DIRECTOR'S THEATER: MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE PT. DEUX

Herewith three more installments (thus completing the one-hour installation on silent directors) from the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill epic "Hollywod" (see previous post if you have no idea what I'm rattling on about). In these sections, Brownlow and Gill focus on the three most innovative directors of the silent era: Rex Ingram, F.W. Murnau and King Vidor.

Ingram (pictured above), the most forgotten of the three, is lovingly evoked in Michael Powell's two-part autobiography--Powell worked for him when Ingram abandoned Hollywood and opened his own studio in Nice (a pre-Coppola off-Hollywood move if ever there was one...and as pre-destined to fail as most other attempts made over the years by other maverick filmmakers to break free of the studio cycle). Read this fine Wikipedia entry for a good introduction to this maverick's career and life. Ingram, hugely successful in the early twenties, was finished by the dawn of sound and lived another twenty years in ignominy...though Powell recounts a lovely last meeting in the late forties while he (Powell) was touring the states with his smash hit movie "The Red Shoes". Though initially reluctant to visit his forgotten mentor whilst soaked in the scent of success himself, Powell found Ingram suave, accepting and wonderfully proud that his protege was carrying on the torch for films as artistic endeavors--which Ingram had been far ahead of his time in espousing. Murnau, far better remembered ("Sunrise" is still quite an experience to view) is also given the full treatment in part three...

And part four carries on with Murnau, featuring a very interesting interview with Janet Gaynor, and clips of what appear to be dailies from "Sunrise". (Dig the forced perspective city set and the fact that he used children dressed as adults in the far distance to help sell the size and scope of the city...) Read this Wiki entry for a good overall perspective on this fascinating innovator--who died too young in a car crash. Edgar G. Ulmer, when interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich, recalled working with Murnau (I believe as a set designer) and, like Gaynor, principally remembers the man's fanatic insistence on getting things precisely as he wanted them--"the tenacity of Murnau" is Ulmer's complimentary and exasperated phrase.

And then we get into King Vidor and "The Crowd", which takes up the rest of part five...and I'm sorry to say that the singular focus on "The Crowd" is, to me, to the documentary's detriment--there is simply far too much of this film on view here while many other interesting films and directors are completely overlooked. Still the Vidor interview is interesting and touching and the scene at the end--when the James Murray character is suicidal and his little boy coaxes him into going on would make a stone cry. While "The Crowd" was certainly a great achievement, I find it a somewhat pious choice--you know those lists of "greatest films of all times" that always used to turn up with "Kane" and "The Bicycle Theif" and "Open City" and "Grand Illusion" on them? Somehow for me, "The Crowd" belongs to that era of thought--the Museum Of Modern Art/Richard Griffith/Paul Rotha/Willard Van Dyke/Lotte Eisner defensively poised "films can be art" movement.

By the way, if silent film is of interest to you, allow me to direct you to the incredibly interesting and rather darkly amusing weblog of that Prussian Count Ferdinand Von Galitzien, whose ruminations on all things silent, foreign and tinged with decadence have brought me great pleasure over the past year or so.

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DIRECTOR'S THEATER: MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE

Below is a real find. It's a mere sliver of a mammoth documentary by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill called "Hollywood" --a comprehensive history of the silent film era which, if I'm not mistaken, I recall seeing on public television in the early 1980's, before it seemingly vanished from sight forever. Some lovely individual, the puzzlinglly named Quallgin, seems to have a copy of it (it doesn't appear to have ever made it to DVD) and has sliced up some highly digestible ten minute bits for your delectation on youtube. I've posted two parts of a one hour episode on silent film directors--"The Man With The Megaphone". (The series was presented in thirteen one-hour installments--totalling a whopping 676 minutes).

