers for decades.
Not that À Nous La Liberté is a socialist screed straight out of Das Kapital, no matter what some critics have wanted to read into it. It's political in the way Duck Soup is political—a call to rebellion against regimentation wherever you may find it, whether at school, at work or at home—whipped up into a souffle so light even the staunchest plutocrat will want to tuck into it.
Actually, Clair's philosophical insights remind me mostly of Henry Miller who, once you get past the famously raunchy sex bits, was primarily focused on one question: why should I work for a living when what I want to do is write? For "write," Clair might substitute "make movies and nap in the sunshine," but it's the same question and given that the same yawning grave awaits you regardless of what path you choose, a fundamental one.
Besides, anyone here who has worked on an assembly line and can honestly say they found it fulfilling, interesting work, raise your hand. My own experience is limited—a summer job in my youth filling up plastic bottles with fruit juice—but it was the worst job I ever had and I don't think saying so makes either me or René Clair a left-wing anarchist.
The other theme of the movie, one Clair explored in Le Million, is the deference we pay to money and the people who have it, regardless of their underlying worth as human beings. Put a criminal in a suit, Clair says, give him money and a position of power, and suddenly we're kowtowing to him even when we'd have hauled him away in irons just the day before, and our reflexive willingness to do so goes a long way toward explaining the dot.com debacle, the housing bubble, Bernie Madoff and the seemingly endless parade of public figures who wind up in prison shackles for real. A criminal is a criminal, Clair reminds us, whether he's in prison stripes or pinstripes.
To make even this mild political message palatable, Clair set the entire movie, which is pretty near silent, to music with most of the dialogue coming in form of songs sung by an unseen chorus. The compositions by Georges Auric are bright and whimsical:
In life, liberty is all that counts But man invented the prison cell Codes and laws, do's and don'ts Work, offices and houses as well ... My old friend, life is great When you're free to be yourself o come on, let's emancipate ... Here's to us two and liberty!
À Nous La Liberté was an international hit, and it was the first foreign language film nominated for an Academy Award in any category (for Lazare Meerson's art direction and set design).
Questions persist to what degree Clair's cinematic critique of industrialization influenced Charles Chaplin's 1936 critique of the same, Modern Times. The film's distributor, Films Sonores Tobis, filed suit against Chaplin, claiming plagiarism, and the suit dragged on for years as lawsuits often do. Clair himself refused to join the suit, considering any inspiration Chaplin might have drawn from À Nous La Liberté to be a great compliment. Personally, I take Chaplin at his word that he never saw Clair's movie, and in any event, as a lawyer I find the legal basis for the case against Chaplin thin at best. Clair was hardly the first person to lament the de-humanizing effects of the industrial age—indeed, Fritz Lang's Metropolis predates À Nous La Liberté by four years—and being one of the primary questions of the day, of interest to painters and politicians alike (not to mention, workers and factory owners), it should come as no surprise that two artists such as Clair and Chaplin would wish to address it.
Nor can an artist copyright an idea; it's the concrete expression of the idea that he owns, and to me at least, what Chaplin had to say in Modern Times bears less of a resemblance to À Nous La Liberté than does, say, Scarface to Little Caesar or The Terminator to Colossus: The Forbin Project; Gone With The Wind to Jezebel; To Have And Have Not to Casablanca, and on and on. As Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out, there are only twelve basic plots which we have been repeating for thousands of years and the question is not what happens but how it happens. And, to me at least, how Modern Times happens is wholly different from how À Nous La Liberté happens.
In any event, it doesn't much matter to me. To tell you the truth, even if Chaplin had broken into Clair's house and taken the movie right out of his wall safe, it wouldn't alter the fact that Modern Times is one of the greatest comedies ever made. As is À Nous La Liberté. Enjoy them both.
That's my opinion anyway and good luck proving otherwise in a court of law.
In any event, the suit was eventually settled for a nominal sum and Chaplin and Clair remained friends.
