Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/03/23

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 3, 2023

Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

Betty Balfour and Gordon Harker in Champagne

Cast: Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Ferdinand von Alten, Gordon Harker, Jack Trevor, Claude Hulbert, Marcel Vibert, Hannah Jones, Clifford Heatherley. Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Eliot Stannard. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold.

Champagne is flat. Still, thank you to the Criterion Channel for the opportunity to see one of the Alfred Hitchcock films I hadn't seen before. Hitchcock himself disowned the movie, hating its cobbled-together script and disliking his leading lady, Betty Balfour, whom, according to Stephen Whitty's invaluable The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, he called "a piece of suburban obscenity." Balfour is not that bad, I think, though she resorts to cutesy mannerisms and she's obviously more in love with the camera than with her leading man, the bland Jean Bradin. The movie is a romantic comedy about an heiress whose pursuit of her man involves flying to mid-ocean to meet him on an ocean liner headed for France. When they reach Paris they quarrel and break up, whereupon she decides to live it up until her father (Gordon Harker) arrives to tell her that he's lost his fortune. She looks for work and lands a job as a "flower girl," handing out flowers to male patrons at a rather sketchy restaurant. A slightly sinister man (Ferdinand von Alten) whom she met on the ship takes an interest in her, but her boyfriend arrives, wanting to make up. A surprise twist makes everything all right. Without much to work with either in story or cast, Hitchcock, with the aid of cinematographer Jack E. Cox, turns his attention to some innovative camerawork, at least providing us with something to watch as the plot grinds on. Some of my disaffection for the movie may lie in the fact that it's a silent film without musical accompaniment, perhaps owing to copyright issues. Although the music supplied for silent films today is often sub-par, it at least distracts one a bit from trying to figure out what the actors are saying between intertitles.