Gunshots fired at Royal Albert Hall ! Assassination attempt.

Gunshots fired at the Royal Albert Hall ! The broadcast of the performance was suddenly interrupted by a scream, then silence.  What happened ? The BBC made an announcement.. "We have to apologise to listeners for the delay in the broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall. An attempt has been made to assassinate the distinguished European diplomat  Monsieur Ropa, who was attending the concert."  Fortunately, the scream, from a woman in the orchestra stalls, distracted the gunman, whose shot deflected. Mr Ropa was not killed. With chilling sangfroide, the concert resumed, as if nothing had happened.

On the eve of the First Night of the BBC Proms 2019, (read my review here) a visit to the Royal Albert Hall as it was in 1934, when people in boxes wore top hats and tuxedos, with medals, and concert goers in the stalls wore fur coats and evening dress (white tie compulsory?). In Alfred Hitchcock's The Man who Knew Too Much, (available from the British Film Institute) we get to see the RAH as it was then.  The basic structure of stage and stalls hasn't changed much - a bit less cheerful then, maybe.  The circular corridor we know now, then opened onto curved doors, which led straight onto the street, where taxis conveniently lined up, waiting. The movie's also interresting because it shows how Hitchcock and his audiences were "European-minded". Jill Lawrence (played by Edna Best) is a champion sharp shooter who competes on the European circuit. She misses out when her shot is interrupted by a chiming watch, the significance of which is revealed later. Later, her companion is shot, while they dance, but as he dies in her arms, warns her of a plot, and tells her to get her husband Bob to retrieve a note (concealed in a shaving brush in his hotel room) and deliver it to the British Consulate. Meanwhile Jill and Bob's daughter Betty is kidnapped. Though Jill looks about 25, (she was 35), the girl looks 14! (the actress was 17).  So Bob doesn't dare inform the British authorities, either, though the Foreign Office knows what's going on.

Bob and his friend manage to penetrate the den where the assassins hide out, disguised as the Temple of a secret order of initiates who worship the sun.  A send up of the esoteriuc, spiritiaulist cults, so popular from Victorian times.  It's headed by a strange eccentric Englishwoman Nurse Agnes,  and an even stranger man called Abbott, played by Peter Lorre, newly escaped from the Nazis.  He didn't speak English at the time, so delivers his lines phonetically, which adds to the surreal situation. Bob and his friend join in the hymns, singing out of tune. The plotters aren't fooled and hold them captive.  Bob overhears Abbott telling Ramon, the assassin,  to fire when the performance reaches a specific climax. Luckily, there's a scuffle, and Bob's friend gets away to warn Betty, who heads to the Royal Albert Hall.  The music is pretty horrible, a pastiche which vaguely resembles RVW's A Sea Symphony but is suitably loud enough to hide the sound of gunshots.  Jill scans the auditorium, and, being a sharp shooter, spots the gun and screams, throwing the gunman off his target.  Just as, implausibly, Abbott's watch had thrown her off target in Switzerland, so Ramon won the tournament.  Jill follows Ramon to the hideout, followed by the police, who break in and shoot Abbott, when yet again, his watch beeps at an inopportune moment.

Because the plot centres around the device of using loud concert repertoire to conceal an assassination, Hitchcock needed a suitable piece of music which would not have been familiar to real concert goers, to keep them in suspense.  Arthur Benjamin was commissioned to write the piece which he named the Storm Clouds Cantata. It's a pastiche of the piece in the film, complete with high dramatic mezzo soprano and chorus. Since it runs less than 9 minutes, and requires fairly big forces, it's not the easiest piece to programme, except as a novelty.  In the early years of the 20th century, cinema was still a "new" genre, which many recognized as a potentially new form for "serious" art combining visuals, music and storytelling.  Even in the silent era, music was specially composed to be performed live while screening. (Please see my piece on Armas Järnefelt : Song of the Scarlet Flower 1919 HERE and on René Clair, Hanns Eisler, Eisenstein and many more.  Because the genre was so new, there was a learning curve, figuring out different ways to blend music with visuals.  By the very nature of film, narrative tends to take precedence, so music is usually employed, as in theatre, as incidental to drama. In rare cases, notably the works of Hanns Eisler, the music itself is integral to the development of concept.  That's why I have so much respect for Arthur Bliss's music for Alexander Korda's Things to Come.  Please read more here.  Bliss knew the horrors of war first hand and was very much taken by the idea that war might be eradicated. His music wasn't incidental, but integral to the film, where long sequences are shot using state of the art cinematographic techniques, which forward the narrative in the expressionist terms which give the film so much of its power. 

Things to Come - Arthur Bliss and Futurism

What will the next hundred years bring to mankind ?  Time to revisit the British cinema classic Things to Come, based on H G Wells' story The Shape of Things to Come which was a sensation in its time (1936) produced by Alexander Korda, directed by William Cameron Menzies, with music by Arthur Bliss.

In Everytown, which resembles Central London, it's Christmas. Crowds are rushing round fancy shops lit with new-fangled neon lights.  In the sound track, a choir sings the carol "God rest you Merry Gentleman" on the phrase, "May nothing you dismay", the brass fanfares scream and the pace slows to rigid march.  Newspaper headlines warn of war. At a family party, kids play with new toys while their elders discuss progress. "If we don't end war", says young Mr Cabal (Raymond Massey), "war will end us". "War stimulates progress" says his optimistic guest.  Suddenly, bells are heard, ringing.  Not for Christmas, though. Sirens sound, and gunfire. Everytown (and the Battleship Dinosaur) is being bombed.  The country mobilizes for war.  Diagonal shots, people running in different directions, rows of soldiers superimposed on one another.  Nothing new for those used to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927 - please read more here) and other futurist films, German, Russian, French and Italian.  Smoke, explosions, bombs, tanks, more aeroplanes together than could fly safely in formation, and poison gas. For Brits, who came to art film later, this must have been thrilling stuff.  Wonderfully discordant music - not what you'd associate with Arthur Bliss. Here's he's wildly uncompromising.  He had, after all, seen war up close. Bliss made a Suite based on the soundtrack, (see below) which premiered before the film was released. Clearly, he knew he was on to something good.

And so the war continues, (to 1970!) the city in ruins, the people reduced to primitive squalor. A  plague "like the Black Death of the Middle Ages" stalks the land. Fearing infection, the healthy turn on the sick.  A man has a car,  but no petrol. It's pulled by horses. Yet even that technology makes him a Chief  (Ralph Richardson) .  Suddenly, a machine lands, a new kind of aeroplane, manned by a man in a black futuristic costume. It's Mr Cabal. He's come from "Wings Over the World". Decades of war have destroyed civilization but WOTW,  "the Brotherhood of Efficiency, the Freemasonry of Science", technocrats pledged to save the world, based in Basra.  Prophetic yet ironic, since strategic control over oil supplies makes much machine-based technology possible. Think of what's happened to modern Iraq.  "We don't approve of independent sovereign states" says Cabal, though his utopia controls the sky (it builds aeroplanes) and seas.  The Chief plays along, helping Cabal, thinking machines will help him with the war, "The Peace of the Strong Arm.... we are warriors, not mechanics ! we have been trained not to think, but to die". Eventually, Cabal gets word to his people and they invade, using a gas that puts people to sleep without killing them, though the Chief drops dead. Thus the Brave New World of Progress, enforced by benevolent  technocrats.More long sequences of machines, production lines, the building of vast machines. Though it's not on the level of Metropolis, this is one of the best sequences in the film, and Bliss's music rises to the occasion - pounding staccato, wailing winds, ferocious brass. Not quite on the level of, say, Antheil's Ballet mécanique or Mosolov's The Iron Foundry or practically anything Varèse, but still....  Had Bliss done more of the same, one wonders where he could have gone. This would have served him well in the brave new world of the Festival of Britain and 1950's progress.

