A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Rich and Strange (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Henry Kendall and Joan Barry in Rich and Strange
Fred Hill: Henry Kendall
Emily Hill: Joan Barry
Commander Gordon: Percy Marmont
The Princess: Betty Amann
The Old Maid: Elsie Randolph

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Val Valentine
Based on a novel by Dale Collins
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Charles Martin
Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold
Music: Adolph Hallis

One of Alfred Hitchcock's early talkie flops, Rich and Strange begins well, with an opening shot of Fred Hill at work in an expressionist-style depersonalized office set, followed by a montage showing his attempt to make it home on the Underground, dealing with elbowing crowds and a recalcitrant umbrella. There's a nicely synched bit in which umbrellas open to musical flourishes before Fred's fizzles. Then it's home to a drab and chaotic existence before the Hills receive their wished-for deliverance from the daily muddle: A rich uncle tells Fred that he can have an advance on his inheritance so he and his wife, Emily, can live a little. They set off to see the world. This early part of the film is perhaps the best because it mostly picks up on the skills Hitchcock learned through his work in silent movies. In fact, it is shot through with droll title cards and very little dialogue of consequence. The Hills are overwhelmed by Paris and shocked at the Folies Bergère, then board ship -- not a promising moment for Fred, who succumbed to seasickness on the Channel crossing -- for a cruise on the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal toward Asia. (The American title was East of Shanghai.) And then the talk takes over, as both Fred and Emily have shipboard romances, she with a somewhat dashing bachelor on his way to Ceylon, he with a German "princess" who cons him out of his money. Rich and Strange is a curious mess, with Henry Kendall, a once-well-known music hall comedian, awkward in the romantic part of Fred's story. Joan Barry steps out in front of the camera behind which she was lurking to speak the lines for Anny Ondra in Hitchcock's  Blackmail (1929), but she's not much more than pretty.  Hitchcock liked the film, but nobody else did very much, and opinion doesn't seem to have changed with time.

The Young Rebels (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1980)

Tomisaburo Wakayama in The Young Rebels 
Journalist: Go Kato
Asakawa Senjo: Tomisaburo Wakayama
Takiko: Junko Mihara
Yukio: Tatsuya Okamoto
Orie: Tomoko Saito

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's polemical pseudo-documentary, The Young Rebels, sounds like that of a Hollywood film from the 1950s, the era of naive, sensational, and didactic dramas about "juvenile delinquency." Which is exactly what The Young Rebels turns out to be: an exploitation film about why kids go wrong. The answer is a simple one: their parents. The kids, Kinoshita is saying, are not all right: They ride around on motorcycles, they cut school, they shoplift, and they have sex. This was not exactly news in 1980: Nagisa Oshima, for example, was onto these facts in 1960, when he made Cruel Story of Youth, and he blamed it on dysfunctional parenting in 1969's Boy. But Oshima's films are about people more than they are about problems. Kinoshita has lost sight of the people in his obsession with the problem, and the result is a scattershot film designed to ferret out examples of parental irresponsibility both high -- affluent parents who are so obsessed with climbing the corporate or social ladders that they either ignore their children or spoil them -- and low -- parents who are so mired in poverty and its attendant ills like alcoholism and crime that they abuse their children. The narrative framework of the film is as simplistic as its point of view: a journalist goes in search of answers and interviews children and parents. Kinoshita is enough of an artist that he knows how to tell the several stories uncovered by the journalist, which gives The Young Rebels enough dramatic substance to keep the polemic at bay during the storytelling, but the piling on of miseries turns into overkill. Eventually, the journalist visits a kind of reform school in Hokkaido, the north of Japan, where wayward boys are nurtured back into society -- but there's even some recidivism there. At the end, the point seems to be that every kid needs a loving mother and father -- the Japanese title translates as a cry for help: "Father! Mother!" It has been pointed out that people raised children for millennia until, sometime in the mid-20th century, they became self-conscious about it and turned it into a problem. Kinoshita's humorless and even hopeless polemic does little to solve the problem, especially when the film often seems bogged down in fogeyism: A scene of joyriding motorcycle gangs, for example, is treated as a vision from hell.