Silent film--aside from silent comedy--has long been a blind spot of mine. Rather than finding the films themselves interesting, I tend to become more fascinated with the meta-film occurring alongside the movie--the making of the film. How did they achieve the effects they did with the limited means available? What was it like shooting with all that background noise? Did they really use mood music? How did the form and language of filmmaking come together so quickly so as to create a set of film "rules" that, for the most part, are still in effect today? We credit Griffith with the close-up, but I wonder. So many silent films were churned out in the first fifteen years of the 20th century--most of them lost to us--that I can't help but think the language was being developed and shared by multiple film companies working alongside each other. And what of the earliest mistakes made in simple basic film grammer--such as "crossing the line" (having characters in close ups looking the wrong way), or figuring out proper screen direction for entrances and exits? These things are still important and vexing--to this day the continuity person and DP are often at each other's throats about which way to cover something--yet these problems must have begun as early as the teens. When somebody cut the film and noticed they'd staged and/or shot it incorrectly--or figured out how to correct the error--did they share the information with other companies?

The film director of the silent era was, of course, largely a re-invention and re-combining of a couple of different job and personality types: the stage director--or more accurately the "actor-manager" type--was one, a kind of swashbuckling, theatrical wizard who whipped his company of actors into shape, got the show up and running and got everyone the hell out of town before the bills they'd run up had to be paid. But the early film directors also owed a good deal of their mystique to their impersonations of mad military figures--unstoppable, physcially rugged and mentally cruel leaders whose troops must be dedicated to following them into the jaws of hell. (Indeed, deaths were common during the making of silents--so few effects existed at that time that every stunt was done practically). And a healthy dose of bullshit-artist--still a required trait for all directors--was an important part of the overall effect. In the following clips, you'll here one of the first directors ever--the venerable Allan Dwan--talk frankly about how he made up what a director was and how he looked as he went along. Also on view in these clips are directors Henry King and Byron Haskin--King, of course, had a long career in both silents and sound and wound up becoming one of the most prestigious "house directors" at Twentieth Century Fox. Haskin was a jack of all trades--mostly a cameraman in the silent days, later a director of some very peculiar b-movies--memorably "Robinson Crusoe On Mars", but also importantly Burt Lancaster's first film, the still powerful "I Walk Alone". King Vidor also appears--I met him briefly and memorably in the mid 1970's at critic/historian Arthur Knight's house. Imagine! Shaking the hand of King Vidor put me one handshake away from John Gilbert and Marion Davies--to say nothing of Griffith himself. As Orson Welles put it, "It's not that life is long, but that history is so short". Meanwhile, I'll post more of this marvelous series over the next few days...

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NEW YORK F@&#ING CITY ON FILM PART TRES!

Dig the following, compiled by the very twenties-oriented youtube poster Aaron1912 (I've embedded quite a bit of his collection over the last year and a half, so a belated thanks is owed to him). It's a wonderful collection of views of New York in the 1920's, including extended sequences from Harold Lloyd's 1928 "Speedy" (he's the cab-driver and Babe Ruth is the passenger who asks to be taken to Yankee Stadium).

Note that trolley cars are still in use in Manhattan (when did they finally go away?) and a few fine views of the El trains are on display. Also the bizarre horse&carriage chase toward the end begs the question: how did sequences like this get accomplished in the pre-digital age? Did people regularly die during the making of comedies? Truly breathtaking, some of these stunts.

And by the way, click here to read the very charming answers to the questions that I asked "thisispinkharma" in our blog/interview/chain/thingy.

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NEW YORK F@&#ING CITY ON FILM PART DUEX!

Let us say it's April 22, 1899 and your Thomas Edison. What might you be doing with yourself? The answer is: standing on a elevated train with a camera, photographing a view of Upper Manhattan--specifically the 104th Street curve. Now the El trains have long been relegated to the dumping ground of New York technology so I can't speak specifically about this curve and its precise location. My guess is that this is the Third Avenue El (taken down in the 1950's) and the distant countryside you see would be the still undeveloped Bronx. I imagine Edison selected the curve for recording as it supplied a natural sweep and perspective for the camera to capture--remember that camera's at this time were fixed, i.e. immovable and thus forced to capture whatever entered the frame with no ability to follow it.

This film is precisely what I was referring to yesterday with my theory of what's important to film watchers a hundred years later: no plot, no unnecessary dramatics. Just a view of what a very different world looked like--which, oddly, is not so different from today's world. For as the El train passes some workers standing perilously close to the edge of the tracks, the men wave goofily at the camera...just like people do now when they realize they're on television.



