From E.A. Dupont’s TWO WORLDS. A Jack and four Johns, five if you count John St John twice.. I don’t know what led Dupont to cast so many Johns, and whether it caused any confusion on set. I guess the risk of confusion from multiple actors with the same first name would be a silly reason for recasting.
The closest competitor to this I know, in Anglo-American cinema, is 1947’s CROSSFIRE, with its three Roberts (Mitchum, Ryan and Young).
Of the Johns listed, John Longden was a leading man for Hitchcock around this time (eg in BLACKMAIL). John Harlow turned into an undistinguished British B-movie director, although he was already directing shorts, and assistant directing (eg on Arthur Robison’s marvelous THE INFORMER, 1928). And he’s the assistant director on this, too. John McMahon didn’t, it seems, do many films we know of, but played Fagin in a 1912 OLIVER TWIST. John St John didn’t do much either, but has a supporting role in Miles Mander’s much-admired THE FIRST BORN.
Anyway, the Dupont film is very interesting and we can get into it later. What are the Daft Days for, otherwise?
I’d been meaning to see the French version of Pabst’s L’ATLANTIDE ever since I saw a ratty copy of the English version.
It plays like a fever dream, and can only be made sense of if we assume Brigitte Helm as the Queen of Atlantis is the embodiment of some kind of psychotropic drug, and Pierre Blanchar a man in thrall to addiction.
The epic settings, bleak and alien, give way to claustrophobia once we’re entombed with Brigitte, and things quickly stop making sense. Oneiric doesn’t begin to cover it.
The movie benefits from a very fulsome and exotic score by one Wolfgang Zeller. Stays quiet for ages then kicks in and barely lets up, adding to the fervid atmosphere. Zeller also scored VAMPYR, which makes sense.
Incredible to think Pabst supposedly made this the same year as PANDORA’S BOX *and* DIARY OF A LOST GIRL *and* THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU. He’d been making a solid film a year since 1923 and suddenly this explosion of crazed masterpieces. With its Algerian desert locations — among the best desert stuff I’ve ever seen — this is not exactly a modest production.
If the movie IS a production from 1929, per IMDb, this would be like BLACKMAIL, a film full of music because it still has one foot in silent cinema. But the IMDb only dates the French version to 1929, the English and German ones came out in 1932, so if the 1929 thing is a mistake, this would be part of the great German rediscovery of film scoring that also includes DER MORDER DIMITRI KARAMASOFF and DER MANN, DER SEINEN MORDER SUCHT.
My house is full of Pabst materials right now for reasons, so it should be possible to ascertain whether this is his first sound film or if WESTFRONT 1918 has that honour. IMDb proudly proclaims that this one opened in Hungary in June ’29, but I can’t see it. Unless, as well as releasing French, English and German versions with different casts, Pabst also prepared a SILENT version three years earlier… OK, The Films of G.W. Pabst, edited by Eric Rentschler, makes no mention of any version of this coming out before ’32. So he’d made WESTFRONT and THREEPENNY OPERA and KAMERADSCHAFT already. THAT makes more sense, or as much as anything in Pabst’s strange, peripatetic and conflicted career, and as much as anything in this delirious and haunting film.
Rewatching EMILE AND THE DETECTIVES (1931) — mainly for Fritz Rasp and the amazing train hallucination.
But then it occurred to us —
First Fiona: this music reminds me a lot of a Universal horror movie.
Me: It’s Allan Gray, who scored A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH —
And I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! which has another hallucinatory train journey…
And there’s A LOT of music here! Making it one of the very first full film scores in a talkie (BLACKMAIL showed the way, but Hubert Bath’s excellent work there wasn’t continued immediately in such a full-on way, almost as if it were considered a mistake to have so much music). Bernard Herrmann considered Karol Rathaus’s score for THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, also 1931, to be the first, but Grey was contemporary with it, and so was Franz Waxman with THE MAN LOOKING FOR HIS MURDERER. It’s Waxman’s later BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN score that bits of EMILE seems to resemble — which may be more than a coincidence with the films being made so close together, and Billy Wilder working on the screenplay of both.
EMIL’s music characterizes the film beautifully: it has all kinds of stuff going on including a jaunty march and slide whistles, not just Frankensteinian dark thrills. It’s memorable and jaunty, even if sometimes it gets in the way. When Emile is trying to retrieve his money from under Rasp’s pillow, the bombastic crashing climaxes of the orchestra cancel out the suspense, which should all be about being as quiet as possible.
Come to think of it, one reason for the music may have been the location filming, with its attendant difficulties in recording live sound. The movie adds an interest absent from M (not that I’m knocking M’s eerily silent studio city) — the real streets of Berlin. A city symphony, with a children’s film going on in the foreground.
shadowplay