DVR Diary: Akira Kurosawa's SCANDAL (1950)

You sometimes hear it said about Akira Kurosawa that, as a Japanese director, he somehow wasn't Japanese enough. Some critics feel they're not getting an authentically Japanese cultural experience from the country's most famous film director, at least when compared to peers like Ozu or Mizoguchi. I suppose Kurosawa was a more cosmopolitan artist. He's arguably one of cinema's great Shakespeareans without having filmed a word the Bard wrote, and he based one of his best modern-dress pictures on an Ed McBain crime novel. A great Russian influence can't be discounted; he adapted stories by Dostoevsky and Gorky and made a film in the USSR when no one else would have him. This Russian influence is problematic, however. The film he made in Russia, Dersu Uzala, is great, but his Dostoevsky film, The Idiot, is one of his worst. Scandal may be worse still, and while it's no literary adaptation, the Dostoevsky influence is partly to blame. If I sum the thing up as half Dostoevsky, half Capracorn, you might consider yourself warned.

Released just months before Rashomon, Scandal is, among other things, Kurosawa's Christmas movie. No holiday movie anthology is really complete without Toshiro Mifune delivering a Christmas tree on his motorcycle or Takashi Shimura drunkenly shouting, in English, "Merry Christmas, Everybody!" But in mentioning all this I get ahead of myself. We should start with Mifune as a young, cranky artist. "I paint the mountains I see inside me!" he explains gruffly when kibitzing peasants note that the mountain he's painting isn't really red. A gentleman as well as an artist, he agrees to take a young woman who's missed her bus to her inn, where he has a room, on his motorcycle. He doesn't know that she's a popular singer (the late Shirley Yamaguchi of Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo) being trailed by paparazzi before Fellini coined a word to describe them. They stake out the inn until they catch our hero paying a purely friendly visit to the singer. He's just had a bath and drapes his bath towel on the wooden balcony alongside hers. With both people in their bathrobes it's a provocative shot the photogs quickly sell to Amour magazine, an aggressively-advertised scandal sheet that tags Aoye the painter as Saijo the singer's new boyfriend.

Scandal is Capracorn insofar as Aoye is a reluctant, angry sort of "Cinderella Man" who reacts to embarrassing publicity as a Frank Capra hero might. He visits the Amour office, browses through the damning issue, asks who the publisher is, and punches him in the face. His honor isn't satisfied, however, so he does what any Japanese man would do: sue 'em! In this he's encouraged by an unencouraging attorney, Mr. Hiruta (Shimura), who impresses our hero by having a consumptive daughter on the classic 19th century model. Hiruta quickly appears to angle for an out-of-court settlement but is almost immediately flipped by the domineering Amour publisher, who'll feed the shyster's bicycle-race gambling habit if he throws the case and assures the magazine's acquittal. As Hiruta, Shimura takes over the film and sinks it. The lawyer is a Dostoevskian figure, self-consciously, narcissistically abject. "He's not bad, he's just weak," his wise, doomed daughter says of him, and his self-loathing is so nakedly obvious that his betrayal becomes transparent from the beginning. Too dumb to be tricky, he's merely mute and downcast when he should at least be pretending to win the case for his client. Friends and family suspect him immediately but pity more than despise him.

The film's Christmas aspect has inspired suspicion of a further Capra influence but the drunken holiday party Aoye and Hiruta attend seems as much a Dostoevskian occasion at which society's losers look forward to a new year and another chance to get things right while getting plastered for the present. It's indisputably not Capracorn when Hiruta's daughter dies; it may be more Dickens than Dostoevsky in its pathetic quality. This tragedy starts the film's final turn, as at the last possible moment Hiruta mans up, confesses his malpractice and incriminates the publisher. Given the way Shimura had been dominating the picture, I expected a courtroom climax of Hollywood hysterics; surely this was the moment for the actor to go full Barrymore, for the character to orate to redemptive death. Instead, he does the bare minimum to salvage the case, and now that I've thought it over this seems more Capraesque. If the Mifune character is the film's cinderella-man protagonist, than Hiruta is Senator Payne to Mifune's Senator Smith, and his redemption must come in an abrupt confession rather than, say, the fatal aria of A Free Soul. Still, since by this point I wished Hiruta dead it was quite anticlimactic and a leaden finish to what had started as a snappy satire, only to be sabotaged by Kurosawa's ill-digested blend of cultural influences. He probably had to get it out of his system before moving on to his next film and global fame.

