Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/13/19

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

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Welcome, Mr. Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)

Cast: Manolo Morán, José Isbert, Lolita Sevilla, Alberto Romea, Elvira Quintillá, Luis Pérez de León, Félix Fernández, Fernando Aguirre. Screenplay: Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, Miguel Mihura. Cinematography: Manuel Berenguer. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Jesús García Leoz.

As he so often did, Luis García Berlanga thumbed his nose at the Franco-era censors with a satiric look at a small Spanish village out to court foreign aid from the Americans under the Marshall Plan. The residents set up a kind of Andalusian Potemkin village, donning costumes they don't usually wear and generally dressing up the place in the fashion they think American tourists will expect. In dream sequences, we see what the villagers not only hope but also what they fear they will get from the Americans.

Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Peter Lorre in Mad Love

Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty. Screenplay: Guy Endore, P.J. Wolfson, John L. Balderston, based on a novel by Maurice Renard. Cinematography: Chester A. Lyons, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Peter Lorre's American debut made him a specialist in creepy roles. He's Dr. Gogol, a mad physician, obsessed with a lovely actress (Frances Drake) married to a concert pianist (Colin Clive) who, when his hands are injured in an accident, allows the doctor to operate on them. But the doctor replaces the pianist's hands with those of a murderer, a specialist in knife-throwing, who has just been guillotined for his crimes. Naturally, this means that the pianist can't play anymore but develops a new talent for throwing sharp objects. And so on. It's a pretty well made piece of hokum that gained some late notoriety when Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of stealing from it when he made Citizen Kane (1941), largely because both films had the same cinematographer, Gregg Toland.