I'm back from my long, long road trip with my brother and three nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie, or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly), and as expected, I didn't do any work on the blog. I know most people these days remain in constant contact with i-phones this and i-pads that, but not the Monkey—when I travel, I travel like Christopher Columbus, that is to say, alone, out of the reach of civilization, ready to sail blindly off the edge of the earth into the celestial abyss.
It's the only way to fly.
But I'm back now and I don't anticipate any more interruptions, at least not for the rest of 2010. With any luck, I can respond to some of the comments you fine, fine folks left while I was gone and after that, I'll post my essay on the best comedy/musical of 1932-33.
And don't forget, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the newly-restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis this weekend, along with a documentary about the restoration and two more Lang movies, Spies and M.
Here's the schedule straight from the TCM website:
8:00pm Metropolis (1927) In this silent film, a city of the future is threatened with destruction when a wealthy corporate leader enlists a mad scientist to put down labor reformers. Cast: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Gustav Frolich Dir: Fritz Lang BW-149 mins
10:30pm Metropolis Refound (2010)
12:30am Spione (1928) Cast: Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Lupu Pick Dir: Fritz Lang
3:00am M (1931) The mob sets out to catch a child killer whose crimes are attracting too much police attention. Cast: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Grundgens, Theo Lingen Dir: Fritz Lang BW-111 mins
Obviously I've hit a bit of a snag, blog-wise. Too much going on—brothers, ballgames and builders, more or less in that order. I'm almost done with my essay on the best comedy of 1933, but now it looks like I won't have an opportunity to post it until sometime next week.
So in the meantime, how about another poll. Or survey, actually.
Of these must-see comedies from 1933, which have you actually seen? You may choose more than one answer.
Design For Living Dinner At Eight Duck Soup I'm No Angel The Private Life of Henry VIII She Done Him Wrong Sons Of The Desert
For a while at least, the good folks at Hulu.com have made Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic Vampyr available for viewing. And how do you know it's a classic? Why, because it received Katie Award nominations for best foreign language picture and best director—it must be good.
Just part of our ongoing mission here at the Monkey to cram a little culture down your throat.
And now with limited commercial interruption, Vampyr.
Dinner At Eight (prod. David O. Selznick) Duck Soup (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz) 42nd Street (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck) Gold Diggers Of 1933 (prod. Jack L. Warner and Robert Lord) Trouble In Paradise (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
Considering that by the end of 1933 the Nazis had all but shuttered the German film industry and that the Depression had crippled the rest of Europe's studios, the field of contenders for best foreign language picture of 1932-33 is remarkably deep:
●Boudu Saved From Drowning, a comedy by Jean Renoir, is ostensibly the story of a suicidal bum fished from the waters of the Seine, but is really a biting satire about the unsatisfying nature of charity when the object of your care won't transform himself into your image.
●Also released in 1932 was Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr, which our friend Erik Beck of the Boston Becks ranks seventh on his list of the all-time greatest horror films, writing "Dreyer does far more with mood and atmosphere than with the kind of effects laden vampire crap that modern directors use."
●Liebelei is an exquisite romance by the master of moody, doomed love, Max Ophüls, who would go on to direct such masterpieces as Letter From An Unknown Woman and The Earrings Of Madame de ....
●And then there's The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang's sequel to his 1922 film Dr. Mabuse The Gambler. The Nazis took Lang's story of an insane criminal mastermind who controls his victims through hypnosis as a criticism of Hitler and his henchmen—it was—and Lang fled Germany shortly after production was completed.
I'm a fan of each of these films and, depending on my mood, I could champion any of them—you might particularly want to track down Vampyr as Halloween approaches—but this week I'm going with Jean Vigo's funny, poetic and influential look at life in a boy's boarding school, Zero For Conduct.
If you put the Our Gang comedies, Animal House and The Dead Poets Society in a blender, strained out the sentimentality and added a dash of Jean-Paul Sartre, Charlie Chaplin and Luis Buñuel, you'd get either a really awesome smoothie or Zero For Conduct (Zéro de conduite). The film's French subtitle, Jeunes Diables au Collège—"Little Devils At School"—is a pretty accurate description of the story's nominal heroes, three scamps, maybe age ten, who plot to take over their rundown school during a Commemoration Day ceremony and pelt the faculty with garbage.
"War is declared! Down with teachers! Up with revolution!"
