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Don't you sign away your name again
Bad: I spent most of last night in too much pain to sleep, and I'm not exactly sleeping overtime as it is. I don't feel like I'm here at all.
Not bad: while unable to sleep, I discovered one of the roles George Sanders should be known for and isn't.
It's in This Land Is Mine (1943), Jean Renoir's drama-fable about life under the German occupation; script by Dudley Nichols, rest of the cast Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, Una O'Connor. The names set it somewhere in France, but the film is deliberately scripted and staged as if taking place anywhere in occupied Europe that could also be England or the United States, those still-free powers that might be inclined to look down on German-held countries as cowards or collaborators. Which is precisely what the story is about: Laughton plays Albert Lory, a timid schoolteacher hopelessly in love with a beautiful colleague, too shy to tell her and too frightened of the world in general to know what to do next if he did; early in the film, he's shamed in front of his students by panicking badly during an air raid and thereafter he's assumed to have turned in Louise's brother, a signalman who helped sabotage a Berlin-bound train, because everyone knows now there's nothing Lory couldn't be scared into doing. As it happens, he's innocent. The real culprit is Sanders' George Lambert, who is not smooth or caddish or lazily epigrammatic; he's a basically decent, conventional man who discovers too late that he doesn't have either the self-knowledge or the self-deception required to be a traitor. He talks himself into betraying his best friend for the allegedly greater good, but he's having second thoughts even as he gives up the fatal information; his conflicted attempts to warn Paul, however, only guarantee his friend's death. The German commander who comes to visit afterward is cheerfully, contemptuously clear: having demonstrated that he can betray, George will be expected to go on doing it, as much and as often as the Germans need. He might start with the dead man's sister, his ex-fiancée. He shoots himself first.
I do not want to shortchange Charles Laughton, who makes the transformation from quaking nobody to momentary hero of the resistance with believable clumsiness and an odd, clownish grace, but I knew he had the range; I hadn't actually been sure about Sanders. But from about his third scene on, he's devastating: there's no way this ends well and he knows it. He's a dead man walking from the moment he lights Major von Keller's cigarette. I wish he'd been cast in more of these off-type roles.
The rest of today: I have no idea. Read the new John le Carré and do laundry, I think. I'm not sure about staring at TCM.
Not bad: while unable to sleep, I discovered one of the roles George Sanders should be known for and isn't.
It's in This Land Is Mine (1943), Jean Renoir's drama-fable about life under the German occupation; script by Dudley Nichols, rest of the cast Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, Una O'Connor. The names set it somewhere in France, but the film is deliberately scripted and staged as if taking place anywhere in occupied Europe that could also be England or the United States, those still-free powers that might be inclined to look down on German-held countries as cowards or collaborators. Which is precisely what the story is about: Laughton plays Albert Lory, a timid schoolteacher hopelessly in love with a beautiful colleague, too shy to tell her and too frightened of the world in general to know what to do next if he did; early in the film, he's shamed in front of his students by panicking badly during an air raid and thereafter he's assumed to have turned in Louise's brother, a signalman who helped sabotage a Berlin-bound train, because everyone knows now there's nothing Lory couldn't be scared into doing. As it happens, he's innocent. The real culprit is Sanders' George Lambert, who is not smooth or caddish or lazily epigrammatic; he's a basically decent, conventional man who discovers too late that he doesn't have either the self-knowledge or the self-deception required to be a traitor. He talks himself into betraying his best friend for the allegedly greater good, but he's having second thoughts even as he gives up the fatal information; his conflicted attempts to warn Paul, however, only guarantee his friend's death. The German commander who comes to visit afterward is cheerfully, contemptuously clear: having demonstrated that he can betray, George will be expected to go on doing it, as much and as often as the Germans need. He might start with the dead man's sister, his ex-fiancée. He shoots himself first.
I do not want to shortchange Charles Laughton, who makes the transformation from quaking nobody to momentary hero of the resistance with believable clumsiness and an odd, clownish grace, but I knew he had the range; I hadn't actually been sure about Sanders. But from about his third scene on, he's devastating: there's no way this ends well and he knows it. He's a dead man walking from the moment he lights Major von Keller's cigarette. I wish he'd been cast in more of these off-type roles.
The rest of today: I have no idea. Read the new John le Carré and do laundry, I think. I'm not sure about staring at TCM.
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It's unavailable on DVD and I've never seen a VHS, but some lovely person has put the whole thing up on YouTube. You might as well watch it before they take it down again.
I was just thinking of him in character for Jamaica Inn and realizing that I'm unable to picture him in any other mode than a cad eating a chicken leg and saying, "I'm in the mood for entertainment, let's visit the dungeons."
Hee. With the possible exception of Hobson's Choice (1954), I have actually never seen Laughton in any of his famous roles—The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Rembrandt (1936), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). I discovered him first as a director; I love him because of The Night of the Hunter (1955), which should never have been his only film. I can't remember if you've seen it. It is American mythology, purely distilled; there's nothing else like it. Robert Mitchum was never more beautiful or more terrifying. And out on Criterion DVD now, thank God.
And on a totally different front, you should see The Canterville Ghost (1944), minor and atmospherically confused—it's never quite sure whether it wants to be comedy, drama, or fantasy-horror, though it introduced me to Robert Young and I do think there are some brilliant things about it—as it is, because everyone should have the chance to hear Laughton as a ghost delicately bowing out of a conversation: "Excuse me, I really must gibber at the oriole window."
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TCM has screened it in the past, just not last night.
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I'd love to see The Canterville Ghost. You've probably guessed that I'm a huge fan of the original Oscar Wilde story, which likewise veers around between social satire, lighthearted ghost comedy, and romance, and then takes a hard left into metaphysical "Sweet William's Ghost" territory. It's inconsistent but it does so many things that I love that I wouldn't change it for the world.
