Was sagst du, Mensch ?

This is a Festival review of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag*) (1930)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 October

This review is of a screening of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag*) (1930), which was a special event at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF) on Friday 5 September at 4.00 p.m.

The naturalness of director Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (1930) beguiles us, and persuades us that what we are seeing might be true – an effect that is part of the immediacy of Neil Brand’s (@NeilKBrand’s) and Jeff Davenport’s live accompaniment.

Even for those of us who could construe the German in the slide at the beginning, and learn that what we were about to see was around 90% complete (some 1,800 metres of a known length of around 2,000 metres), nothing seemed to be missing, and the restoration was so clear that it did not leave us distinguishing different parts of the footage.

After the event, what one is left with is the impression of the morals and activities of the weekend in Berlin, spent by the lake at Schildhorn, and one has to pinch oneself and say that this presentation of life (outside of the candid shots of contemporary Berlin) is no more truthful than a newsreel of the day : that is the power of cinema, and of exposures that were not only clear, but insightful and affecting, that they can speak to us to-day when care has been used to present them alongside themes that match their moods, but had a feeling if not always of energy as such, then of being alive.

That, too, is something that we would come to associate with screenwriter Billy Wilder, whether in Some Like it Hot (1959), or Sunset Boulevard (1950), and is as good a reason as any to be interested in this film…


Over at TAKE ONE, Mike Levy has more observations about the film / performance...




End-notes

* Might we still write Menschen am Sonntag, or would it more often be Leuten - without the full sense that these are real, human people ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

That's a classy address !

This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 September 2013

This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

What the connotations were, in 1950, of an address in Sunset Boulevard, I do not know, but I am sure that Billy Wilder knew what his audience would think, and what specifically it signified to have one in the early ten thousands...

Both as Norma Desmond and in real life (Gloria Swanson was then the age of the former actress whom she plays), the end of what is often called The Silent Era partly caused a wane in her popularity in the 1930s. Here, though, Swanson – and Wilder with her – is capitalizing on her name, and I suspect that the photographs with which she decorates her still lavish home are from that home.

With Wilder’s amusing script, we have all the elements for us to be more knowing than William Holden, as Joe Gillis, and for the spooky Max, played delightfully by Erich von Stroheim, to put the wind up him – whether or not one believes that the corpse of Gillis is literally telling the story, or that we somehow hear what he has to say from his perspective, including narrating Desmond’s descent under the direction of Max, is neither here no there.

The strength of what we see unfold is how it is rooted in the fabric and how it brings the characters to life – as Gillis is beckoned into the palazzo, having symbolically lodged, without asking, his pride-and-joy white motor in one of its garages, his mind is already thinking of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. By contrast, the house comes alive, out of a slumber as if he is a Prince Charming to her Sleeping Beauty, and yet the lavishness of what is bestowed on him is not unlike what Pip thinks that he seeks after.

Here, the benefactress needs no guessing at, only how she could have preserved her wealth, and Gillis is no more grateful or moderate with what he is bought by her than Pip is with the attempts to make him a gentleman – in neither case does it prove what is really desired.

Whether we believe that the room over the garage becoming inoccupable is just convenient, or the house having its way with Gillis, it comes back to life with him there, and provides the means for what happens to unfold, even including Miss Desmond’s own vehicle, which Max seemingly effortlessly gets back on the road – the pool would not be there without Gillis, and Miss Desmond would not have a life outside the house without him.
In this house without locks, the doors come to resemble pairs of eyes (as Beckettt was later to play with in Film (1965), and even to ask Buster Keaton to play another serious role), and yet there are secrets, from turning, from Miss Desmond, by turning off the lights of the car when Gillis goes out in it.

What Pip turns out to want is Estella, and Gillis wants is Betty Schaefer and to work with her on a script. In Gillis’ case, he is not big enough to accept her gracious willingness to forget all that he has told her (although maybe he believes that she would not be able to do so, and that she is better off without him), but still thinks that he can give the relatively ageing star ‘the go-by’, after all that he has thrown in her face as fantasy.