A hundred years after that fateful Christmas, the people of the world live in idealized luxury, under the ground.  Cabal's great-grandson Oswald now heads the Wings Over the World. In this new art deco Paradise there are plans to explore the Moon, using a "Space Gun" (No rockets on the horizon in 1936)  But some things don't change. "What is the point of progress? " cries a new Chief, the demagogue Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke),  his image emblazoned on gigantic screens, preaching to his followers in a chilling foretaste of modern media maipulation, "We demand a halt - the object of life is "happy living" ! ... Let this be the last day of the scientific age - Destroy it ! NOW!"  Whipped up by fear and strange rhetoric,  the crowd roars in assent. Inflamed, they move upon the Space Gun to destroy it and what it stands for, armed with bars of metal, bent on violence.  As the demagogue screams, the mobs march, swarming over the vast machine, like a horde of maddened hornets.  "Beware of the concussion"!" warns Cabal as the Space Gun is fired, to no avail. The capsule heads off towards the moon, in a beam of light. The will to explore cannot be extinguished, "For Man, no rest, no ending...", says Cabal, "til all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him are conquered. For if we are no more than little animals, we must snatch each scrap of happiness .... it is all, or nothing ! which shall it be?"As the screen fades, an unseen choir echoes his words "Which shall it be!" in ringing affirmation.

Please also see my Gunshots fired at the Royal Albert Hall which shows how different Bliss's achievemnt was from "ordinary" music written for film.  In Things to Come, Bliss's music was part of the concept : it was more than music created to provide a soundtrack

Time Capsule - Welsh Clog Dancing

Discovered not long ago in the archives of the British Film Institute, Clog Dance, a documentary which is a time capsule that seems to exist as if in a parallel universe.  The Welsh village of Porthmadog filmed as if  the world outside didn't exist : the streets are empty, the terrraces neat, as if untouched by time. At the turn of the last century, Welsh Slate from the mountains of Ffestiniog  was a major export industry and Porthmadoc an international trading port, where Welsh seamen travelled the world.  By the time the film was made in 1959 that was almost forgotten memory.  Gwenyth Thomas, who was a child then, resolves that her grandchildren should learn their heritage before it's too late.   Even the film-making is surreal : by modern standards Mrs Thomas looks aged, though she's probably only in her 60's and her grandchildren looked like they've stepped out of a time warp that could have existed at any time from the 1920's.  Suddenly, the camera sitches back to the past : Mrs Thomas becomes a little girl, looking out of a window on the harbour, watching a sailor dancing.  The dances are rhythmic, the click of the wooden clogs providing simple percussion. Because the  sailors travelled,  they adapted dance figures they'd seen abroad, even a "cossack dance" for girls as well as boys.  The film shows "the intricate Toby Step", dancing over brooms, and dances to harp accompaniment.

John Edwards, the clog maker, who once made clogs for miners to work in, but now makes clogs for boys to dance in.  The film documents his craftsmanship : he chooses the wood, carving it to fit the curve of the foot, binding the uppers to the wooden base with copper and nails.  Then he cycles (no gears)  through the village, tossing them in front of the new owners’ homes  Mrs Thomas then trains her "new material" as the narrator calls the kids she teaches.  Clog dancing has become the local craze. The Porthmadog dance team become the first to dance in public and win prizes at eisteddfodau. And they don't just dance. In the film they travel by horse cart, sitting on bales of hay. Then home to "tea and Welsh cakes and melting butter".  Most of the scenes are shot with the dancers in costume (bonnets, breeches, aprons) in a room which looks like a farm kitchen, with stone floor and dressers filled with pottery.  Even if this nostalgia is re-created for film,  it's still nostalgia closer to source than  much of the nostalgia industry today.  The teacher in the film was a real dancer — Mrs Parker  (no first name) and the harpist, who also arranged the music was Eleanor Dwyryd, so there is an element of authenticity in this film though it's clearly referencing times that have passed.  But its very innocence gives it charm, and thus sincerity.  Clog Dance is an "orphan" film whose rights holders cannot be traced ("President Pictures,  made with the help of Yr Part'r Gest").  but its legacy lives on. I wonder what happened to the kid in the film ? Some of them  (like George) have such personalities : they can't have been professional actors.   View Clog Dance HERE on the BFI website. 

Please also see my piece on  Nothing Venture : Surreal Nostalgia England 1948 a much stranger film than meets the eye at first, another time warp where everything feels like an eternal, idealized childhood summer where bad guys know their place.

Svatý Václav (St Wenceslaus) Czech icon in film

At the Barbican, Sunday 28th October, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the Czech Republic, a rare screening of the film Svatý Václav (St Wenceslaus), patron saint of Bohemia.  The film was a grand scale spectacular, planned to mark the 1000th anniversary of the assassination of the King on 28th September 935. Hence two national holidays 28th September and 28th October.  Given that the saintly King Vaclav symbolizes Czech identity in so many ways why did the film fall into obscurity, only to be revived fairly recently ? It's not easily available to buy, so catch the 2010 screening in Prague  (no translation -you have to pay attention !) with the original orchestral score by Oskar Nedbal and Jaroslav Křička,or go to the Barbican where it will be accompanied by singers and musicians from Cappella Mariana, the Prague-based early-music ensemble specialising in medieval polyphony.  

Directed by Jan Stanislav Kolár, Svatý Václav is made in a cinematic style similar to Fritz Lang's saga Die Nibelung (1924) (Please read my summary here) so expect stylized acting and costumes, which in fact have their own non-naturalistic charm.  This suits the treatment, part based on historical fact, part on legend, which, given what Vaclav means to the Czech nation, is even more potent.  The film opens with a shot of a fortified castle on a hill : the home of King Bořivoj (played by the director himself) and Queen Ludmily who are baptised as Christians in 873.  As we know from Lohengrin, Christianity was by no means a given in that era.  While hunting in a forest, Prince Vratislav meets Drahomíra, who rides horses like a knight and throws spears like a hero. She's not a Christian but converts to marry him. When their son Vaclav is born, grandmother Ludmila snatches him away at birth and brings him up properly devout.  Vaclav and his brother Boleslav and sister Přibyslava grow up happily in the castle, built like a stockade from whole logs from the surrounding forests.  People dance, sing and trade with foreign merchants, but Vaclav likes praying before a cross of stone.  Even when he's helping in the kitchen, the boy prays so fervently that he burns dinner.  Not surprisngly Drahomíra, estranged from her children, plots revenge, and Ludmily is strangled to death, with her own scarf.  When he hears of his grandmother's death, Vaclav goes into action against the pagans, banging a giant cymbal as a call to arms. Panoramic shots of knights lined up on ridges above the plains, scores of footsoldiers running through valleys, trumpeters blowing horns that look like mammoth tusks.   