Clair never again had a year like 1931. He left France for Britain in 1935 and then for Hollywood after that, making amiable but mostly forgotten movies such as I Married A Witch and It Happened Tomorrow. He returned to France after the war and three times won the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics' award for best film. In 1960 Clair was elected to the Académie française, a highly-select group of so-called "immortals" who hold court over matters regarding the French language. That body's prize for the year's best film is named for René Clair.
Clair directed his last movie in 1965 and died in 1981. He is regarded as one of the most significant figures in French film history.
... if I don't stop writing five thousand word essays about who I didn't pick for best director of 1931-32.
William Powell, Myrna Loy and Asta in The Thin Man movies Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday The movies of Val Lewton Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer The Thing (From Another World) Gene Kelly performing "I Got Rhythm" in An American in Paris
The films of Alfred Hitchcock The comedies of Alec Guinness Rio Bravo Anita O'Day in Jazz On A Summer's Day
The Apartment Paula Prentiss Julie Andrews Walter Matthau Manhattan The movies of Hayao Miyazaki Miranda Richardson Pierce Brosnan in The Matador Amy Adams
II. The Contenders I chose five nominees for best director of 1931-32: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté), Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), James Whale (Frankenstein), Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel) and Howard Hawks (Scarface). It's a deep field and any one of them would be a good choice, I think, but from looking at other alternate Oscar type blogs, there doesn't seem to be a clear consensus as to who it should be. Danny Peary, whose book Alternate Oscars inspired this lunacy, picked Howard Hawks, as did Nighthawk of The Boston Becks. Jon Mullich at Madbeast.com chose Rouben Mamoulian, while Masted at Listology went with James Whale (although Masted follows the calendar rather than Oscar year). Boudu at Top Movies, who also follows the calendar year, threw me a curveball and picked Yasujiro Ozu for I Was Born, But ... Can't say he's wrong, but I've got Ozu's Tokyo Story down in my notes as the winner for 1953 and that award is written in permanent ink. Finally, although Films 101 doesn't pick winners, that site has ranked René Clair's À Nous La Liberté as the best of the eligible movies, so that probably means something.
Which seems to leave poor Edmund Goulding out in the cold, but as Jon Mullich wrote, "Goulding did a remarkable job in directing so many high caliber, high ego names in the cast [of Grand Hotel], and got particularly remarkable performances from Joan Crawford and Lionel Barrymore." He deserves serious consideration.
René Clair you already know, if you've been following this blog. The French director was one of the true pioneers of the early sound era, not only figuring out how to integrate sound with a fluid camera—a real technical achievement in and of itself—but also using the new technology in ways no one had before thought of to enhance his storytelling. Between 1929 and 1931, he made the three best films of his career, Under The Roofs Of Paris (which I wrote about here), Le Million (here) and this year's best picture nominee, À Nous La Liberté. I won't reiterate here what I've already written about him except to say that what I wrote about Le Million—"[It] really is a Saturday night movie, full of slapstick and sightgags, and the only thing that keeps me from naming it the best Fun-Stupid movie of [the year] is my reluctance to task your patience with subtitles"—also applies to À Nous La Liberté, a whimsical and sometimes biting comedy about two prison inmates, one of whom escapes and winds up as the CEO of a factory that, ironically, he runs like a prison; the other who later coincidentally takes a job in the same factory with all hell thereafter gently but decidedly breaking loose. It's witty, inventive and unforgettable, a real contender.
Like Clair, Rouben Mamoulian immediately grasped the storytelling possibilities inherent in the new sound technology and like Clair and Fritz Lang, he figured out how to work around the limitations of bulky sound recording equipment to maintain the fluid camera work that characterized the end of the silent era. I mentioned him (here) in connection with the 1929 movie Applause which he filmed on location in the New York subway system and used recorded traffic and crowd noises for the soundtrack. I'll mention him again when we get to the 1932 musical comedy Love Me Tonight, which includes an inventive introduction to the song "That's the Song of Paree" using only the sounds of the city—the swish of a broom, the snore of a sleeping drunk, etc.—and a clever staging of the standard "Isn't It Romantic," which starts with a three-sided reflection of Maurice Chevalier in a tailor's mirror and winds up on the balcony of a princess.
