I Hate the Sight of Blood but It's in My Veins

I have a couple of short reviews of films soon to be released on DVD and Blu-ray. Read on, you son of a bitches!

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye (d. Mario Bava) - In his commentary track for Mario Bava's 1963 thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Tim Lucas notes an early difference between the original European cut of the film, which bears the aforementioned title, and the Samuel Z. Arkoff-shepherded American cut, which, in a reversal of the expected, is slightly longer and goes by the title Evil Eye. The star, Leticia Roman, is on a plane. In Bava's original cut, after some establishing stuff and credits, there's a hard cut to Roman and we get some narration about who she is and why she's flying to Italy. In the American cut, before the camera lands on Roman it drifts along the plane's aisle and we hear the thoughts of various other passengers. They're all mundane, everyday thoughts until we reach Roman, who is thinking about murder. It turns out her character, an American named Nora Davis, is obsessed by mystery novels, and she's simply thinking deeply about the one she's currently engrossed by. This opening, Lucas informs us on the commentary, is considered by Quentin Tarantino to be one of the greatest openings of all time, and it, Lucas goes on to say, along with other tone-lightening elements to be found in the Evil Eye cut, are missed when one watches The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Maybe, maybe not. I have Evil Eye playing now as I write this, which I offer in the spirit of full disclosure, and because having seen neither, when I received the new Kino Lorber Blu-ray that contains both versions, I opted for The Girl Who Knew Too Much, it being a Bava film I'd never seen, and it being Bava's preferred cut, or so I've inferred, although since Bava went on to more or less dismiss the whole enterprise who can say, and, even if one could, would it matter? On top of this is the fact that, for what I presume are rescued-from-obscurity reasons, Kino gives Evil Eye preferential treatment on the cover, The Girl Who Knew Too Much snagging only a "Plus The Girl Who Knew Too Much" credit.

In any event, The Girl Who Knew Too Much is somewhat less spirited than Evil Eye (which in fairness to myself is nearly over) and a big reason for that is that Bava's cut makes Nora's obsession with mystery novels less of of a fun tone-setting idea than a plot contrivance, and, in fact, it's the film(s)'s plot that came to bug him later in life. He called the plot, which has to do with a series of murders in Rome the victims of which, all women, have last names that progress through the alphabet, hence the designation "The A-B-C Murders," the most recent of these Nora witnesses, anyway, Bava called the plot "preposterous." I guess it is, but if preposterous plots were a barrier to be avoided in making these kinds of films, I'm not sure we'd even have these kinds of films. In the end, none of that matters. What matters is what Bava does with it. That beginning to Evil Eye is pretty good and a very Hitchcockian idea, Hitchcock being the artist Bava is clearly pursuing here. There's lots of nice touches, such as Nora walking through a deserted series of hallways and rooms while the voice of, one assumes, the killer plays over a tape recorder. That bit is very stark and creepy, and not particularly light-hearted -- when Hitchcock wanted to make a light movie he tended to do so top to bottom, but Bava doesn't, or couldn't, which might explain why he removed those elements for the final version of The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Maybe he thought it was an uneasy marriage; if so, I'm not sure I agree. When Nora witnesses the murder, she sees the killer (face obscured) pull the knife from the dead woman's body, and Bava shoots this so we get the killer, the body, the street, the low brick wall, trees, the night, and we see the body move with the killer's effort to retrieve the knife. It's a terrific bit of restrained gruesomeness that adds weight to the proceedings without getting in the way of the fun. As I watch Evil Eye now I think that, surprisingly, Samuel Arkoff had the right idea. It's a better time at the pictures. Either way, John Saxon is in both versions and he's pretty young, and young John Saxon looks like Walter Koenig. So there's that too.

Limelight (d. Charlie Chaplin) - Charlie Chaplin turned 63 in 1952, the same year he released this film about an aging, alcoholic vaudeville comedian who noticed some time ago that the world no longer has much interest in him. At the beginning of the film, Chaplin's character, Calvero, is stumbling drunk into the boarding house where he lives when he discovers that another tenant, a young woman named Terry (Claire Bloom) has attempted suicide. Calvero saves her and the two become friends. Terry is a ballerina whose depression and crippling lack of confidence keep her from performing, while Calvero, even with all he knows about show business, maintains a perhaps unreasonable optimism. The two encourage each other to keep trying, to find work performing. Calvero stops drinking. He and Terry fall in love but don't do anything about it.