Vaclav also has to battle with Germans, led  by Heinrich der Vogler, whose helmet is emblazoned  with the black wings of an eagle, a metre high.  The Germans are fomidable - proper chainmail, bigger horses, but the Czechs hold their own.  Vaclav is injured, but survives. Eventually he captures Heinrich's son (rather effeminate, in this film) but instead of killing him, restores him to his father in exchange for peace.  The Czech knights are welcomed into the German court and presented with holy Christian relics.  Meanwhile Boleslav is plotting, aided by sympathisers of the old order and Drahomíra's old friend, the giant Košvan.  At a feast in the castle, pipers pipe and dancers make merry. Mead is poured from goblets, but Boleslaw plans to poison his brother. A blind harpist sings a ballad about a King showing his sons that a sheaf of staves cannot be broken, though each staff on its own can break.  When the King dies, the brothers fight and are themselves killed by enemies   Boleslav listens and pours away the poison.  Vaclav raises his chalice and prays.  He embraces Boleslav and leaves.  On the battlements, Vaclav stands alone, in th night breeze. Radmilo, Košvan's daughter, realizes that’s how saintly Vaclav might be. Boleslav is racked with anguish but doesn't stop Košvan's assassins from cornering Vaclav at the gate of the castle and killing him.  A storm blows up, so fierce that the killers are driven away. Vaclav's body rests in state.  Suddenly, the Drahomíra appears and weeps over the martyred Vaclav.  Boleslav is declared King but she blocks his path. "Matko!" he says (mother).  A glowing crucifix appears, like a miracle,  over Vaclav's corpse. Boleslav cries for forgiveness. (I think, I don't read Czech)  Svatý Václav is actually a very good movie, even without  the patriotic and religious context.  Definitely recommended.  

Please also see my other posts on cinema in this period, Czech and Weimar. For example:
 Erotikon - the drama Janacek didn't write
The White Plague - Hugo and Pavel Haas
and lots more on Hugo Haas's later work

Thielemann swings ! Silvesterkonzert Dresden

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has named Christian Thielemann as conductior of the 2019 Vienna New Years Concert.  All the more reason Thielemann's Silvesterkonzert with the Dresden Staatskapelle.  He's done similar repertoire at the Dresden New Year's Eve concerts for years. Come 2018/2019 he'll be nipping back and forth, but one thing for sure, he'll be interesting.  Dresden Silvesterkonzerts don't always follow the same formula.  This year's concert marked the centenary of  UFA GmbH, the conglomerate behind the German film industry.  Yet the concert was more than music from the movies. Outside Germany, UFA is associated with the Nazis, who took it over in 1933. With the rise of Far Right extremism all round the world, it might be safer to steer clear. But it's far braver to confront the past, warts and all.  If we don't learn from the past, we'll make the same mistakes. 
With some trepidation, I approached the programme. But the UFA situation is far more complex than simple black and white. Deliberate pun on the technology behind Weimar film. For UFA was associated with some of the finest art movies ever made, and with directors like Fritz Lang and F W Murnau.  Goebbels wasn't the first to realize that film could be used for mind control.  Witness the wave of Soviet films like October (more here) which are works of art but also propaganda.  When the Nazis came to power, the studios churned out stuff like Jud Süß which I confess I haven't been able to watch for more than a few minutes. And hundreds of Africans and Roma were forced to work in slave conditions.  But  UFA made over 1000 films in this period and not all can be condemned.  The gradation between art and the abuse of art is a dilemma we need to confront, if we are to learn. 
Thielemann began with Erich Korngold's main theme and love scene from Captain Blood.  Korngold  didn't work at UFA but his music epitomizes what we'd now call "Hollywood Style" but like so many in Hollywood, he was European. Chances are he would have followed Max Reinhardt to the US whatever the circumstances, but by remembering him we also honour those who did not have a choice  Theo Mackeben remained in Germany, writing operettas and film scores, but  he knew Brecht and Weill, having conducted the premiere of Die Dreigroschenoper.  Angela Denoke sang his song Frauen sind keine Engel, not as politcial as Weill but certainly racy.   Hans May went into exile, but to Britain, not Hollywood, where he was part of the then-thriving British film industry.   Daniel Behle sang May's Heut ist der schönste Tag.  The show stopper, though, was Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt made famous by Marlene Dietrich. Elisabeth Kulman looked the part in a silvery gown, but vocally she's a lot stronger than Dietrich and could sing the "cadenza" arrangement.  The song comes from Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel  (1930) starring Marlene Dietrich.  The real star of that film was Emil Jannings, who'd established a career in Hollywood silent film.  He "reverse migrated" back to Germany. After 1933 he made movies for UFA on historical subjects, which in the circumstances had political overtones. Was he nationalist or Nazi ? Does nationalism necessarily lead to evil things ?
The Dresden Staatskapelle musicians morphed into dance band for fox trots, setting the mood for songs by Werner Richard Heymann, two from Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930). The songs have an almost Schlager-like gaiety.   Saxophones and guitars turned the Staatskapelle into jazzband, with Daniel Behle hamming up stylishly in top hat and tails.  A moment for contemplation, though, with melancholy torch songs by Michael Jary, sensitively sung by Elisabeth Kullman.  Jary was a jazz musician, a genre the Nazis despised, but managed to scrape a living writing film scores for UFA. More songs by Mackeben , Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Stolz, "the luckiest man in the world" who made and lost several fortunes in the theatre. Winding up old, penniless and stateless in Paris, he was about to be imprisoned as an enemy alien, when he was saved by a beautiful 19-year-old heiress,who fell in love with him at first sight and became his (I think) sixth wife. They went to Hollywood where he made another fortune in movie music before returning to Dahlem and then Vienna (read more here).
Altogether a delicious concert,  played with total conviction, the material treated as serious music, not just "movie music".  One of the finest classical,orchestras in the world, letting their hair down without dropping a note.  When Christian Thielemann swings, he swings like a natural!  Thielemann and the orchestra had much more substantial music to work with in Georg Haentzschel's Große Suite in sechs Sätzen zu Münchhausen from one of the most extravagant movies UFA ever made, József Baky's Münchhausen (1943).  Goebbels gave UFA an unlimited budget. The Grand Canal in Venice, no less,  was closed off for the filming.  Thousands of extras were employed, including, alas, African prisoners of war and German-born men from former colonies in West Africa.  Münchhausen travels to the palace of the Grand Sultan, where the Turks are comic and the eunuchs camp. That's fairly benign by the standards of the time and not only in Nazi Germany, one should emphasize.  The Black men are dressed in silks, as slaves.  One wonders what was going on in their heads ?  At least they were - relatively - safe and many survived.  This is such an amazing movie that I'll write more in depth later.  Like the Wizard of Oz, it's fantasy but with quietly subversive political undercurrents,. The script was by Erich Kästner, definitely not a Nazi.

Natives and freedom - The Hurricane 1937

"A sense of honour in the South Seas is as about as silly as  a silk hat in a hurricane"  says Dr Kersaint to M. De Laage, the tyrannical governor of Manikura, a French colony in the South Pacific, who is "under the spell of honour and duty" and defines honour as the need to impose control on feckless natives. A ship arrives, bringing Mme De Laage, and Terangi, the First Mate, a born sailor who "kept hanging from the mast like a bird, with wings stretched for home".

The natives rush cheerfully aboard the ship to welcome the crew home, to the strains of Aloha Oe (read more about that song here). The natives, as the Doctor says, "are like birds who need to flock together in the breeze" The village celebrates the wedding of Terangi and Marama. Great shots of native girls in leis and Terangi's muscular bare chest.  Terangi and Marama set off in a dugout for an island honeymoon.  But Terangi smells a good wind: the ship sets sails again. In Tahiti, Ternagi and his friends are in a bar with loose women who smoke. Terangi plays with a mechanical hula doll with childish delight.  "Get up when a white man tells you!" sneers a drunk. Ternagi fells him with one blow.