DVR Diary: THE EXILE (1947)

It's hard not to believe that Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Max Ophuls didn't appreciate where they were, which was Universal Studios, where Ophuls, freshly fired by Howard Hughes and still hoping to make his American directorial debut, would film Fairbanks's screenplay -- he received sole credit for a collaboration with Ophuls and Clemence Dane, among others -- as Junior's first film as an independent producer. The Exile is often described as Junior's homage to his swashbuckling father, but it could as easily be seen as the two auteurs' tribute to Universal itself, as if Ophuls + Fairbanks = James Whale. Why, there's a climactic fight in a windmill a la Frankenstein and IMDB confirms my fleeting glimpse of Michael Mark, Little Maria's poor father, in a bit part. Like Ophuls, Whale liked to move the camera around, though his were halting steps compared to the later master. Perhaps most reminiscent of Whale are the obvious backdrop skies of this setbound yet expressionist picture, which is, to be fair, only superficially an homage to Whale or Universal. The auteurs are greater romantics than Whale or any of the Universal crew ever were and put their personal stamp -- presumably Fairbanks's as much as Ophuls's -- on what looks very much like a Universal film, down to the participation of Maria (Cobra Woman) Montez, Nigel (Dr. Watson) Bruce and Henry (Prof. Moriarty) Daniell in key roles. Moreover, it has more heart, or at least a different kind of heart, than any of Fairbanks Senior's pictures did.

You may know The Exile by its alias, Bonnie Prince Charlie, a title that eliminates any uncertainty over who the film is about. Fairbanks and company adapted a novel about the eventual Charles II by Cosmo Hamilton, portraying the prince in Dutch exile late in the Protectorate and wearying of the grim responsibility his remaining loyalists impose upon him. He doesn't want to risk their lives in another attempt to reclaim England by force and appears content to live a simpler life as an assistant innkeeper, having fallen for the innkeeper's daughter (Pauline Crosset aka Rita Corday). The first half of the picture is doubly comic as the regime in England trembles at the thought of Charles' plots while he romps with his new love Katie, and Charles has to help entertain a preposterous imposter (Robert Coote) calling himself Charles Stuart only so he can mooch meals off the fools who trust his letters of credit. Katie herself doesn't know the truth, despite the appearance of the flamboyant Countess Arabella (Montez), who lavishes attentions on humble Charlie.

Things turn deadly serious once the English government's agent, Col. Ingram (Daniell) arrives at the inn. Daniell, one of the great villain actors, is such a baleful presence that Ophuls's gliding camera seems frozen in his presence as Ingram has a guarded, loaded talk with the inn's English employee. The film hits a peak of suspense as Charlie is about to walk away with Ingram none the wiser on his true identity, and the impostor strolls in and affects a royal tantrum at the sight of a Roundhead. For a moment Charlie seems willing to let this idiot get his comeuppance, but once it becomes apparent that Ingram is credulous enough to kill the fool our hero must stop hiding in plain sight. Now the film becomes the sort of swashbuckler Fairbanks Senior would have recognized, with Ophuls sharing credit with "action scene designer" David Sharpe for some bravura sequences climaxing in the windmill fight. Credit is also due to cinematographer Fritz Planer (and two undredited collaborators) for adding an extra expressionist, almost noir aspect to these night battles. While his collaborators arguably are looking backward, Planer shoots as if he wanted this, rather than Anthony Mann's Black Book, to be the first historical costume noir film. It's not at all inappropriate, of course, in a film that in many ways looks like the last Universal film in the studio's classical manner.

Still, neither Fairbanks nor Ophuls really had noir in his heart. The heart of their picture is the romance of the exiled king and the inkeeper's daughter, Charlie realizing that he really could live out his life happily there, only to face unavoidable responsibility once the once-hoped-for summons comes from England. This sort of bittersweetness is Ophuls's meat, and for all that this is Fairbanks's film as producer and writer, it's also clearly an Ophuls film in its sentiments as well as its mobility. The two worked so well together that it's a shame that their film's flop at the box office kept them from teaming up again. Ophuls went on to greater victories, of course, but Fairbanks, whose career grows more interesting the more I see of it, probably was never as good after this. It's a bigger shame that he's remembered more for Sinbad the Sailor, where he more blatantly apes his father, than for The Exile, perhaps his most personal work of art.

On the Big Screen: FANTASTIC FOUR (2015)

