Category: Festival review

Pordenone from afar (2023, Day 1)

This time last year saw me start this blog with ten days of posts attending the Pordenone silent film festival from afar. This year, I’m once more not making the trip to Pordenone. It’s the same reasons: time, money, and the budgeting of annual leave across the year. But yet again I am inexorably drawn to the idea of Pordenone, and what follows is the first of another ten daily posts about the online version of the festival. Day 1 sees a two-part screening. First, an hour-long programme of slapstick shorts (with music by Daan Van den Hurk). Second, a feature film western (with music by Philip Carli). We’ve barely a moment to lose before the next films are upon us, so for goodness’ sake keep reading…

Le Torchon brûle, ou une querelle de ménage (1911; Fr.; Roméo Bosetti). The wife serves the husband a meal. The husband objects to the meal. The situation snowballs. Crockery is thrown. Then furniture. Soon the husband is ripping cupboards off the wall and hurling them out of the window in fury. (Down below, outside, two policemen are slowly but inevitably buried in the defenestrated wreckage of the home.) When the entire room is broken in pieces or hurled out the window, the couple turn on each other with bare hands. They role around on the floor, down the hall, down the stairs, into another room, out the window—where they land on top of the policemen. They keep on rolling: across the street, under a car (still fighting), under a horse and cart (still fighting), through a mob of merchants and shoppers (trashing a stall en route), down the street, down a manhole, into the sewer. Then a wonderfully bizarre twist: the film is reversed and the couple whizz back up the manhole and out into the street, up a set of stairs, up the road, over the broken pile of furniture (before the eyes of the disbelieving policemen), then hurl themselves through the air back into their apartment. The end. A charming, silly, anarchic, violent piece of slapstick. And a neat comment on the escalation of an argument that can quite literally go nowhere but return to its source—presumably to begin again the next day.

Rudi Sportman (1911; Aut.-Hu.; Emil Artur Longen). A man and woman sit outside a tennis court. The man irritates the woman, the woman irritates the man. Presumably frustrated by his inability to smoke and read the paper in peace, the man begins the next scene trying to get on a horse. He does so backwards, forwards, falls off, remounts, then is jettisoned by the horse. Frustrated again, the next scene shows him trying and failing to ride a bicycle. The woman from the first scene ends up being run down and chasing the man away with a stick. The man (still dressed in frock coat, shirt, and tie) now bunders onto a football pitch, where his attempts to enter the game end in him being chivvied and kicked and beaten by the players. Enthused (and presumably suffering from the debilitating effects of his various falls and beatings), he next tries hurdles, then tennis. (All the while, there are glimpses of a lost European world in the background: the buildings, the officials, the way of life… What happened to those young men playing football in 1914? What became of the lads diving into the pool to save the hapless rower? Did the boat attendant become a military attendant?) The man’s enthusiasm sends him stumbling, falling, summersaulting—and leaving. Next to the rowing pool, where he swiftly ends up in the water. Reprimanded by the attendant, he finds solace in the final scene with the woman—a man in drag, who might or might not be his other half, who now seems both pleased that the man has been severely injured and pleased that he has returned to her. She gives him a kiss, licks her lips, and the film ends.

At Coney Island (1912; US; Mack Sennett). It’s familiar Mack Sennett fare: two alternately grinning and gurning men fight over a woman. Around them, the swarm of life: real life in 1912 Coney Island, with groups of Keystone players dotted around, embodying grotesque families, arrogant fathers, scurrying girls, violent adulterers, and a midget policeman. A chaotic mess of desire sends men and women scuttling into fairground rides, and (just as quickly) out again. Wives chase after husbands, children scream. Couples illicit and singles jealous hurl after one another down terrifyingly unsafe rides, stopping only to shake their fists at each other, gurn, jump up and down in fury. Soon a kind of turquoise dusk descends. But why should continuity concern anyone in this madcap world? The dancehall is a light rose, the tent a bright orange. Time passes, but the men keep chasing their desire—and I’ve hardly had time to unpick who is being chased by whom, or whether the policeman is after the father or the lover or the child, when the film ends.

En Sølvbryllupsdag (1920; Den.; Lau Lauritzen Sr.). “Their Silver Wedding Anniversary”. Already the title bodes ill. The wife wakes Mr Taxman with the news of their anniversary. In his separate bed a little way from the wife, the Taxman—a walrusy sort of fellow—yawns, turns from gurn to grin, kisses his wife, and mourns their lack of money. Talk is of money, but it soon escalates: “You’re a lazy, fat, spoiled bastard—so the woman from the culture centre says”, his wife informs him. “And you are an old, mean, sleazy sea-goose. That what I say!” Soon these two heavy-set middle-aged people are out of bed and shouting at each other. In tears, the wife leaves home. Chuntering, the Taxman goes back to bed. Cue a passing brass quartet. They troop up to the Taxman’s house and start blasting him a serenade. Whereupon… he weeps! It’s weirdly touching, this comic scene: a reminder of time past and passing, of regret and age and loss. But it’s also funny, for soon the emotion shifts gear: the Taxman throws a jug of water out the window to chase away the band. A visitor to the taxman (now deemed a lawyer in the title). He relays an offer of 25,000Kr from an uncle, but only on the condition that the agent reports that the couple lead a harmonious life together. The husband leaves the agent with a large case of cigars, a glass, a soda siphon, and a whole bottle of spirits. He goes on “The Wild Hunt for the Silver Bride!” (Meanwhile—and this is a lovely touch—we see the agent contemplate the bottle, turn it away from him, then give up and slowly fill his glass to the brim. A tiny dash of soda later, he settles down to his drink.) Where is Ludovica? She’s gone on a trip. We follow the jacketless husband through the streets of Copenhagen—these glimpses of a century-old world are always so beautiful—and into a women’s meeting, where he tries to silence the speakers at the podium so he can yell for Ludovica, only for the entire hall of women to run him out. (Meanwhile, the agent pours a second and third glass—and by the third he misses the glass with the soda altogether.) The man meanwhile charges into a women’s bathing area and peers into each and every booth, only to be chased and ejected yet again by a crowd of women. (A fourth glass goes down the agent’s throat.) The man returns home, finds his wife in tears on the stairs, and hurries her in. The agent, now drunk out of his head, sits giggling in the chair where we left him. But he can hand over the cheque, amid blasts of cigar smoke, to the old couple. “Remember: you can’t buy silver for gold!” a final title reminds us. (And a final treat in the last title: an animated logo for Nordisk Films, complete with real bear atop a globe.)

From Hand to Mouth (1919; US; Alfred Goulding). Harold Lloyd is The Boy, “hungry enough to eat a turnip and call it a turkey”. We are introduced to various kinds of will (people and objects). Will Snobbe gets my favourite intro: “His head would make a fine hat rack”. Meanwhile, outside, the Boy, amid scenes of poverty. (How long since scenes of outright poverty and hardship were the mainstay of American comedy?) He gazes longingly at a cheap restaurant. He puts on a napkin, takes a think bone out of his pocket, and chews on it. The Boy steals a biscuit, which is then stolen by a child. He chases the child, retrieves the biscuit, but the child is so cute he gives it back to her. Meanwhile in the lawyer’s office (the lawyer being called Leech, of course), the will is being fought over. Snobbe and Leech are in cahoots. The plot proceeds. Child and Boy (now friends) find cash, buy food—only to find the money is counterfeit. (They have also befriended a dog with a broken paw, who—just as they drop their unpaid-for food—drops his unpaid-for food.) Boy meets Girl, who rescues him from arrest. Cue various lost wallets, found wallets, biffed policemen, angry policemen, a kind of whack-a-mole sequence with the Boy popping up between two manholes, and a high-speed chase that mashes the Boy’s chase into the plot handed down from Snobbe to his ruffian underlings. At night, the Boy accompanies them on their robbery. A delightful gag about opening a window (assuring the band he knows how to jimmy open the window, the Boy systematically smashes it with a crowbar) is accompanied by a little gag in the titles: an anthropomorphic moon looks at the dialogue on each card, then appears to laugh at the payoff. Of course, the house being robbed is the Girl’s, and the Boy (after trying to eat the entire larder) soon takes her side in the robbery. Via a dazzling chase (Boy lassoing a car from a bicycle, which he then rides without steering), the Boy tries to summon the police to help him. None are interested, so he summons them via a series of vengeful acts: he hits them, insults them, hoses them down, vandalizes a police station (then reaches through the smashed glass to pull a cop’s nose)—until dozens of officers are pursuing him to the villains’ lair, where they treat the baddies to some good ol’ fashioned police brutality. Boy and Girl arrive just in time to scoop up the inheritance from the lawyer and chase out Snobbe. A lovely final scene shows Boy and Girl, with street child and dog-with-broken-paw, eating a hearty supper. A final longing look of love, as the Boy sneaks a spoonful of her pudding. An absolute delight of a film.

Cretinetti che bello! (1909; It.; André Deed). “Too beautiful!” a title announces, and it needs to do so to clarify the almost inexplicable events that follow… A man in an absurd wig and jazzy waistcoat is invited to a wedding, so he dons an enormous top hat, clown shoes, and powders his face with an inch of powder. Now with monocle and cigar, he marches along, looking so beautiful he attracts women (all men in drag) from his house, a gelato stall, and a park bench. At the wedding, more women (most of whom are again men in drag) fall for him, including the bride and the women of both families—who chase him outside, through a park, and tear him—quite literally—to pieces. Horrified and disappointed, they run off. But the pieces start moving around and eventually reanimate themselves, so that Segnor Cretinetti delightfully comes back to life and jigs with glee. A joyfully silly film, and a nice way to round off the programme of shorts.

Next, our main feature presentation…

The Fox (1920; US; Robert Thornby).

A sleepy town on the edge of the desert. Suddenly, an eruption of violence, horses and cars and lassoes careering through the streets. The Sheriff is called for, violent gangmen are everywhere. Enter Harry Carey as Santa Fe. (“They didn’t know where he came from, and they didn’t care.”) He sees a bear tamer threaten a child. Cue fistfight, the tamer using the bear for self-defence(!). Santa Fe chases off the father, only for the child to chase him. The child admits the man wasn’t his father. “He found me, just like you”. The two outsiders make friends. One mishap with the law later, and the child is effectively adopted—they are put in the same cell together. But the Sheriff’s daughter Annette pleads for Santa Fe’s good nature. The old sheriff offers Santa Fe a job. But the child remains in jail as a “hostage”, to make Harry more liable to do the Sheriff a favour. First, Santa Fe takes a job as a porter in the local bank. (Carey is very funny here, and throughout: the way he playfights, the way he tries to kill a fly, the way he holds a duster.) But Santa Fe’s here to spy on the goings on behind-the-scenes at the bank. Coulter, the dodgy president, enlists the help of his clerk Farwell to take the fall for his own emptying of the bank’s funds.

Meanwhile, Santa Fe is at a restaurant—carrying stacks dishes, rushing with the precarious skill of a comedian. In the desert, Farwell is captured under false pretences (all according to Coulter’s plan). In the restaurant, Santa Fe prepares a surprise for some gang members: mustard in their coffee. But to his surprise, they love it: “Now that’s good coffee!” But a fight nevertheless ensues, with hurled furniture and crockery. “Can you only fight?” the Sheriff asks, bringing him back to the jail. Now the gang, drunk, barge in and start a fight in a store. But the Sheriff arrives, only to be bested by the gang. (In this section of the film, there are some very nice low-key lighting for the night scenes. And a nice shot of Santa Fe in jail, beautifully lit, highlights on the bars and his shoulders—the same light that catches the flies buzzing in the foreground.) Santa Fe comes to save the day, gun in hand, and earns the respect of the Sheriff and Annette. His esteem warrants him a better hat and a sturdier pair of trousers: he slowly starts to look the part of the cowboy rather than the hobo. He heads into the desert to chase the gang and the missing clerk. He finds the “Painted Cliff Gang” hideout in the desert cliffs: a kind of “city”, hidden from the outside world. He finds and rescues Farwell, then returns to the town. Santa Fe reveals that he is a government agent and offers his full support.

So, to the desert, where the gang—armed with Lewis machine-guns—fight the forces of town and law. They are waiting for the cavalry. And they arrive in style, these “Veterans of the Argonne”. Hails of bullets, falling bodies from cliffs, sticks of dynamite, Santa Fe climbing cliff walls, a huge explosion, the charge of the army, machine-gun fire sawing through a bridge support, “waves of lead and cold steel”. The bad guys are marched off and the cavalry chase after Coulter. But it’s Santa Fe who finds him, and the missing funds. Various happy endings ensure: Farwell marries the sheriff’s younger daughter, while Santa Fe goes off with Annette and the child—who Santa Fe hopes to enlist in the army. The makeshift family ride off into the desert. The End.

