Pilgrimage: NOW PLAYING, 1933

Three Cornered Moon plays Milwaukee this week. Paramount has a pretty extensive ad campaign for this proto-screwball comedy.

 

 

 

The comparison to the Marx Bros. (whose Duck Soup is coming soon) is weird. I mean, the Marxes were real-life performers, so yes, they're "paid to be goofy," but it's not as if the Rimplegar family is real. Colbert, Arlen, et al were being paid to be goofy just as much as the Marxes were. But maybe we have here a hint at the difference between screwball comedy and the Marx Bros. style. With the Marxes, it's impossible to suspend disbelief; regardless of what the brothers are called in any given picture, they're their standard selves every time and we all know it. But with screwball, perhaps, we're encouraged to believe in and empathize with the characters, even if we know they're played by familiar stars. That's not the whole picture, but it's part of it. Discuss it amongst yourselves.

At the Warner, William Powell is snooping around.

 

Based on my short study of the advertising for John Gilbert's talkies, I take it as a warning sign whenever movie ads talk about the sort of role that made the star famous. You can probably infer that the star isn't quite as famous as he was. Fortunately for Powell, his greatest popularity was yet to come, but it would take a different studio to set him right.

However it fits in Powell's career, this Michael Curtiz picture looks like prime Pre-Code material. Here's the original trailer from TCM.com



The Veterans of Foreign Wars were in Milwaukee for a convention this week, and some of the big theaters programmed accordingly.

Here's a weird way of promoting your picture while barely saying a word about it.

John Ford's Pilgrimage had been sitting in my DVR queue for nearly a year before this week's article gave me reason to give it a look. I wonder what an audience of veterans made of it. Indeed, I wonder what Ford fans today make of it, since here the old sentimentalist gives us one of cinema's most hateful mothers. Henrietta Crosman gives an alarming performance as a crabby old lady who at first won't let her son fight in the Great War, then practically pushes him into it rather than have him marry a girlfriend she considers trash. The boy suffers a brutally ignominious death while the girl gives birth to his son, condemned to be a bastard because they didn't have time to marry. After the fact, the old lady still shuns the girl, and her own grandson, as if blaming them for her son's death. Then the picture becomes a fish-out-of-water comedy as Crosman reluctantly joins a delegation of Gold Star Mothers on the title trip to France to see their sons' graves. An ominous tone hangs over the comedy as the mother remains crabby while we suspect that a terrible catharsis is coming. Even though Ford predictably softens in the second half, having Crosman save a young Frenchman from suicide so she can see the error of her ways by learning his story, a mirror of her son's, and setting things right, the first hour of Pilgrimage probably struck many 1933 viewers, even those grown cynical about the war, like a punch in the face. I can imagine how Milwaukee audiences might have felt if that goofy ad drew them to the picture. But maybe I should give them more credit. Problematic as it is, Pilgrimage is an admirably ambitious picture, the first half especially showing Ford in his High Art mode, and Crosman's is a convincing, compelling performance. It's certainly a unique way of addressing people's ambivalence about World War I, and it's hard to imagine Ford or anyone else updating it for World War II. Vietnam, maybe.

AGE OF CONSENT (1969)

There's a new movie of The Tempest coming out this fall. The gimmick is that Prospero will be played by Helen Mirren. In this age of inclusive casting, I say: Why not? I expect that when the film comes out, someone will find it ironic that Mirren took the part, given that she made her film debut in a movie some believe was inspired by the same Shakespeare play. Of course, it seems sometimes as if all you need to do is make a movie with an old man on an island and someone will say it was inspired by The Tempest, especially if it comes late in a filmmaker's career. Age of Consent was Michael Powell's final feature film, and the director is arguably more of a Prospero figure than the painter played by co-producer James Mason. Powell found himself in Australia after the British film industry effectively blackballed him for making Peeping Tom in 1960. Exiled from the studio resources that had made his great collaborations with Emeric Pressburger possible, Powell had to find ways to make magic on the cheap. That he succeeded doesn't make Age another Tempest. At least it's less interesting to me as a variation on Shakespeare than as a variation on Powell's own past work.