The cameras and the lights show who is mistaken in thinking that she is still a star, as Gillis is forced to admit…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Belt and braces : Kirk Douglas, to the rescue ?

This is a Festival review of Ace in the Hole (1951)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 September

This is a Festival review of Ace in the Hole (1951)

A long way back to before the Festival's opening film, but here goes:

* Contains spoilers *

Billy Wilder co-wrote the film, so it seemed well deserved to think of reviving Ace in the Hole, not just as part of a theme of journalism in film, but to see why the film might have lacked popularity. As to the pairing with the short (not so short) Wakefield Express about a newspaper of that name (and its production and that of four sister papers), I am less sure, and think that I would have preferred to go, without an introduction, straight to Kirk Douglas, as Chuck Tatum, talking his way into a job in Albuquerque.

(If the short had been screened second, there would have been a risk that that some might - I would have chosen to leave after the feature (but so be it), and, although I accept that accompanying films were part of the fabric of how films were shown even in my childhood, that is not a usual way with revivals.)

Chuck has been there a year when we see him next, and I failed to notice that now he has ‘gone native’ by adopting the local habit of wearing braces on his trousers, but also a belt. Everybody knows him, everybody knows his rants about the stultifying nature of small-town news. (Garrison Keillor may have seen this film: his narrator in Love Me reminds me of it, now that I – have a chance to – reflect.)

Rattle-snakes aren’t Chuck’s thing, unlike the sheriff where he ends up, but he is dispatched to a gathering in their honour: he does not get to the destination, but we have a flavour of it through the Sheriff Kretzer’s specimen (and its tastes in food), because he sees the meat in a news story of Leo Minosa, a man trapped underground, trapped because (since Leo interprets being imprisoned as punishment) he went there to plunder a native American burial-ground yet another time.

Leo trusts the journalist who pushed past authority to get to him, and believes that he is trying to get him out quickly, rather than realizing that Chuck is spinning out the story as part of a plan to get back into a job in New York (or Chicago). The plan works, but the curse is that the delay has brought about Leo’s inevitable death – by then, Chuck, sure of himself, has already taken off his braces, thereby transporting us to the proprietor’s office and his mockery of such means of playing it safe.

So, as the imagery has told us, Chuck has started playing without a safety-net, and, when he could seek assistance for himself, he delays – again, the theme of putting something off – too long, because he feels obligated to see that Leo is given the final rites. Still not tending to his needs, and, after both dismissing the crowd that has gathered in the preceding days and having failed to interest his New York boss in the story of his betrayal, Chuck goes back to Albuquerque with that story.

He had played the newspaper bosses off against each other to get what he wanted, but his self-destructive self stakes everything on a closing story behind the final one: having seemed unable to announce Leo’s death to the world as ‘a scoop’, he has declaimed the matter in public and told everyone to go, a scene perhaps reminiscent of Christ clearing the Temple (but, here, the idolatrous temple of his own making, and one that contains a body to prove it).

Not for the most pure of motives, he has resisted the advances of Leo’s wife Lorraine (with the suitable bewitchment of Jan Sterling), who really just wants something better than Leo, his family, and the run-down desert café that they run. She only did not leave earlier (as she does afterwards) because she, too, believes in Chuck’s persuasive rhetoric, but she does not want to have to play the grieving wife to help the rescue story. Misjudging it, Chuck pushes it too far, too far beyond what is safe, by trying to force Lorraine back into her role, because it is his role, not hers.

In the final analysis, he staked too highly. In spotting and creating a dramatic story, in exploiting (as he says in relation to the sheriff’s snake festival and the card-game there that Chuck forced him to miss), he thought that he had, in Leo, an ace in the hole, not a pair of deuces.

With whom (or what), then, has Chuck been playing poker that his seemingly winning hand has collapsed, and been shown for what it is? Is he really a tragic hero, and is that what made Ace in the Hole, for all that it is well written, something that also did not make the film itself a winner with an audience that does not seek that sort of ending?


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