Herewith a ride on the New York City subway, filmed on June 5 1905 just a few months after the completion of the damn thing (which was in October '04). The ride begins at Union Square, 14th Street and terminates at the old Grand Central Station (the one put up in 1869--the magnificent current Grand Central was still eight years away from being built!) Nonetheless, the location of the subway stop didn't change and so we are underground on Lexington Ave. and 42nd street. The lack of stops in between makes this an express, the equivalent of today's 4 or 5 train which run along the east side of the city. It appears that another subway car followed the one pictured from rather close behind in order to capture the ride. Was this common practice or a special rig for the purposes of the film? The ride through the tunnels is endless and spooky but don't give up--about two minutes in, at the end of the line, you'll see a view of the waiting subway patrons at 42nd street. Note how weirdly happy you will feel to see humanity appear. And what humanity! People actually dressed like that! Toward the end pay special attention to the two men wearing top hats who march down the platform arm in arm. Hmmm....

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NEW YORK F@&#ING CITY ON FILM!

As I'm in New York this week, checking the final print of "City Island", I'm a bit pressed for writing time. Nonetheless, New York City always works it's mysterious magic on me and--like so many others--I find myself walking about my home town in a trance, imagining what everything might have looked like fifty or a hundred years ago. I'm always amazed at New York's ability to retain the past within the present--staring at Central Park South this morning, with snowfall covering the street and the park, I was momentarily convinced that 1899, 1929, 1959 and 2009 were all of one and the same.

I have a theory that most movies will fail to live on in the popular culture more than fifty or a hundred years. Certainly many films from the past--particularly from the late twenties and early thirties--use plot lines that are mere puzzlements to us now. (If you didn't know, for instance, that once upon a time in a very different America a woman could sue a man for proposing to her, then changing his mind and backing out of it--this was called "breach of promise"--and that the real reason it was considered a very real crime was because it besmirched the woman's "reputation", then you wouldn't understand a great many of the plays and movies from that era, many of which used this device dramatically). However even movies that no longer make sense are of archeaological value, showing us customs, manners and often times scenery that would otherwise have gone unpreserved. Indeed, the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison were often times simply filmed documentations of a given site--say an elevated train riding through the Bronx, or people skating in Central Park. That these little filmed recordings of nothing much soon gave way to the crude melodrama's of the era is, of course, a given; the more provocative question is which of these movies are of value to us now? A strange tale of a girl being tied to a railroad track? Or an actual documentation of New York CIty on a winters day early in the late nineteenth century? Most of us, I think, would vote for the latter. Following this logic, I have to assume that one-hundred years from today my movie "City Island"--a script lovingly crafted and carried around for years before experiencing the miracle of cinematic birth--will be of little if any interest to whomever is alive in 2109 SAVE FOR THE SHOTS OF THE ACTUAL LOCATIONS, places which may or may not still be extant. Who knows if the story and the concerns of its characters will make sense to the people of the next century? But the views of the actual places and the way in which people talked, dressed and behaved a hundred years ago, will certainly be of some value to somedbody who will be only to happy to fast forward their way impatiently through the plot. Does this bother me? As long as I'm not alive, the answer is no.

Below is the first of a series of "Old New York On Film" clips that I'll post this week. In honor of the snow on the ground today, we start with a view of Central Park in the snow, shot in...1898. See if you don't get a chill as the woman crosses in front of the camera about 20 seconds in...and the cop who crosses at 40 seconds, complete with absurd 19th Century cop outfit and hat. The nearness of their presence, the actuality of these people and their lives--which haven't existed in a hundred or so years--are what I'm talking about when I sense the presence of the past as I walk around present New York.

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THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH: AN INTERVIEW WITH RAYMOND DE FELITTA?

I've been tagged by one of our faithful readers, Marianna from Greece, to participate in a sort of chain-letter style blogger event in which one blogger interviews another. Then, as a result, a fellow blogger who reads the interview must make contact and ask me to interview them. Does this make sense? In any event, learning to participate in group activities--never a strong suit of mine as a child--is something I'm trying to get better at in middle-age, so I agreed. Below is my interview, questions courtesy of Marianna whose very nice blog can be found by clicking here.