Such is the basic plot of Limelight, the one Chaplin masterpiece that has really struggled to be recognized as such. When it was released, Chaplin's life was in upheaval due to accusations that he was a Communist; this essentially scuttled the US release, which can only be regarded as ironic since Limelight is perhaps his least political film. It's about art, creativity, performance, the past, love, and death. It really is an immense piece of work. Watching it again today after many years, on the new Criterion Blu-ray that comes out Tuesday, I was struck most by what a confident, natural all-around actor Chaplin was, as at home in the sound era that he resisted as he was in the silent films that made him famous. His Calvero is a man battling despair and finding it both tempting to surrender as the time left to him to begin a new life on stage quickly runs out, and easy to keep going, to let his natural optimism and frothiness win out in the face of a young, beautiful, talented woman who has unaccountably given up. Chaplin is able to play all of this, from one scene to the next, within the same scene, from the beginning of the film until it ends over two hours later, without ever letting his performance seem messy or overstuffed. Simple things like Chaplin's ability to make his voice break as emotion threatens to overwhelm Calvero feel not just like good acting, but like brilliance.

The biggest criticism Limelight has had to fight against over the years is the charge that it is sentimental. Oh, it's sentimental, all right. Lots of Chaplin's films are sentimental. The problem with this accusation is that it accepts the corrupted definition of "sentimental," which sees the word only as a pejorative, and leaves behind its original, more Victorian (and Limelight is a very Victorian film in a lot of ways) meaning, which merely describes a thing or person that is nostalgic or tender or sad to large, perhaps exaggerated degree. Excessively so, one might even argue, and of course this is where the anti-sentimentality crowd gathers their ammunition. It's funny, though, how an excess of just about any other emotion is considered acceptable. No one would complain that a horror film had too much fear in it. Melodrama (which Limelight might have been had Chaplin's visual style matched his emotional pitch) has fought this same battle, but in critical circles, at least, the understanding of melodrama as a genre, or a form, won out long ago. With sentimentality, it's still not appreciated that like anything else it can be used well or badly, it can be executed well or badly. And if you think that Calvero marveling at the grace of Terry's dancing, or Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as Calvero's partner for one show, appearing together on screen for the first and only time, or Nigel Bruce, in a wonderful performance as a theater producer, simply and devastatingly delivering the line "Carry the sofa out to the wings," counts as bad sentimentality, or is bad because it is sentimental, then I guess we'll have to leave it at that. There's no talking to you.

This is For Your Eyes

In his essay “The Immortal Tramp” that accompanies the new Blu-ray and DVD release of City Lights by Criterion, Gary Giddins describes the unusual and ambitious nature of Charlie Chaplin’s classic 1931 film:

Chaplin’s new art was a form of storytelling combining burlesque comedy and dreadful pathos, each tuned to a pitch so high that the audience is jolted from one physical response to another: laughter and tears, the two faces of Comedy and not Tragedy but rather the melodramatic concession of Pathos, looking straight at each other. Familiar territory today, but it smacked of radical egotism then. No one had brought it off before, and Chaplin – the orphaned music hall clown who became, through movies, the most popular comedian the world had ever known – defied his partners’ warning that his ambition would cost him his audience.