And revolution is just what this school needs. With the exception of a newly-hired instructor (Jean Dasté) who imitates Chaplin and does handstands in class, the boys' teachers—led by a wizened dwarf with a preposterous beard and a hat he keeps under glass—are a wholly unsympathetic collection of spies, toadies, dimwits, bores and martinets, as small in spirit as the dean is in body. The boys rebel at every turn, instigating food fights (the cook serves nothing but beans) and pillow fights before finally leading the full-scale insurrection that caps this brief forty-one minute film.
"Zero For Conduct," wrote Terrence Rafferty for New Yorker magazine in 1990, "was a celebration of the pure freedom of children's imaginations, a stirring expression of resistance to the forces of authority and order—to anything that would impose discipline on the diverse, unruly energy of play." Nearly eighty years after it was made, "Zero For Conduct still seems ... like one of the few truly subversive movies ever made."
But while planning for "revolution" provides a unifying theme, the narrative of Zero For Conduct is primarily episodic, as life generally is at the age of ten, with director Vigo taking time to remember moments that a kid would find important—playing a toy trumpet with your nose, smoking purloined cigars, following an absent-minded teacher through the streets, chasing him as he tries to introduce himself to a pretty woman, then somehow getting sidetracked as they mistake a priest's flapping cassock for the girl's skirt.
At times Zero For Conduct reminded me of Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But ..., the 1932 Japanese silent film about two school age brothers who play hooky, fake test scores and bribe a delivery boy to beat up the local bully. Of that movie I wrote "It's not that nothing happens, it's that nothing feels as if it's made to happen simply to satisfy the mechanics of plot."
Think of how the quest for the Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story pulls together what are otherwise unrelated episodes in the life of little Ralphie Parker, and you'll get an idea of how Vigo uses talk of revolution to weave the various threads of Zero For Conduct into a single tapestry.
Visually, Zero For Conduct almost plays as a documentary, with most of the movie shot on location. Vigo comments on the action and the players with the placement of his camera, often photographing the students from below, emphasizing their oversize sense of their own maturity, while shooting their instructors from high-angle positions which tends to diminish them in our eyes. Vigo was a key figure in a loosely-defined movement called "Poetic Realism," which focused on marginalized characters, told stories tinged with nostalgia and fatalism, and relied on "heightened aestheticism" to emphasize the "representational aspects" of the film. No, I don't know what that means either, but I do recognize that there is a look and feel in the films of Jean Vigo that reminds me of Jean Renoir, Julien Duviver and Marcel Carné—like Vigo, members of the Poetic Realism movement—whose films were highly naturalistic in their look yet which featured action that clearly was scripted and staged.
As the film continues, though, Vigo also plays around with surrealism, which was still a hot ticket item in Europe. In addition to the films of Luis Buñuel, several directors working in France had taken stabs at the form including René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, and Jean Vigo underscores his theme of rebellion against convention with several surreal scenes—a teacher's drawing comes to life, sheepishly transforming itself, as the lone sympathetic teacher is rebuked by a colleague, from a man in swim trunks into the cloaked visage of Napoleon; a student does a slow-motion backflip into a chair; and a professor is tied to his bed and suspended from the wall while he sleeps. There's also one brief, surprising shot of full-frontal male nudity, not in the least sexual, more in the tradition of "I wave my private parts at your auntie," which I suspect was Vigo's way of giving French authorities the finger.
The spirit of rebellion that infuses Zero For Conduct was not lost on French authorities—after the film's premiere on April 7, 1933, it was banned and was not shown again in France until February 1946, nearly twelve years after Vigo's untimely death.
I confess it took more than one viewing for me to appreciate Zero For Conduct—I carried into my first viewing certain Hollywood-bred expectations of what should/would happen and I kept waiting for the predictable plot-twists and the ending wrapped up with a bow. It wasn't until the second time through that I allowed myself to enter into the spirit of the thing and remember what it was really like to be a kid. Sometimes as adults we forget how momentous little episodes are to children and to their development, and while you know that in one sense nothing will change after the boys have taken over the school, in more important ways, everything will change as their perceptions of themselves will forever be altered—there's a big difference between being someone who "could" do a thing and being someone who "has done" that thing.
Zero For Conduct was a flop at the box office, won no awards and was barely seen outside of Paris until after World War II, yet it directly influenced Francois Truffaut's greatest film, The 400 Blows, and the French New Wave generally. That's pedigree enough for me.