But in colonies, fighting back is insurrection. The Hurricane's subtext was dangerous. Setting the movie in a French colony disguised the fact that the same brutal rules applied elsewhere, including Hawaii.   Or in the mainland US, for that matter.

Terangi is imprisoned. Being a free spirit, he keeps escaping and his sentence gets extended.   "Sixteen years in a cell with rats as companions".in chains, being whipped, doing hard labour., but Terangi remains unbroken.  He escapes again from maximum security, but inadvertently kills a guard. He steals a canoe and paddles 600 miles back to Manakura, navigating by the winds, braving storms at sea.  The local Priest takes him in secrecy to an island, where he's reunited with Marama and their child.

Back in Manakura, a hurricane is building up.  "Imagine Paris", says Mme De Laage, "civilizations don't do well in a hurricane"   The natives are restless : they know something, they're smiling.  Terangi's a legend, a symbol of freedom. De Laage finds out where he's hidden and sets off to capture him.  "You'll find a stronger authority than me in that storm!" cries the Priest. The hurricane hits Manakura.  People take shelter in the church, whose bells won't stop ringing in the wind. Fabulous cinematography - sheets of rain, flying debris, palm trees crashing, pounding waves. I've been in hurricanes. When I first saw this film on TV, it seemed realistic enough (to a kid).  

Terangi appears in a boat and the priest tells him to save those he can, who include Mme De Laage.  Eventually the church bell falls silent. But by then the church has been flattened, the priest and most of his parishioners killed. Terangi and his family wash up on a beach and light a fire. M. De Laage comes and rescues his wife. Terangi and his family escape in a war canoe.  De Laage spots it in the distance from his ship. "It's just debris" says his wife.

Given that The Hurricane was made in 1937, the director John Ford and producer Samuel Goldwyn really couldn't take risks with the authorities, so they probably needed to play up the pseudo-religious moralizing, which is pretty turgid. Overlook that, though, and the movie is daringly radical. It challenges racism outright, and the idea of rigid, relentless power structures.  Although  Ternagi and Marama are acted by white people in  brownface (Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour) and the characters they play are cardboard, the stereotypes aren't negative.  Compare The Hurricane to Typhoon, the 1940 Paramount movie shot in (then) glorious Technicolor and maximum special effects. There, the natives are no more than scenery and Dorothy Lamour's part serves only to offer glimpses of her body. Typhoon is  B movie crime flick set in the tropics. The Hurricane is much more, and would have been even better had Hollywood, and the West in general, been ready for something stronger.

Chillingly prophetic - A Face in the Crowd

"Bible-reading, pork chop eating, just plain folks".  When The People, whoever they may be, place their faith in "demagogues in denim", they aren't taking control but handing it over.  Populism is the Triumph of Id over reason.  If the Fuhrer cheats on tax, wouldn't "we" do too?  If he attacks women, he's just reinforcing what "we" take as normal. Under the cover of The People's Will, any evil becomes aspiration.  Bullying may be successful, bit it's wrong.  Mass movements are not democracy.  Real change only comes when the fundamentals of society change. Misogyny is a symptom.  How can any system change if it's based on fundamental ideas of inequality and lack of respect for others? When people internalize self hate and think it's OK, it's like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Sixty years ago, Elia Kazan predicted the Triumph of Trump in his film A Face in the Crowd.(1957).  Lonesome Rhodes - note the impersonal name - plays "Mama Guitar" which he loves more than any woman because it's subservient and can be controlled.  People love his songs because they seem earthy. "Plain folks" identify with his homilies of home and hatred.  Lonesome becomes a star on the country music circuit.  When he sneers at advertisers, his public love it because they think he's a symbol of freedom. But he's a natural born manipulator, whose only interest is in himself.  He knows how to sell, even if what he sells is illusion: Vitajex pills that do nothing but make buyers feel they're empowered and virile.  As he rises upwards, his speil gets bigger. Eventually he gets into politics.  "Daniel Boone didn't get no welfare", so poor folks don't need support..... Far from being empowered, Lonesome's fans will empower those who exploit them. The movie is frighteningly prescient: phrases in the script pop up in populist movements everywhere. Kazan, a leftwing intellectual, might have been just the kind of uppity outsider "plain folks" don't like, but he understood that mass populism is by no means just small-town America.  Lonesome is Hitler, Stalin or Mao, disguised as Good Ol' Country Boy. Intellectuals don't come out clean, either, because they, too. are seduced.  Watch this movie, and listen to every word.

A Face in the Crowd is brilliant, but falls flat in its happy ending. Lonesome is exposed when his cynicism is revealed live on air, and his fans get mad. and his game collapses.  In real life, as we've seen, people seem to take pride in being selectively gullible. No matter how blatantly they're abused, they take it without demur. Turkeys for Christmas. No matter how evil the Fuhrer, it's OK as long as he is One of Us. Political pundits will analyze Brexit, Trump and other movements, but I suspect the roots lie in wilful ignorance, in a kind of mass collusion. Lonesome has a machine which plays applause when there's no audience.  Lonesome's platform is mass media, which reflects whatever is fed into it, not necessarily the truth, whatever that might be.  A metaphor for those who live in cyberspace where reason doesn't intrude.  Unless change comes from genuine respect for other people, it remains an empty slogan.

Aelita Queen of Mars 1924 Soviet Sci Fi

Aelita, Queen of Mars, an early Russian Sci Fi film made by Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945) who'd worked in German and French film studios before returning to the Soviet in 1923, the year before Aelita was made.  Aelita thus exemplifies the ideals of the Soviet experiment, where dreams of modernity and progressive change flourished, briefly, before the Stalinist clampdown. Constructivism and Futurism, inspiring Eisenstein, and so many others.  This context matters, for it was the background to Shostakovich's opera The Nose (reviewed here).  The teenage Shostakovich is believed to have played piano at screenings of the film.  Although the plot is loosely based on a story by Tolstoy, Protazanov's film contrasts the reality of Soviet life in his time with a brilliantly exotic fantasy kingdom on Mars. 

Aelita lives in a palace designed in extravagant art deco angles with shards of reflective glass and strange perspectives. She wears a headdress of spikes, vaguely "Japanese", plays a fountain of light as if it were a harp and paints pictures with a shimmering wand. The Kingdom is ruled by The Elders, led by Tuskub, a malevolent-looking dictator, and Gor, a hunk known as the "Guardian of the Tower of Energy".  The soldiers are faceless robots whose movements are stylized and jerky  yet also vaguely reminiscent of the Ballets Russe.  Aelita's maid hops about in a cage-like dress, her movements  mechanical, though her personality is cheeky and vivacious.

Aelita's kingdom is so technologically advanced that it can send out radio messages to Earth.  At 6.27 CET time on 4th December 1921, a transmission is broadcast: "Anta Udeli Uta". No-one understand, except Engineer Los in Russia, who dreams of space travel and has drawn up plans for a trip to Mars. Los's best friend is Spiridnov, a wild-eyed intellectual, even more of a dreamer than Los. Significantly, Los and Spiridnov are played by the same actor. Los is newly married to Natasha, who is down to earth in every way. She is pursued by Erlich, a black marketeer who takes her to illegal speakeasys where people dance and drink as if the Old Days of  Tsardom had never faded.  She rejects him, but Los does not understand and goes away on a long business trip.  While Los is away, Spiridnov hides Los' spaceship plans in a hole behind a fireplace.When Los comes back from his trip, he thinks Natasha has been unfaithful and shoots her. As she lies in her coffin, Spiridnov appears.  Where's Los ? Los is building his space ship to escape, helped by Gussov, a cheerful Soviet soldier.  They have a stowaway, Kratsov, an inept bounty hunter who wants to arrest Los for murder and/or black marketeering, another sign that Los and Spiridnov might be two sides of a whole.