Day 1: Summary

A breathless start to the online festival. I found the hour of slapstick from across the globe an absolute delight. Even the least cinematically interesting (Rudi Sportman) had the delight of its real locations in a lost world, a lost time. Pratfalls in the foreground, history in the background. And talking of comedy, I was surprised by how many comic touches there were in The Fox. It was the first complete Harry Carey film I’ve ever seen, so a real treat. And a surprise, too. For I could imagine Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd playing a similar role to Carey’s “Santa Fe” (the outsider hiding his physical abilities while timidly wooing the girl of a patrician figure), and the stray child could be a companion for Chaplin. Even the way Carey flirts, or looks longingly, is a little comic—comic in the way he’s so shy, and turns away when the girl catches him lingering. I like the way he slowly accrues the imagery of the cowboy: first the gun, then the hat, the jeans, and finally the all-action heroics of the finale. He moves from smart outsider, impressing with his deft touches and wit, to become the lawman and gunfighter of physical action. A solid, compact, oddly light film. (I admit, I’m not much for westerns—and I did prefer the slapstick to The Fox today.) A lot to see, but all new to me. And no time to dawdle! It’s only day one and already I feel the schedule nipping at my heels…

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 8: part 2)

It’s the final film of the (streamed) festival, and also a chance to reflect on the experience of going to Pordenone without going to Pordenone. We end on a silly, giggly, frothy, funny note with what the programme described as “a saucy bedroom farce”…

Up in Mabel’s Room (1926; US; E. Mason Hopper)

The tone is set straight away, with Mabel on a cruise ship with a crowd of five gentleman callers. The wind is blowing on deck and she manages to flash them all before falling headfirst into her room. Yes, she has men at her beck and call, but it’s her ex-husband Garry she wants back. (“You mean to say you’re going to scramble the same egg again?” her maid asks.) Mabel caught Garry in a ladies’ lingerie store buying something he wouldn’t explain. “Sounds like a movie”, quips the maid. Indeed. (Or a P.G. Wodehouse novel, which this film increasingly resembles; or, I suppose, vice versa.) But Mabel reveals that Garry was merely buying her a gift—a black lace negligee with his embroidered dedication to her—and has kept it ever since the divorce. (“And to think he never got to see me wear it”, she sighs sadly.)

Enter older siblings Leonard and Henrietta. She is the subject of a series of fat jokes about her penchant for chocolate; he is subject to the jealousies of other men for his existing friendship with Mabel. He reveals that Garry is now posing as a bachelor and his “marriage” is a hidden secret. Mabel’s face pouts in thought. Already she sees opportunities to win back Garry.

Cut to land, and to the offices where Garry works as an architect. Next door, his friend Jimmy is overwhelmed by telephone calls; he grabs all the receivers and shouts into them at once. And here are our other set of characters: Alicia, Jimmy’s wife (always suspicious); Phyllis, “unmarried but not unwilling”; Arthur, besotted by Phyllis but too shy to pop the question. Everyone is sleek and neat, the women bedecked in fluffy furs around shoulders and necks. The early scenes also introduce us to the farcical mode of much of the film: office corridors serve as conduits for mistaken identities and quick escapes, for flirtations and flights. Phyllis is all over Garry; Arthur is jealous of Garry. Garry is invited to Jimmie and Alicia’s wedding anniversary (of course, they’ve only been married six months, but their celebration is a “precaution” against divorce, which is as easy to catch as the common cold).

Into this mix comes Mabel. She immediately sets about seducing Garry. She forces herself into his arms, trying to get a kiss—her hands tighten around the back of his neck. “Well if you won’t kiss me, I’ll kiss you!” But Garry resists: “You’re not my wife any more! You’re my widow!” She climbs all over him, steps on his feet and they walk awkwardly a few steps then fall over. In front of his secretary, Mabel stuffs Garry’s face into her bosom and makes him drunk on her perfume. Garry is thought “pure” by his new friends, and he worries Mabel will make everyone think him “a swivel chair sheik”.

The El Rey Night Club. A party. Scanty chorus of girls. Leonard is Jimmy’s uncle and he tells Garry he’s brought a “snappy number” with him: and, yes, it’s Mabel. She grabs Garry and dances with him. Her embrace is a strangle hold. (“We’re supposed to be dancing… not wrestling”, Garry complains.) The only thing that would stop her marrying him again, she says, is if another girl beat her to it…

Garry can see the plot approaching fast. He also finds out that Leonard thinks Mabel’s ex was a wife-beater and a thief, that he would force the ex to remarry her—unless it turned out he was married to someone else. Phyllis having broken up with Arthur, Garry takes Arthur’s engagement ring and pursues the first woman he sees: this turns out to be Phyllis, who is already keen on Garry. Mabel is surprised but immediately resourceful: she tells Garry she’ll send Phyllis the signed lingerie Garry gave her. She publicly badmouths her ex in front of everyone. Garry fumes. Leonard and Henrietta want to give Garry and Phyllis an engagement party. Close-up of Mabel, pouting and squinting: she has a plan…

Mabel first visits Garry at his apartment, makes instant friends with Garry’s butler Hawkins, then steps out of her coat into a very revealing little dress and makes herself at home. Phyllis turns up, also in something frilly, fluffy, and revealing; Garry hurls Mabel behind a screen and tries himself to flee upstairs, but Phyllis catches him to say goodnight (“I adore you Garry. You’re so innocent and pure…”). Mabel listens in and starts hurling her clothes over the screen to be discovered by Phyllis. First it’s her coat (Phyllis is concerned); then her shoes appear beside the screen (Garry pretends they’re novelty ashtrays); then more and more clothing appears, down to transparent underlayers. Phyllis storms out, then Mabel calls to Garry. She pretends to appear in all her glory and hurls down the screen—but after reducing him to a pulp of nerves, she reveals she has kept on her top layer and walks triumphantly from the door.

It’s the house party hosted by Leonard and Henriette.

Garry and Hawkins have their plan. There’s a fantastic little scene in which they both try to visually describe the “intimate” garment they must steal. Garry tries first and is immediately caught by Mabel, then by Phyllis—who takes solace back with Arthur.

Mabel now starts flirting with Jimmy to make Garry (and Alicia) jealous.

Hawkins turns up with a stolen garment to give to Garry, but it’s the wrong garment; Garry is now caught by Phyllis, who faints and is taken up to Mabel’s room, where Garry is now hidden under jer bed trying to catch the right piece of clothing.

The farce gathers pace: all the men are sequentially caught in possession of the nightie, and the house butler keeps directing jealous woman to their other-halves who are all “up in Mabel’s room”. There, Hawkins and Garry bump into each other from respective hiding places: questioning titles cross the screen to meet each other: “Did you get it?” But the real negligee remains hidden. Trying to escape out of Mabel’s window, they are spotted and the cry goes out that there are burglars. At last the negligee is found but Leonard and Arthur shoot at the supposed burglars, forcing them back into Mabel’s room.

Everyone is now convinced the burglar is in Mabel’s room: Mabel, Phyllis, and Henrietta climb the stairs from inside, while Leonard climbs in from outside—the garment having by now been dropped outside at Arthur’s feet. All three men now hide inside under the bed and the three women sneak in through the door; there’s a great scene as the groups go back and force from hiding place to hiding place. Leonard is caught, but Garry and Hawkins escape through the window to try and recapture the negligee—bumping into a hose on the way down and soaking Garry’s clothes.

More farce in the other rooms: Jimmy goes into Garry’s room, where he is mistaken for Garry by Mabel who flirts with him; Alicia sees this and storms off. But as Arthur now has the negligee, Mabel has to sneak into his room—and a suspicious Phyllis finds her there under Arthur’s bed. Mabel has captured the negligee and put it on under her dress.

Meanwhile Garry is down to underclothes after his watery escape. To avoid detection, he climbs back up to Mabel’s room to get back to his own; but Mabel catches him in her room wearing her night dress and pretending to be a lamp. Hawkins is then caught going upstairs by the whole household; he says that Garry is yet again “up in Mabel’s room”, where everyone now goes. The butler interrupts the siege: a telegram for Mabel saying that her divorce is void due to a technical reason. Garry and Mabel are still married! Everyone bursts in. Mabel’s negligee and the telegram explain the whole story. The married couple embrace, but a shower of shoes from their well-wishing friends knocks out Garry; he falls into Mabel’s arms; she looks to camera and winks, then is herself struck by a shoe. She kisses the prostrate Garry, and the film fades to black. The End

I was worried after the first half hour of this film that the flippant, knowing tone (and the endless quips of narrational titles) would grate after a while. But when the action and dialogue took over, I shed my reservations and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It’s a Wodehouse novel come alive. And even the titles became more visually inventive. There are small fonts to indicate a whisper, large ones for shouting—and wiggly, trembling text to indicate a scream. Though the camera is static throughout, the editing is snappy and the film mobilizes everything it can to quicken the pace while providing clear continuity across multiple spaces. Marie Prevost steals every scene, every shot she’s in: winking, pouting, flaunting, seething, rolling her eyes. It’s one of the most outrageously enjoyable (and clearly, self-enjoying) performances you can imagine. Up in Mabel’s Room is also the first film streamed to feature an orchestral score. (Though there is a brief appearance of other instruments in the soundtrack for The Lady, they disappear after a single scene: why bother providing them if you’re going to take them away so soon?) Günter A. Buchwald’s jazzy score is excellent. The restless, peppy theme for Mabel breaks out each time she outthinks and outacts her competitors and husband. I imagine it would be great fun to see and hear performed live. Which brings me neatly to…

Pordenone 2022: Online festival round-up

So, what are my impressions of the festival in its streamed format? It’s my first experience of Pordenone and I’m very glad to have participated. For accessibility, it’s a tremendous new feature of the festival (and others like it). Technically, I had no issue with any of the streams. It took a minute to learn how to amend the format of the subtitles to make them unobtrusive (the default mode gives them an opaque background that blots out part of the screen), but apart from that I have no complaints. The 24-hour period to watch the films is much appreciated, as watching them “live” would be virtually impossible for me given that I’m fitting a festival into a normal working week. As it was, even seeing all the films on offer was a hectic fit. I skipped all the filmed introductions to the films, which I regret—but I really couldn’t spare the time. The variety of the films themselves—from 1912 to 1930, from Hollywood to Slovakia—was good, with enough of a sense of the running themes (Ruritania, Norma Talmadge) to get a sense of the festival. The music was very good, though I greatly miss seeing it performed live. I never feel the need to comment much on piano scores: put simply, much less can go wrong with them than with orchestral scores. They are adequate, often more than that. But I do miss seeing and hearing performers and orchestra, and I’m aware the live festival had many more large-scale performances than the streamed selection. I’m also aware of the films I missed. Among the many not streamed was Abel Gance’s La Dixième symphonie (1918). As anyone who glimpses at my publications page will realize, Gance is my specialist subject. I’ve never seen La Dixième symphonie with an audience and I would love to know how the screening went at its live projection.

More generally, I feel that both “experience” and “participate” are odd verbs to use (as I did at the outset) to describe me alone, sat or stood by my monitor, hundreds of miles from the festival. The option to add comments or stars to review or rank the films was there, but I didn’t “participate” in this either. Yet how strangely moving it was to see among these signed reviews the name of a university friend whom I’ve not seen since, and to know that they were somewhere in the world—also, I presume, sat at their monitor in the gloom. How different it is to peer at a monitor and glimpse another’s existence, than to encounter them at a festival and talk. I’ve attended a festival, yet I’ve gone nowhere and seen no-one. Much of my writing in recent years has reflected on the experience of live cinema, and I feel guilty having proselytized on behalf of liveness while never having been to a festival. But it’s a matter of time and—more so now than ever—money.

What does appeal to me is writing, and I don’t suppose I’d be able to (or want to) take notes during a live performance as I have when viewing these films at home. Writing these entries has been time-consuming. But the writing has also given me more of a sense of purpose and meaning in “participating” in a festival. I may not have been to Pordenone, but at least it’s given me the final push to start this blog and write a regular piece on silent cinema. I hope to keep it up, with a fresh film or related subject each week or so.