The Marvel Age of Comics, as Stan Lee called it, began in 1961 with his and Jack Kirby's answer to DC Comics's Justice League of America. Everything else you've seen with the Marvel name on it in the past sixteen years, from the beginning of Twentieth Century-Fox's X-Men franchise and including the cycle of films produced by Marvel's own studio, begins with The Fantastic Four. Efforts to put them on film predate this era of movies, and studios are still trying to do them justice, though it arguably becomes more difficult the more these cinematic universes evolve without them. If Marvel ever does get the movie rights back, as so many fans wish, they might be better off putting them in a period piece, possibly set in the time the original comics were published, than making them latecomers to the ongoing MCU party. Goodness knows it's been hard to account for their existence in any other era. Nothing seems to work like the original idea that Reed Richards wanted to get to the moon before the Russians, and before his American handlers, not to mention his spaceship, were ready for him and his motley crew to go. Later generations of creators seemed to think that it should have sufficed for him to be an explorer, but the element of a race that Reed must win seemed to be important at the onset, and one thing Josh Trank gets right, out of very few, is that sense of aggressive impatience. In his already-infamous film, Reed has developed a teleportation device that will allow people to explore a world in another dimension. After a successful test sends a chimp over and brings him back alive, Reed and his collaborators expect to be the first men to cross over. But the boys are all too young -- Trank, apparently following the creators of the alternate-universe Ultimate Fantastic Four comic book, abandons Reed's patriarchal aspect and renders Johnny Storm, originally a token teen, redundant -- and the untrustworthy establishment types want to send astronauts or soldiers across. So in a move worthy of the creator of Chronicle, the found-footage superhero sleeper that earned Trank this perhaps career-destroying gig, Reed and his colleagues get drunk and decide to take a joyride to Planet Zero, leaving girl scientist Sue Storm (the doted-upon Kosovar-American adopted daughter of controversially-colored scientist Franklin Storm and thus envied by Franklin's hothead natural son Johnny) behind to save most of their bacon when the impromptu expedition goes inevitably south. In comics, Reed Richards has always combined impulsiveness with authority; he may be thought of as a careful if not bloodless calculator, but he's always in a position to act on his ideas without obstruction. In this movie Reed has no authority, but that seems to be part of the point.

If any point remains after all the reshoots and Trank's not-quickly-enough retracted repudiation of the finished product, it's a younger generation's struggle for autonomy, their effort to earn the right to control their own destiny. That's not what Stan and Jack's books were about, but it's a suitable topic for a revisionist movie -- and it's not as if Marvel Comics haven't gone revisionist on the FF over the years. I remember a miniseries called Unstable Molecules -- after the material Reed uses to make his team's infinitely-adaptable costumes -- that was done as a period piece in order to take a quite bleak view of the era that birthed the original comics, the repressive 1950s. It could have been seen as an insult to the original comics, but it actually was a fine book that promised sequels whose failure to appear is regrettable. Josh Trank's Fantastic 4 isn't a failure because it's revisionist; nor is it a failure because the studio tampered with Trank's vision, though its interventions most likely turned a mere misfire into a disaster.It may be, however, that The Fantastic Four is an idea that can't sustain very much revisionism. We'd know better if someone had actually made a satisfactory and faithful movie beforehand, but by most scorecards this is the fourth failure in as many tries. Whose fault is that? Is the foundational Marvel Comic possibly untranslatable into movies?

A big part of the problem this time is that Trank and his collaborators, if not his Ultimate precursors, fell into many of the same traps that threaten superhero filmmakers and anyone attempting to "reboot" a venerable pop-culture franchise. First and foremost comes an overdose of origins. In the very first Fantastic Four comic the team's origin is treated as an aside, a flashback to account for the strange people suddenly leaping into action on sight of an awkward-looking smoke signal before their initial adventure resumes. In time, Lee and Kirby would explain that Reed and Ben "The Thing" Grimm were college buddies who fought in World War II together, but those details either weren't worth mentioning in issue one or the creators hadn't thought of them yet. Such indifference is intolerable to our time, when we need detailed accounts of how each hero "begins" because heroism can't be taken for granted today. So now we start with Reed and Ben as children and grade-school classmates, which is all to explain why drunk Reed impulsively calls Ben in to participate in his ill-fated trip to Planet Zero. You'll notice, by the way, how convoluted a process it has become to put the four main characters into position to be transformed, all because no one finds it plausible anymore that a scientist going into space would take, along with his trusty pilot, his completely unqualified girlfriend and her kid brother. Revisionists trade dramatic neatness for plausibility -- in a superhero story! -- and they probably lose something crucial to this comic book's appeal.

But to continue: another problem with today's originitis is the impulse to foreshadow a series' long history and make the origin story more -- ha! -- dramatically coherent by placing key characters at the scene who only emerged later in the original books or episodes. An early example of this was Tim Burton's writers making the Joker, in his earlier, naturally-pigmented state, the murderer of Batman's parents. A later example is the Gotham TV show making the future Catwoman a witness to the murder. For the Fantastic Four, what you do is involve Doctor Doom in the origin story as much as possible. Doom wasn't exactly a latecomer, making his debut in the fourth issue, and it would be understandable for a tentpole film project to lead with the franchise's strongest villain. But why embed him in the origin? In this film Victor Von Doom (the filmmakers retreated from an announced plan to give him a different civilian name) is a former employee of Franklin Storm working along lines similar to Reed's and brought back to help shepherd the project to fruition -- and he's supposed to have a thing for Sue. Modern writers apparently believe such extra details necessary to establish arch-enmity, as if Doom's irrepressible itch for world conquest, and a jealousy of Reed shown to predate the origin incident, wouldn't take care of that. But since this film is nothing but origin, if you want a supervillain in it he has to be part of the origin. So Victor is one of the drunken crew on the jaunt to Planet Zero, where he in seeming death acquires the superpowers that have never been necessary to one of comics' greatest mad scientists, as well as a motivation -- to prevent the new world from exploitation by humans -- that seems pretty miserable in comparison to the comics character's epic ambitions. Given how this all plays out, there's really no good reason for this character to be Doctor Doom except for the benefit of name recognition. By now FF fans are impatient to see any other of the series' deep roster of villains, so why not put one of them into the origin story and save Doom as your big selling point for your sequel a la The Dark Knight? The reason seems to be that despite all the self-conscious revisionism at work, the writers were really running on origin-story autopilot, until everyone started fighting over the controls and the plane went down.