And now look at us. Comedy as a means to achieving pathos, or at least as something that is inextricably bound up in it, almost defines the form over the last half century. There are certainly exceptions, and in fact currently there is a strong tide of absurdity in comedy that may be the result of a conscious choice by some comics to pull ridiculousness, the good kind, the Monty Python kind, away from those who abuse the relationship between comedy and pathos, of which there are a great many. But without Chaplin, and without City Lights, would Albert Brooks have ever thought to include in his masterpiece Modern Romance the short scene of the old man in the phone booth desperately trying, and failing, to save or rekindle a romance that ended badly? It’s a sad moment that illuminates what’s driving Brooks’s character more sharply and succinctly than any of the (truly great) comedy. Woody Allen, meanwhile, for about the first third of his career seemed intent on illustrating the history of American film comedy up to that point, beginning with complete absurdity in films like Take the Money and Run and Love and Death before moving on to (my deep love for comedic absurdity forbids me from saying something like “graduating to”) the more emotional films like Annie Hall and Manhattan that caused everyone to decide that he must be a major filmmaker. Allen has always cited Bob Hope as a primary influence on his comedy, and the shape and cadence of his jokes bear this out, but Allen has nevertheless worked hard to put the most Hope-like of his films behind him. Never the greatest fan of his own work, Allen would undoubtedly be appalled by the suggestion that his early films were even a patch on Hope’s best, but Allen is fundamentally a comedic filmmaker and much of his aesthetic owes more to Chaplin and City Lights than to The Road to Utopia (or Bergman, for that matter, though, like Hope, Bergman is still there).

So how did Chaplin do it? The key to the success of City Lights, even more important than Chaplin’s exquisite craftsmanship, is his performance. Watching the film again last night, Chaplin struck me as perhaps the supreme silent film actor, the man who understood how to exploit the limitations, or “limitations,” of the form better than anybody else, which obviously has something to do with why he was still making silent films in 1931. When bad comedians want to spoof silent movies, they tend to triple-down on the burlesque Giddins describes and force contemporary actors to mug in a way you’d rarely actually see, and which, in any case, you’d never see from Chaplin, a frequent target of bad spoofs. Chaplin is immune to this, though, because he knew exactly how to calibrate his performances, and in City Lights you see an actor who knows how to play to the rafters just enough to either sell the joke, or, in his tender scenes with Virginia Cherrell as the sweet blind girl who believes Chaplin’s penniless tramp to be her wealthy savior, to overcome the restrictions of silent films – which Chaplin evidently didn’t consider restrictions even after technological progress had removed them – through expression that is not, in my view, heightened much beyond what you might see in a good sound production of the same story. By which I mean, the idea behind silent film acting, as with live theater acting, is to go big so that, in the theater, the back seats can pick up what you’re doing, and in silent films the audience can understand what words would normally, but can’t or in the case of City Lights, won’t, convey (and incidentally, City Lights doesn’t have a lot of intertitles; it has enough, I suppose, and you probably shouldn’t listen to me since I’m no expert on this cinematic era, and in this regard it’s certainly no Warning Shadows, but still). But as an actor Chaplin seems to operate on the theory that if you just act the emotion as directly as possible, audiences can’t help but understand. Look at the tramp’s first encounter with the blind girl, and the way Chaplin plays the moment he picks up on her disability – there’s nothing showy about the moment, there’s no close-up; it’s all performance and, crucially, context. Chaplin was very good at, and very smart about, letting his story do a good bit of the acting for him.

I wonder, too, if City Lights would be as funny as it is without the pathos, and watching it again after many years I laughed a whole lot. Again, this is a question of context, and maybe it’s a matter of the kinds of laughs Chaplin is getting rather than whether or not he’d be getting them at all. The film’s biggest laugh for me comes at the very beginning, as the tramp struggles to stand at attention for the National Anthem while off-balance due to his pants being skewered by a statue (long story), all of this being before there’s any context at all. And I’m going to get off track here, but this is – and maybe not only this, but this kind of thing -- is the apex of physical comedy, for lots of reasons but mainly, I think, because Chaplin knows when to call it quits. If you read about comedy, or listen to comedians talk about it, especially today when one can go and pay money and ostensibly be taught how to be funny, you’ll hear a lot about escalation being a vital element to the form, and so now as a result (of that and probably a host of other things it would be too complicated to go into here) when a comedian deigns to do slapstick they typically get their laughs by never pulling back and pushing forward until every possible laugh has trailed off. Chaplin, though, knows when to stop, and knows it’s funnier to simply let it be. The scene I just described, or the slapstick within the scene, probably doesn’t even last a minute, and what’s funny is the performance, the seriousness of the tramp, rather than seeing how far he’ll go. Later, the tramp, drunk, walks across a dance floor and slips, to put it simply. It’s a terrific and hilarious pratfall that Chaplin does precisely one time, and while it’s exaggerated, this being a pratfall and everything, Chaplin also uses speed-ramping to make it go by quicker. Which, okay, that’s not why he used speed-ramping, but one of the results is, he gets his laugh and moves on – he doesn’t belabor anything. The only comedic sequence that goes on for a considerable length of time is the boxing match, but that’s a piece of elaborate choreography that wouldn’t work as well if he moved through it too fast. I could probably argue that it’s still too long, but I don’t want to because I don’t especially care. And see, too, the early bit with the street elevator. That scene not only doesn’t escalate – it’s funny precisely because it never escalates. It overturns not only this supposed rule of comedy, but it overturns while simultaneously using Hitchcock’s definition of suspense, that being the audience knowing something the character doesn’t. Chaplin does exactly this, but unlike Hitchcock never pays it off. And he makes this, somehow, funny.