Mason plays Bradley Monahan, an abstract artist who can't stand to see his works treated like commodities in a New York gallery. He flees to his Australian homeland, to a little island near the Great Barrier Reef, in search of solitude, excepting his dog Godfrey. He gains fresh inspiration after encountering Cora (Mirren), a feral teenager who catches crustaceans to sell to local grocers. Cora toils for her wicked grandmother, but is saving some money of her own to move to Brisbane on in the hope of becoming a hairdresser. Bradley is a new customer, the proceeds from whom Cora can keep completely from the drunken hag of a grandma, but when the painter deduces that Cora has stolen someone else's chicken to sell to him, he suggests a more honest way of making her living: posing for him. While he doesn't seem to have done figurative art before, Cora stirs new creativity in him, and his artistic appreciation of her budding body makes her aware of her awakening womanhood. Others have been aware of it already, but she knows how to beat down unwanted suitors. The question is whether Bradley himself is a suitor or not....

Maybe Age of Consent is Michael Powell's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Age of Consent is taken from a painter's novel, and the main characters are more Pygmalion and Galataea than Prospero and Miranda. That relationship reminded me of a similar relationship in Powell's most famous film, The Red Shoes. In that story, initiated by Pressburger and adopted by Powell later, Boris Lermontov is a ballet impresario and Victoria Page his star dancer in the making. A visionary but not an artist in his own right, Lermontov shapes Page into his desired image through intellectual and emotional manipulation. Vicky is torn between her loyalty to dance and her love for a composer -- Lermontov has told her that she can't have both art and love -- and the tension destroys her. In Age, Powell directs a kind of do-over of the fundamental archetypal relationship at the heart of Shoes. While Lermontov may see himself as the real total artist and Vicky as his model, in Age that's the actual relationship between the leads. Cora becomes a willing servant of Bradley's art, eventually putting aside any agenda of her own. As a true artist, Bradley's mentorship of Cora is free of the manipulative, exploitative quality that makes Lermontov a kind of villain. And in an ending that actually took me by surprise, but struck me afterward as an old director's self-gratifying fantasy, Bradley's apparently selfless dedication to art is rewarded by Cora's sexual desire.

Powell's achievement in Age of Consent is kind of magical. Without the resources to create the incredible special effects of his Forties films, the director put his artistic stamp on the film with details as simple as set painting. Bradley gradually transforms his sabbatical shack into a dazzling interior, complete with dazzling sawblade sun, and once he's fully settled in you know that you're in Michael Powell's world. He also makes the most of a lush location; Bradley's paradise combines the best of nature and art.

Young Mirren is a kind of special effect in her own right, setting a precedent for decades of cinematic nudity with which her reputation as a great actress has only recently caught up. James Mason is a hero merely for facilitating a final Powell feature, but he was clearly a true believer in this project, giving a looser, livelier performance than I'd ever seen from him. With his beard and his hint of an Australian accent he seems determined not to do "James Mason," and he succeeds admirably. The only major fault I can find with this film is Jack MacGowran's obnoxious performance as Bradley's disreputable crony, who brings nearly needless plot complications with him to the island. On the other hand, Godfrey gives a great performance, almost award-worthy if there was a supporting animal category.

Powell's luck remained bad, however, and Age of Consent was shown in most markets in mutilated form. Fortunately, I never got around to seeing it until Sony made it available in a two-film set with A Matter of Life and Death, one of the director's Forties triumphs. Age is not embarrassed by the company.

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951)

Last Sunday's showing on TCM was my first encounter with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's conceptual follow-up to their classic The Red Shoes (1948). Hoffmann has been available for a few years now as a Criterion DVD, but despite being a Powell fan I've steered clear of it. That's because I'd seen their later effort, 1955's Oh Rosalinda! (on the big screen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, on a double-bill with The Elusive Pimpernel), and was unimpressed by it. But now there was no avoiding it; I owed The Archers a look at what many people say was their last go at the peak of their powers.