1. If you had to choose one song to be in your life's soundtrack which one would it be and why?

Why one? I listen to music almost constantly--therefore picking one song would constitute a form of torture as it would be playing in constant rotation, driving me mad. (Apropos of this: Gore Vidal once said "What is a long life but a nightmare of endless repetition?") But if I were to pick a song which I considered the best, most poignant accompaniment to how I picture my own existence it would be the Art Tatum-Ben Webster recording of "All The Things You Are" by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein.

2. If you had to distinguish one moment, a moment you hold close to your heart, from your life so far...which one would it be?

So many come to mind of course--I've led a full and fortunate existence. But it would, I think, come down to any random moment I have with my son.

Why?

Because the most seemingly inconsequential moments with your kid are somehow to me the most delightful and profound ones. I'm talking about the moments where suddenly the miracle of their existence strikes you with full force--and usually they're doing nothing specifically wonderful at that moment, beyond of course existing.

Let me add one more specific moment that I hold seriously close to my heart: being in my old apartment in Greenwich Village one night and watching on TV as it was announced that my film "Two Family House" won the big Audience prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The joy was not just in nabbing the prize; it was in not being there in person to collect it, a fact the New York Times commented upon which made me seem (and feel) deeply cool.

3. In the movie "S1m0ne" Al Pacino plays a producer who finds working with a digitally-made actress easier and better than working with a real-life one. Do you feel that nowadays technology and the, so called, 'digital age' have the effect of making humans less and less needed?

No. Though I fit the classic profile of a Luddite, I am in fact enthused and enchanted with the so-called "digital age" and the various ways in which it is making precisely what I'm interested in more available and achievable. All progress comes with a cost of course--hasn't the automobile, so necessary in our lives, completely altered and uglified the world's landscapes? On the other hand, the car is a brilliant invention and many automobiles are even works of art. (Though none, I daresay, are being currently manufactured). Even if we are growing more isolated as a result of our much vaunted "interconnectivity", humans will always be needed to USE the technology that develops. Digital media--whatever purpose it may be serving--is ultimately a consumer tool, and the consumer will always be a human. And there are certain actors who I would have preferred working with a digital version of.

4. Is there something in your line of work that you saw and said "oh I wish I had done that!"? Did you admire anything to the point of healthy jealousy?

A great many things provoke the "healthy jealousy" you speak of, though I prefer to think of it as "honest envy". When I was a kid, the fight scene in the movie "Shane" made me want to be George Stevens, the director who staged it. (Funny that I've never shot anything remotely resembling that--although there is a pretty funny fight scene in "The Thing About My Folks"). Other movies that made me want to have made them: "All That Jazz", "Sunset Blvd.", "The Sweet Smell Of Success" and "The Awful Truth". Musically, anytime I hear Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson play the piano, it makes me want to quit everything else I'm doing and pursue that sort of excellence single-mindedly. And then there are great tennis players. I'm not one. But something about that particular sport's champions fills me with awe and envy. Perhaps it's because they are alone with their technique and not part of a team. They have only themselves to rely upon, which I somehow relate to. Certainly as a pianist it makes sense to me; but even in filmmaking, though it is a highly collaborative endeavor, the director is in an extremely lonely position. The final judgements are yours; they may not be what others want so you must rely on your instinct. So often on a crowded set, you feel that sense of isolation that I can only imagine a tennis player feels when staring at his or her opponent.

5. If you were given the opportunity to go back in time and change something from your past, would you choose to do anything differently or not? And why?

I can honestly say no to this since I've come to believe (just in the last few years) that everything follows a pattern that was established long ago, in some forgotten "war room" where our lives are doped out before we live them. We are merely actors--not the scriptwriters. Apropos of this, I'll quote a line from Steven Soderbergh's new Che Guevara movie: "Live your life as if you've already died". Isn't that a rather brilliant thought?

