Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/09/18

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

Sunday, December 9, 2018

West Point (Edward Sedgwick, 1928)

William Haines and Joan Crawford in West Point

Brice Wayne: William Haines
Betty Channing: Joan Crawford
"Tex" McNeil: William Bakewell
Bob Sperry: Neil Neely
Bob Chase: Ralph Emerson
Football Captain Munson: Leon Kellar
Coach Towers: Raymond G. Moses

Director: Edward Sedgwick
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock, story; Joseph Farnham, titles
Cinematography: Ira H. Morgan
Film editing: Frank Sullivan

For a silent film, Edward Sedgwick's West Point is awfully talky, by which I mean that it's heavily laden with intertitles. That's because it's partly a romantic sitcom and partly a patriotic tribute to the values of the United States Military Academy, and it needs the titles to carry the gags and repartee as well as the flag-waving endorsements of honor and probity. William Haines plays Brice Wayne, an entitled but charming jerk, and the opening scenes in which he establishes both the arrogance and the charm of the character are chopped up by titles feeding us his jokes. A sample: Meeting a fellow cadet with a Jewish name, Wayne quips, "Oh, an Eskimo!" Fortunately, Haines is a fine comic player and overcomes both the title interruptions and the lame dialogue, especially when Wayne meets the female lead, Haines's frequent co-star Joan Crawford, who has matching comic skills. Crawford lets us know from the outset that Betty Channing sees through Wayne's jerkiness to the attractively vulnerable guy beneath. If West Point stuck more to the interplay between Wayne and Betty, it might have been a more enduring classic comedy, but when it ventures into the area of esprit de corps, after Wayne becomes a star on the Army football team and stumbles over his own arrogance and entitlement, the movie becomes a predictable Moral Lesson. Fortunately, the vintage footage shot at West Point is interesting enough to keep us going through the dull parts. William Bakewell is good as Wayne's friend Tex McNeil, a naïf who worships Wayne to a point that's suggestively homoerotic, given what we now know about Haines's sexual orientation.