So you've rightfully knocked the world on its worshipful butt with the ballet sequence from Red Shoes, one part Busby Berkeley, another part Salvador Dali. How do you go about topping it? Why, why don't we make a whole film that way! Except that there's a problem right out of the gate. The Red Shoes ballet is, well, a ballet, composed and choreographed for the movie itself. But The Tales of Hoffmann is an opera from the 19th century. When you film a ballet as a subjective, psychological, surrealist dream fantasy, you're under no creative constraint whatsoever. Accordingly, the Red Shoes ballet is a milestone of cinema. With opera, as Powell and Pressburger learned, though perhaps not until after the fact, you can't be so free. You're grounded by the lyrics, or at least The Archers choose to be. They want us to see the actors singing the lyrics. Never mind that the actors are mostly dancers (the Red Shoes triumvirate of Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine leading the team) and that they're only lip-synching for opera singers in the recording studio. There's nothing wrong with that given the circumstances, and it'd actually be more reason to do fewer "dialogue" scenes. But here our filmmakers take a literal approach, trusting in their dancers' ability to sell the dubbed-in singing with their pantomime skills. They acquit themselves well enough, Helpmann as the villain in all the segments doing best, but the fault isn't with them but with the way that Powell and Pressburger hobble themselves by taking this approach. Like Busby Berkeley, they had smashed the proscenium arch in Red Shoes and turned dance into a genre of cinema. But Tales of Hoffmann is inescapably stagy no matter what tricks the directors try. As a result, no matter how creative the set and costume design (and the latter is very good), the magic of Red Shoes, for me at least, just wasn't there.

Robert Helpmann looking rather evil in one of The Tales of Hoffmann
(image from www.stylusmagazine.com)

Hoffman may interest fans of fantasy cinema. The film follows the Offenbach opera in presenting three stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann as episodes of the writer's own life. He tells his tales in a tavern during the intermission of a ballet, expecting a ballerina to meet him there after the show. He has a rival (Helpmann in the movie) who strongly resembles all the villains in his tales. All the tales have a supernatural element. The Tale of Olympia is the story of Dr. Copellius's living doll and Hoffmann's infatuation with her under the influence of magic spectacles. The Tale of Giulietta concerns a Venetian courtesan and a magic mirror that can steal Hoffmann's reflection. The Tale of Antonia features a young woman who is forbidden from singing by a father who thinks it'll kill her, and a malevolent Doctor Miracle who entices her into a fatal performance. Through all his adventures, and at the tavern, Hoffmann is attended by a young man, Nicklaus, who in the opera and the film is played by a woman. What the opera tells you, and the film does not, is that Nicklaus is actually an honest-to-goodness Muse in disguise, hence the female performance. Cinematically each episode has its moments, but for me they came only sporadically. While the tales are German and the opera is French, the libretto was adapted into English.

Wikipedia tells me that, of all people, George A. Romero has proclaimed Tales of Hoffmann his favorite film of all time. Considering that the Tale of Olympia ends with the living doll being torn to pieces, I can actually believe it. Otherwise this is more likely to be a favorite of opera fans and those who think that art direction can carry a picture by itself. This is another style-vs-substance showdown in which style loses. Hoffmann is similar to Sin City (if in this way only) in its conceptual misguidedness, but like Robert Rodriguez's comic-book experiment, it probably has fans for whom style is enough. Fortunately for me, TCM followed it up immediately with The Red Shoes, and my faith in Powell and Pressburger was restored.

Here's a clip from Hoffmann, featuring Moira Shearer in a skintight costume in a sequence that was cut out of the film for many years. Unlike the rest of the film, this is pure ballet, and some people might consider Shearer alone worth the price of admission.