There. That's the interview. Below are the rules for continuing this little excercise. Thank you for the questions Marianna. And beneath the rules, I've posted an absolutely wonderful clip from another Gregory La Cava movie, "The Half Naked Truth" starring Lee Tracy and Lupe Velez, the latter of whom performs a mad jazz dance the likes of which you've never seen. The sequence is masterfully shot and the more I watch it, the more complex I realize La Cava's shooting and editing truly are. Now, is anyone interested in being interviewed?

1. Send me an e-mail or comment saying "interview me"

2. Then 5 questions will be e-mailed to you (questions I choose to ask you).

3. Answer them on your blog

4. Do not forget to re-post the rules along with your answers and offer to interview anyone else who e-mails you or comments that they wish to be interviewed.

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DIRECTOR'S THEATER: THE LA CAVA PAPERS

A massive case of work avoidance--both screenplay writing and blogging--led to the inexcusable delay between my last posting, featuring outtakes from Gregory La Cava's "My Man Godfrey" and this follow-up post, which I conceived while writing the first post but didn't get around to for a week. Procrastination is, I think, at the heart of the blogging life--one blogs initially in order to procrastinate, avoiding the "real" tasks at hand. And then, once firmly entrenched in bloggomania (a state in which one produces bloggorhea), one procrastinates working on the blog.

Enough. Back to the subject at hand, the forgotten but fascinating director Gregory La Cava. Click here to read a fine article by Gary Morris about this shamefully neglected filmmaker. I spoke last week of "My Man Godfrey", his most famous film, but several others are equally interesting and still freshly entertaining. La Cava seemed to be an early exponent of improvisatory work with actors--though at this distance its hard to say how much his finished films deviated from their screenplays. Certainly the best of his work always came as a result of working with a strong script--"Stage Door", my favorite of his films, came from the sturdy carpentry shop of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber (who also concocted "Dinner At Eight"). Let's whet the appetite with a look at the trailer of "Stage Door" (the movie, by the way, is posted on in full on youtube).

Having set the period and hopefully created a modicum of enthusiasm for the subject, lets examine what little there is about La Cava in print and see what we can learn about him. First up, Frank Capra:

"The meteor, Gregory La Cava, was an extreme proponent of inventing scenes on the set. Blessed with a brilliant, fertile mind and a flashing wit, he claimed he could make pictures without scripts. But without scripts the studio heads could make no accurate budgets, schedules, or time allowances for actors commitments. Shooting off the cuff, executives said, was reckless gambling...He stuck to his off-the-cuff guns. Result: fewer and fewer film assignments for him--then none. The flashing rocket of his wit was denied a launching pad because he wouldn't, or couldn't conform. So he mixed his exotic fuels with more mundane spirits and brooded himself into oblivion--his rebel colors still flying. La Cava was a man out of his time--a precursor of the "new wave" directors of Europe. Pity he didn't live long enough to lead them.

Frank Capra, "The Name Above The Title"

Capra's thumbnail history of his fellow filmmaker gives us two important pieces of information: that La Cava did indeed invent whole scenes on the set; and that he was a drunk. (His friendship with W.C. Fields might have similarly led us to this conclusion). Capra's correct about La Cava's sparse output--after he peaked with "Godfrey" and "Stage Door" he made only three more films, none of them successful. These were "Lady In A Jam", "Fifth Avenue Girl" and "Living In A Big Way". I have a feeling that whatever looseness developed on the sets of the more tightly scripted "Godfrey" and "Stage Door" may have gone to his head--director's who don't write do seem to require ownership over the screenplays they bring to life--especially if the movies are successful. (Altman was notoriously bad at crediting the fine writers he worked with for having much to do with his films).

Our next account of La Cava is an eye-witness one, from the sound engineer (and later director) Edward L. Bernds. (I had the privilege of knowing Ed while growing up and plan to write about him at greater length...unless, of course, I keep procrastinating). Bernds worked with La Cava on a 1935 Columbia movie called "She Married Her Boss". His feelings toward his boss are ambivalent; clearly he was fascinated by him, but also frustrated (a not uncommon feeling toward La Cava). In his memoir, "Mr. Bernds Goes To Hollywood", he makes extensive reference to a journal he kept while on the set.