Aelita, meanwhile, has been watching Earth on Martian TV and sees Los and Natasha kiss. She's fascinated and rejects Gor, her suitor.  It's interesting that Aelita, although played by a female actress, is decidedly androgynous, her heavy makeup more masculine than feminine.  She's also unnaturally  flat chested, so perhaps there are other levels in this film the censors might have missed.  When Los and Gussov arrive on Mars, Aelita wants Los, though he's still in love with Natasha.  Gussov fools around with Aelita's cute maid, though he has a wife back in Russia.  The maid gets sent down to the dungeons for consorting with foreigners.  Gussov follows to save her, and rouses the prisoners to revolt.  "Freedom of speech put an end to thousands of years of slavery on Mars".  "It used to be like this in our country" cries Gussov. "October 25th, 1917" flashes  a subtitle Men are seen breaking their chains, beating weapons into sickles, placing sickles over hammers.  The Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" is declared.  Fabulous battlescene between the soldier robots and the Proletariats, who have boxes for heads.  The Elders are routed. Aelita  says that she'll now rule, alone. "I don't buy that" says Los, "Queens can't run revolutions". Sure enough, she orders the army to shoot the mutineers.  Los pushes her off the steps and "she" turns into Natasha. Suddenly Los wakes up. The words "Anta Uteli Uta" ring in his mind. Then we see a workman pasting a poster for a brand of tyres with that slogan.  Suddenly Los is back on earth with Natasha, who's very much alive. He runs to the fireplace, snatches up his plans for space travel and throws them into the fire "That's enough for dreams!" he says "We have other things to worry about".

Strange Fascination - Hugo Haas

Hugo Haas, brother of the composer Pavel Haas, about both of whom there's a lot on this website if you search.  Please read my piece here: Strange Afterlives: Hugo and Pavel Haas.  In their native Czechoslovakia, Hugo was a megastar, acting and directing in movies like White Plague (more here), a very explicit protest against the Nazis.  Knowing he'd ge targetted, he got out quick. Pavel, with a much lower profile, died in Terezin.  In Hollywood, Hugo had to start all over from scratch, but was too independent minded and too arty to be a success with the big studios.  So he made B movies, but low-budget movies with high standards, like The Other Woman, Hit and Run  and Pickup. The closest he came to commercial success was Strange Fascination (1952|) which was marketed as unadulterated schlock and probably sold because it flattered downmarket stereotypes about Europe. But like most of Haas's postwar work, it deals with the dilemma of exiles uprooted from Europe, trying to find a new life in America. "I feel like a displaced person" says Haas,quietly.

In Strange Fascination, Haas plays Paul Marvan.  "He's considered the finest exponent of Chopin in Europe, you know,"  gasps wealthy society matron Diana, who lionizes celebrity. Her friends snap back, acidly: "Strange that in America, he's completely unknown".  Her kids hate him. "He's  a stranger, you can't talk to him about baseball, or movies" (delicious irony!). Inadvertently he upsets Margo a nightclub singer who goes to his concert the next night hoping to heckle but is moved "by that stuff you play".  Margo's played by Cleo Moore, who starred in most of Haas's late films.  She wiggles her way into his life and they marry,  Rich Diana isn't pleased and drops Paul, whose career doesn't flourish in America.  The pianist who "plays" for him isn't very good. Financial worries:  Paul has to sell his tuxedo and play mixed programmes in variety clubs  He won't let Margo go back to show business.  Diana won't help - she's jealous because Paul loves Margo.  Desperate, Paul tries to cash in on his insurance by throwing his hand into a printing press. The insurance company won't pay out because it wasn't an accident. Paul comes home to find that Margo's left him.  Paul is reduced to knocking out tunes in a shelter for homeless men. "Say, why can't you play something gay, you bum!" Quietly Paul beats out a boogie woogie with his remaining hand.  Strange fascination isn't a particularly good movie compared with Haas's other woirk but it's a story that no doubt was lived by many. who didn't find fame or fortune.

Berge in Flammen : Mountains in flames

Berge in Flammen, Mountains on Fire -  Bergfilm, art film, and war film, conceived and directed By Luis Trenker (1892-1990).  You'd think, from English language media, that 1914-1918 happened only on the western front. Not so! Millions died on the eastern front and in the south, in the Alps. All the more reason for watching Berge in Flammen, set in the Dolomites during the war of attrition that ran almost non stop from 1915 to 1917.  Imagine, trenches in mountains way above the snowline,dug into permafrost, cut off from supply lines.

Largely filmed on location,  the camera crew were themselves  skilled mountaineers - some of these shots would have been technically difficult to carry off.  Yet Berge in Flammen is an astonishingly beautiful film, a symphony of high peaks, snowfields and rockwalls,  shot from dizzying, expressionist angles.  Nature as poetry, dwarfing the silly battles below.  Global warming and safety regulations probably mean that films like this can't be made again. In any case, the South Tyrol depicted here is largely memory, but that, too, is a reason for seeing this film and appreciating its message. Not for nothing is this film bilingual, and those involved in the making thereof, a mix of Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen and Italians. Very much the "can do" camaraderie of the mountains. Some of the camera crew were not only climbers but also actors.

An idyllic beginning. Florian Dimal (Luis Trenker) and Arthur Franchini (Luigi Serventi) help each other up a rockstack.  They're free climbing, using only ropes, no helmets, no fancy modern gear.  But in the valley below, the church bells ring, It's August 1914. Franz Josef, the Emperor, has announced war. Florian and Arthur end up on different sides. Fantastic shots of life in underground caves and trenches tunneled through metres of snow.  Rickety ladders up steep slopes. Constant bombardment and with that, rock falls. Not many "special effects" in this filming. When the men trek through snow up to their hips, they're not acting. Bergfilme audiences knew about mountains and the technical aspects of climbing . 

Machine guns on precipices, hand grenades thrown by men clinging to ledges. Barbed wire and frozen bodies.  A sentry goes snow blind in a storm, frozen to the sandbags he was guarding. At one stage an officer with binoculars watches the action. The man at his shoulder is shot by a sniper. The officer keeps talking, unaware that his companion is dead.  Soldiers scale vertical cliffs, using mechanical drills to place explosives or maximum damage.  It doesn't take much to set off an  avalanches .And avalanches happen all the time. Most Bergfilme include shots of skiers in mass formation, but those here are particularly impressive because the men wear white coats with hoods, moving like apparitions.  The snowfields on glaciers are as spectacular as the cliffs and peaks.

Meanwhile, Florian's village has been occupied by the Italians.  Florian's home is billeted but the soldiers friendly. "Farina!"  says an Italian. "Mehl" says Pia, Florian's wife.  Florian is sent out alone, in secret on reconnaissance.  But he can't stay.  Crawling back up to the summit, during an enemy barrage, he's shot at by his own men, though is saved. The fortress is dynamited :  the whole peak explodes.  Twenty years later, Florian and Arthur (from Rome) ascend the mountains again, over the old battlefield. A vista of the Twin peaks of the Dolomites. They sit happily, together, no need for words.  The soundtrack, incidentally is very good, as modern as the cinematography.  The composer was Giuseppe Becci.