So, thank you Pordenone. Perhaps one day we’ll meet in person.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 8: part 1)

It’s the final day of streaming, and with two feature films to cover I’ve decided to dedicate a post to each one. First up is a film which bowled me over completely, and about which I will gush unapologetically…

The Lady (1925; US; Frank Borzage)

Working-class music hall singer Polly Pearl marries a wastrel aristocrat who abandons her on their honeymoon in Monte Carlo, leaving her alone and pregnant. When the husband dies, Polly’s former father-in-law arrives to claim custody of the child, but she sends the boy away with a foster family, knowing that she may never see him again…

We’re back in the company of Norma Talmadge, in a film directed by the great Frank Borzage and a script by Frances Marion. “The Lady” is an aspirational title that bar manager Polly had always hoped to attain. The title introducing “the Lady” makes way for a close-up of a woman’s hands wiping beer and froth from a bar. The transition lays bare the conflict between hopes and reality at the heart of Polly’s life.

British soldiers stumble into Polly’s “English bar”. The sergeant is drunk, his comrade sober. The drunk petulantly squirts Polly with a soda siphon. “That’s a ‘ell of a way to treat a lady!” she says. There’s laughter from the clientele: “Can you imagine Polly Pearl callin’ herself a lady!” It’s a cheery introduction, but a hurtful one. The laughter is friendly, but we know what kind of life she must have led. It’s a nice detail in the film’s titles that the word “lady” is often on the last line, or is even the last word, of the text: the tail of the “y” is elongated in the same way as the first “y” of the first “lady” in the introduction.

A kindly face on another table. Mr Wendover was born in the same town. Polly hasn’t been home for fifteen years. The close-ups of Talmadge are beautiful. Her grey hair forms part of her gentle back-lit halo. Wendover calls her “Madame Polly”. He shows her photos of their lost far-off hometown. A montage of preserved glimpses of home. There is a lengthy close-up of Talmadge with tears in her eyes. It’s an extraordinary intimacy between the camera and her face. She once “dreamed of being a lady”. Wendover sees her emotion. “You must have had an interesting life. Tell me about it, won’t you, Madame Polly?” he asks. It’s a mark of his respect that the “y” of the “you” and “Polly” have the elongated tails of “lady”.

Twenty-four years earlier, in London. Here is Polly frolicking on stage, a different person entirely—her body, her face transformed, filled with energy and life. From a box at the side of the stage, Leonard St Aubyns gazes at her in rapture.

Music hall life is brought to the screen with a dozen lovely comic touches. Look at the boy who stands on guard at the stage door, letting in no-one—until he’s bribed with a cigar by a flash dresser. The man even lights it for the boy, who stands there puffing contentedly.

Polly’s friend Fanny makes insinuations about her relationship with St Aubyns. She makes a fuss over the roses he gave her. “Can’t you see diamond lizards in his eyes?” Fanny asks, gesturing to her own spangle on her dress. Polly says she can’t pay, Fanny says she’s “too afraid to pay for it”—and she means paying with her body. “Some day I hopes to be nice”, Polly replies, and Fanny laughs at her desire to be “a lady”.

The flash dresser is Tom Robinson, a bookmaker who comes with flowers for Polly but makes do with Fanny. He looks the latter over. “Oh well”, he says “—seein’ as how the outfit’s paid for—” and off they go. It’s a funny, sad series of exchanges, and it’s strangely moving when all the other characters have gone and it’s just Polly and St Aubyns alone backstage. There’s no title here, but you can read her lips—“I love you”—and see that he does not return her words before they kiss.

(Outside, Fanny asks Tom: “Sorry it’s me not Polly?” He pauses, then says: “I’ll tell you after the ride.” It’s a great line, but it also undercuts the sentiment of the surrounding scene—and we’ll see that this couple’s kind of honesty is perhaps more long-lasting than other relationships in the film.)

The stern father of St Aubyns arrives and offers to pay Polly to send his son away. Immediately he tries to put a price on her, the most devaluing thing of all. For he’s convinced his son is wasting all his money on her, something she fiercely denies. Polly shows him the marriage ring, which she keeps hidden in her blouse. “Not another penny until you return home—alone”, the father says to his son. What is Leonard’s reaction? He sits sulking on a chair. It’s hurtful that his first thought is for money, not for Polly. And it’s moving how optimistic Polly is, saying she’d love him all the same if he were poor. And Leonard rashly announces a honeymoon to Monte Carlo, which makes her cry for happiness.

The last sight of the London world: the theatre boy stumbles in, sucking on the remains of the cigar. We see the world through his befogged eyes: everyone is distorted and squished. It’s a comic touch, but it’s also strangely sinister.

For now we’re in Monte Carlo and already Polly’s life is unravelling. Leonard is gambling and losing, and flirting with a well-dressed woman called Adrienne. Polly laughs at the woman’s pretensions, but Fanny and Tom (still together) warn her she’s after her husband. Leonard is kissing Adrienne’s hand and gets irritated when Polly approaches. She tries to be friendly with Adrienne but the latter snubs her.

It’s at this point that the print begins to disintegrate before our eyes, just as Polly’s relationship disintegrates. We see fragments, glimpses of Polly’s heartbreak. Leonard “can’t stand the riffraff you associate with”. But Tom and Fanny prove their worth, comforting Polly who now has the courage to confront Leonard in the hotel. Polly finds him locked in an embrace with Adrienne. The latter remains cool and smokes instead of replying to Polly’s questions. Infuriated, Polly hurls herself at Adrienne. Her violence is less damaging than what Leonard says next: “You common little trollop! … My father was right! I was a fool to marry a guttersnipe like you!” And there is that elongated “y” in the last word of the text, its long tail grimly echoing the “y” of “lady”. (It’s such a clever little visual trope to use, this simple “y”—and every time it calls us back to the main title and the idea it summons.) Polly stands there, hope draining from her body—as the film warps and bleaches around her.

Marseille, months later. Polly stumbles through dark streets into a tavern. She sits and asks for tea, to the shock of the waiter and owner. Madame Blanche sees Polly’s vulnerable state and pounces, black arms gleaming with sequins, holding her neck and pouring alcohol into her. Polly realizes what kind of place it is: drunks, sailors and women intermingle. She flees in fear but collapses outside and is carried back in.

There is a cut to an astonishing reveal: Polly is in bed, playing with an infant’s foot, the rest of the baby concealed under the sheet. Its tiny fingers wrapped around her thumb. But in comes Mme Blanche. “You pauper, lyin’ in bed like a lady!” Mme demands Polly dance and sing for her customers to earn a living. (The censor would clearly not allow Polly to become a prostitute, but it’s the closest the film can get.)

So Polly is on stage, melting hearts. She refuses money from a customer of another kind. Mme is angry that Polly only smiles for her “brat” and not for her customers. But the baby clutches at Mme’s fingers and her heart softens a little.

Just as Polly is settling into some kind of safe existence, an agent sent by the elder St Aubyns arrives and writes to London that he has found “the grandson”.

Rev. Cairns, an English man of the cloth, baptizes the child: the boy is called Leonard. Is it her way of recapturing the past? Or reclaiming the future? A boy that might grow up to be better than his father. A moment of solemnity in the tavern/brothel when Cairns quotes the line “and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”. One of the girls laughs, another has tears in her eyes.

St Aubyns arrives. Polly sees him and realizes why he’s come: we see all her thoughts in her face. St Aubyns announces that Leonard is dead and that he has come with a court order of custody “on the grounds that you are unfit”. (Again, the “y” of “you” is the elongated “y” of “lady”.) We can read her lips: “You hypocrite”, she cries, as he gestures with contempt at the world he sees around him. She must fetch the child. She paces the room, going back and forth from cot to door, turning in indecision. “He’ll ruin him like he did Leonard”, she says, and begs Mrs Cairns to take the child away with her—to somewhere where even Polly can’t trace them.

(Cut back to a woman trawling for clients in the tavern. She tries St Aubyns and his agent, but is treated with stuffy contempt: so she sticks her tongue out at them and knocks the old man’s hat over his nose. It’s the kind of reaction we all want to give St Aubyns.)

Polly issues her last hopes to Mrs Cairns: “give him your name and bring him up like your own—a gentleman.” She kisses her son goodbye. “Promise me you’ll be to him all that I hoped to be.” Finally: “Don’t let him know that his mother—wasn’t a lady.” It’s a devastating little moment. And when Polly runs back to the tavern, we see everything on her face: grief, shaken into triumphant defiance as she thinks of outwitting St Aubyns. She says she’ll sing whilst they’re waiting. As Mme Blanche and Mrs Cairns prepare for the child’s departure, we see Polly sing: the desperation of her performance, as she tries to hold back her fear while singing. When she knows the child is safe, she is laughing and crying and almost insensible as confronts St Aubyns: “damn you” she says, and strikes him just as she struck at Leonard’s lover. She collapses.

And when we see her again, five years later, it’s as if she has hardly been able to pick herself up from the ground. Here she is, searching the streets of London for her child. Talmadge breaks my heart as this older character. Her face has become older; it’s not disguised, it’s all in the performance. Her face has become less mobile, slower to reveal its expressions. The emotion is held in the eyes. Her restraint is so touching. And the lighting, the dark streets, the faint wash of violent tinting—it’s a perfectly, perfectly sad scene. Polly is selling flowers. A child stops and talks to her. She asks him his name. An angry father moves him on. Polly and her soggy little garlands are moved on by the police.

Tom and Fanny appear, in a car. They are still together, all these years later. Polly tries to sell them a flower. She flees in shame, then changes her mind and calls out after they are gone. Truly, Talmadge is glorious. Look at her face in the long close-up after the car has gone; a whole series of emotions and exhaustion, and Borzage lets it all play out before he cuts to a wider shot. Another child and mother appear. “What might your name be, me lad?” Before he can answer, the film deteriorates again. She still waits to find Leonard. A passing policeman says: “If I was you, I’d give up waiting for that young man” and pats her on the shoulder. He leaves, and there is another extended moment at the end of a scene when it’s just Talmadge on screen. These in-between moments, when action is left behind, are made to tell.

We are back to the present, in Polly’s English bar in Marseille. “Life’s done for me, but some’ow I go on—and on—” she says. Acts of kindness have kept her going. Mme Blanche died and left her money, which enabled her to buy this bar.

But here is an act of selfishness. A brawl erupts, the British sergeant drawing a pistol. His comrade grabs it but is punched away, accidentally firing as he falls back into Polly’s arms. The sergeant is dead. The police arrive.

And, yes, the young man in Polly’s arms is her son. You realize it instinctively, even before she sees his soldier’s identification tag: “Leonard Cairns”. He’s unconscious, asleep like a child in her arms. Talmadge has another extraordinary solo performance in medium close-up. She looks again at the name tag. She can hardly believe it, as we might not. The film plants this miracle at her feet, at our feet—and all at once she realizes what has happened, that he has killed a man, that she might lose him again. “He’s my boy!” she cries to Mr Wendover, and somehow not hearing her words at this point is enormously moving. (Why is that so? There’s always a distance between us and these silent figures. The best silent films invite us to cross this threshold, and when this happens there’s a kind of connection made all the deeper for the time and space it traverses. So yes, we can read Norma Talmadge’s lips—mouthing the rediscovery of her lost son, nearly a hundred years ago—and discover her words again, spoken inside our own heads.)

Already the police are here. Leonard is alive, struggling to open his eyes. When he recalls the fight, he grieves the death of his friend: “we were buddies”, he carried him across No Man’s land. Another region of grief and loss opens up. Polly tries to convince Leonard that she fired the lethal shot: “You know, my lad, that I shot him. It means nothing to me—you’re so young—and need your chance.” (Yes, an elongated “y”, linking his chance with her longing for a different life.) Leonard looks at her with wonder, and they are eye to eye. Polly asks Mr Wendover to back-up her claim—she is staring at him, desperate to give her boy a chance. But Leonard refuses to let her take the blame: “There are some things a gentlemen cannot do.” And Mrs Cairns’s promise to her is fulfilled—another emotional payoff in this astonishing scene.

“But it’s the most wonderful thing I ever heard of—”, Leonard says, that Polly should try to save him, a stranger. “But you’re not a stranger—why—I—” (she pauses, and it’s agony!) “—I have a wonderful memory of a son like you”, she goes on, and a tear falls from her cheek—the most perfect moment, in this most perfect scene. Even the “y” of “you” links him to her, which is matched in his response: “And I have a memory of a wonderful mother like you”. She puts her hand upon his cheek. It’s not quite a caress, it doesn’t dare to be. But when he turns to leave, she asks him: “Do you mind if I kiss you—in memory of my boy?” They embrace, and it’s a kind of fulfilment of the miracle.

He marches out of her life, escorted by the police. Her hand wipes the bar, as in the opening shot. And I didn’t think the film could pull any more emotional punches, but somehow it does. Mr Wendover says he won’t leave France until Leonard is freed. Polly is thankful her son is a gentleman. “And do you know why he is a gentleman?” Mr Wendover asks. “Because his mother happens to be—” (her hand stops wiping the bar) “—a Lady.” She looks up at him. And there is her face, her face that has carried the whole film, smiling at the realization that she may be loved. It’s another perfect moment, in a film full of perfect moments. Dissolve. The End.