"Some of La Cava's instructions to his cast members seemed strange..."Keep it filled up with business. No story value here except to show relationship of woman serving man. Keep it glib. Don't let anything stand out--the story value will seep through the scene as a hole." Something seeped through: the scene betwween (Claudette) Colbert and Melvyn Douglas was fast, sharp and amusing. Later, La Cava to his players: "I liked the easy way you played the scene. Throw it away: don't think of anything but glibness and ease." Diary, June 14, La Cava: "Do what you feel--then your reflexes are handling you, which is the theory of it". Diary, July 1: "Lines don't matter. Words don't matter, except sense and feeling--the thing is to get the essence of them-what is said doesn't matter!!"...I recall thinking that if what is said didn't matter, why bother to speak? Shoot a couple of close-ups of actors staring at one another and allow the essence of the scene to ripple and sseep through. La Cava's instructions did seem to be up in the clouds sometwhere. The term "double-talk" was not known in 1935--if it had been, I probably would have used it."

Edward L. Bernds, "Mr. Bernds Goes To Hollywood"

Well, I'm not sure about the "words don't matter" bit, but I think La Cava was onto something that might not have been easy to grasp; his instructions seem all about relaxation, about not thinking while doing--a very Zennish kind of approach for a mid-thirties screwball comedy director. Is this what gives the performances in his films there slightly ducky, warm and charming qualities? Look below at two superb scenes from "Stage Door"--especially Andrea Leeds wonderful "birthday breakdown" scene. I'll quote a bit from the above mentioned article by Morris:

" In Stage Door, she (Andrea Leeds) said, "Gregory La Cava had all of us girls in the movie come to the studio for two weeks before the shooting started and live as though we were in the lodging house itself. He rewrote scenes from day to day to get the feeling of a bunch of girls together — as spontaneous as possible. He would talk to each of us like a lifelong friend. That gave us a feeling of intimacy." Others on the set of Stage Door said he had a secretary eavesdropping on the girls and writing down their comments, some of which he incorporated into the film. La Cava's careful work with Katharine Hepburn on this film rescued her from the dreaded status of "box-office poison," and Ginger Rogers, not always charitable in her comments on those she worked with, labeled him "masterful."

Producer Pandro Berman, who worked on many of La Cava's films, talked about the chaos that existed on the director's sets. "He amazed me, and I gave him complete freedom. I went through a terrible ordeal on the picture [Stage Door], not knowing where we were going, what we were doing tomorrow, how the script would turn out. The picture aged me a hundred years every day we worked. Every single person on our boards here and in New York wanted me to fire Greg. It was pure hell!"

Gary Morris, "Forgotten Master"

In spite of which the film turned out beautifully. So why didn't it ever work out for La Cava again? Ralph Bellamy, in an interview I'll post soon (it's mostly about Leo McCarey) refers to the 1942 "Lady In A Jam" disparigingly--unfavorably comparing La Cava's attempts at working without a script to McCarey's on "The Awful Truth". Perhaps the boozing had already gotten the better of him. I wonder if anyone ever spoke to Gene Kelly about "Living In A Big Way", the 1947 curio that ended La Cava's career (and almost Kelly's as well). More to come...

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MY MAN GODFREY: ANOTHER MAN'S OUTTAKES

Having exhausted my store of "City Island" outtakes, I've taken to shamelessly plundering youtube for outtakes from other films. First up was Jon Favreau's "Made" (see five posts ago?), next was the collection of Warner Brothers 1930's bloopers (see three posts ago?) Now it's time for Carol Lombard and William Powell to swear angrily at themselves when they blow their lines in outtakes from the 1936 classic "My Man Godfrey". The question of why we still find blooper reels amusing has no sensible answer; seeing actors get pissed off at themselves and break the fourth wall is, like grilled cheese sandwiches, Checker Cabs and Lawrence Welk re-runs, one of life's inexplicable pleasures.

