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

Friday, November 8, 2019

Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929)


Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929)

Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Lewis Stone, Raymond Hackett, Holmes Herbert, Eugenie Besserer, Ullrich Haupt, Mitchell Lewis. Screenplay: Willard Mack, based on a play by Alexandre Bisson. Cinematography: Arthur Reed. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William S. Gray. Music: William Axt, Sam Wineland.

Perhaps because Lionel Barrymore had directed a few silent films and because he had acted on stage before giving over his career entirely to movies, MGM drafted him into directing Ruth Chatterton, making her own transition from stage to screen, in this remake of the old chestnut Madame X. Alexandre Bisson's 1908 play had been a hit starring Sarah Bernhardt and was filmed twice as a silent before being dusted off for the novelty of the talkies. The 1929 film was enough of a hit to put Barrymore and Chatterton in the running for the second annual Academy Awards. There were no official nominations that year -- only winners were announced -- but Academy records show that they were under consideration for the Oscars that went to Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady and Mary Pickford for Coquette (Sam Taylor). That they were considered at all is a sign of how weak the direction and performances of the year were -- it was the first time talking pictures were allowed to compete for the awards. Barrymore boasted of one feat he achieved as a director on the film: He improvised a boom microphone with a fishing pole. But even that claim has been contended by others, and it's likely that MGM's novice sound engineer Douglas Shearer was as responsible as Barrymore for the innovation. Otherwise, Madame X is stiffly staged and filmed, betraying not only its theatrical origins but also the difficulty filmmakers were having with recorded sound. Scenes are often badly framed, with a character's nose and mouth peeping into the shot or the lower half of a face disappearing at the bottom on the screen. In a scene in which Lewis Stone and Holmes Herbert are at a table for an intense discussion, Herbert keeps standing up and sitting down, and you can sense the cameraman's effort to tilt the bulky sound camera up and down to follow him. As for the acting, Chatterton starts off badly in the opening scenes in which her character is still a lady. She retains the intonations of stage elocution, with "cruel" coming out as "crew-ell" and her voice pitched and her mannerisms exaggerated so they can reach the recesses of the theater.  But later in the film, after she has "fallen," she's often quite effectively naturalistic as the weary, tough woman of the world, and she pulls off her drunk scene well. The plot of Madame X is familiar stuff: Woman sins, woman suffers, woman achieves a kind of redemption, and woman dies. But it's substantial enough that it continued to be remade, as soon as 1937 with Gladys George directed by Sam Wood, in British, Philippine, Greek and Mexican versions, in a glossy Ross Hunter-produced version starring Lana Turner directed by David Lowell Rich in 1966, and even in a 1981 TV film with Tuesday Weld. 

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