The actors are mostly helpless passengers. Many of them have quite impressive recent credits that make their work here deeply disappointing. Kate Mara has no personality apart from an intellectual quirk -- Sue's expertise in pattern analysis allows her to track down a fugitive Reed even though his new ability to change his appearance presumably made it impossible to discover a pattern -- and her status as Daddy's Girl leaves her out of the youth-rebellion aspect of the story. Michael B. Jordan, meanwhile, has nothing but youthful rebellion going for him, Johnny being willing to become a living weapon, apparently, in order to stick it to Dad. Miles Teller made his name in a picture that was stolen from him and his standing as lead character, as Reed, is no more secure here. You may recognize Toby Kebbell's eyes and mouth as those of Koba, the evil chimp who steals Dawn of the Planet of the Apes from motion-capture master Andy Serkis. You won't recognize them once his Victor Von Doom is transformed into an emotionless, expressionless living mask. Jack Kirby and his successors could always cheat and make Doom's armored face plate (see also Iron Man) more expressive than it really could be, but the latest movie Doom is an all-too-honest debacle.

I've saved the worst for last: the multiply-misguided casting of Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm. It's revisionist, I guess, to have Ben, a football star before he became a pilot and superhero, be a runt regularly clobbered by an abusive older brother. You can have some nice role reversal once Ben becomes a giant rock monster and super soldier, but the real failure with Ben is the ultimate failure of the whole film -- leaving aside the ineptitudes of the re-shot action climax. The Thing embodies the unique tone that made Marvel so daringly different in the Silver Age of Comics. Like Conan the Barbarian, Ben Grimm is a man (or monster) of gigantic melancholy and gigantic mirth. Fairly quickly, in one of Lee and Kirby's miracles of inspiration, Ben evolved from self-pitying grotesque into the series' comic relief, if not its heart and soul. At first feared, he was soon adored by the public, the irreconcilables of Yancy Street always excepted. He might occasionally lapse into an existential funk, but most of the time he was the Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing, the Idol of Millions. Like Spider-Man, the Thing echoed Stan Lee's inimitable narrative voice that managed to operate in two registers simultaneously, at once self-important and self-mocking. Is it fair to condemn Bell and Trank for inflicting upon us an utterly humorless Ben Grimm? In their defense it can be repeated that the Thing reached his definitive form, not only in content but in form as Kirby made him rockier and somehow cuter looking, only over time, and that just as he wasn't this way at the end of the first issue he shouldn't be expected to be that way by the end of this latest first movie. But just as writers want to encompass as much of the work of decades in two hours, why shouldn't we expect the first film to deliver the characters to us in their definitive forms by the time it's done? Writers may be obsessed with origins, but I doubt that characters' fans really want to see them in their earliest forms, especially when they're as uninspiring as this immature, introverted, bloodless quartet. Done wrong, an origin story is like showing people how sausage is made, and together Trank and Fox probably have killed most people's appetite for another FF movie, no matter how much some still wish that Marvel would make one themselves, for many years to come.

GOLD (2013)

We've actually seen quite a few German westerns, so the novelty of Thomas Arslan's film is that it's a German northwestern, an exploration of the Klondike rather than a Karl May-inspired romp among the noble savages. Gold (the English word is the official German title) has inspired many comparisons with one of the best American westerns of the still-young century, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff. In part that's because Gold, too, has a female protagonist, but it may also be because some viewers ask, "Is that it?" at the end. Gold is no more about reaching one's destination than Meek's Cutoff was, but it's both more picturesque, within its budgetary limitations, and somewhat more existential than the American film. The poster art you see here has whitened the landscape through which the characters ride to better match the lingering popular imagination of the Klondike, but in the movie itself browns and greens prevail and the action takes place in warmer weather than we're used to seeing in this particular subgenre. If the absence of winter disappoints you you can always wait for The Hateful Eight, but Arslan and cinematographer Patrick Orth do nicely by their British Columbia locations, emphasizing wilderness rather than winter. There's no effort, as in Meek's Cutoff, to obscure the epic sweep of the landscape, but as in the Reichardt film a little band of increasingly desperate people of increasingly questionable competence subordinate the landscape to a human scale.

 

By the 1890s adventurers like Emily can reach the frontier's edge by train.

From there, things look more generically western, albeit further north.