So anyway, context, and pathos. There’s something about the gentleness that is at the heart of City Lights that makes everything funnier, not just the slapstick but the tramp’s occasional, and useless, attempts at being stern with others. This is no doubt at least in part a retroactive effect brought about by the film’s famous last shot of the tramp’s anxious but gleefully hopeful face, all the film’s emotion gathered up and concentrated into that one image. I was about to say that the upshot of all this is that it makes it possible to not think we’ve been laughing at the tramp, but of course that’s nonsense – we certainly haven’t been laughing with him, and anyway, that’s what comedy is: laughing at people. And of course the blind girl, her sight having been restored by the time the final scene rolls around, is shown laughing at the tramp before she realizes who he is. So she’s like us – it’s not that she’s “no better” than us, she’s just like us, and Chaplin isn’t asking “Why were you laughing at this man?” or judging us for doing so. He’s simply saying, and this is the pathos of his comedy, “Laugh all you want, because it’s funny. It’s just that it’s not only funny.”

I'll Give You More Gold Than Your Apron Can Hold

In This Is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdonavich asks the great director about Charlie Chaplin, and Welles says that while Chaplin was unquestionably a genius, Welles preferred Keaton because Chaplin never made him laugh much. I'm not about to argue with Orson Welles, so let me respectfully state that I do not really understand this. The Keaton part I get, but I don't get the concept of not laughing at a Chaplin film. Take, oh, let's say, just as a random example, The Gold Rush (which, hey, Criterion is releasing today on DVD and Blu-ray!). Early in that film, Chaplin's Little Tramp, here credited as "The Lone Prospector," is trying to find his way through the snowy wilds of the Klondike, and as guidance he's shown consulting his compass, which is just the four points written on a sheet of paper. The way he positions it, holds it still, and then moves his body around so that he is now walking North, is simply hilarious. I know, I probably don't make it sound like much of a gut-buster, but trust me, it's a brilliant throwaway, and simply one of probably dozens of kinds of jokes that Chaplin puts to use.

Last year when I wrote up The Great Dictator I made the same point about Chaplin's comic inventiveness -- for all his later, and eventually much focused-upon by critics, social conscience (which is obviously in full force in The Great Dictator, and somewaht less so, but still there, in The Gold Rush), I find it hard to think of Chaplin as anything but a comic filmmaker, first and foremost. I almost said "comedian", but that's only half the story. Watching Chaplin, or any of the great silent-through Golden Age-through Jerry Lewis comic filmmakers, really throws into relief the paucity of invention in the vast majority of modern comedies. And I like modern comedies, the funny ones anyway, but how often are any of them visual? There's Woody Allen when he's being funny, the Coens when they're being funny and then who? Most of the time, the director of a modern comedy, even the ones you might have to sort of think of as auteurs, like Judd Apatow, will simply make sure the people who are saying the funny things are in frame. The writing is the point, and having the dialogue spoken aloud. Few people use the medium to help craft the jokes. It can be really stunning to see how much further out on a limb the silent filmmakers were willing to go creatively, back when there weren't as many cliches to fall back on.

