Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/25/24

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, February 25, 2024

Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Me and My Gal

Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Marion Burns, George Walsh, J. Farrell MacDonald, Noel Madison, Henry B. Walthall, Bert Hanlon, Adrian Morris, George Chandler. Screenplay: Arthur Kober, Philip Klein, Barry Conners. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Gordon Wiles. Film editing: Jack Murray.

Why have I never seen Me and My Gal before? Is it because it's not an easy movie to pigeonhole, being not quite romantic comedy, not quite screwball, and not quite crime drama? Or because it's one of those pre-Code movies that teeter on the edge of seriousness and back off from it in sometimes uncomfortable ways? It starts with an old man about to drown his dog and ends with the police detective protagonist fudging the truth to protect the not entirely innocent. And in between it's wall-to-wall wisecracks, most of them delivered by a never-better Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, who does the gum-chewing dame as well as anyone, even Joan Blondell. Tracy plays Danny Dolan, a cop whose attitude toward those he's supposed to protect and serve is summed up in his response to someone telling him there's been another bank robbery: "Oh, who'd the bank rob now?" And when told that it was the bank that got robbed, retorts, "Ah, turned the tables on 'em, eh? Smart!" There's also a slapstick drunk, a well-staged bank break-in, and even a parody of the Clark Gable and Norma Shearer movie based on Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which Dolan remembers as Strange Inner Tube. Much of the credit for turning potential chaos into a thoroughly entertaining movie has to go to Raoul Walsh, one those Hollywood tough-guy directors who seem not to get the recognition they deserve today.

Le Million (René Clair, 1931)

René Lefèvre and Annabella in Le Million

Cast: Annabella, René Lefèvre, Jean-Louis Allibert, Paul Ollivier, Constantin Siroesco, Vanda Gréville, Odette Talazac, Pedro Elviro, Jane Pierson, André Michaud, Eugène Stuber, Pierre Alcover, Armand Bernard. Screenplay: René Clair, based on a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Music: Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, Georges Van Parys.

The French do wonderful things with air. They invented the soufflé and Champagne, and the Montgolfier brothers mastered the art of ballooning. And no French director had a greater gift for buoyancy than René Clair, whose mastery of pacing keeps even the most cockamamie of stories from collapsing, going flat, or crashing to Earth. Le Million is the quintessential Clair film, a musical farce that inspired countless movies, some of which don't always stay aloft. You can see the lineaments of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) in it as well as Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). The story is much ado about a lottery ticket left in an old jacket owned by a young artist (René Lefèvre) with a mountain of debts, and it carries us from his studio to the jail to backstage at the opera and back again, sometimes journeying over the rooftops of Paris, all of which are embodied not by the real things but by Lazare Meerson's evocative sets. The music is pretty but forgettable, which is really all you need it to be.