The Lady will be one of those films that I won’t be able to describe to someone else without welling up. (This happens with a few other silents. I remember giving a lecture at the London Film School and almost breaking down mid-sentence when I tried to describe the ending of Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm [1913]. I wasn’t expecting it, but there it came, the wave of emotion, and my voice cut out in front of a roomful of strangers.) Talmadge is of course the star and holds the film’s huge emotional weight, but the whole thing is wonderful. The cast are uniformly excellent, the script has a wonderful balance of the tragic, the comic, and the miraculous. It sets things up that you don’t immediately spot, then knocks you over with them at the end. And despite the damage at various points, the print is absolutely beautiful to look at. The lighting is superb, the sets are atmospheric, and all united with the gorgeous tinting that brings warmth and texture to the world on screen. I’ll be thinking about this film for years to come, and no doubt still blubbing when trying to describe it to strangers. Many thanks for this, Pordenone.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 7)

Day 7 brings us the film I was most looking forward to seeing among this year’s streamed content. (Pause to consider what a foul phrase is “streamed content”.) It’s also the film that most conflicted, confounded, and confused me.

Manolescu (1929; Ger.; V. Tourjansky)

Manolescu and Cleo con their way through European cities, stealing and defrauding as they go, on the run from the law and her ex. Will she escape him? Will he escape his own lifestyle?

I have great difficulty in writing about my feelings for this film. For a start, I made no notes when watching it: Manolescu was the one film I wanted to concentrate on entirely, without pen or paper to distract my eyes even for a moment. To write this review, I’ve had to go through the film again and my thoughts are even more complex now that I see again how rich is the look and feel and design of the film. But my reservations are still there. So here we go—with due warning of sexual violence in the content…

Paris. Smouldering nightscape. A descending camera over the rooftops. A homeless man on a bench. Nightclubs ejecting revellers in the early hours. Mosjoukine as Manolescu in his finest night attire.

But Manolescu is back home and exercising by 7 a.m. The curtain is drawn. Outside, a studio Paris so fabulous the camera can drive elaborate routes through its impeccable geography. Here are cars and people, dark streets, neon signs.

A letter from the Club: Manolescu owes them 82,000F. Paris rejects him, so he obeys the neon suggestion outside: “Adieu Paris / Visitez Monte Carlo!”

The station. Steam and smoke. And Brigette Helm, smoking and sultry. She is Cleo and Manolescu stares at her and takes the neighbouring compartment.

Jack arrives to say farewell to Cleo but is being observed. His agent warns him off. He leaps onto the train, but then leaps onto another train in the other direction. The police board the train to Monte Carlo and inspect passports.

Manolescu tries to get into Cleo’s room, first by stealth then by force. The police arrive and Cleo realizes she needs protection, so she pretends to be asleep in Manolescu’s room. The police go. He locks the door, then the door to Cleo’s apartment. He paws her, forces her back onto the bed. She pushes her back against the compartment wall, closes her eyes, waits to submit. It’s a horrifying scene.

Now there are astonishing landscapes. Glorious sun and shade. Gleaming cliffs. Gleaming hotel facades.

Cleo has given Manolescu the slip and gone to her hotel. Manolescu follows. At reception, he pretends to be “Count Lahovary” to get better service. He cons his way into Cleo’s room. She’s in the bath. She demands he leave, again and again. He waits outside. She dresses. She confronts him. Eye to eye. The most astonishing shot, held for a long time: her eye the focus of the whole world, staring at him in a kind of wilful fury. His face. Gleaming eyes. A smile fades. “What do you want from me?” His answer: he grabs her, kisses her breast. They writhe together. She reacts with hatred. The camera tracks closer. They stare at each other like animals. They kiss, his hands around her throat.

They are together, laughing, running, exercising in the sun, riding, boating. Their embrace amid the sheets. The camera begins to spin. Their whirling faces dissolve onto the gleaming whirl of a roulette wheel. Casino life.

At the hotel, Jack arrives with a huge bunch of flowers. He’s like a bear. His hair in grizzly flight from his enormous head. His moustache a black lightning bolt under his nose. He enters. Manolescu hides on the balcony at Cleo’s instruction. Jack and Cleo. Their embrace turns into a kind of fight. She wrests herself away, giddy. Hatred disguised as decorum. Fear and panic. Pretence. (On the balcony, Manolescu peers into the neighbouring room: a rich old woman storing her jewels. An idea.) Jack leaves to dress. Cleo and Manolescu. What is she thinking? (Really, what is she thinking?) They kiss. There’s something animal in them. Jack walks in. There is a fight of amazing savagery: punches hurled in close-up, fury in the eyes, fury in the bodies. More animalism. Cleo flees, but only into the corridor to get help. The police arrive and drag Jack away.

Manolescu promises they’ll stay together. “We stay together?” she replies. “Could you then offer me the life I am used to living?” Taken out of context, it’s an extraordinarily revealing question. The life she’s been living has been one of enforced companionship and criminality. (And sure, he’ll give her that.) But what the question is taken to mean in the scene is one of finances: could Manolescu provide her with enough money to live the way she wants. So he steals the rich woman’s jewels in the neighbouring room.

Title: “That’s how George Manolescu’s life as a swindler began.” (Really? Wasn’t he already fleeing debts in Paris? Isn’t he already a rapist?)

Their life of crime and money fraud. Manolescu cheats his contacts and wins out.

Jack in his cell, his agent promising him to help with Cleo.

London. Neon signs. Pearl theft. Shots of faraway places. Newspaper headlines across the world: Manolescu’s thousand disguises, thousand crimes.

A nightclub. Cleo staring at another man. (No-one can stare like Brigitte Helm, no-one raise her pencil-thin brows so intently, no one narrow her eyes with such intensity of willpower.) A rift is opening.

Jack is released. Back at the hotel, a fight between Manolescu and Cleo. He taunts her with the prospect of living a life of poverty. (Has the film lost all sense of orientation? Isn’t he the one supposed to be afraid of losing her?) He grabs her arm. Let me go, read her lips, and again and again. But he just wrenches hold of her, and they swirl. A grotesque parody of a lovers’ dance.  He leaves. She weeps on a bed. (Again, what is she thinking?)

Jack arrives. She manages to half raise herself. He approaches, furiously. She has her back against the wall. It’s the same framing and pose exactly as the rape scene in the train. (How can the film be this intelligent in knowing how men treat Cleo, and yet proceed to treat Cleo as though she is the problem, the cause of men’s violence?) She somehow wrestles him into an embrace. She is squirming, desperate. She is on the bed, half-weeping, half-writhing into a new shape to enable her to survive. (God, Helm is magnificent: look at that face between her arms, raised to hide the shifting of her face, her train of thought, her pulse of cunning.) Jack looks bewildered. His eyes flashing under the breaking tide of black hair. She raises herself. He tries again to summon the will to strangle her. Their arms. Hers, bare and pale; his, thick and dark in his coat. Look at her shoulder blades, tensing, shifting. His face, gleaming with sweat. And now its her turn to strangle him into a kiss. His fury ebbs. His enormous face turns into that of a child, beaming at last with mad happiness. They have wrestled and a weird, mad pact resolved. She falls away from him, exhausted. “I’m so happy you’re back with me!” he says: the strangest line of dialogue after the preceding scene, one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable survival/attempted murder/seduction scenes I can recall.

Then Manolescu returns. Cleo between two brutes. Jack hurls a sculpture and hits Manolescu in the head. He falls. Cleo over his body. “Murderer!” she rasps, and Jack turns to leave—a giant lumbering from an inexplicable scene of defeat.

Cleo phones for the police. But look at Manolescu, on the floor. From the back of his head, in the shadows: that isn’t blood seeping from him, it’s electricity. Sparks are bubbling from his brain onto the carpet. The camera falls into them. The screen is the pulse of an electric sea. A vision of a courtroom. Faces and benches in the negative: black and white reversed. It is terrifying. The whole screen flickers uneasily. The electricity is still seeping, pulsing through his brain. Only Manolescu is in the positive: his face in profile in a scene of (literal) negativity. The crowd turns as one to stare at him. The judge rises: “Robbery… swindling… forgery…”. Manolescu stands: “Cleo… all… because of… you…”. The camera turns Manolescu on his side. He is no longer standing; he is in bed. A world of white. And Dita Parlo. She is Jeannette, a nurse with the warmest smile in the world. The film will take her side, the side that says “Cleo: all because of you” and blame Cleo for Manolescu’s own decisions.

Nurse and patient are falling for one another, but here is Cleo: “I am not to be blamed for what has happened… please, forgive me.” (The contradiction is clear, but what does the film want us to make of it?) “This is your doing!” shouts Manolescu as he sees another headline revealing his criminal work.

So Cleo departs and Manolescu and Jeannette go to the Alps to recuperate from his head injury. But Cleo visits: “We belong to each other”, she says, “I would never let anyone else have you!” “I hate you!” he hisses, and again hands and eyes are wrestling with fury. He rejects her. She catches sight of Jeannette. The two women look at one another. Cleo is contemptuous. (That raised brow, that narrowed eye.)

New Year’s Eve and Jack is drinking alone when Cleo turns up. Yet as soon as they embrace, Cleo is reluctant: “What abut Manolescu?… I have betrayed him.” Literally, this might be true—the police are on Manolescu’s trail, but how on earth are we expected to take Cleo’s logic? For now she is turned away. She is alone in the corridor, her black silhouette cast behind her on the wall. She walks away. The shadow lingers, then slips down and down the wall until it’s gone.

New Year’s Eve in the Alpine cabin. Manolescu and Jeannette and their host are having a party when two police agents arrive. Manolescu begs them to wait ten minutes so he can toast the New year with his lover. They acquiesce. Happy New Year drinks and deluded happiness. Then Manolescu must reveal the truth: they are here to take him away. Jeannette collapses beneath the Christmas tree. As he departs into the night snow, she runs outside and stands crying out that she will wait for him. This is the last image: a screaming woman, attacked by the howling night storm, pledging her love to a monster.

So that’s the film. And I’m very conflicted about it. I love Ivan Mosjoukine, I think Brigitte Helm is astonishing, and I’m a fan of Tourjansky. It’s a film made by UFA in 1928-29. This was the summit of silent filmmaking in Europe. This film has everything going for it. And it is indeed technically brilliant, sumptuous to look at, amazingly well preserved and presented, filled with spellbinding scenes and moments. But there is something at the heart of the scenario—and in turn, of the characters—that simply does not work, that is in fact exceedingly nasty. Even giving the brief synopsis at the start of this review was a struggle for me, for I gave the kind of synopsis you might see online for this film. Here is a different synopsis: Cleo is enslaved by her rapist, only to be blamed for his life of crime and rejected in order for Manolescu to “redeem” himself with a better woman.

After that early scene on the train, in which Manolescu decides he has a right to have sex with Cleo for “protecting” her, everything else is sullied. No matter how much I could talk about how fabulous it looks, about how great the performances are, I cannot get over the way the characters are conceived and conceive of each other and of themselves. The only way of making it make sense is to accept that Cleo falls for Manolescu despite the fact that in their very first scene together he imprisons her and then rapes her, then recaptures her again once she tries to escape. The unspoken condition that the film thinks it establishes—and which the film assumes somehow justifies Manolescu’s actions—is that Cleo sells herself. But she doesn’t sell herself in that first scene. There is no bargain, no conversation. We know nothing about her before she enters the train, other than that she is afraid and is hiding something. Over the course of the film, it’s clear what kind of life she’s led: but being subjected to the whims of male violence in order to live in relative luxury invites our (or at least, my) deepest sympathy, and deepest anger towards her exploiters. But for Manolescu and for the film, her associations make her the criminal. In the astonishing fantasy trial scene, among all the words used to describe him (“Robbery… swindling… forgery”), the word “rapist” is not mentioned. When the electricity starts seeping out of his head, I half wondered if the film was about to flip a switch and condemn Manolescu: were we about to watch him being dragged into hell? But no, his own self justification begins—and the film is complicit in constructing a redemption for this awful man.

The final section of the film is him finding a better woman than Cleo to love. All the film’s judgement falls upon Cleo, who is expelled from Manolescu’s life and then from Jack’s. Manolescu’s fate is to go to jail, but Jeannette awaits him. Are we really meant to sympathize with Manolescu? I find this utterly incomprehensible. If the film was about how awful Manolescu is, and how Cleo manages to find redemption and escape her life, then this review would be nothing but praise. As the film stands, I am alienated by the scenario. Is it the screenwriters’ fault? Is it a fault of the original novel, on which it is based? Or do we make some giant leap of faith and assume the film is somehow suggesting we do in fact take against Manolescu from the start, and that we should ignore the whole of the rest of the film’s story of a man pushed into criminality and then finding redemption?

