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I think I'd better remain seated
Yesterday I worked twelve hours and when I attempted to recover by watching a couple of movies, they both annoyed me to the point of having to get them out of my system.
Johnny Belinda (1948) is four different social problem dramas rolled into the same runtime. There's the one about disability, the one about small-town gossip, the one about justified self-defense, and the one about rape. I understand that the Broadway hit on which the film was based was not written until 1940, but existentially it should have been a pre-Code, when you could shove a lifetime supply of melodrama into seventy minutes and not have to care about whether it was sensitively handled or not. It may have been the first Hollywood film to get the green light on rape from the PCA, but it's so gingerly tactful about addressing the subject that the assault and its emotional-physical consequences are effectively elided into a plot device. One giant leap for nuance and maturity. Considering how much time the script spends talking around, about, and for her, I appreciate that Jane Wyman's Oscar-winning portrayal of a sweet deaf-mute girl who learns to communicate with hearing people just in time to find herself first a mother and then on trial for murder is as unsugary as it is, and I enjoyed how much Lew Ayres avoids the saintly pitfalls of playing the progressive young doctor by a carefully judged application of crankiness—he looks like he was born short a couple of drinks, several years' worth of sleep, and his last professional fee—but I wanted desperately to rescue them from their oncoming romance. The congeries of the plot has a couple of nice moments of real human complexity and a couple that are not so nice of real human nastiness and the rest of it feels like someone drew a line through the set labeled "GOOD TASTE" and everyone kept getting CAD injuries trying not to cross it. I mean, this is a movie where two men have a fistfight on a stormy sea-cliff and one of them goes over to his death while a foghorn desolately booms. Just own the dime novel already. Alas, it does not.
Deception (1946) misses being a wickedly funny, semi-soaped women's noir by the infuriating margin of failing to define in advance who any of its characters actually are. Is the virtuoso cellist played by Paul Henreid really so shattered from his concentration camp years that he must be sheltered from all knowledge of his wife's former relations with another man, or is he just a classically temperamental artist who's a bundle of nerves right up until he's a diamond on the night? Is the brilliant composer played by Claude Rains really the kind of coldly calculating sociopath who would ruin the lives of his ex-lover and her new husband to revenge his wounded vanity, or is he just an exceptionally charming asshole who likes to push people's buttons but stops short of the big red one? Is the talented pianist played by Bette Davis right in her fearful interpretations of both of the men in her life, or is she just a terrible judge of character? Who knows? We're not given enough objectively reliable information to tell! That's how you create ambiguity, isn't it? I began this film in the not unreasonable trust that it understood its characters, even if the hermetically stripped-down suspense of the plot necessarily involved their sometime opacity to me; I finished it with the realization that I had just seen the Golden Age A-picture equivalent of one of those TV shows where any twist can be shocking if it comes out of utter nowhere. Scene by scene, it's tense, witty, twisty, and histrionic, full of zinger lines and modernist shadows and a shifting balance of sympathies between all three principals who are of course acting their hearts out—Rains in particular gets one tour-de-force scene ordering dinner before an important audition that might as well be one of the baritone arias from Les contes d'Hoffmann. Taken all together, it's like trying to punch fog and it left me really wanting to. I don't need to know all the decisions that went into creating a character, but I need to know that decisions were made. As far as I can tell, Deception decided that the best way to create its atmosphere of unknowingness was just not to know anything and as a result I got to the last tragically uncertain shot and shouted for half an hour. Research after the fact indicated that the stage source material was significantly reshaped by the dictates of both the Code and the studio system: it did no one, including the box office, any favors. The central cello concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold is just as mesmerizingly rich and brash as the fictional composer's music is asserted to be and I was very glad to read that he salvaged it into his own repertoire later on.
Some very talented people were involved in both of these movies, I need not point out. The first was directed by Jean Negulesco, the second co-written by John Collier. They still got crushed by the Production Code. Obviously I needed some kind of antidote.