"Realism and naturalism are not for me," Mamoulian said later. "I think it's too feeble an instrument."
His Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens with a tracking shot so audacious, the studio later cut it out the film and it wasn't seen by audiences after its initial release until the film's restoration forty years later. Mamoulian didn't care that audiences might hear the movement of the era's bulky sound cameras—if the scene was good enough, he reasoned, they'd be too engrossed in the action to notice. This approach was nearly unique in Hollywood during the early sound era and having immersed myself in the films of the period, I can tell you the work of those directors—Clair, Lang, Mamoulian—who solved the technical and artistic puzzle of sound fairly leaps off the screen.
In addition, the special effects in Dr. Jekyll, while primitive by today's standards, equal or better those of any movie before 1933's King Kong. Relying on layered makeup and filtered camera lenses, Jekyll makes a seamless transformation into Hyde, a truly impressive bit of filmmaking.
A Broadway stage director by trade and preference, Mamoulian returned to the theater where in 1944, he directed the groundbreaking stage musical Oklahoma. He directed only seventeen movies in his career, very few of which are known to modern audiences. Aside from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his best known films are Greta Garbo's Queen Christina, Tyrone Power's 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro and the late-era Fred Astaire musical Silk Stockings. He also directed the first three-strip Technicolor film, Becky Sharp, starring Miriam Hopkins, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for directing the 1936 musical The Gay Desperado, starring Ida Lupino. He was fired from his last two directing gigs, the 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess and 1963's Cleopatra, and retired. In 1982 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America. He died in 1987 at the age of ninety.
Equally creative was James Whale, who if he didn't invent the horror genre, redefined it so thoroughly that it's difficult, even now, to make a horror film without dipping into the bag of tricks he came up with for Frankenstein and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein. While Dracula was the first blockbuster horror film of the sound era, Whale's Frankenstein was the first to make use of sound's potential to scare the bejeezus out of an audience. (Fritz Lang's M also took full advantage of the new medium, but wouldn't be released in the United States until 1933, two years after Frankenstein.) Whale also worked hand-in-hand with set designer Charles D. Hall and makeup artist Jack Pierce to create some of the most iconic images of film history. And of no small consequence to the people who paid his salary, Whale also single-handedly kept Universal Pictures afloat during the early years of the Depression with a string of hits that included not only Frankenstein but also The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride Of Frankenstein, offsetting, for a time at least, producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.'s spendthrift ways.
Yet, for all his mastery of the horror genre, Whale didn't think of himself primarily as a horror director. He got his start on the London stage, both as an actor and as a set designer and most of his films were adaptations of theatrical dramas rather than horror. He directed another Katie nominee, Waterloo Bridge starring Mae Clarke, and Show Boat (the version with Paul Robeson's legendary performance of "Ol' Man River") (more about that when we reach 1936).
Despite reaching such heights, though, glory proved to be fleeting for Whale. After 1935's Bride of Frankenstein, which he resisted making for as long as he could, he never again directed a horror picture, and although credited with directing Show Boat, he was actually fired before production ended, having uncharacteristically gone way over budget. Whale's career took a nosedive after that. He directed a string of commercially unsuccessful pictures and was pretty much out of movies by 1941, directing only once more, filming in 1949 a forty-minute stage performance that was never released. In 1957, after a series of strokes, Whale committed suicide by drowning himself in his swimming pool.
His life was the subject of the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters, starring Ian McKellen. Over the years, some critics have attempted to reinterpret Whale's work in light of the fact that he was one of the few openly gay directors working in Hollywood—for example, "Sexual Subversion: The Bride Of Frankenstein" by Gary Morris writing for Bright Lights Film Journal—but friends and colleagues have dismissed the effort. "All artists do work that comes out of the unconscious mind," said friend and fellow film director Curtis Harrington, "and later on you can analyze it and say the symbolism may mean something, but artists don't think that way and I would bet my life that James Whale would never have had such concepts in mind."
Me, I don't know and I have no opinion. Arguments between film critics are mostly of interest only to other film critics and they aren't much help to an audience sitting in a dark theater. All I know is that I like those old Universal horror movies and that Whale was their principal author. Good enough for me.