I wish I could write a more coherent review, but the film compels and appals me in equal measure. I so wanted to love this film. It’s an extraordinary piece of work and a deeply uncomfortable watch.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 6)

Day 6 takes us back to the fictional worlds of Ruritanian kingdoms, and to the streets of 1920s London thanks to this British-German co-production from Anthony Asquith…

The Runaway Princess (1929; UK/Ger.; Anthony Asquith)

On her 21st birthday, the Princess of Lothen Kunitz runs away from her palace to avoid enforced marriage to a stranger. She goes to London with her old tutor, where she tries to earn a living—but is caught up in a fraud scheme…

The camera tilts down to reveal a grand castle, somewhere in central Europe. Tops hats are raised to a banner bearing the image of the Princess. It is Priscilla, who is thus preceded by her symbolic trappings. When we finally see her, she is surrounded by courtiers and hussars. (Hussars always look the most gawdy, hence their appearance in all the Ruritanian films streamed thus far from Pordenone; though here I note that they are wearing British-style lacing on their tunics rather than the more continental style frogging. (I have a longstanding interest in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century uniforms, but I’ll try and spare you further observations on this topic.)

Priscilla is presented with a goblet. She tries to take a good swig of the contents, but her chaperone intervenes. There is a nice gag with the courtiers dealing with the birthday gifts being offered to the Princess. She hands one large item to her aide, who passes it to their right to an usher, who passes it to their right to another usher. The usher looks hopefully to his right, but there’s no-one there, so he tries to hand it back to someone on his left. The aide eventually takes it back, disappears for a moment, and looks furtively behind him once he’s dumped it behind the dais.

A girls’ choir step forward and a singer fluffs her line. The princess tries not to laugh. Sympathy and embarrassment. We feel the awkwardness and absurdity of the occasion.

Fritzing is a faithful old tutor to the unhappy princess. Fritzing commiserates with Priscilla in the confines of a large library-cum-study, where she would clearly rather spend her time. They discuss her future, and she says “I wouldn’t marry a prince for anybody.”

Cue the Grand Duke, her father, giving her a necklace: and an ultimatum. The necklace has been given to all princesses when they come of age: it’s an engagement gift. She must marry the Crown Prince of Savona. The necklace is tight around her throat. Outside, she tries to tear it off: but the courtiers are all around and she must feign contentment.

She plans an escape, sending luggage to Amsterdam. Her packing is interrupted for a bicycle lesson, to take place under the eyes of a stern chaperone.

But Priscilla tears off into the woods, where she (quite literally) bumps into a stranger. Under boughs of crushed-focus light and shade, they share a few moments of tranquillity. Then the chaperone intervenes and they are parted.

When the Prince is announced the next day, the camera tracks in grandly and we see only the back of the man’s head. (And yes, I think the eventual pay-off is spelled clearly enough at this point.) Where is the princess? The Grand Duke must improvise: “the joy of her betrothal has caused the Princess to have a breakdown”: cut to the bicycle tyre being repumped as Priscilla and Fritzing ride away to the train station.

But on the train things start to go awry. They are the victim of money forgers, who substitute a duff £5 note for their own currency. And the stranger from the woods is following them, too—and recognizes her face from the newspaper. Also on board is a detective, investigating a gang of fraudsters—who assumes the stranger is likewise on their trail.

Then we are in London. And it’s a London of wonderful business and bustle and crowds. The budgetary constraints creating the kingdom of Lothen Kunitz confine that world to two or three spaces. But in London the streets are the camera’s to roam. The excitement of London excites the camera, which can now track and cut and look at the life of the city.

The stranger is still following Priscilla: half-mocking her efforts to get a job. Frankly, his persistence is creepy and I’m not surprised Priscilla is keen to prove him wrong. (If she called the police, the rest of the plot wouldn’t work, which is a shame.)

The race to get a job with another applicant is intercut with a dog race: it’s a neat joke but appears out of nowhere and there’s nothing else like it in the film. (Only when you look at other Asquith films can you see a context: the same kind of intercutting trick is more startlingly used in A Cottage on Dartmoor [1929] when cannons roar into life in a rapid montage of anger and violence in a barbershop.)

Priscilla ends up inserting herself into a modelling role, putting on skates and a dress as the “sportif” model—ending up plunging straight through and past the catwalk into the lobby. It’s a parody of her desire to be in control, trying as she did in Lothen Kunitz to have control over what she does and what she wears.

When she gets another job, she ends up being employed by the crooks. When her first failure ends in two of them shouting at her, there is a brilliant montage of faces—framed closer and closer—bearing down on her. It’s a more successful sequence of stylishness than the dog track scene, having more direct purpose and effect within the scene.

Then the smartest of the fraudsters works out that Priscilla is so blithely trusting that they can pay her with fake notes and get her to distribute their currency for them. The detective and the stranger are nosing around, observing notes and getting closer to their goal. At least, the detective thinks so—having earmarked Fritzing and Priscilla as the masterminds.

At every turn, Priscilla bumps into the stranger—who I wished she’d slap. Instead, she tries to show off her job success ordering everything expensive on the menu at a restaurant. (“Princess?” one waiter asks another. “Film star!” the other asserts. It’s much like the link made explicitly at the end of Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar: the Ruritanian figure as glamorous star, for whom different rules might apply.)

The film comes to a climax as the criminals are grabbed and the princess has to reveal her real name—as does the stranger. And yes, the stranger turns out to be the Crown Prince of Savona.

The royal couple appear at the end, endlessly nodding to an invisible throng of well-wishers. They look happy, but are they? The last shots of the film exactly mirror those at the start: but now the banner being saluted contains an image of the couple, and the camera tilts up from the castle to the sky.

It’s meagre fare, this film. With similar aspects to Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar, The Runaway Princess falls short in every point of comparison. It’s not as stylish, not as charming, not as inventive, not as clever. The finale of Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar questions the very material of Ruritanian fantasy, whereas The Runaway Princess returns to where it starts. If there is any question of ambiguity at whether the couple are now merely trapped with each other rather than on their own, it is only a hint: the film wraps up so quickly there is no time to think. The relationship between Nickolo and Astrid is much warmer, more developed, and more convincing in Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar. In The Runaway Princess, the “stranger” is given no substance at all, and his presence is only bearable given that we know Priscilla seems to like him. And even though she does like him, his stalking her from country to country is still difficult to accept without any scene of real warmth of engagement between them across the entire film. The Austrian actress Mady Christians is very good as Priscilla, but Paul Cavanagh is given so little to work with he can hardly do anything for his character. The Fritzing character is likewise very thin: not the complex character of André in Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar (or, in anther Ruritanian example of the period, the tutor figure Dr Jüttner in Lubitsch’s The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg [1927]). In terms of style, there are moments when Asquith has fun (the dog race gag, the quick cutting of close-ups in the argument) but even these stand out awkwardly against the pedestrian pace of much of the film. It’s worth noting too that the print used of The Runaway Princess was not in the best shape. There were sections of what looked like 16mm subbing for 35mm elements, and the film clearly hasn’t been restored recently. I’m still glad to have been shown it, but it’s one of the weaker films to be streamed this year.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 5)

Some real central European kingdoms today, as we visit Slovenia and Slovakia with a short travelog and a long ethnographic documentary…

Kralj Aleksander na Bledu (1922; Yug.; Veličan Bešter)

The title gives it away: here is King Alexander I of Yugoslavia visiting Bled. In fact, the land precedes the monarch and is far more interesting.

Here are turquoise mountains and skies and lake. Trees in the heat of celluloid haze. Cliffs, spires, sails. The camera wobbles, turns its neck with difficulty. It feels the motions of the waves. It is being operated unsteadily. It cuts. Pans. Repeats. Now we have our feet on land. Green gliffs and peaks viewed through trees. Higher still. The turquoise lake. Then the chateau, orange; closer, further away; then green.

Suddenly, dismounted hussars march towards us in a vivid orange tint. The film sheds its colours and indiscipline (and yes, much of its inexplicable charm). A train approaches and the men, now neatly arranged in monochrome, await the King. An anonymous little man in officer’s uniform marches one way, then another. It’s the King, apparently. A dog ignores him and scurries, nose-down, over the tracks. The King inspects the troops, their eyes straining right. The film ceases.

Po horách, po dalách (1930; Cs.; Karel Plicka)

The title is from an old folk song, “Over Mountains, Over Valleys…”—and this is where the film goes. It is the past, caught before it disappeared. It is the people, caught before between two world wars.

Trees tremble in the wind. Sheep appear, guided by men—their trousers the colour of the grass, their shirts the colour of the clouds. Children’s faces against the sky. Children whistling, playing the pipes. A dog nestling against his knees.

The film moves at the pace of life in the mountain pastures. The sheep pen closes. The sheep press close. Clouds move in the distance. The shepherds eat. Look at the texture of their clothes, faces, hats. Sun and wind and cold have given them their complexions, complexions whose grain settles into the texture of nitrate.

The men make mugs, vessels, belts. They put on their shoes, they wind the straps. This is the way feet have been bound for centuries, millennia even. They mould sheep cheese in wooden presses, grinning as they reveal dairy reimagined into ducks.

A village. Women dressed for church. Children as miniature adults, the same clothing, following the same steps.

Musicians play extraordinary tubas on rocks. They dance. Violins play. (And surely we’re missing a great deal by having just a piano accompany the film. Imagine the effect of the instruments on screen being played in the theatre.)

Strange rituals, games, all under the vast sky, against the hazy mountains. Girls play horses. Boys play carts.

A bagpiper at the centre of a moving throng of children dancing, waving, clapping. Extraordinary athleticism of diving, tumbling, wheeling, climbing. Bodies writhe and wriggle and flex. And all against the vast landscape. Children become frogs, animals, insects with multiple limbs. Boys become barrels. They are watched by little sheep, who must wonder at the strangeness of human beings.

Corpus Christi. Swathes of people pressed together. Banners. Poles.

A cradle in the fields. A mother and daughter sing a lullaby to the infant.

But now the men and women are marching with rakes and symbols. Women dance around their landlord.

By the Váh River. Geese wander. A woman washes. Bride and bridesmaids. The bride in close-up, but the camera sees her enormous costume—a peasant girl dressed like a cross between Queen Elisabeth I and an Aztec deity; she stands facing the camera, then in profile. She is grinning, embarrassed. Carts pile high with guests, cushions. There is a manpowered merry-go-round at the centre of celebrations. The operators must get as dizzy as the occupants.

An Orthodox pilgrimage of Slovenes into Russia. Banners, endless genuflecting and crossing. Beggars, old men, priests, women sat on the grass. The past and its people mill about. Ancient old men, tiny boys. Men with hair and pipes. Men who are all hair, creases in their face. A crucifix is wreathed in flowers. Boys climb a wooden frame and ring a bell several times their size.

A farm. It is Sunday. Families walk. A bride is dressed. We watch her headdress assembled. Peasant faces, too sincere to smile. Sandalled feet over ancient cobbles. Past the churchyard, overgrown with tall grass. Figures in white sit among the crosses. Prayers are said above the graves. The land looms over the tombs, over the kneeling mourners.

An ancient piper. Tiny children with blonde hair, straw hair, hair like fresh grass. A group sits on a knoll, their feet higher than the rooftops below. Mothers and children sway. Boys prance and dance, leaping with unbelievable athleticism. The boys become men, who dance in the smoke of a fire. A sword dance of lethal precision and timing. The musicians bite on huge pipes as they play their violins. The band marches forward, the dancers recoil.

Hemp is being made, under the eyes of a matriarch with rake, pitchfork, and sickle. (The flies crawl on her warm arm.) There is embroidery. The striking patterns of the women’s dresses being made by their hands. A child watches her mother sow. Cloth is washed, beaten, hung to dry.

“Studies of folk clothing and types”. Bodies and faces and smiles under that great sky. Grinning and shyness.

Children’s games. Inexplicable routines.

The Belan Alps. The shadows of clouds rush over mountain pastures. Rivers sparkle. Rock gleams. Clouds pass over dark peaks. Stunning views, grass banks follow the immense folds of rock and earth.