 

Arslan follows a small group of German immigrants who've gathered for an expedition to the gold fields organized by Wilhelm Laser (Peter Kurth), an irrepressibly European figure who inspires little confidence, though his hired man Carl Boehmer (Marko Mandic) is more acclimated and more promising. A latecomer to the group is, unexpectedly, a single woman, Emily Meyer (Nina Hoss). More than the others, she seems to be going for the sake of going, more the classic western loner than any of the others. Boehmer, however, is another western archetype, the man with a past. Evocative of John Wayne in Stagecoach, he's a justified killer who has unfinished business, whether he likes it or not, with his enemies.
 

Things fall apart fairly rapidly once it becomes clear that Laser is a con man. Compared to other characters he gets off easy, if only because Emily rescues him from a sunrise lynching. Others drop out or die. One man (Lars Rudolph) most likely does both; driven mad by the horrors he sees, he strips naked and runs off alone. By that point, with Laser gone and another self-appointed leader done in by blundering into a bear trap, only Emily and Boehmer are left. Through luck more than anything else they end up in an outpost of civilization, only to find Boehmer's reckoning waiting for him.

Emily arrives alone and departs alone. Does she go on out of greed, for the sake of another, or is her urge to press on much different than the mania that sent her onetime partner running naked into the deep woods? For a film called Gold, this film isn't really about greed once the scheming Laser is out of it. A stubborn restlessness is the prevailing spirit, a determination to go one's own way, often against good advice, for the satisfaction of having chosen it oneself. The party seems doomed to self-destruction. They're the sort who are warned against doing something stupid and almost immediately walk into disaster. Boehmer seems more competent and thoughtful, and Emily less aggressively reckless, than the rest, but their mere presence in this misguided band seems to signal that something's wrong with them, too. Nina Hoss plays Emily with a disquieting stoicism that barely hints at deeper motives for her relentless quest. When she takes leave of us, her perseverance can be seen with equal fairness as heroic or foolhardy, or as both in equal measure. To writer-director Arslan's credit, he recognizes in Emily an enigma that can't be reduced to the neatness of a romantic character arc or resolved in violent catharsis. That may leave Gold's ending as unsatisfying to some as the in medias res finish of Meek's Cutoff. But by disdaining conventional dramatics both films may leave us truer portraits of the pioneers and fortune seekers that populated a continent.

Pre-Code Parade: THE EASIEST WAY (1931)

For Adolphe Menjou 1931 was the crucial year of his transition from silent stardom to a sound career. He had spent most of 1930 working in French, either in European productions or in the short-lived genre of Hollywood-produced foreign versions of their big releases. As The Great Lover demonstrated, the passage could be a minefield, even after Menjou had apparently found his footing with The Front Page. Jack Conway's M-G-M picture appeared before either of those films and adapted a play still considered daring and censorable thirty years after its stage debut. Menjou took second billing after Constance Bennett, though you'll note that some newspaper advertising featured him alone. If Great Lover approximated Menjou's silent star vehicles, featuring the star as a loveable cad, Easiest Way is a Constance Bennett showcase in which Menjou is in no way lovable. To be fair, none of the men in the picture are particularly lovable, including Robert Montgomery as the actual romantic lead, and especially rising star Clark Gable as Bennett's self-righteous brother-in-law. In short, this is a women's picture and a true Pre-Code product if also dated, given the source material, in its reluctance to make a real heroine of its main character.

Like many Pre-Codes, it puts the Depression in your face by placing Bennett in a squalid, crowded, working-class tenement family in which, it must be conceded, she doesn't seem to belong. As Laura Murdock, she shares a bed with her sisters (Anita Page and Elizabeth Ann Keever), who compete to kick each other out of bed in the morning. We're treated to ample lingerie shots of Bennett and Page as they, the breadwinners of the household (which includes two younger brothers as well as parents J. Farrell McDonald and Clara "Auntie Em" Blandick), prepare for their workday. While the Page character looks destined for housewifedom as Gable's girl, he being a laundry delivery man, Laura Murdock toils away as a department store sales clerk until a customer advises her that she has a figure worthy of an artist's model. That sounds questionable at first, but the man means commercial art, so she'll get to keep her clothes on. In painted form, Laura catches the eye of ad-agency mastermind William Brockton (Menjou), a Mad Man of his time, who makes her his mistress. This makes most of her family happy -- her out-of-work dad is happy to sponge off her -- but alienates her from her sister, if only because Gable takes moral offense at her position and a different kind of offense at her showing up at his humble home in a chauffeur-driven car to bring her sister expensive gifts. He may seem more like a jerk now than he was meant to originally, but I suspect that some Pre-Code audiences saw him that way already.

When Brockton leaves her at a resort while he goes on to a business meeting, Laura falls for aspiring foreign correspondent Jack Madison (Montgomery). Presumably yearning for legitimacy, she agrees to marry Jack but must first wait for him to return from an assignment in South America. Brockton takes getting dumped with Menjou's usual insouciance, but he's actually playing a waiting game as Jack's sojourn runs on and Laura's money and pawnable goods run out. Facing a hotel bill that must be paid at once, and having lost contact with Jack, Laura meets Brockton again and gets a new proposition: he'll take her back, but she must dump Jack in writing. This, presumably, is his insurance against her returning to Jack or, more likely, Jack taking her back.

