Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/18/22

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, August 18, 2022

The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)

Cast: Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Roscoe Ates, Edward Brophy, Hale Hamilton, Jesse Scott, Marcia Mae Jones. Screenplay: Frances Marion. Cinematography: Gordon Avil. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

David Thomson has made the suggestion that The Champ is only a prequel to a much more interesting movie about how Dink (Jackie Cooper) fares after being turned over to his mother, moving from hardscrabble poverty with his alcoholic pug of a father to affluent gentility and respectability. That movie was never made, and I’m not sure I would have trusted MGM in the ‘30s to have made it anyway. What we have is enjoyable enough, sentimentality made palatable by the performances of Cooper and Wallace Beery, who have real chemistry, and by King Vidor’s superbly confident direction of them. For a creaky antique, it’s superbly watchable.