And so to "My Man Godfrey" and it's director. If you don't know the film, by all means see it as soon as possible--along with "The Awful Truth" and "Bringing Up Baby" it defines the 1930's screwball comedy and still manages to remain wonderfully funny and romantic even if the thirties are not especially your thing (and if that's the case, I say...feh!). If you don't grasp what screwball comedy was, by all means look it up on Google and read any of a number of scholarly articles out there on this sub-genre of the depression years--I hardly need to add my two cents to the vast literature written on the subject. My real concern in this post isn't the genre, or Carol Lombard's line-flubs (delightful though they are--largely because of her supremely foul mouth)...but the forgotten director of "My Man Godfrey", the strikingly named and strangely enigmatic Gregory La Cava.

La Cava was an animator in the 1920's, working with Walter Lantz (later of "Woody Woodpecker" fame) on "The Katenjammer Kids" and eventually graduating to director of real, live people--if you consider that an accurate description of W.C. Fields--at the end of the silent era. (His Fields films are all silents--I've never bothered to watch a silent Fields, assuming that without his voice he's minus too major an element to bother with...I have the same feeling about the silent Laurel&Hardy's). (By the way--Fields also found La Cava's name striking, as witness the handful of times he dropped it in referring to one or another offscreen characters, i.e. "Ask Mrs. La Cava if she needs a milk delivery..." etc.) In the early sound era, La Cava proved more aware than many directors at realizing that talkies were slower and potentially more deadly in pacing than the late silents had been; indeed, he became something of a maniac about challenging that development. La Cava's best known early work--the deeply strange "Gabriel Over the White House" and "Symphony Of Six Million"--still feel sharper, more cinematic, more assured than many other movies of the early thirties. (This excludes Warner Brothers movies which, oddly, always seemed to grasp the necessity for pace. Why was this? I like to think it was something mundane along the lines of directors having less stock to shoot with and being forced to hurry the actors up before a rollout occurred).

It was a few years later, though, that La Cava hit the jackpot with the film that made him an A-lister, "My Man Godfrey". This was followed closely by what I think is his best film, the Katherine Hepburn-Ginger Rogers starring (and Eve Arden-Lucille Ball featuring) "Stage Door" (1937). La Cava was, apparently, an early exponent of improvisation within a scripted framework--Leo McCarey was as well--and it appears that this was both a benefit to his reputation as well as his eventual undoing. For while working with strong scripts (Morrie Ryskind contributed to both "Godfrey" and "Stage Door" and both films' source material was solid--the former a novel by Eric Hatch, the latter a hit Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber), La Cava's loose approach seemed to result in a freedom of performance that you don't see in other films--save McCarey's and Hawks's. I'm not even certain that he was doing precisely what we think of as improvisation--the lines don't sound made up...rather the scenes feel freshly spontaneous and perhaps reworked with the actors so as to get the maximum invention and spontaneity out of the players. Actors, I've found, who enjoy being loose are far more believable and charismatic when you as a director let them "go"--let them invent and depart from the exact wording of the script. La Cava seemed to do something along this order--even the outtakes of "Godfrey" which I've posted below seem faster, looser, funnier...less self-conscious. Indeed, the performances of the whole cast in both "Godfrey" and "Stage Door" seem downright cozy. In the day of the sacred script and controlling Producer, La Cava was a rebel--an auteur before the word had reached our shores who believed movies were made on the set, not in the offices prior to the shooting. His methods apparently provoked confusion and dismay among everyone except the actors, most of whom seemed to have revered him. In this sense he was also ahead of his time--not regarding actors as "cattle" but realizing the potential inherent in making the actors his collaborators. In some ways, discussing La Cava feels eerily like discussing Altman--who nobody seems to have enjoyed much except the actors as well. In the era of the contract director, La Cava moved studios almost picture to picture--a sign that he was more interested in his art than he was in his job.

Tomorrow I'll post reflections on La Cava from other directors and actors as well as a couple of clips from "Stage Door". Below I've also posted the first reel of "Godfrey" betting that, if you watch it, you'll be hooked into viewing the whole film which is available--among other places--in a dozen parts on youtube.

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"ONE AM" BY CHARLIE CHAPLIN: BEST FILM OF 2009?