Mutiny on the Bounty was a deeply unsatisfying movie but not because of Laughton, who was fine, funny, and put a lot into his role. That movie pulled its punches. Practically everything in it is a hot-button issue dressed up in period clothes, and the filmmakers wimped out on addressing any of the questions they raised. I'm still mad at them.
I've not yet seen Night of the Hunter, though I've heard a lot about it. (One of the members of "They Might Be Giants" said that "Particle Man" was inspired by another member's saying that when Robert Mitchum takes his shirt off in that movie, he looks like an evil triangle.) I'll watch it one day, but I want to make sure I'll have company as I know it will upset me.
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Amen, sister.
I'd love to see The Canterville Ghost. You've probably guessed that I'm a huge fan of the original Oscar Wilde story, which likewise veers around between social satire, lighthearted ghost comedy, and romance, and then takes a hard left into metaphysical "Sweet William's Ghost" territory. It's inconsistent but it does so many things that I love that I wouldn't change it for the world.
I should warn you that while I have not read the original novella, I know it has to differ in some substantial ways from the 1944 film simply because Wilde couldn't have set his story during World War II. Therefore I have no idea what you'll think of it, but it does have Charles Laughton as a ghost.
(The film was directed by Jules Dassin, who is best known for the brutal, classic noirs Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) and the French-language Rififi (1955), the archetype of all heist films. Naturally, I discovered him first with his light comedy—The Canterville Ghost and A Letter for Evie (1946), a lovely little retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac that I wish were available on DVD. Eventually I'll get around to Never on Sunday (1960), which is the one with the international hit song.)
That movie pulled its punches. Practically everything in it is a hot-button issue dressed up in period clothes, and the filmmakers wimped out on addressing any of the questions they raised. I'm still mad at them.
Could I ask you for a more detailed explanation? I know both some of the history and the general outline of the film.
(One of the members of "They Might Be Giants" said that "Particle Man" was inspired by another member's saying that when Robert Mitchum takes his shirt off in that movie, he looks like an evil triangle.)
What, seriously? I think that crossed a wire in my brain.
I'll watch it one day, but I want to make sure I'll have company as I know it will upset me.
I'll very gladly watch it again with you, if you like.
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I'd love to. Now that I have transport, that'll be relatively easy to accomplish.
The thing about Mutiny on the Bounty, at least the Laughton/Gable version... there are at least two complex dramas that the movie first sets up, then discards. As in the book, the expedition gets to Tahiti (I think?) and spends a long time there before heading home. Leaving Tahiti provokes the title mutiny, in fact. Well, while on Tahiti, a lot of the nicer protagonists start relationships with (gorgeous, exotic-ified) Tahitian women. Fletcher Christian hooks up with the daughter of one of the local chieftains. Then they're forced to leave them, and the mutiny breaks loose.
Much later, the mutineers somehow-or-other stop back at Tahiti, talk their girlfriends into fleeing with them aboard the stolen ship, and they sail off to Pitcairn Island and wreck the ship so they can't go back. Well, the problematical thing here... The girlfriends are pretty cool with that. Christian's girlfriend's dad is sad, but he's completely cool about letting her sail off into nowhere with a probable murderer, though she can never come home again, even if she changes her mind. (My mother watched it to that point and said, "In real life, those girls' families would have been down on the beach, weeping and beating their breasts and scratching themselves with shells in grief, because they knew they'd never see the girls again." My mom has actually read the book. Maybe that happens in the book, I don't know.) Anyhow, the only people I really felt sorry for there were the girlfriends. It's as though no one involved in the film noticed that women were people and would have opinions about this. Anyhow, it was bad writing.
Similarly punch-pulling: the film ends back in England with a handful of the mutineers about to be executed in the morning. And we've spent the whole film with these guys, and know that they're basically decent men who were involved against their will; they had no other option. The protagonist gets off on a technicality, though, so that's OK. Then he receives an officer's commission and sails away aboard another ship with "Rule, Britannia" playing on the soundtrack, as far as I can tell, non-ironically. We're actually supposed to have a warm fuzzy feeling about this. We go straight from the pale staring faces in the condemned cell to the protagonist trotting off to his bright new future. It was just revolting.
Mind you, if the rest of the movie had stunk, I wouldn't have minded those things in particular. The movie was good enough at other points for me to feel betrayed when it came out with hamhanded stuff like that transition from the condemned cell.
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Which reminds me: Ian Wallace, "A Transport of Delight."
It's as though no one involved in the film noticed that women were people and would have opinions about this.
In 1935! Imagine!
The movie was good enough at other points for me to feel betrayed when it came out with hamhanded stuff like that transition from the condemned cell.
It is very annoying when art has dead spots like that.
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Years after I saw it, I've finally written it up!
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I just showed TNotH to Kestrell the other day, and went looking to see if you'd written about it. What you write here is true and beautiful, but I'd love to see a more lengthy discussion :-)
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I have never written much about The Night of the Hunter for LJ. I saw it for the first time in the summer of 2005; I could have sworn I'd at least taken notes at the time, but all I've got are scattered LJ-comments like this one from years later: "It was like falling into someone else's nightmares; drifting down the river, the preacher's shadow on the horizon. There's one hymn I won't ever be able to hear again . . . a sermon, a murder ballad, a mystery play. Also, you do not want to fuck with old ladies with shotguns." I'd want to see it again before making any more extensive claims. I've seen it twice now and both times it was beautiful.
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Thank you!
The film ran on TCM tonight; I plan to rewatch it soon with