Laura hasn't yet written the letter after two weeks, by which time Jack has returned to the U.S. This sets up an overly theatrical climax underscoring the story's old-fashioned tragic sensibility. If Warner Bros. made this film, I could imagine a farcical resolution in which Laura had sent the letter and must race to retrieve it before Jack can open it, her success setting up a happy ending with Jack none the wiser about her last crisis. Instead, the Metro film goes for pathos and an apparently necessary punishment for Laura. She stupidly arranges to meet Jack at the apartment Brockton has set her up in, hoping to elope with him before he can ask what she's doing there -- but of course Brockton shows up like the lord of the manor that he is, which sets Jack straight about things. Inevitably Jack breaks up with her and goes somewhere to get plastered, while Brockton magnanimously offers to keep Laura in the manner to which he's grown accustomed. She refuses -- and in a coda that apparently was one of several Metro shot for different markets or different tastes, we cut to Christmastime at the festive Gable-Page household, as a furtive figure lurks outside. Gable himself pulls up to discover Laura peeping through a window as her sister and niece decorate the tree. Gable learns that Laura has been "working" lately -- we're invited to put the worst possible spin on that -- but this bourgeois boor must have been haunted by ghosts recently, because he's surprisingly forgiving and friendly, inviting Laura in out of the cold for a family reunion. The film ends on an oddly ambivalent note, probably dictated by the Hays Office, in which a happy ending is promised but left to our imagination. Gable somehow knows the score up to this point and predicts that Jack will forgive Laura once he recovers from his bender, and until then, Merry Christmas!

Pre-Code cinema was never entirely immune from Hollywood's custodians of morals, but prime Pre-Code isn't as compromised as The Easiest Way, which seems to have been targeted for special scrutiny due to its enduring reputation as an immoral story. If Laura doesn't reunite with Jack at the end, that's probably less because Robert Montgomery wasn't available than that the Hays Office, usually less persuasive than the succeeding Breen Office, wanted the film to end on a more probationary note. That scandalous reputation probably guaranteed that the film would turn a profit, but it certainly did Adolphe Menjou no favors. As an all-American businessman he's closer to his eventual character-actor persona than he would be in Great Lover, but Brockton is also an all-American creep and a role that gradually drains Menjou of whatever charm he brought to the early scenes. It doesn't seem like the role you'd take if you still hope to be a top-billed star in your own right, but at that Menjou still has more charisma than the soft-spoken and ultimately self-pitying Montgomery, who had already filmed a dozen substantial roles before this but still looks pretty green. As I said, none of the male actors come off well, and even Constance Bennett never really seems right for her role. She's so posh in voice and manner from the beginning that you wonder whether she's a changeling left behind when the fairies took the Murdocks' real daughter. It may have felt more real had Bennett and Anita Page switched roles, but by 1931 there was only so much, probably, that anyone could do with this hoary material. Columbia Pictures cried foul when it came out because the Hays Office had effectively forbidden them from filming the play a few years earlier. I suppose the easiest way, then and now, is always to film a proven property with a marketable title, but Columbia and Metro should have tried harder.

Pre-Code Parade: THE GREAT LOVER (1931)

The coming of sound ended the careers, or at least the stardom, of many silent actors. Some simply didn't have voices of star quality, whether due to foreign or regional accents or simple lack of character. I've seen enough of John Gilbert's talkies, for instance, to decide that, whatever else M-G-M may have been up to with him, his voice lacked star quality. Other stars could talk but found that their star personae had become obsolete, either due to the Depression or changing story styles inspired by sound. Harold Lloyd is a good example of this sort, though he fought on grimly against obsolescence for most of the 1930s. William Haines arguably suffered a triple whammy, having not just an obsolete persona and a weak voice but studio hostility (due to scandal) to deal with. The times were risky for nearly everyone who had been big in silent film. We lose track of that risk when we see that a silent star survived and thrived well into the sound era. We might miss that that survival required an overhaul of a star's screen persona if it threatened to become obsolete, especially if the star's silent star vehicles go largely unseen. All of this leads up to a story about Adolphe Menjou. He was a silent star who turned into a great character actor in the sound era, his career arguably climaxing with his turn as the cynical general in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory in 1957. His silent stardom is largely a footnote to his character-actor career, most of us knowing little about it apart maybe from Chaplin making him a star in A Woman of Paris. Menjou is one of the stars who survived by changing his persona. You can see the change in one triumphant film: Lewis Milestone's The Front Page, in which Menjou proved once and for all that he not only had a voice, but that he had a voice for the new era of movies as the fast-talking, hard-boiled newspaper editor Walter Burns. The Front Page was released in April 1931. Harry Beaumont's The Great Lover appeared in July, which meant that with all his new momentum, his survival (and more than that) seemingly assured, Menjou promptly tripped over himself.