Born in Paris in 1905, Jean Vigo was the son of the French anarchist Eugeni Bonaventura de Vigo i Sallés, better known as Miguel Almereyda. When Vigo was twelve, his father was arrested and later murdered in his prison cell, presumably by his jailers. Hustled out of Paris, Vigo was educated under an assumed name in the south of France, yet despite the outrage he felt for French authorities, Vigo found things to love—his fellow students, later his wife and friends—and he found ways to translate that tenderness into film. Suffering from the tuberculosis he had contracted at the age of twenty-one, Vigo literally worked himself to death, directing his follow-up film, L'atalante from a stretcher and dying a few months after its completion in 1934.
Postscript: To my knowledge, Zero For Conduct is not readily available in the U.S. There are better copies floating around the internet, but at least I can show this battered, murky print legally.
My post on the best foreign language picture of 1932-33 is well in hand—1300 words and a public domain copy of the film so far with more to come. Mostly it's a question of filling in the blanks at this point, verbs and whatnot. I don't know how you write, but I start by putting down the things I know then filling in later the things I don't know.
For example, this—
... episodic ... as life generally is at the age of ten ... centers around a plot to take over the school during a Commemoration Day ceremony featuring the town's mayor ... but ... playing a toy trumpet with your nose, smoking purloined cigars, mistaking a sleeping drunk for a corpse ...
—will eventually become ... well, something.
In the meantime, apropos of nothing, here is a bit from Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul, one of those British sketch-comedy shows of the sort I used to watch when Katie-Bar-The-Door and I lived overseas. I first saw this on Hey Dullblog, a blog by and for "people who think about the Beatles maybe a little too much" (as if there is such a thing). It answers the age-old question, what if the Beatles had never taken drugs, remained loveable 1964-era moptops and stayed together forever.
KC over at Classic Movies tells me that today is Edna Purviance's birthday. Well, so it is! Edna would have been 115 today if she hadn't—well, you know.
Edna Purviance (pronounced Purr-VYE-ance) is remembered primarily as Charlie Chaplin's leading lady in all those shorts he made as the Essanay and Mutual studios during the silent era. She was working as a stenographer in San Francisco when she caught Chaplin's roving eye; he hired her on for his first film as Essanay Studios—1915's A Night Out—and she became his leading lady in three dozen features and shorts, more than any other actress.
"Mr. Chaplin asked me if I would like to act in pictures with him," she said later. "I laughed at the idea, but agreed to try it. I guess he took me because I had nothing to unlearn and he could teach me in his own way. I want to tell you that I suffered untold agonies. Eyes seemed to be everywhere. I was simply frightened to death. But he had unlimited patience in directing me and teaching me."
The two were romantically involved for a brief time until Chaplin's marriage in 1918 to seventeen year old Mildred Harris. Nevertheless, Purviance continued to star in Chaplin's movies, including such classics as The Kid, The Immigrant and A Dog's Life.
In 1923, Chaplin attempted to launch Purviance on an independent career, directing her in the drama A Woman Of Paris. Although highly regarded today, the picture was a flop at the box office and Purviance all but retired from acting.
Despite the end of their professional and romantic relationships, Chaplin kept Purviance on the studio payroll for the rest of her life and cast her in bit parts in Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. She was married once, to Pan-Am pilot John Squire, and the two remained married until his death did them part in 1945. Purviance herself died of throat cancer in 1958.
But as always, the best way to get to know a film figure is to watch the movie. Here are two, The Cure and The Adventurer. Purviance plays "The Girl" in both. You can also click here to watch perhaps her greatest film, The Immigrant, which is preserved in the National Film Registry.
... where x equals the number of years, at my current pace of covering three movie years every calendar year, to reach what I call "convergence"—that is to say, when I'll be reviewing movies in the theaters rather than writing history.
Math is not my strong suit (why do you think I went to law school), but it works out to 38.5.
Boudu Saved From Drowning (prod. Michel Simon) Liebelei (prod. Herman Millakowsky) The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (prod. Fritz Lang and Seymour Nebenzal) Vampyr (prod. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Julian West) Zero For Conduct (prod. Jean Vigo)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
I'm back from my long, long road trip with my brother and three nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie, or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly), and as expected, I didn't do any work on the blog. I know most people these days remain in constant contact with i-phones this and i-pads that, but not the Monkey—when I travel, I travel like Christopher Columbus, that is to say, alone, out of the reach of civilization, ready to sail blindly off the edge of the earth into the celestial abyss.
Posts