And there before it all are the farmers, cutting and harvesting the grass, sharpening blades, spinning wool, processing flax. Wooden tools, wooden looms. Dexterity passed down over centuries. Highlanders’ music, costumes. A horse and rider against the astonishing backdrop. Sheepskin jerkins, men dancing. Beechwood chopping: boys are woodsmen, axe, and tree at once. Men are lifting one another, twirling around, fighting on benches, barrelling down the hill in ones and twos, and threes, and fours. Children lifting other children with just their legs. These are bodies with years of labour already in them. Cows wander past the twirling acrobatics of the shepherds. A game called “train engine” in which bodies are the carriages and engine. But how many of them have ever seen a train? “Strength in the legs”, “Strength in the hands”, “Pulling tomcat”. “Flipping the boys over on a stick”, “Doing the horses”, children riding atop children riding atop children. “Tying to the stick”, children turned into knots. Adults carrying bundles of children across a grassy ridge, behind them the mountains. The film stops, but it could go on forever—if history were not inevitably to intervene.

What am I to make of all this? The film has a hypnotic rhythm to it. Everything is presented with very little comment. Filmic interventions are chiefly noticeable in the details: when the people step forward for the camera. But in these instances, you can sense the real emotions: embarrassment, amusement, awkwardness, reticence. Yes, the people are performing for the camera, but they’re clearly performing for each other as well. There is a rough-and-ready feel to even the most elaborate scenes. And everything takes place before the immense landscape, on natural stages that both ground the inhabitants and stretch beyond them. These are lives led on unending swathes of grass, under enormous skies. This is not the managed poetry of a Dovzhenko, but a looser assemblage of faces and landscapes. People and places determine the film’s shape, its rhythm. And I love watching these silent folk in these silent spaces. The majesty of a tangible reality, removed from our grasp and set apart from our time.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 4)

It’s back to Ruritania for Day 4: a slice of slapstick with Stan Laurel for starters, then a main course of Germano-Swedish romantic comedy…

Rupert of Hee Haw (1924; US; Percy Pembroke)

“The Plot”, explains the opening title: “A Princess is engaged to marry a king—but she loves another—This makes it an original story.” Stan Laurel plays a sozzled King, together with the lookalike who brings chaos to the court…

All the Ruritanian trappings are here: the uniforms, the palace sets, the tapestries, suits of armour etc. In fact, the settings have the best recurring jokes. When the King is drunk, the set itself behaves as if drunk: a wall moves back and forth to confound him, then acts as if it was innocent. When the King shoots the cuckoo clock, the suit of armour raises its arms in shock. When the King reappears later in the film, another suit of armour thumps him unconscious. And all for no apparent reason. The King’s fiancée, the Princess, gets her own recurring gag: whenever she is slapped on the back or knocked over, huge clouds of powder (or dust) billow from her clothing. It’s as if she’s fossilized, or she’s wearing a museum costume.

The chaos spreads through the court. A general’s hat reacts every time the King sneezes. First the hat leaps into the air. So the General takes off the hat. The King sneezes and the hat’s plume leaps into the air. The General re-affixes the plume. The King sneezes and the General’s hair leaps into the air. What’s wonderful is that the General looks so nonplussed at each turn, turning around as if to spot how the gag’s being done.

The film takes apart every social formality it can get its hands on. Displays of etiquette become slapstick routines: lines of saluting courtiers turn into front-facing, sideways-kicking brawls. Signs of rank are treated with contempt, articles of uniform defaced and used against their owners.

I quickly lost sense of what the plot was, and so did the film. It swiftly becomes a chaos of banana skins, pratfalls, abrupt changes of fortune, arse-kicks, bits-with-a-dog, incompetent duelling, and callous announcements of deaths and misfortunes. There’s a subplot involving a letter but frankly I had no idea what was supposed to be happening. For Rupert of Hee Haw, the Ruritanian genre is merely a fancy-dress box into which the performers dive and emerge in a chaos of tropes. For only 23 minutes, it feels rather baggy—like the costume doesn’t quite fit the film.

Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar / Majestät Schneidet Bubiköpfe (1928; Swe./Ger.; Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius)

Nickolo Grégory is an aspiring young barber, raised in the trade by his grandfather André. He falls for Astrid, the granddaughter of hair tonic millionairess Sophie Svensson. The millionairess thinks her granddaughter should marry Count Edelstjerna, the closest thing to royalty she can find. But André has a secret, which is that Nickolo is the long-lost Crown Prince of the kingdom of Tirania—and a king worthy of Astrid (and her grandmother). But how will they reclaim the crown, and can they trust the agents sent to help them?

This is an absolutely charming film. It has a charming script, a charming cast, charming performances, charming photography. Its lightness of touch was a very pleasing change from yesterday’s feature, Profonazione, as was its sophisticated staging and camerawork: nothing showy, but imaginative when needed and making the most of its resources.

I’ve commented on title designs more than once in the features from Pordenone this year, and do so again now. Here, the title designs gesture at the secret “royalty” of Nickolo’s family, and the aristocratic pretensions of Sophie’s family.

But everything in this film is well designed. When André sees the hair tonic bottle produced by Sophie Svensson, the shape of the bottle dissolves onto the shape of the castle she has bought with its proceeds of its fabulous success.

Design matches aspiration throughout. André keeps the “thousand-year-old iron crown Tirania” in a secret case behind a mirrored cabinet door. The door is decorated with filigree that matches that used on the film’s intertitles: his secret is hinted at in the very design of the film’s narration. Likewise, when Sophie and Count Edelstjerna are discussing his plans to marry Astrid, Sophie has eyes only for the Count’s signet ring. The Count, too, has eyes only for the portrait of Astrid. Everyone’s aspiration is expressed through knowing gestures, comic transferences. Even Astrid’s rival for Nickolo’s heart, Karin, flirts with Nickolo by a kind of proxy: letting him continually fashion and refashion her hair. Hair itself becomes the means of access to various spaces: Astrid herself eventually invites Nickolo to the Svensson castle to cut her hair.

The rivals in romance play out in a lovely dance sequence in a wood beside the sea. It’s a cliché to expect beautiful coastal landscapes in Swedish films, but here is another. The camera views the circling lines of dancers from the festive Midsummer tree. It swirls and tracks, at one moment keeping pace with the dance, at others stepping aside to let others swirl around it. Couples swap, interact, tease, and reunite.

Nickolo and Astrid slip away on a rowing boat to an island. The film gives us gorgeous close-ups of the two leads—Brita Appelgren and Enrique Rivero—and we see them stood against sea and sky. The characters are falling for one another, so we must fall a little for them too.

The plot literally sails into view at this point: a large ship from Tirania, bearing the nation’s flag. Nickolo reveals he never knew his parents, since he was rescued from revolution in Tirania by André when he was an infant. Meanwhile, from shore, André secretly signals to the boat, crewed (we now learn) by people intent on conning money out of the old man. It signals that the plot will become more convoluted before the truth is revealed…

First, Sophie must be convinced of Nickolo’s worth. When she sees him shingling Astrid’s hair at the castle, he throws him out: a beautiful gag involving deep staging that shows off the scale of the castle and the scale of Sophie’s ambition. Nickolo is pushed through a never-ending series of doorways, all in the same shot, by the endlessly aggressive Sophie. Shingling is all the rage, but her hair-growth fortune takes it as an insult. (The film’s Swedish title makes the issue clearer: literally, “His Royal Highness the Shingler”, as does the German title “His Royal Highness the Bob-cutter”, something missed in the given English title. Nickolo specializes in a speciality of 1920s women’s fashion: the bob cut, a style inimical to the older generation of Sophie and her long hair-growth tonic industry.)

The agents extort money from André to help stage a coup and restore the dynasty, but he must get more funds from Sophie. He brings the ancient crown and unboxes it before Sophie’s goggling eyes. The pomp of ceremony is delightfully undercut as Sophie reaches out to touch the crown and André slaps away her hand and snaps shut the box.

The flashback to the story of revolution in Tirania is a lesson in how to maximize minimal budget of space and time in a montage. Guards in fezzes and Greek-style fustanella skirts swarm through palace corridors. Huge curtains billow. Gun barrels recoil. Flashes through windows. Soldiers pile on each other. An infant is handed to the young André, the King’s barber. The film uses only a handful of single-scene sets, but clever lighting, staging, and a wind-machine transform them into a microcosm kingdom, a time and place of drama and mystery. Drama and comedy blend in the story’s telling and reception: André having too much fun relaying past events, Sophie being too moved (and too ravenous) at the prospects of a royal future for her granddaughter and herself. Sophie has a fabulous vision of Nickolo and Astrid on the throne, dressed like dolls, crowning her as Queen Mother. (Karin Swanström, as Sophie, is superb and steals every scene she’s in.) André shows her the deeds to the dynasty, another written/visual symbol of aspiration to match its comic brethren: the ornate titles, the hair tonic bottle, the signet ring—even the modes of hair.

There follows a further complication of plot: not knowing her immanent fortune, Astrid wants to be abducted and escape with Nickolo onto the Tiranian ship, which falls into the plans of André and Sophie—and the Tiranian agents.

The machinations of the finale are set up in a complex series of intercutting spaces. In the barbershop: Nickolo, his female client Karin (jealous of Astrid), Astrid (jealous of Karin); elsewhere: two strangers that Astrid phones, pretending to be speaking to the Count, to make Nickolo jealous; finally, the Count himself, who is actually in the barbershop, snoozing in a booth.

I simply don’t have the time to describe the complexities of what happens in the next scene that night. There are ladders, lies, false abductions, real abductions, subterfuge, disguises, piles of money, pistols, hidden figures, speedboats, faulty engines, races to the rescue… It’s like a scene from P.G. Wodehouse orchestrated by Franz Léhar.

The best twist is that the villains’ ship is filled with other young men who have been told they are the Crown Prince of Tirania, each with a thousand-year-old iron crown of Tirania and the deeds to the throne. The villains kidnapped five orphans when the kingdom fell, and fobbed them off on perfect strangers whom they would later extort for profit. “We easily found five idiots”, the crook explains, “sorry—five patriots”, he corrects himself. It’s a delightful way of undercutting the absurdities of Ruritanian pomp—it takes a dig at the characters’ ambitions, as well as ours for expecting a fairy-tale ending. And why (the film surely asks us) should we favour the right of an exiled king to stage a coup d’état? The country’s name suggests Tirania was a tyrannical state, not a democracy. Why be nostalgic for a world of monarchical whim and caste-bound deference? As with Rupert of Hee Haw (though in a far more sophisticated fashion), Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar invites us to question the precepts of the Ruritanian genre on which it is founded.

Yet we do get a kind of fairy-tale ending, albeit one that is magnificently, showily mercantile: The couple marry and create their magical kingdom, a barbershop in Paris: “Grégory & Cie., Salon de Coiffure”, complete with the mythical Tiranian crown and royal accoutrements as part of the décor. Neon signs overlay the screen, the final marker of aspiration triumphantly stamped upon reality itself. Everyone gets what they want, including Sophie, who plays her part in the fantasy of the “king’s” barbershop alongside André. Sincerity didn’t suit them: they are better here as knowing performers. Why try and reclaim a real throne when one can simply create a fake one that’s more worthwhile?

It’s an ending that acknowledges the falsity of nationalist delusion. Balkan immigrants and Swedish merchants set up their own world in central Europe. It’s also a reflection of the film’s own hybridity: a German-Swedish co-production with a French-Chilean leading man and a German-Swedish cast. Better to be a cosmopolitan in Paris than an autocrat in a tiny kingdom. How nice to leave a film grinning from ear to ear.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 3)

Profanazione (1924; It.; Eugenio Perego)

A ripe melodrama from Italy: after her brother Alfredo secretly steals her husband’s money, Giulia (Leda Gys) must ask help from Roberto, who obliges but then forces himself upon her; after Giulia has a second child, her husband Luciano suspects that the daughter growing up in their house is not his…

At last, a bad film! For the sake of my time and fingers, I’m relieved that I don’t have to write or think as much of Profanazione as previous films. That said, it is only an hour long and packs enough unexpected (which is to say, clumsily inserted) twists to give one enough of a reason to stick with it.

But the problems are manifest from the start. The performances are not bad, as such, but rather obvious: when drama strikes, eyes begin to bulge and hands begin to ascend towards heads and faces. The camera is almost inert, though there are enough neat compositions to ward off aesthetic hunger. What disappoints most is the way that the intertitles do too much work, substituting text for visual imagination.

When Giulia visits her rich admirer Roberto, we read: “Before she crosses the threshold of his house, she feels all the anguish of the sacrifice of her woman’s pride.” [N.B. The original word “orgoglio“ (“pride”) is mistranslated as “watch” in the available subtitles on the stream.] All that we see, with only a second or two to linger, is Giulia closing her eyes outside the gates.