The Great Lover was a troubled production. According to one report, German-American director Arthur Robison, whose best know work is the silent Warning Shadows, quit the picture on the same day that actor Ralph Graves was fired for taking a swing at an assistant director after reporting late to the set. The real problem was that Lover was an old-fashioned Menjou lovable-cad vehicle that plowed on unawares after Front Page had proven that Menjou wouldn't need to do this sort of thing anymore. Pittsburgh-born Menjou puts on a nondescript Euro accent to play opera star Jean Paurel, bearer of the "Great Lover" nickname. The movie surrounds Menjou with a lot of comic relief that ends up making him look like the straight man of his own comedy. Cliff Edwards plays his high-pressure press agent who hardly lets our hero get a word in during his photo ops. Roscoe Ates does his annoying stuttering act as a photographer; he seems to have been thrown in for kiddie appeal. Strangest of all, and speaking of talking-picture turnarounds, Ernest Torrence, typed as a hulking heavy or husky he-man -- and best known today as Steamboat Bill to Buster Keaton's Junior -- plays Menjou's butler. Sound revealed Torrence's mellifluous voice, not to mention an operatic background relevant not only here but in Ramon Novarro's foolhardy musical vehicle Call of the Flesh, expanded his range in the last few years of his life. Here he's a doting servant who tends to speak of Menjou's attributes and activities with a proprietary (or wishful) "we" and indulges in all the superstitions of the theater. Surrounded by eccentrics. Menjou is expected to be "himself" -- his old type -- and not much more thought was taken about his role.

Basically, it's almost a Star Is Born situation except that Jean Paurel is no drunk. His latest conquest is an ambitious singer, Diana Page (unlike Menjou, it sounds like Irene Dunne does her own singing), while Paurel's only ambition is to make it with her. This makes another recent girlfriend, the diva Savarova (Olga Baclanova is billed, Karloff-like, by her last name only), wickedly jealous, while supporting singer Carlo (Neil Hamilton replaced the pugnacious Graves) longs for Diana and resents Paurel. Diana really loves Carlo but depends on Paurel for career advancement and feels emotionally obliged to him. The payoff comes on the opening night of Paurel and Page's first engagement as an engaged couple, when Savarova denounces Diana as a cheater to Paurel between acts, driving him into a rage of denial that cracks his once-mighty voice and forces Carlo to take over the lead role. This sets up the great moment of renunciation in which Paurel releases Diana from her obligation so she can go off with her true love, while our hero, gently prodded by his faithful butler, gradually warms to the idea or pursuing another passing acquaintance the same way the Little Tramp kicks his heels up before marching down that road.

I can't sum up the failings of The Great Lover any better than this Milwaukee movie reviewer:

 

I can add that the film earns some Pre-Code Points for its rude treatment of a fat female singer -- Torrence enters a room and flees upon spying her prominent rear end -- and for a sexy shot of Menjou finding Dunne in mid-undress. But it should be obvious that Great Lover isn't Pre-Code enough. It's too much an attempt to recreate silent archetypes in sound, sort of like John Gilbert babbling "I love you, I love you, I love you," etc. as if reading a title card. Menjou's blithely amoral silent persona should have been a perfect fit for Pre-Code, but it needed a different kind of vehicle, either rougher or more streamlined but anything but the self-conscious suavity of this film, which is itself constantly undermined by broad, boorish comedy. Even if Lover were better it probably would have flopped because its moment of movie history was already gone. Hindsight is easy, of course, and it probably wasn't as obvious to Menjou in the spring of 1931, with one film in theaters and another in production, that Front Page rather than Great Lover pointed the way to his future -- that he could be a verbal fighter, at least, as well as a lover. He figured it out eventually, but still did the suave Euro type occasionally for awhile. Menjou's stature may have diminished somewhat but he still counts as a successful survivor of the transition from silence to sound. The Great Lover is an object lesson in how treacherous that transition could be, even for those who succeeded.

On the Big Screen: ANT-MAN (2015)

If this seems late, I suppose it was out of respect for Edgar Wright and whatever vision he had in mind that I waited two weeks before seeing the twelfth Marvel Studios production. Wright, one of the great comedy directors of our time, had lobbied Hollywood for years to let him make an Ant-Man movie, only to exit his pet project at the brink of principal photography over creative differences with Marvel. It's clear by now that Marvel abhors auteurs, as is inevitable when the studio's overriding project is the creation of a Cinematic Universe, and it's assumed that the studio wanted Ant-Man to be more Marvel in some way than Wright had planned. The irony, now that I've seen Peyton Reed's film, is that the Marvel elements, the details that link this story to the universe of the other films, are the most interesting thing about the story. I say that as a comics fan accustomed to reading stories in a universal context, while lay viewers may feel differently. For me, the backstory of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) was infinitely more interesting than the all-too-typical zero-to-hero story of Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who becomes the title character under Pym's tutelage.