In the same way that it is unfair to describe Hammer horror as Universal horror with more tits and Technicolor, it is almost certainly unfair to describe The Living Idol (1957) as Val Lewton on CinemaScope and mescaline, but I can't believe writer-director-producer Albert Lewin had never seen Cat People (1942) or The Leopard Man (1943) when the plot of this delirious mess of exotica turns on the supposed racial memory of maidens sacrificed to jaguars as manifested in the present day by the spiritual illness of the indigenous adopted daughter of a British professor of Mayan antiquities. The priceless find of an ancient jaguar statue dotted all over with Maya blue and snarling with white shell fangs horrifies her in ways she cannot account for. Masked dancers at a carnival spring and claw at her as if they have singled her out as their especial prey. The caged jaguar at the Chapultepec Zoo reacts to her as ferociously as the panther to Irena Dubrovna in New York City. The stucco portrait of an aristocratic maiden of the Classic period seems to bear her face. Her birth father was killed by a jaguar-carved stela. The professor is convinced that the ancient struggle of life with chaos and evil has been awoken by his daughter's contact with the jaguar and must be played out to its bitter, mythic end; her sturdy-minded American boyfriend is less convinced. I think this plot may be nonsense if examined closely—the most casual glance at the function of the jaguar in Maya religion disproves its central conceit. For once I'm not sure I care. The movie so clearly doesn't. Lewin, who had previously been responsible for the surprisingly weird The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and the surreally Wagnerian Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), had a gift for mixing amateur psychology and applied mythology in flammable, Romantic proportions and then filming the results as if the concept of a top that could be gone over was something he had heard about once and never put much stock in. It runs on symbols and patterns, on images and dream logic. At one point a lecture on human sacrifice dissolves into the dream sequence, past-life regression, possessed hallucination of Liliane Montevecchi staked out in pure blackness and ritual jewelry, circled by drums and streaming torches like self-willed things, until the eyes of the jaguar flash out at her like cenote water and its spotted paw lashes out to mark her, across centuries and lifetimes, with her own blood on her cheek. It's camp and uncanny and it looks fantastic in all senses of the word; it makes up for yet another superfluous voiceover and one of the most artificial big cat attacks I have ever seen onscreen, in which a stand-in gets nuzzled in fast motion while the dubbing of the soundtrack does its best to convince me of bloodthirsty snarls. You should understand that I cannot tell you if this movie is any good at all. People in it say things like "Nothing worth explaining can be explained" or "Ingratitude is not exclusively a human attribute. It belongs to divinity as well." The action starts in the ruins of Chichén Itzá and concludes in a Catholic church, where Christ has already been called out as a glorified normalization of human sacrifice along with capital punishment and the nationalistic cult of war. It just isn't concerned for a moment with good taste as opposed to artistic effect and I'm so glad to have to discovered it on the heels of the two careful failures described above. Maybe it's a failure, too, but it doesn't give a damn. This confidence brought to you by my unashamed backers at Patreon.
Johnny Belinda (1948) is four different social problem dramas rolled into the same runtime. There's the one about disability, the one about small-town gossip, the one about justified self-defense, and the one about rape. I understand that the Broadway hit on which the film was based was not written until 1940, but existentially it should have been a pre-Code, when you could shove a lifetime supply of melodrama into seventy minutes and not have to care about whether it was sensitively handled or not. It may have been the first Hollywood film to get the green light on rape from the PCA, but it's so gingerly tactful about addressing the subject that the assault and its emotional-physical consequences are effectively elided into a plot device. One giant leap for nuance and maturity. Considering how much time the script spends talking around, about, and for her, I appreciate that Jane Wyman's Oscar-winning portrayal of a sweet deaf-mute girl who learns to communicate with hearing people just in time to find herself first a mother and then on trial for murder is as unsugary as it is, and I enjoyed how much Lew Ayres avoids the saintly pitfalls of playing the progressive young doctor by a carefully judged application of crankiness—he looks like he was born short a couple of drinks, several years' worth of sleep, and his last professional fee—but I wanted desperately to rescue them from their oncoming romance. The congeries of the plot has a couple of nice moments of real human complexity and a couple that are not so nice of real human nastiness and the rest of it feels like someone drew a line through the set labeled "GOOD TASTE" and everyone kept getting CAD injuries trying not to cross it. I mean, this is a movie where two men have a fistfight on a stormy sea-cliff and one of them goes over to his death while a foghorn desolately booms. Just own the dime novel already. Alas, it does not.
Deception (1946) misses being a wickedly funny, semi-soaped women's noir by the infuriating margin of failing to define in advance who any of its characters actually are. Is the virtuoso cellist played by Paul Henreid really so shattered from his concentration camp years that he must be sheltered from all knowledge of his wife's former relations with another man, or is he just a classically temperamental artist who's a bundle of nerves right up until he's a diamond on the night? Is the brilliant composer played by Claude Rains really the kind of coldly calculating sociopath who would ruin the lives of his ex-lover and her new husband to revenge his wounded vanity, or is he just an exceptionally charming asshole who likes to push people's buttons but stops short of the big red one? Is the talented pianist played by Bette Davis right in her fearful interpretations of both of the men in her life, or is she just a terrible judge of character? Who knows? We're not given enough objectively reliable information to tell! That's how you create ambiguity, isn't it? I began this film in the not unreasonable trust that it understood its characters, even if the hermetically stripped-down suspense of the plot necessarily involved their sometime opacity to me; I finished it with the realization that I had just seen the Golden Age A-picture equivalent of one of those TV shows where any twist can be shocking if it comes out of utter nowhere. Scene by scene, it's tense, witty, twisty, and histrionic, full of zinger lines and modernist shadows and a shifting balance of sympathies between all three principals who are of course acting their hearts out—Rains in particular gets one tour-de-force scene ordering dinner before an important audition that might as well be one of the baritone arias from Les contes d'Hoffmann. Taken all together, it's like trying to punch fog and it left me really wanting to. I don't need to know all the decisions that went into creating a character, but I need to know that decisions were made. As far as I can tell, Deception decided that the best way to create its atmosphere of unknowingness was just not to know anything and as a result I got to the last tragically uncertain shot and shouted for half an hour. Research after the fact indicated that the stage source material was significantly reshaped by the dictates of both the Code and the studio system: it did no one, including the box office, any favors. The central cello concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold is just as mesmerizingly rich and brash as the fictional composer's music is asserted to be and I was very glad to read that he salvaged it into his own repertoire later on.