Elsewhere, text invokes complex emotions that widening eyes and static poses cannot. “She seeks comfort for her pain in the love of her children, but in vain”, says a title. We see Giulia in her chair. Another explanatory title. Cut back to Giulia in the same chair. And so on, and so on, and so on…

What keeps the film failing completely is the sheer brutality and narcissism of all its male characters, who bully, ignore, abuse, and exploit Giulia and (later) her two daughters. It isn’t sophisticated fare, but it stops you falling asleep. Faced by Roberto’s brutal advances, Giulia fights with her gun and then with her teeth, then (after she has been violated off-screen) takes the flowers Roberto gives her and thrashes his face with them. It’s an extraordinary set-up, but somehow the crudeness of the surrounding film bled dry the feeling it should have invoked. This film was released in 1924. If it had been an Italian film made ten years earlier, I can’t imagine it being this lacking in atmosphere, feeling, texture. It’s a world away from the great “diva” films of the 1910s.

In Profanazione, the male violence keeps coming. A few years later (how time flies!), Roberto threatens to come to Giulia’s house and see “his” daughter. Giulia drives out of town to ward him off. She breaks down. “How fate is against her…” Yes, and the screenwriters too. For Roberto arrives from the other direction and they drive back together. At home, Giulia’s children (dressed in ridiculously frilly tea cosies) play and crash their toy car: cue the inexplicable sight of Giulia and Roberto plunging off a cliff.

The husband, Luciano, arrives at the scene. The best thing he can do to his insensate wife is grab her and shake her arms. (Weirdly, he’s gentler to Roberto, lying on the other bed.) But wait—Luciano has contracted a rare eye-bulging condition. A stroke? No, he is suspicious! As Luciano is refreshing himself on the details of the plot through various bits of incriminating paperwork wrested from the unconscious bodies, Giulia awakes—and it’s her turn for bulging eyes. (It’s contagious.) Luciano acts “like a madman” and searches documents for evidence. (Not only do his eyes bulge, but his neck apparently swells too much for his collar; perhaps he has a parchment allergy?)

Bits of the film fly by in-between cuts inflicted by time, others by design. Is anger leeching from the frame, between the frames? Is the melodrama so potent it’s causing the celluloid to buckle, break, flee? The film breaks itself into numbered parts, most of the transitions between parts occurring mid-scene. Thus: we see Giulia sitting. End of Part 3. Part 4: Giulia is still sitting! Oh dear, her eyes are closing. The next day. Luciano is pacing. A telegram.  Giulia is havering in the doorway again. Roberto is in a wheelchair, too feeble for Luciano to slap him about. “I will wait for you to answer until I die!” The nurse (a nun, by the looks of her) says: “If he has sinned, God will punish him—not you.” Roberto lies about which is his child: he says it’s Mimì to protect his real child (I must have missed her name) from wrath. So Luciano goes home to embrace “his” own child and hits the innocent Mimì. “I’ll keep my child, you keep his!” he screams at Giulia. Great stuff, Luciano.

(I’ve already written too much on the film, but I’ve come this far…)

Giulia stomachs this for a scene, then tells Luciano everything: we see again Giulia hitting Roberto with roses, but no more. (How one longs for the film to do something, anything, visually imaginative with memory, feeling, subjectivity etc.) Does Luciano believe his wife or Roberto? But news just in: Roberto is dead. Giulia’s eyes bulge and she walks slowly away. Upstairs, Mimì “falls into an uncontrollable fit of weeping”. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Giulia lifts her arms and prays; her pose dissolves onto an image of the Virgin Mary. It’s one of the film’s few attempts at complex visual design, and all it can reach for is cheap Catholic tat.

The images of birds in a cage, the children superimposed over them, is so obvious that even Luciano gets the message. He finally forgives everyone. And, complete with a duff subtitle translation that somehow suits the lazy sentiment, we read: “The heart wants what its want” [sic]. Now Alfredo returns from his travels (he buggered off early on in proceedings, having caused Giulia’s predicament in the first place) and confesses his role. It’s a shame that Luciano has now recovered his cool so doesn’t vent some rage on Alfredo, who (for my money) has eased his way undeservingly through all trouble.

The film’s last title waves goodbye with a breezy note: “THE END / Good evening, thank you!” It’s as if it senses that we’ll be in a hurry to leave at the end. I certainly was.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 2: part 2)

The second part of Day 2 takes us to two very different silent worlds: a haunted fairground populated by marionettes, and a snow-bound urban apartment populated by a working-class family. I confess I didn’t have the time to watch the filmed intros today (or any day) so I cannot tell you about the day’s themes, only reflect on the films themselves and how they (one, at least) link to previous films in the festival…

Die Grosse Liebe einer kleinen Tänzerin [Das Kabinett des Dr Larifari] (1924; Ger.; Alfred Zeisler and Kictor Abel)

This is a terrifying film. Though the film’s given title (The Great Love of a Little Dancer) offers little sense of its content, it’s alternate title (The Cabinet of Dr Larifari) is a clearer signal to its style, mode, and method. Here is a nightmare version of a nightmare film: a doll’s hallucination of Dr Caligari.

The world is immediately recognizable. Recognizable yet different. A distorted version of the distorted sets of Caligari. It’s a misremembered recreation of the earlier film. It’s a dream recalling details but not the whole, or the whole but not the details. Where are we? Glimpses of a city behind the fair. We are on the fringes of another reality.

Here are grotesque figures. Distended torsos, bloated bodies, elongated legs, scrunched faces, squished heads. Spiderweb lines tingle from their limbs up to the top of the frame. Mr Adolar is a thin, pinched voyeur. Esmerelda is not grotesque, tough her gentle smile is just as carved as Adolar’s smirk. Adolar tickles her chin. My skin crawled. Everyone walks slowly, awkwardly. Which is to say they do not “walk” as such. They are led, guided, controlled. The awkwardness is inherent in this world. Like the painted sets of Caligari­—where even light and shadow are unable to move, to escape that dreadful, fixed world—the dolls of Larifari move without will. They move slowly, unable to provide their own momentum.

Larifari stares jealously. He always stares jealously. He can’t help it. Jealousy is furiously inscribed in his face. His face has no other expression, no other purpose. He is there to be jealousy.

There are characters with extendable legs, jack-in-the-box spines, punch-bag faces.

Here is Leonidas, Esmerelda’s line-tamer lover.

And here is his lion. A talking lion with possessed eyes. A terrifying companion. A companion who follows with an absurd leaping step. Like a giant flea.

Larafari is frightened and so falls into a bucket. Low comedy turns sinister. Larafari swears eternal revenge. Of course it will be eternal, he cannot change. His motives are as fixed as his face, his spine.

Superimposed vision of Larafari in Esmerelda’s room. A curse: Every man who comes near her will have their head literally turned. His words come in a jumble of rearranging letters. Yes, the text is animate: but the letters march and wheedle like dolls; even punctuation performs jerky, awkward, acrobatics.

Here is a man like a mashed pumpkin who lifts weights. Here are Knockenmus and Bruchspinat (Bonepulp and Brokenspinach). The names are ciphers of a childish nightmare. They are an infant’s plate of mashed food come to life.

The curse takes hold. The head-turned victims must visit Professor Mordgeschrei (Pr. Deathknell), the Miracle Doctor. Why must they visit him? Why is there no other recourse? Because! Because there is no reality beyond the frame. There is no city beyond the fairground. As in Caligari, there is no escape. The film gestures to a space beyond without ever suggesting it exists as a reality. The outside world is a painted flat, a model. The sky is painted. The horizon is an infinite impossibility.

Dolls with backward heads twitch and writhe. The doctor’s lair opens its moustache-mouth door. The doctor assembles himself: it is Larafari! Esmerelda reveals her second face: one of fixed terror. There can be no transition between expressions. Each is fixed, with the threat of permanent fixity. Transition is for the living.

He decapitates then re-capitates the circus folk in a crude head-swap operation. (Even the grammar of the frame aids and abets him: masking the heads in three dreadful vignettes, surrounded by darkness.)

Meanwhile the lion is being tortured by its tail trapped in the door and endlessly elongating. (Yet I can’t bear the thought of it escaping, of coming in, of appearing in the scene in order to “help” me.)

Esmerelda is naked. Her stiff hands cover herself. Is she tied down? I cannot tell. But it matters not. A different logic is at work.

Larafari has a saw. He approaches.

Thank god we don’t see the operation. It is an unthinkable process.

Esmerelda is sawn in half, but still she takes care to cover her breasts. What dignity is left to her?

The lion attacks Larifari and makes him scatter his limbs. Is he dead? Or can he escape the limits of his own construction?

Esmerelda has lost Leonidas. In despair, she commits suicide by falling off the bed and shattering.

But it’s all a dream! Or is it? No, it’s all a film. The dolls are put back into their Piccolo Film coffin.

As I said, this is a terrifying film.

Just Around the Corner (1921; US; Frances Marion)

The Birdsong family live in a poor district of the city. The widowed Ma has a heart condition which will soon kill her. Her son Jimmie is a young lad on the cusp of manhood. Her daughter Essie is dating a young huckster, Joe. Ma hopes Essie will marry, and worries for both her and her son providing for themselves when she is gone. The film is an interesting counterpart to Yes and No: more successful in some regards, less in others. There are no stars here, the most famous name being the film’s author-director. But the emotional success of the story, manipulative though it is, crept up on me slowly and surely.

Yes, this film has “Scenario and direction by Frances Marion”. Another woman’s name at the head of a picture, adapted from a story written by another female author. And the film has the same intelligent female eye for detail, meaning, for social pressures.

Here are glimpses of the city streets. Real faces, real bodies, wrapped up. Rich photography, clothed in rich tinting.

Ma (Margaret Seddon) can frown and smile at once; love and worry are one and the same. As with Norma Talmadge’s character of Minnie, it is the moments when Ma is left alone that move me. There is her pain when Jimmie leaves without kissing her goodbye, and her gladness when he returns and they embrace. (And there, in a picture frame on the wall, is a photo of her with her lost husband. It’s never highlighted, but there it is, the past—her past—present in the background.)

The film’s painted title designs are most tasteful than Yes or No.

Essie works in a flower shop. The lighting is beautiful, but the work is visibly hard. (I recognize the same real hands that are in the flower shop scenes of Kirsanoff’s masterpiece Ménilmontant (1924).) The texture of hands roughened, hardened, darkened by labour. The texture of human skin. Real faces. A curious sensation: the sheer beauty of the photography and tinting, and the harshness of the work on screen.

This is a film that knows how its world—our world—is run, and who runs it: the boss evades the law by getting his women to work at home on Saturdays. The boss is also predatory. Jimmie tries to be a man. His gait is forced. He looks absurd. He is trying to help. The boss feigns a punch. Jimmie recoils. Essie placates the boss. The world runs as ever.

The print is superb, but here is the first sign of real decay. The films mottles, becomes blotched and bleached. Decay flickers over Jimmie’s face when he tries to stand up to his boss. He is trying to look like a man, to make time artificially speed up. But here is the real sign of passing time: the boy’s face is being eaten away by the death of celluloid. His face is long eaten away by now.

Ma is at the window. A capsule of sadness. (I wished the sight of her here had lingered, her loneliness is so tragic.)

Jimmie tries to force himself to be a man. He shaves. Essie: “What are you shaving Jimmie, your eyebrows?” It’s a great line, followed by an intrusive, weird closeup of a few hairs on the boy’s chin.

Lulu is Essie’s friend, but we distrust her immediately: she’s dressed up, judgemental of Ma. Her carelessness is hurtful. When she disparages Ma (“You certainly forgot the ‘Welcome’ on your doormat, dearie”), she insults us. When Lulu gets Essie a job as an usherette at a theatre, Ma is upset: “It’s night work, I’m afraid of it”. There is something unsaid here, an experience unrelated by Ma. It’s a nod to the position of women and their exploitability. We’ve already seen how Essie’s boss behaves. Nothing is spelt out, but it’s there, lurking outside the safety of the frame.

Lulu makes up Essie for her role, and Ma frets again: “It’s not about lipstick—it’s what it might lead to.” It sounds absurd, but Ma speaks as a figure from an earlier generation, the generation voiced in Griffith’s Biograph films, where fears of being a “painted woman” and all that might imply are explored in numerous scenarios. It’s also a worry about how men will read Essie. Ma wants to obey one set of rules (voiced by her, but set by men) to not fall foul of another set of expectations (again, set by men). And on the mirror behind Essie is a photo, indistinct, of her father.

Now we meet Essie’s boyfriend, first via a photo she has of him. It’s a ludicrous pose, a ludicrous look. He is comic, but is he more than that? He first appears in the flesh trying to impress his peers by balancing a hat on his nose. Now he’s hawking tickets at inflated prices to a man in a shop. He’s a wrong’un, no doubt.

