Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/02/17

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

Monday, October 2, 2017

Number Seventeen (Alfred Hitchcock, 1932)

Ann Casson and John Stuart in Number Seventeen

Barton: John Stuart
Ben: Leon M. Lion

Nora Brant: Anne Grey

Brant: Donald Calthrop

Henry Doyle: Barry Jones

Rose Ackroyd: Ann Casson

Mr. Ackroyd: Henry Caine

Sheldrake: Garry Marsh

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Ackland

Based on a play by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon

Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Bryan Langley

For the first part of the film, a bunch of people stumble around a derelict house, and for the rest of it most of them get on a speeding train and scramble around in pursuit of a presumably valuable necklace. There's a woman who's supposed to be a deaf-mute but turns out not to be and a corpse that's supposed to be dead but isn't, along with a giddy ingenue who falls through the ceiling and a cockney derelict who is supposed to supply comic relief from the gun-waving and running about. He doesn't, but the actor who played him, Leon M. Lion, not only got top billing but also a credit as producer. In short, Number Seventeen is a total mess. That it's atmospherically staged and photographed and the runaway train sequence is exciting in a mindless way are the positive elements we can ascribe to Hitchcock, who really didn't want to do this film version of a popular play, but agreed to anyway, then tried to turn a play he thought filled with clichés into a comedy thriller. He later called it "a disaster," and he was right.