Some very talented people were involved in both of these movies, I need not point out. The first was directed by Jean Negulesco, the second co-written by John Collier. They still got crushed by the Production Code. Obviously I needed some kind of antidote.
In the same way that it is unfair to describe Hammer horror as Universal horror with more tits and Technicolor, it is almost certainly unfair to describe The Living Idol (1957) as Val Lewton on CinemaScope and mescaline, but I can't believe writer-director-producer Albert Lewin had never seen Cat People (1942) or The Leopard Man (1943) when the plot of this delirious mess of exotica turns on the supposed racial memory of maidens sacrificed to jaguars as manifested in the present day by the spiritual illness of the indigenous adopted daughter of a British professor of Mayan antiquities. The priceless find of an ancient jaguar statue dotted all over with Maya blue and snarling with white shell fangs horrifies her in ways she cannot account for. Masked dancers at a carnival spring and claw at her as if they have singled her out as their especial prey. The caged jaguar at the Chapultepec Zoo reacts to her as ferociously as the panther to Irena Dubrovna in New York City. The stucco portrait of an aristocratic maiden of the Classic period seems to bear her face. Her birth father was killed by a jaguar-carved stela. The professor is convinced that the ancient struggle of life with chaos and evil has been awoken by his daughter's contact with the jaguar and must be played out to its bitter, mythic end; her sturdy-minded American boyfriend is less convinced. I think this plot may be nonsense if examined closely—the most casual glance at the function of the jaguar in Maya religion disproves its central conceit. For once I'm not sure I care. The movie so clearly doesn't. Lewin, who had previously been responsible for the surprisingly weird The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and the surreally Wagnerian Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), had a gift for mixing amateur psychology and applied mythology in flammable, Romantic proportions and then filming the results as if the concept of a top that could be gone over was something he had heard about once and never put much stock in. It runs on symbols and patterns, on images and dream logic. At one point a lecture on human sacrifice dissolves into the dream sequence, past-life regression, possessed hallucination of Liliane Montevecchi staked out in pure blackness and ritual jewelry, circled by drums and streaming torches like self-willed things, until the eyes of the jaguar flash out at her like cenote water and its spotted paw lashes out to mark her, across centuries and lifetimes, with her own blood on her cheek. It's camp and uncanny and it looks fantastic in all senses of the word; it makes up for yet another superfluous voiceover and one of the most artificial big cat attacks I have ever seen onscreen, in which a stand-in gets nuzzled in fast motion while the dubbing of the soundtrack does its best to convince me of bloodthirsty snarls. You should understand that I cannot tell you if this movie is any good at all. People in it say things like "Nothing worth explaining can be explained" or "Ingratitude is not exclusively a human attribute. It belongs to divinity as well." The action starts in the ruins of Chichén Itzá and concludes in a Catholic church, where Christ has already been called out as a glorified normalization of human sacrifice along with capital punishment and the nationalistic cult of war. It just isn't concerned for a moment with good taste as opposed to artistic effect and I'm so glad to have to discovered it on the heels of the two careful failures described above. Maybe it's a failure, too, but it doesn't give a damn. This confidence brought to you by my unashamed backers at Patreon.
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Thank you!
Shame about the end of Deception, tho.
That one had such a strong cast, I think even a few lines here and there could have fixed it. But no!
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Lewing ... had a gift for mixing amateur psychology and applied mythology in flammable, Romantic proportions and then filming the results as if the concept of a top that could be gone over was something he had heard about once and never put much stock in. -- I mean, that's the sort of review a director would ... make a deal with a jaguar god to get. Flammable! A top that could be gone over! Love it.
The one where they tiptoe around rape reminds me of a ridiculous thing that happened for All Saints Day in church--I'll report on it in my journal.
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It really was! The title came up in blood-red bas-relief in a frame of Mayan glyphs and I felt better already.
-- I mean, that's the sort of review a director would ... make a deal with a jaguar god to get. Flammable! A top that could be gone over! Love it.
I love your idea of the film-dealing jaguar god. "Now, of course, I'm going to need a central part . . ."
The one where they tiptoe around rape reminds me of a ridiculous thing that happened for All Saints Day in church--I'll report on it in my journal.
I shall check it out!
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Yes, but not because the two are lyrically related; I just like that one a lot.
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You're very welcome. I'm glad to be able to.
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I absolutely recommend it. It is on the Criterion Channel, of all places, along with Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, which I suppose I should now rewatch.
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Thank you!
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It might seem a trivial compliment, ignoring the substance of your review - until that exact length of one hundred words is considered. I would not be at all surprised to discover that this precision is no coincidence. Not at all!
As to that -
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/6a/2c/2e/6a2c2eb09155f8d5376c7a772d0c401d.jpg