We are in the changing room of theatre. It’s a feminine space, but it’s overlooked by the male space of the dark street alley—where men can tap the caged window to get there attention.

Essie is taken to “a sixty-cent restaurant”—a cost-based denomination that Balzac would have appreciated, describing a life through a balance sheet of daily costs and expectations. (Balzac: “We only resent spending money on necessities.”)

Will Jimmie come home to meet Ma for the first time? Ma hopes so. Her children are out but she tells her neighbour and cries because she is happy. Like her frowning smile, her joy is expressed through a means shared by sadness.

Joe avoids all talk of marriage. He whistles as Essie leans in to press him on the issue. His character is played for laughs, at first, but it’s clear that the laughs are expressive of his entirely superficial nature: he laughs off all responsibility. His laughter grates, his lightness irritates, angers.

When he reaches the Birdsong apartment, Joe stops at the entrance. He says he has a celluloid collar and worries: “the fireside ain’t no place for me. I might blow your mother to smithereens!” It’s a good line (though I now resist laughing at anything this foul character says or does), but I immediately think of Jimmie’s face blotched with decay. The character refers to the medium that captures his life on screen: a life that is flammable, dangerous, at risk of instant disappearance.

And yes, of course he runs off without coming in. And it’s so hurtful. We’ve already seen him flirt with another woman; he lies, cheats, he’s a coward. The film is squeezing my outrage gland. It’s difficult to resist.

“Winter is beautiful to fur-wrapped you and me…” an intertitle states. An interesting assumption about our class, compared to the characters. Winter is beautiful and harsh on screen. It’s real snow, real snow piled up on the streets. It looks beautiful but we see what it means to have to slip and slide across the street and huddle in doorways and shops to keep warm. Essie doesn’t want to put on a warm coat because it doesn’t look fashionable—fashionable, that is, accord to men’s tastes—and because it’s not the done thing to have a cold.

Ma is on her own again. Her whole body sinks under weight of her illness, her sadness. She is alone with a lamp, putting on rouge to look presentable to the boyfriend who will surely never turn up. It’s another tragic little vignette, so telling.

Where are Joe and Essie? They are dancing in a competition, and Joe blames her for losing. He ignores her requests, and she knows it—yet still she tags along, and I hate Joe all the more for it.

Ma and Jimmie are at home. She imagines Essie’s “beau” as like her husband, and the image of her son’s future. It’s a weird dynamic, imagining all the male figures in her family as father-figures. But I take it to be the depth of her feeling for her lost husband. Everything links back to him, to the loss of him. It’s this sense that takes hold of the last scenes, and is so moving. She has led a whole life up to know that we never see, but now we glimpse something of it, its intensity, its depth.

Ma is on her deathbed. It’s the only time we see her with her hair down. It looks darker, looser. Jimmie worries about her, saying she looks “queer”. In fact, I think she looks young—her hair falling over her shoulders and the pillow. Yet she looks afraid, too. (And yes, I’m welling up at this point, and even now, rewriting my notes.)

Essie is running through the snow to chase Joe. Ma has said that it would kill her not to see him now, of all nights. She has forgotten her coat, but it’s too urgent to go back. She chases Joe down. “Let her die”, he says, and my god finally Essie slaps him.

I was already in the grip of the film, but when a stranger offers Essie his coat on the street and she brings him back home… well, yes, I was crying in spite of my reservations. It was nice to see an act of unapologetic kindness on screen. The stranger sits down on the bed, holds Ma’s hand. “Ain’t she pretty?” Essie says, and the stranger strokes Ma’s cheek. (Even as I type this, my description sounds mawkish. No doubt the film is mawkish, but I’ve given up pretending I had “critical distance” at this point.) “It’s a strong hand like Papa’s was, Essie. It makes me feel so good.”

The new family have dinner, the stranger being the kind of male presence lacking in these women’s lives: kind, gentle, unthreatening. “You are just like their father—big, strong and friendly…”, says Ma. It’s another glimpse of Ma’s past, long gone—and it’s such a gentle scene, her death. You can’t help feeling she deserves this last illusion, that the sensation of the stranger’s hand on hers has been years in coming.

The final scene—of the spring in which we see Essie married to the stranger—is a little comic and a little sad. It is homely. Yes, we’ve arrived at home at last—but there is Ma, just a photograph on the wall, absent—just like the photograph on Ma’s wall of her own husband, absent.

The last moments of Just Around the Corner make an interesting companion to Yes or No. As in the latter, in Just Around the Corner Essie puts on a record. They sing together. But there is no complexity here, no ambiguity. Yes, there is sadness, but it’s a neat kind of sadness. There is no hesitation about what the film has meant, or what the new family means. The future is settled, uninteresting. Yes or No offers doubt and leaves you thinking. Yes or No is a more sober film, if a less moving one than Just Around the Corner.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2022, Day 2: part 1)

The first part of Day 2 is devoted to Norma Talmadge, with a short from 1912 and a feature from 1920.

Mrs. ‘Enry’ Awkins (1912; US; Van Dyke Brooke)

Norma Talmadge is surrounded by a motley collection of men: her father (a gout-ridden drunk), her father’s friend Bill (a rough who’s happy to punch down), her lover Henry (not without charm, but his arm-in-a-sling suggests not the strongest), her father’s doctor (who manages to reconcile father and daughter, even if he can’t stop the father drinking). It’s Talmadge who dominates every scene she’s in: force-feeding her father, slapping Bill, dominating Henry. The film offers a series of snapshots into a working-class life, fast-forwarding through an unspecified period of time. Is it days? Weeks? Liza is at home, on the street, at home, at a theatre; she is making Henry jealous, she is marrying him; she feeds her father, she is estranged from her father, she is reconciled with her father. There are several suggestions that we are in London: the policeman’s uniform, the selection of street views, the fashion. When I say fashion, I mean trousers: Bill’s dog-tooth pair that he wears to take Liza to a variety show, Henry’s pair with a double row of buttons that he wears for his wedding to Liza. (There are more buttons on his cap; a budget pearly king). It’s a curiosity. A few pages from a Victorian novel, whole chapters missing, with glimpses of a life imagined. Talmadge’s eyes are more intelligent than the film from which she stares out.

Yes or No (1920; US; R. William Neill)

Norma Talmadge plays two roles: Margaret Vane, a rich society woman with a husband suffering from overwork and a heart condition; Minnie Berry, a poor working-class woman whose husband, Jack, works too hard (for Mr Vane) to spend time with his wife. Both women are pursued by ne’er-do-wells: the lounge lizard Paul Derreck woos Mrs Vane, the dodgy lodger Ted Leach woos Minnie. Which wife will say “Yes” to their wooer, and which “No”?

The film’s opening titles are revealing: they wear their moral message on their sleeve, they are aesthetically dubious, and they foreground the status of Norma Talmadge. It’s a mark of her prestige that the most significant title of the credits is her own boast of personal quality control. She signs the title with the signature signature-style of a D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille. It’s a nice reminder that there were powerful women in Hollywood who could hold their own against the big male names of the industry. Of course, the film is also “presented by” Joseph M. Schenck, Talmadge’s husband. The family feel is completed by the fact that Minnie’s sister Emma (who is also Margaret’s maid) is played by Natalie Talmadge, the sister of Norma Talmadge. (And yes, to extend the family machinations, the sometime wife of Buster Keaton, Schenck’s employee.)

Margaret has a luxurious home, filled with everything soft, luxurious, and fluffy one can imagine. This includes a ludicrous little dog, a kind of animate powder puff. (Silent it may be on screen, but you can sense how irritating is its bark.) In her world, even the flower her admirer gives her is luxurious: not just a single flower, but a huge sprig, almost as tall as Margaret.

It’s almost a relief to go into Minnie’s home. Almost, because it is crammed, albeit with life. Children scamper messily, dinner is always on the boil, washing always needing doing. Talmadge lets Minnie be more expressive, more open, more sympathetic, than Margaret. Makeup and hair ally us with Minnie. As Margaret, Talmadge sports a blonde wig that looks faintly intimidating; one cannot imagine stroking her hair. Minnie’s hair is Talmadge’s own; it is pulled back naturally, a little untidily, practically; one longs for her husband to reach out and show her some tenderness.

Yes, Talmadge allows herself more room for expression with Minnie—but it’s so deft, so subtle, so telling. She finds a book for her husband, gives it to him; she smiles at his closeness, and when he leaves without a kiss or a touch, she holds her pose while letting her face and body give a kind of sigh, of tiredness, of sadness. When she thinks, we see her think, and sometimes her glance brushes past the camera as her eyes move across the scene. You want to offer her a smile, to tell her it’ll be alright in the end. Goodness, yes, Talmadge is magnificent: the way she looks when no-one but us can see her. Minnie’s husband leaves for the evening and her face falls; he comes back to kiss her, and her face lights up. When the lodger touches her arm after giving her a gift, she is alone and feels her arm where he touched her: as if remembering what physical intimacy was, or might be—and whose intimacy she wants.

But for all these magical little moments, the film is a frustrating watch. Frustrating, because the film plays out exactly according to its set-up (and allegorical names) suggest. Frustrating, because Talmadge’s subtlety is surrounded by clumsiness. I’m thinking principally of the intertitles, most of which have text superimposed over crass painted designs.

If I had no text of my own and simply shared the film’s titles with you, these background images would tell the whole film: I can’t think of a film which so earnestly spells out everything in this same way.

Mr Vane’s doctor is introduced with a doctor’s bag under his name. Fine. But do we need to see a knife and fork on a table under the title announcing that dinner’s ready? Or a movie ticket in a title saying they’re off to the movies? Minnie’s brother, Tom, speaks his mind, but is he so bolshy that he needs a lit bomb under his words criticizing their boss?

The ne’er-do-well characters have it worse. It isn’t enough that Paul Derreck wears a sinister smoking jacket or kisses Margaret’s hand in a way that makes your flesh creep. No, his words are imposed over images of mantraps, chains, or—and here my mouth literally fell open with disbelief—an image of Satan lurking in the shadows. Really? Yes, really.

And Minnie’s husband doesn’t get off the hook, either. His dreams of designing a washing machine give rise to fabulous visions of their golden future. The film doesn’t show us a pie in the sky, but it might as well: a washing machine on a mountain, blazing bright over the metropolis. Mythical domes dreaming in soft clouds. I can do without this sort of thing, thanks.

The film, too, eventually (to paraphrase a contemporary author) puts down the needle of insinuation and picks up the club of statement. When things get serious and Jack rescues Minnie from the (by now) openly sexually aggressive Leach, it’s fists to the rescue: Leach is pummelled, then unceremoniously dumped down a staircase, and the film isn’t even interested to know if he’s crippled for life. Meanwhile, Margaret leaves her husband for Paul, which is the final blow to the husband’s heart. He dies, and Paul is revealed “not to find the widow as attractive as the wife”. After threatening to kill Paul if he doesn’t marry her, the pair fight and Margaret is left in her false paradise of a home. Emma is still there, still sympathetic. But she too takes her leave. There is a ghost of a kiss between widow and maid. It’s the only sincere kiss in Margaret’s story, and it’s barely made. (A different film and a different director might have made this moment more loaded.) The kiss is gone, the maid leaves, Margaret picks up a gun. Fade to black. Title: “The world soon forgot the death of Margaret Vane.” For once, the words of the title do the talking: it’s a blunt, sad, brutal transition.

And what a relief that the title designs fall away for some of the most intimate moments of dialogue at the end of the film. Their absence is part of why the final scene is so delicate, so uneasy. The Berry couple live in a new apartment, well-furnished (but not excessively so, like the Vanes’). The children are happy, playing with their uncle Tom. And the married couple? “There wouldn’t be much unhappiness in the world, Min—if all women were like you”, says Jack. “Perhaps they would be—if it wasn’t for the men”, Minnie replies. It’s an intelligent reply, whose weight of meaning is lost on Jack. For him, it’s a matter of men “guessing” women: “I’m glad I guess right”, is how he concludes his philosophy. Minnie goes to the record player and puts on a record: “Happiness” is the song. The music plays. She smiles. She looks over at her sister and the sister’s boyfriend, snuggling on the sofa. Her smile extends, then fades. She takes in a deep breath. Before she exhales, there is a cut. We see Jack, his eyes wandering without object, smoke rolling in his mouth, his fingers drumming his knee; he almost turns to look over his shoulder. Cut to black. Fade in: The End. This scene is one of the film’s finest. Jack and Minnie stay locked in their own thoughts—hers clearly deeper than his. Each are poised for some expression of thought that is never given.

Paul Cuff