Of Edmund Goulding, you're likely only to remember the last thing I will tell you, so here are three facts to chew on before we get to it: (1) he had an eye for emotional truth that made him one of the best directors of actors ever, with nine of his stars receiving Academy Award nominations (two—Mary Astor in The Great Lie and Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge—won), and others such as Joan Crawford and Tyrone Power, though not nominated, giving arguably the best performances of their careers in his movies; (2) while known primarily as a director of so-called "women's pictures" such as Dark Victory and The Old Maid, he was a master of many genres, including action (the 1938 remake of The Dawn Patrol with Errol Flynn) and film noir (Nightmare Alley); and (3) on the set, he was a jack-of-all-trades, not only directing, but writing screenplays, composing music, and overseeing the details of set design, costumes and even makeup; everything, in fact, but cinematography: according to Lee Garmes, Goulding wasn't good at picturing what the camera was filming and wasn't much interested either.
And here's a fourth fact: three movies he directed, Grand Hotel, Dark Victory and The Razor's Edge were nominated for best picture (with Grand Hotel winning). Yet he was never nominated for best director.
Why not? Well, quite possibly because Goulding, not to put too fine a point on it, was a bad, bad boy, a bisexual voyeur who held elaborate orgies in his house, directing movie stars and nameless-faceless hookers alike in elaborate sexual scenes that horrified the part of Hollywood likely to be horrified by such things, and potentially embarrassing the part of Hollywood that secretly indulged themselves of his offerings. In fact, right around the time Grand Hotel was raking it in at the box office, Louis B. Mayer was hustling Goulding out of the country one step ahead of the cops who wanted to question him about two women who wound up in a hospital after one of these parties.
How wild were these parties? Let's put it this way: Katie Award-winning actress Louise Brooks, who is one of the most scandalous figures to grace the pages of this blog, was considered too much of a Midwestern prude to receive an invitation to these little shindigs, despite being one of Goulding's friends and one of the few people who had nice things to say about him later in life. It's kind of like how Jenna Jameson, the most famous porn star ever, turned down a date with Charlie Sheen because she didn't want to ruin her reputation. You don't have to know the details to know it was bad.
Which leaves Howard Hawks. If the best director award were purely a matter of career achievement, Hawks would be the winner, hands-down (and he may be anyway). Not only did he direct more great movies during the course of his career than any of his competitors—maybe more than all of theirs combined—he directed as many great movies as any director you can name and belongs, to my mind at least, on a Mt. Rushmore of great American directors.
But the best director award is not a career achievement award—well, not entirely a career achievement award—and so Hawks isn't guaranteed to win the award if and/or when I ever get around to making a decision, at least not this year. Still, I'm either going give him a Katie Award at some point, whether tomorrow or for Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Rio Bravo or something else. You can count on it. He directed forty-seven in all, mastering every genre in the process, and is movies will be a recurring feature of this blog.
I will say one thing about Scarface, though—while it is undeniably one of Hawks's best movies, it's also wholly atypical of his work. Although it was here he first began to experiment with faster-paced dialogue, it's staid by comparison even to Twentieth Century which he directed just two years later. Nor does it feature the overlapping dialogue that became a mainstay of his work nearly four decades before Robert Altman invented it. There are no "Hawksian" women either, no male comradery, no songs or purposeful lulls in the action, and no action-packed meditations on stoicism in the face of danger. Not to mention there's an awful lot of the sort of fancy camera work—for example, the elaborate tracking shot that opens the picture—that Hawks would later eschew. In fact, if you didn't already know this was a Howard Hawks film, you'd never know it was a Howard Hawks film. And I'm sort of thinking when I finally get around to writing about him, I want to be writing about him, not just a facsimile thereof. You know?
Still, a great movie is a great movie, right? But then the same can be said of À Nous La Liberté, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and Grand Hotel.
In any event, there are your five nominees. While all of them are deserving, only one can win. I don't know about you, but I'm on the edge of my seat wondering who it will be.
We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