Happy new year. As the long introductory weekend dwindles with less and less to concern us re: xmas and New Years plans (and let's face it who really cares about football teams like Arizona and San Diego?), movies become dominant once again in conversation. Nearly every social encounter reduces itself to a quick checklist of the end-of-year glut of "awards movies" and everyones feelings about them. I hate these conversations. No matter how lousy a movie is, I know how hard it was to A) write, B) get the star to commit, C) find the money, D) make the damn thing. In fact I've come to believe that movies are the hardest pursuit man has invented for himself. Getting to be President is nothing compared with getting a movie made.

That said, I heartily enjoyed "The Wrestler", rather liked "Frost/Nixon", was disappointed with "Defiance" and thought "Milk" a job well done. If I don't like a movie, I prefer not to mention it. However the best film I've seen this year so far wasn't sent to me by the studios, hopeful for a vote. Indeed it wasn't even made this century. In fact it was barely made in the last century--1916 being much closer to the nineteenth than the twenty-first century. Charlie Chaplin's "One AM', shot and released before the U.S. entry into the first world war, is a perfect piece of work--as formal, composed, simple and profound as Bach. It stars Chaplin and, except for the cab driver in the opening scene (Albert Austin), NOBODY ELSE. It's a solo study of a tipsy gentleman engaged in a war with the eccentric collection of objects in his home. Or is it his home? I've watched "One AM" a few times this weekend, due to my son's infatuation with it...(his first exposure to Chaplin, an Essanay short called "His First Job" was only a modest success; he was more interested in the fact that the actors moved their mouths but couldn't be heard than he was in the film, which isn't a particularly strong one)...and one of the peculiarities of the film, the more I watch it, is how strange Chaplin's behavior is in relation to the stuff in what we presume is his house. He has so little familiarity with the objects, the stairs, the clock that keeps banging him in the head and the immortal Murphy bed which utterly annihilates him in the last five minutes of the film, that I 've begun to think that the real plot of "One AM" is that of a man who enters the wrong house (he does have to use the window in the opening to gain entry) and is too drunk to realize what he's done. See the film, posted below in two parts, and give me your thoughts.

"One AM" is the third released comedy in Chaplin's "Mutual Comedies" period--his third studio (the first was Sennett, the second Essanay) and the most important in terms of his artistic development. The Mutual's are, to my mind, much more consistent and inventive--he was given more time per film and began to experiment with his "rough draft" technique of shooting which later developed into something of a mania with him, causing him to take years between films. Essentially, what this came down to was Chaplin filming routines not as an end in and of itself but as a way for him to study the film and alter the routine; I feel quite certain that the Murphy Bed routine that closes out "One AM" is as good as it is because he gave it a few try-outs, watched the pacing and the pattern of reversals and surprises, and honed the routine. Notice too that, aside from a single cutaway, the routine is captured in one take. In his autobiography, Chaplin remembers his two years making films for Mutual as a particularly rosy time:

"Fulfilling the Mutual contract, I suppose, was the happiest period of my career. I was light and unencumbered, twenty-seven years old, with fabulous prospects and a friendly, glamorous world before me. Within a short time I would be a millionaire--it all seemed slightly mad. Money was pouring into my coffers, The ten thousand dollars I received every week accumulated into hundres of thousands. Now I was worth four hundred thousand, now five hundred thousand. I could never take it for granted..."

Well, yes. But it also happens that most great artists have a brief moment where they realize their potential and are not yet burdened by it--it has yet to become a responsibility to be fulfilled and remains something more akin to a spasm, an involuntary response to the sudden flaming of genius. This is what the Chaplin Mutual period seems to me to be; coming after the delightful but uneven early years, and pre-dating the wonderful but obsessive and often self-important "great years" ("The Gold Rush", "City Lights", etc). The Chaplin Mutual's are unpretentious, unemotional and just a bit smarter and more profound than you might expect. Pay special attention to the moment when Chaplin mounts the stairway to the right side of the room, sees the stuffed bear and immediately turns and walks back down...a truly marvelous and early example of what makes his comedy still so powerful; the sudden introduction of well-earned cowardice within the facade of impenetrability. Did I just describe you? I certainly just described myself...

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