All of which is to say that The Gold Rush is a very funny movie. But Chaplin manages more, as he usually does. I think just in terms of plot The Gold Rush is an odd bird. Never mind how much he manages to cram in there in under 90 minutes, but in the first twenty minutes, along with all the famous set pieces (the shoe-eating comes pretty early), you have two murders and the sudden death of Black Larsen (Tom Murray), the guy you'd been led to believe was going to be the villain. You have the discovery of gold and the wounding-into-partial amnesia of Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), a key character whose temporary disability will suddenly drive great chunks of the plot. Some of Chaplin's narrative devices here might be considered clumsy by some, but I think that could only be because we're used to something neater and more cleanly plotted. A half hour of snow, murder, avalanches, chicken suits, and starvation jokes go by before Georgia (Georgia Hale), Chaplin's love interest, even turns up. The film is almost over before Georgia returns his affections. Yet none of this is ever rushed, but rather purely economical. Although its economy, or the success of it, is rather mysterious. How can a good ten minutes of screentime be given over the famous scene of Chaplin and Swain trapped inside a cabin that is teetering over a cliff, leaving maybe another ten minutes to get across that the two men are rich and Georgia and the Lone Prospector are in love, and have it all play smoothly? Who can do that? And how can they do it? And how can that same film include the most moving use of "Auld Lang Syne" that I, at least, have ever seen, even though no vocals can be heard, and even though the actual music is an orchestral version laid over the scene 82 years later?

Chaplin's ambitions led him to tell big stories, which he then put under a microscope, so that a film with a title as sweeping as The Gold Rush basically has only three or four major characters. This allows for an intimacy that a more tedious form of ambition would naturally have to sacrifice. Chaplin's best films tend to be very noticably structured as a collection of long scenes, almost a series of unified sketches, but this is noticable only to the degree you realize how long certain scenes are allowed to play out. The flow of narrative is there, however, and if Chaplin craftily makes you accept certain absurd leaps in logic in order to be swept along, the more power to him. Even if you can't fully, Chaplin provides an emotional heft to The Gold Rush that, hefty or not, is applied lightly. The ending of the film is interesting when you consider how he used another version of it, heavily tweaked, at the end of City Lights six years later. In comparison, you could almost call the ending of The Gold Rush the cynic's version of the later film's famous last shot, but in fact it's just the fantasist's version. It's nice to imagine things playing out this way. City Lights might make you wonder what happens after the ending, and The Gold Rush might not, but you also shouldn't need to.

Humanity Was Kicked Around Somewhat

Included in the vastly informative booklet of old and new essays that accompanies the Criterion release of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (due in stores this Tuesday) is Chaplin's own defense of his film, specifically the slightly problematic climactic speech, printed originally in 1940 in the New York Times. In that essay, Chaplin says:

There is always a kind of praise or a kind of criticism that can't be quarreled with or argued about. "It's funny" or "It isn't funny." Who knows except you? Even the laughter may fool you. "It's beautiful" or "It isn't beautiful." We are a democracy; we are allowed a difference of opinion, and every single, blessed one of us is right. Thank heaven for that!

Chaplin is taking a rather more accepting attitude towards criticism than I imagine he actually possessed, but the first part, about something being funny or not funny and that reaction being unique to each individual, is something that has been latched onto by the defenders of any given comedy ever since (and likely long before). The idea is, if an audience laughs, they think it's funny, and therefore it is funny, and so comedy is a more subjectively judged artform than pretty much any other artform you might name. Well, that's horseshit. By the logic just outlined, if I cry at a movie, that film is emotionally powerful, or if I get scared by a horror movie, it's a good horror movie, or if I etc. at a movie, that movie succeeds at being etc. In short, if anyone feels the emotion the filmmaker wants you to feel, then the film is good. And so it is, to me (or you). But criticism is supposed to grapple with, among other things, why a thing works or doesn't, and the widespread attempt to remove comedy from this process with a kind of "Ah, what can you do?" shrug is nonsensical at its core, and even patronizing towards comedy, in that this attitude assumes that there is no such thing as a good joke or a bad joke, but only jokes that make you laugh, or don't.