Prophetic London Belongs to Me

A petty criminal, peruses the comics. "Easy Pickings", he thinks. But "easy pickings" and easy answers don't mean taking control.   London Belongs to Me now seems terrifyingly prophetic. The film begins in the London of 1938 : social change is already underway.   Once grand terraces are now multiple occupancy rooming houses, with lodgers who can't meet their rents, or feed their gas meters.  The landlady, Mrs Vizzard, lives in grand delusion, still dressed in Edwardian garb, her home cluttered as if in Victorian time warp.  A new lodger (Mr Squales) turns up. He's so unnatural that she thinks he's an actor. He is, but not quite in the way she thinks.  Mrs Vizzard  hosts seances for dodgy mediums who claim to commune with the dead and foretell the future. Think on that.

It's Christmas, and Mr and Mrs Josser, daughter Doris and Uncle Henry are having Christmas dinner.  Fellow tenant Connie fakes a faint to con a free feed.  The family discuss the Munich Agreement.  As he cracks a walnut, Uncle Henry says "If we don't wake up, Hitler will have us like this!"  "For goodness sake", says Mrs Josser, "Put on your paper hat and enter into the spirit".  Percy the flashy young spiv takes Doris to a dodgy night club, which gets raided. Percy escapes but Doris gets caught. But the policeman, Sgt  Bill Wilson, who takes her details, doesn't note them in the right place, because he fancies her.   Hoping to make enough money to start a business, Percy steals a car.  Spotting the police, he panics. The  ex-girlfriend who forced him to take her for a ride is killed, though it's not exactly clear how and by whom.  Even Mr Squales worries that he might have been involved, without "being himself".  . 

Mrs Vizzard learns that Mr Squales has been faking photographs of ghosts at seances, and kicks him out.  "I've no use for frauds and common adventurers".  Squales overhears Sgt Wilson order Percy's arrest and uses this to have a  trance "revelation" . When Percy is picked up, Mrs Vizzard is fooled all over again.  In prison, Percy has graphic nightmares. "I never did it!" he cries.   Mr Josser uses the money he's saved for a cottage in the country to hire a defence lawyer for Percy, even though he doesn't like the lad, because it's the moral thing to do.  Mr Squales turns up for the prosecution. It seems the girlfriend was killed by a "blow to the head" though she was hit by a passing car after falling out of  Percy's car.  Percy is condemned.  Won over by Mr Josser's generosity, Uncle Henry organizes a mission to save Percy, and raises a petition that gets so many names that it has to be carried to the Home Office pushed in a pram. Wonderful shots of the procession of protestors crossing Westminster Bridge in pouring rain !  Big Ben booms. It's 5 pm. Are they too late ? But the newspapers announce that Percy's been reprieved.  It's August the 31st, 1939...; what happens next ?  Air raid sirens. Mr Squales, now married to Mrs Vizzard, says the spirits tell him the war will soon be over. Mr and Mrs Josser are staying in London, despite the war.  They wouldn't leave Doris.  The film ends with a shot of Dulcimer Street. "They certainly are fine houses" says the narrator.  So are some of the people within.

London Belongs to Me was made by Sidney Gilliat in 1948. It stars Richard Attenborough, then aged 25 though he looks even younger.  It's long been one of the great classics of British cinema, but after the Brexit debacle, perhaps it means even more, now.

James Cagney in Shakespeare : Midsummer Night's Dream Hollywood

James Cagney in Shakespeare? And Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Havilland and Dick Powell too, in  A Midsummer Night's Dream, the movie (1935). Shakespeare's text was cut and adapted. Mendelssohn's music revised by Erich Korngold, and extra dance sequences added, by Nijinsky's sister Bronislava.  Huge money was thrown behind the production, and all the state of the art technical resources Warner Brothers could muster.  This  was Midsummer Night's Dream as Hollywood musical extravaganza. It's compelling and repelling at the same time. Shakespeare kitsch, but kitsch on such a grand, audacious scale that you have to keep watching.  What a pity this was made in black and white and not in gaudy Technicolor !

On the other hand the special effects are so clearly "home made" that their very crudity is part of the charm.   Surfaces are splashed all over with reflecting fragments which sparkle "fairy dust". everywhere to distract the eye. The cameras lenses are heavily greased to soften focus  and many close-ups are lit from behind to soften detail.  This magic forest was clearly made in the studio workshops. The fairies are chorus girls, heavier on the hoof than ballerinas might be. But in its own gauche way this movie captures some of the wide-eyed naivety which Shakespeare found in the rude mechanicals. No one seriously believes the Wall is a Wall!

Once someone told me that he couldn't watch Shakespeare unless the costumes were "authentic" . Shakespeare and his audience would have thought he was a fool. They walked around in costumes as part of their normal lives. When they went to the theatre, they used their minds and imaginations.  The spartan simplicity of theatre practice in Shakespeare's own time is more "authentic" than glammed-up excess. In the past, audiences were accustomed to conceptual thinking, because they studied the classics and had an idea of Greek drama. They also went to church and understood the role of symbolism. Audiences now expect the literalism of TV costume drama. More than ever, we need Shakespeare's Midsummers Night's Dream to remind us of the interplay between art and reality, between outward appearances and inner meaning. Which is why it's worth watching the Hollywood Midsummers Night's Dream.  Bottom and his friends are workmen who don't know much about art, but they're funny because they improvise. Warner Brothers set out to make a 1930's extravaganza that would cost money, make money and establish their high-art credentials.  So this movie achieves Shakespeare's aims, despite itself.

So back to the actors. Victor Jory's Batman cape acts a more convincing Oberon than he does and Anita Louise is more tat than Tatiana, and her singing cuts like a rusty razor blade. Shakespeare's poetry gets so mangled that you're glad the text gets cut to breaks where armies of extras run in long lines, pretending to be fairies. Hordes of kids and dwarves (that Hollywood speciality).  Dick Powell was a matinee idol, and Olivia de Havilland box office hot, so the directors (Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle) make more of Lysander and Hermia than they might have otherwise. Mickey Rooney was 15 when he played Puck, so something of his child star impishness enlivens his acting.  When he stumbles on words, and over-exaggerates, he creates a suitably Puckish waywardness. James Cagney, though, is a wonderfully earthy Bottom. The other actors ham their way through the poetry and make it sound arch. Cagney's delivery feels like Bottom's natural growl. Bottom as con man and gangster who fools the toffs - yes, indeed! And gets fooled himself in the process. Did he realize how well he played this part?

As for the music, the sound quality on the recording is so bad that it kills a lot. Since I like Korngold,  I like the blend of corn and gold in this soundtrack, with its twittering decorations  and glamorous flourishes.  Korngold writes authentic Hollywood, and very much created the style, even before he left Vienna.  He was interested in movies even before sound.  I need a fix of echt Mendelssohn to clear my ears after watching this movie, but a fix of sugar is a guilty treat.  Below, the trailer, which  says loads about the philosophy behind this film. It is embarrassingly close to the values of present-day opera audiences.

Dennis Hopper naked - Night Tide

Night Tide (1961) a Hollywood B movie so beautifully made, so quirky and so original it should be recognized as art. It stars Dennis Hopper , then only 24, as Johnny, a sailor who comes from land-locked Denver, Colorado. Fascinated by the sights and sounds of Venice Beach with its carnival attractions. Enticed by exotic music, he wanders into a jazz club. Pay attention to the  music. It weaves serpent-like throughout the film and is a way above average film score. Composer is David Raskin.The director was Curtis Harrington. 