In the Marvel Comics universe, Hank Pym and his wife Janet Van Dyne were founding members of The Avengers, peers of Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk, with Captain America arriving a few months later. Pym was also the creator of Ultron, the evil robot who starred in the second Avengers movie, but for all his historical importance his powers of shrinking (and growing; his Avengers identity was Giant-Man) and control over insects made him something less than first-team cinematic material. The Cinematic Universe has retconned Pym a generation back in time, making him a precursor to the movie Avengers. We meet him in a prologue set in 1989, arguing with a graying Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and a just-plain gray Howard Stark (John Slattery returns from Iron Man 2) over the use of his superscientific "Pym Particles" by SHIELD. During the film proper, we learn that Pym was the original Ant-Man, a super-agent during the later Cold War, who retired following a tragedy involving his wife, the winsome Wasp (an actress is credited with the role, but is clearly a placeholder pending future developments). Grief and secrecy have estranged Pym from his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who as a board member joined in a hostile takeover of Pym's business by Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who is basically our old friend the Evil Yuppie/Corporate Guy, only bald in deference to modern fashions. Some reactionary comics fans will look at this guy and say, "Why didn't they cast him as Lex Luthor instead of that geeky kid?" but I think he proved his unworthiness here. Anyway, while Hope remains emotionally estranged from her father, she's grown alarmed by Cross's continuation of Pym's research without Pym's cooperation, fearing the ways Cross might exploit the technology, and is secretly and grudgingly collaborating with Dad to thwart the new boss.

Dad's idea is to hire a capable cat-burglar to learn how to use his Ant-Man suit and sabotage Cross's work. The idea only further embitters Hope, who feels quite capable and entitled to follow in her parents' tiny footsteps. But we can't get Scott Lang into the film otherwise, and I'm afraid we must. Lang is an ex-con, having pulled off some nigh-impossible corporate burglary that's given him a Robin Hood reputation in some quarters. But he's introduced to us with a nearly-fatal half hour of sad-sackery as the poor man has trouble finding and holding a job with his criminal record. His wife has left him for a cop, but Scott's daughter still adores him, as does his criminal sidekick Luis (Michael Pena). Luis and his buddies want Scott to resume his burgling career, and it turns out they're all being manipulated by an all-seeing Hank Pym, who wants to maneuver Lang, whose past exploit impressed him, into a position where he can be properly propositioned. Suffice it to say that Scott and his merry men become Pym's strike force. Scott himself must learn in typical painful fashion how to utilize his new size-shifting abilities while a belligerent Hope teaches him the finer points of combat in the genre's alternative to meeting cute. They all have a rapidly closing window of time to do their thing, since after numerous failed experiments (that reduce sheep and men to little globs of gore) Cross apparently has perfected his enhanced "Yellowjacket" suit, and plans to sell the tech to very bad people. In practice he proves a very bad person himself, as explained by an almost throwaway comment about the psychological damage done by overuse of Pym Particles. It's all for the best, though, for otherwise Scott would have no one to fight.

Ant-Man has one of the weakest ensembles of any Marvel film. Douglas is all right but nothing special as an eminence gris, while Evangeline Lilly, who hasn't gotten many good reviews, actually strikes the right note of belligerent entitlement as a future Wasp. And that's about it. Rudd is generically glib apart from the justified self-pity the plot requires of him -- and how many of you out there are sick and tired of the whole zero-to-hero thing? It shows no sign of going away soon, as recent the asinine comments of Guy Ritchie and Charlie Hunnam regarding King Arthur demonstrate, but as much as its advocates think its the only thing keeping heroic characters from boring us to death, zero-to-hero is starting to bore me to death. For a while I was wishing Marvel had made a period piece all about Hank and Janet, but once Hank takes over the Scott storyline the movie settles into a satisfying caper picture with some impressive special effects illustrating the predicament of a suddenly shrunken man. But before I praise Ant-Man I have to damn the post-Wright writers (including Rudd) who made Scott's sidekicks into three ethnic stooges. I try not to be "politically correct" about entertainment, but it did make me a little uncomfortable to see Scott's buddies -- Hispanic, black and Eastern European -- react with superstitious hysteria to Scott's demonstration of his new suit. Michael Pena is particular is embarrassing, not because he's a Hispanic actor playing an idiot, but because it's hard to imagine the idiot Pena plays surviving more than an hour as a professional criminal.There probably is a little too much Marvel in the picture, including a gratuitous cameo by Anthony Mackie as The Falcon that sets up the post-credits teaser, which is itself a staggering anticlimax to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But much less Marvel would have made Ant-Man hard to endure. I'd like to think that Wright would have written (or did write) a much funnier film with better comic acting, but who can say? What we have is an Ant-Man that just manages to transcend its troubled production, and maybe only because, contrary to what Wright may have wanted, it's really part of a larger whole that actually makes it worth our while.