The Great Dictator often seems regarded as a comedy only in a technical sense, because the film's remarkable historical stature has nearly overwhelmed everything else about it. But it really is a comedy, through and through (the excellent DVD commentary on the Criterion disc, by Dan Kamin and Hooman Mehran, thankfully provides a complete picture of the film, which includes Chaplin's general approach to comedy and how he applies and executes it in The Great Dictator). Few scenes go by without some sort of gag -- at one point, a transitional shot of Adenoid Hynkel, Chaplin's Adolf Hitler substitute, simply walking through a room includes a fluidly comic pratfall -- and the film is classically structured around a series of comedic set-pieces: the slapstick WWI opening, Hynkel's absurd German-gibberish speech, the Jewish barber's (also Chaplin) initial abuse by the German police which includes his famous dazed dance down the street after being accidentally clonked on the head by a frying pan-wielding Paulette Goddard, and so on. And then there's the variety: slapstick, puns, one liners, surrealism, scatology. The result is that The Great Dictator is a sprawling comedy epic of the kind you almost never see anymore, and when you do you often wish you hadn't.

But it can never be forgotten that The Great Dictator is also a film with -- shudder -- a "point", though in this case that is vitally important to Chaplin's success. For one thing, rarely has a point been more worth making, in any venue. Made in 1940 after the nightmare of Hitler's Germany was in full swing, but before America had entered the war, The Great Dictator manages to somehow be both zany and unblinking (at least within reason, if that qualifier doesn't sound like too much of a contradiction) of Hitler's, or Hynkel's, savage crimes. Many of Chaplin's jokes are downright audacious in their blackness. Take the moment when Chaplin's barber is about to be hanged from a lamppost, following a series of physical comedy hijinks that echo the much more light-hearted antics between the Little Tramp and the police in City Lights. It's all a lot of fun, but then they are going to lynch him. Not only that, but when a kindly German officer named Schulz (Reginald Gardiner) stops the lynching, the barber, who has been strung up off the ground by this point, drops out of frame, and this is played for laughs. And not only that, but it's funny.

The jokes that flow from the palace scenes, that is the scenes that directly involve Chaplin's version of Hitler, can be downright shocking (and, as I mentioned, surreal; Hynkel's manic scamper up the curtain is positively Lynchian). Some of the shock comes from historical context, not just of the war and the Holocaust, but in regards to what was considered generally permissible in Hollywood at the time. The pay-off to the bullet-proof uniform gag, for instance, or the parachute hat, which is played with terrific quiet by Chaplin and Billy Gilbert, whose robust performance as Herring, Chaplin and Hynkel's Goering, is one of the film's secret weapons (as is Henry Daniell as Garbitsch, whose horrific nature is highlighted by the fact that he doesn't get any jokes). Gilbert actually has the film's single best line, when he can barely contain his excited joy as he tells Hynkel about this "wonderful new poison gas" that's just been discovered. "It will kill everybody!" he enthuses. It's a joke that cuts out the middle man in a way that Dr. Strangelove, The Great Dictator's wiseass younger brother, never quite allows itself to try.

Meanwhile, of course, there's the film's most famous scene, which shows Hynkel dancing with a balloon made to look like a globe of the planet it is Hynkel's dream to conquer. It's a virtuoso scene, funny and strange and elegant. There's an uneasy beauty to it that would later be reproduced, in a much different way, decades later in the "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" number from Cabaret. In the DVD commentary, Dan Kamin claims -- rightly, in my view -- that Chaplin never tops this moment...well, this moment, and the one that immediately follows, a barber scene between Chaplin and Chester Conklin, though to me even that one pales in comparison.

If anything in The Great Dictator proves that not all jokes are created equal, and that the involuntary response of laughter, or absence of same, from the audience is not necessary any indication of the level of craft and artful imagination at work, it's the globe scene. And that's not even the one I laugh at the hardest. It's simply the one I'm most in awe of. It's the one that boils the film down into one glorious flourish of creativity, disgusting in its beauty and appalling in its entirely correct implications. This is the art of comedy.