Johnny sees an exotic woman, so elegant she seems to come from another  world.  She's terrified when a strange woman comes in and addresses her.  It's all Greek to  Johnny, but he follows her because she's so upset. She's called Mora, and she lives in a tower, looking out to sea, over a merry-go-round. "I'm a mermaid" she says, "Half woman and half fish". She sits in a tank of water and people pay 25 cents to look at her. "It's very relaxing". She came from the island of Mykonos, adopted by a sea captain, who is way too Oxbridge to have been a career seaman, but has washed up in Venice Beach ("nothing like the real Venice, of course")  At a night party on the beach, Mora dances to hypnotic bongo drums, faster and faster til she falls in a faint. Johnny spots the Greek woman in the distance.  A bizarre English fortune teller and a wholesome American girl warn Johnny that there's something dangerous about Mora.

A wonderfully-filmed sequence of angles and strange planes, where Johnny runs under freeway bridges and derelict buildings, following the Greek woman who disappears outside the sea captain's house. Captain Murdock tells Johnny about the Sirens, who lure men to their deaths.  Not legends. . "There are things in this world you'll never believe!"  At last, Mora acknowledges the mystery woman. "She's one of Them, she's coming to take me back" The fortune teller, like Captain Murdock, has a bizarre past,{ but is or the scriptwriter was)  transformation, vortices, danger. "Is that good or bad?" says down to earth Johnny.


Back in his rooming house, Johnny thinks he's embracing Mora but she disappears. He sees wet footprints running from the bathtub, down the stairs, and follows them to the beach. Another well filmed sequence , shot under the pier: Johnny rescuers Mora from the water.  Next we see her in bed, but where was Johnny all night? Mora tells him to go get a massage, which is a very strange thing to say if they'd spent the night together in the usual way.  The masseur is one of the jazz musicians. Captain Murdock's there, too.

This is no ordinary massage. "You all tied up in knots" says the masseur. "Girlfriend not treating you right?" Are there deeper meanings in the film? The conversation between the masseur and the sea captain is full of innuendo, so explicitly homosexual that the scene was cut from initial release. The camera has lingered lovingly on Dennis Hopper's body, in tight Navv pants and naked, so many times that it's pretty clear that there's another narrative behind the main plot. hence the jazz band and dangerous (for 1961) interracial and unmentioned other subcultures, but an overwhelming fear of women.   Unsurprisingly, the movie was released as downmarket schlock horror. Mainstream audiences wouldn't get the subtext. Needless to say, the film was produced by a small independent company, not a big studio.

Mora calls Johnny into the sea. He dives underwater and nearly drowns. Where's Moira?  He next sees her on the rocks, with a fishtail instead of legs.  In reality, or what passes for it, he reads a newspaper which has a story about Mora the Mermaid. She and the Captain have been doing their act for 20 years, but she still looks the same as she did then.

Yet another brilliantly filmed sequence as Johnny walks throughb the fairground, the carvings on the attractions lit up as if the were gargoyles come alive. Lightning flashes, waves crash. Then Johnny sees Mora, floating, apparently dead......  But how did she die, ad who killed her? Captain Murdock tells the police that he'd brought Mora up to think she was a Siren, so she couldn't have relations with men.  He says he killed her previous boyfriends, so they couldn't take her away, and committed suicide rather than have Johnny die, too. The police think Mora was the killer and that the Captain was trying to protect her. "But what about the mystery woman?" asks Johnny. " It was true. !It wasn't m imagination".  When Johnny leaves, the nice wholesome girl asks if he'll be back. "Merry-go-round", he says. Mora lived above the merry-go-round. in ever sense. As the shore patrol take Johnny back to base, it's pouring with rain outside. Not quite "Sunny California".

If you like this post, please read : George Antheil : Daughter of Horror 
and Zemlinsky Die Seejungfrau

Berlioz meets George Antheil The Spectre of the Rose

Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Dance, orchestrated by Hector Berlioz, the music upon which Fokine created the ballet La spectre de la rose (1911) for VaclavNijinsky. But that's not all!   George Antheil re-adapted Berlioz re-adapting Weber for the movie Spectre of the Rose (1946). Antheil created the music for Ballet Mécanique, the brilliant Dadaist masterpiece created by Ferinard Léger. Antheil was at the heart of the Paris avant garde in the 1920's, hanging out with Man Ray, Stravinsky and pretty much everyone. For him, film was an art form, created by intellectuals for lively minds. Even in Hollywood, Antheil managed to connect with the adventurous and creative.  Lots on this site about Antheil, and on the other experimental and art film of the 20's and 30's.

The movie, Specter of the Rose (1946) was so quirky that there was no way it would have been a hit at the box office hit like so much else that Ben Hecht did.  Allusions to art and the arts community crackle all through the script: it's a highly crafted satire with killer bon mots. An elderly former ballerina sits knitting. She's importuned by a bankrupt promoter called Poliakoff, played by an actor called Chekhov, as the personification of High Camp. In this little world of losers who once had dreams, characters  sport fancy foreign names and speak with theatrical flourish, and repartees as sharp as in Marx Brothers comedy. There's a brilliant vignette when a hardboiled hack gets drunk and spouts philosophy (which is actually quite radical pointed, politically). "We lived in a poem" says Mme La Sylph.  Hence the story is built around the ballet La spctre de la Rose. where a young girl falls in love with the idea of art and imagines that a Rose has come alive. to dance with her.  The movie, however, morphs into murder mystery.  Did the principal dancer Sanine (played by an actor called Kirov!) murder his first wife in a fit of madness?  She died dancing on stage. Will he kill his new dance partner, his new wife Heidi.  

Against all odds, the company, on the verge of bankruptcy, becomes a hit. At the peak of success, Daniner and Heidi disappear and the show closes. Sanine has had a psychotic episode. "The rose has a thorn, the rose has a knife and dances around you till you die"  Sabine puts on his Rose costume and dances about the apartment in a mad scene, where Antheil's reworking of Berlioz/Weber explodes into mayhem. With a Nijinsky-style leap, Sanine jumps out of the window, to his death. Poliakoff , now broke again, goes back to tacky touring shows "with the trunks, the hair pulling and the mad love songs from Old Vienna", "It's better than begging" says Mme La Sylph.  Then you realize why she's a tricoteuse. The Specter of the rose is gallows humour.

Hangmen also die! Fritz Lang, Brecht and Hanns Eisler

Reissued last year on DVD in a restoration by the BFI, Fritz Lang's Hangmen also Die!. (1943).  Lang worked with Bertolt Brecht on the script, which loosely recounts the reprisals that followed the assasination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942. The score was written by Hanns Eisler. The producer was Arnold Pressbuger.  Some of the actors were émigrés, too.  In theory,  the co-operation of so many Weimar exiles could have made the movie quite something. The film isn't quite a masterpiece though it's good and gripping. Its value lies in its political significance. It ends with the word "Not" held on screen for several moments. Does this mean "Not" as in German? Could be. But the words "The End" follow, reminding the audience at the time that the Reich was still in power, and that the struggle against Hitler must continue.

Although Hanns Eisler received one of his Oscar nominations for the soundtrack, there isn't a lot of music in this movie, which is fair enough. The subject is grim, the mood too tense for background diversion. Eisler writes a stirring introduction, heard as the camera pans over mock-up scenes of Prague. When his music does enter, it's atmospheric. In the scene in a restaurant, the music suggests dance music, though it comes over slightly distorted. No-one is really in the mood for dancing when hostages are being taken and suspects hunted down. Later there's a scene when arrested people are taken off in trucks to their deaths. It's oddly clean and antiseptic: it's Hollywood, after all.  The final screenplay used wasn't echt Brecht or Lang. The men start singing a maudlin rhyming song which ends with the cry "No surrender!". It's a far cry from Solidaritätslied but could be the kind of song ordinary people might sing, which is part of the purpose behind making the movie, which was to inspire the masses. Luckily, there's plenty of really top notch Eisler elsewhere.

By Hollywood thriller standards, Hangmen also Die! is a  movie that keeps you on your toes. I first saw it as a teenager, fascinated by Weimar and its aftermath though I didn't yet know who Hanns Eisler was, but I vividly remember the atmosphere.

Strange afterlives : Hugo and Pavel Haas

Pavel and Hugo Haas

Pavel Haas and Hugo Haas : brothers from Brno who led very different lives.   Pavel, the composer, was incarcerated in Terezin and murdered in Auschwitz. Hugo, a movie star and director, far more famous in his time, was able to escape and start a second career in Hollywood. Both brothers seem to have suffered a strange afterlife in that their reputations are miscontrued. Perhaps it's the way English language sources have dominated the internet, distorting reality.

From 1919 to 1921, Pavel Haas studied at the Brno Conservatory of which Janáček  was Director. Even in those early days,  no Czech composer could fail not to be influenced by Janáček,  but any decent composer finds his or her own, original voice. Pavel Haas's String Quartet no 1 (1920), suggests that Haas was well aware of the avant garde in other parts of Europe. Janáček wasn't a cuddly personality.  Read here what Haas said of him. Haas wrote mainly chamber music and songs. My favourites are the String Quartet no 3 and his Four Songs on Chinese Poetry (1944), though look under the label "Theresienstadt" below for more.
 

Pavel and Hugo, with their parents

Hugo Haas started in the movies in 1925 and soon became a matinee idol, involved with, literally, dozens of movies of all kinds. Many of these films are still highly regarded and available, but you'd have to check Czech language sources to find them, since the English-language media seem to ignore them altogether.  Although I don't speak Czech I used to follow them well enough because the acting and direction was so vivid.  Perhaps the most remarkable of Hugo's many movies was Bílá nemoc, or The White Plague  This was made in 1937, when Hitler was threatening Czechoslovakia, but the rest oif Europe didn't seem to care. The script was by Karel Čapek, who also wrote the play on which Janáček based The Makropulos Affair. In that "Czech renaissance" (1914-1938), the arts were very much in the vanguard of social progress. And the music score was by Pavel Haas.
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In Bílá nemoc,there's a sudden frame of a man in the howling mob outside the Dictator's palace (which is monumentalist Art Deco and filled with geometric symbols) . It's Dr Galen (Hugo Haas). There's a mysterious plague in the country, which starts as white spots on the body and kills everyone it touches. Everyone's paranoid about contamination. Galen has a cure but he's not allowed to use it because his political terms are too high. So he's only allowed to treat the destitute in Ward 13, who don't count. But those he treats, survive. Gradually the plague spreads, and the paranoia. The Dictator visits the research hospital but Galen isn't allowed near him. Galen is anti-war, and that's another form of plague. Eventually, Baron Krog, the second most powerful man in the land, gets sick and is saved when he promises to respect Galen's ideas. Galen meets the dictator. Both of them fought in the Great War, but the Dictator believes war is a good thing and Galen thinks otherwise. Soon, the Dictator gets infected too, has a change of heart, signs ceasefire documents, and summons Galen. Galen tries to pass through the howling crowds, but they confront him when he talks anti-war and they beat him to death. No-one now to stop the plague, or the war. And of course, we now know what happened when Hitler marched in a few months after the movie was made.

Being prominent, Hugo Haas was able to escape, while Pavel didn't. Via Austria and Portugal, he arrived in Hollywood where he had to begin all over again as an actor of small parts, though he had been a very experienced director and producer. Eventually he found a niche in smaller studios where he made films which are only B movies because their budgets were small. Many of them have the characteristic flavour of his earlier career when he was as big at the box office as the glitzier stars of Hollywood.  Watch, for example, The Other Woman (1954) in which Haas plays a film director who *used to be something in Europe", as an extra whispers. His boss insists he should be more "American". "Movies for kiddies?" snorts Haas in contempt. He gives a wannabe a chance, but when she blows her lines, she blackmails him. She's a  twisted loser but destroys him. Eventually she's found strangled, but by then Haas's life is ruined. The last frame ends as the first, where Haas is seen screaming from behind bars. First time round, he was showing actors how to emote. this time, it's him behind bars for real.

Pavel Haas, wife and daughter

Pavel Haas made movies, too, since he wrote several film scores for Hugo and the Czech cinema industry. Ironically, the film in which he actually appears, as himself, was the Nazi propaganda film glorifying the joys of Theresienstadt. He conducts his Study for Strings with an orchestra made up of camp inmates. The fragment is short but potent - the kinds of  "modern" music Nazis don't like. Hugo's son Ivan,incidentally, appears in Hugo's later films, in small roles. Maybe he gets overlooked, but not by those who care about Hugo and Pavel Haas and the world they knew.

Kurt Weill collides with Fritz Lang

Kurt Weill collides with Fritz Lang and both come crashing down. It might have seemed a good idea in theory to pair the creator of brilliant films like Metropolis (more here) with the composer of The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny (more here)  in a film about capitalism and crime, but You and Me is a disaster flick, despite superb acting by George Raft and Sylvia Sidney. On the other hand, we can learn from mishaps like this, so it's worth looking at. If nothing else, it prepares us for the tragedy that is Weill.

The film begins with a song that should belong to Weimar cabaret, except that it's scored for Broadway camp.  We see a chic department store selling jewels., perfumes, cars and expensive toys, way beyond the dreams of those actually working on the shop floor. A metaphor for capitalist consumerism, if ever there was one.  But the song is pure ham.  The singer says "You have to buy" then mentions things that money can't buy, while the screen shows diplomas (which can be bought). Rhyming couplets, which work in German folk tradition, sound corny in English. Without the intellectual edge of Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill turns to tacky hack.

You and Me works, as a drama, because the plot, though implausible, is audacious. Mr Morris, who owns the department store, employs ex cons incognito, giving them a chance to go straight. No-one knows who they are. Helen (Sylvia Sidney) looks so pure and innocent that when Joe (George Raft) falls in love with her he tries to run away. But she loves him too and they marry. Helen tells the landlady that no-one must know they're married  because it's store policy, but Joe begins to twig that something's not right.  It turns out that they are both ex cons, and marriage would be a breach of probation. Joe's mates plan a heist, raiding Morris's department store. Helen tips Mr Morris off and then gives the men a long speech about the economics of crime. This is worth seeing! So the men stay straight. Joe, however, is livid that Helen lied to him, so this time, it's she who runs away, though she's preganat.  Many months later the ex cons track her down in hospital. This time Helen and Joe can have a real wedding, with howling baby for company.

You and Me has the makings of a very good film, but the attempt to bolt  on pseudo Weimar agitprop blows it off course. The song sequences aren't well written and don't integrate into the drama. There;'s political depth aplenty in this plot, but Weill's contribution dilutes the message, turning it into maudlin sentimentality.  The Rise and Fall of the City of  Mahagonny works because the songs are part of the story. The songs are pastiche, just like the cheap falseness of the city itself. The opera is supposed to sound like it's held together by ramshackle plasterboard. London audiences could not get past the opulent ROH setting enough to realize that that was part of the irony.