The Criterion Collection #435 The Furies

By Dan Callahan

[The Furies streets on June 24th, 2008. Screencaps from DVDBeaver.]

Anthony Mann is best known today for the remarkable series of westerns he made with James Stewart in the fifties, but he reached his peak with Men in War (1957) and Man of the West (1958), late works which brought his central theme of the violence within man and the demoralizing aftermath of violence to nearly intolerable heights of insight and catharsis. In his famous Stewart films, Mann had a tendency to be a bit too tidy in his storytelling; coming out of one of his mid-period westerns can be a little like exiting a scrupulous, intelligent lecture on ethics and morality, festooned with some of the best landscape photography this side of John Ford. Criterion’s surprising, all-stops-out release of Mann’s early western The Furies (1950) offers a valuable view of this director nearing the height of his powers, before his gifts had calcified; in many ways, it’s his most exciting movie because it’s also his most unresolved, opening up a Pandora’s box of psychological issues that cannot be contained in any conventional conclusion.

At its core, The Furies is a passionate stand off between a father and a daughter, played by a rip-snorting Walter Huston (in his last role on screen) and a primal Barbara Stanwyck, who dazzlingly alternates between extreme aggression and extreme, childlike vulnerability. As T.C. Jeffords, a wily cattle baron who fancies himself a sort of prairie Napoleon, Huston is in titanic grand old man mold (if you want to see the real genesis of Daniel Day-Lewis’ John Huston-aping Daniel Plainview, look no further). His beady eyes twinkling, T.C. continually asks Vance to scratch his “sixth lumbar vertebrae,” and when you see the outrageously knowing way that Stanwyck scratches her Daddy’s itches, you’ll wonder how Mann snuck this Incest Out West epic past the censors.

The Furies has several tributary plots, the most affecting of which is Vance’s platonic love affair with her best friend Juan (Gilbert Roland), a Mexican on the verge of being burned off his own land by her father. Stanwyck develops far more heat and feeling with Roland than with her nominal leading man, Wendell Corey, but the real face-off mid-way through the film is between Vance and a self-described “adventuress” played by the formidable Judith Anderson. In the theater, Anderson was the greatest modern Medea and had cornered the market on vengeance, so it’s quite appropriate when this vengeance is visited upon her in the film’s most shocking scene; I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say that Stanwyck is the first, best and ultimate Scissors Sister.

It would take a boatload of Freudian psychoanalysts to unpack all the psychosexual baggage on display in The Furies, all amplified by one of Franz Waxman’s stormiest scores; most of the film is so alarming, and Stanwyck’s Vance is so dedicatedly perverse, that it’s easy to shake off the last twenty minutes or so, which serve as a kind of valedictory for Huston the actor while smoothing out the rough edges of his crude tycoon character. Fascinating as Stanwyck and Huston are, though, in the end it’s Anderson who haunts the film. In her last scene, this former tigress rises to a level of regret that’s practically Shakespearian in its pathos and depth, matching Mann’s obsessive attempts to bring the form of classical tragedy to the western. Her suffering is echoed in the famous scene in Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) where James Stewart’s hand gets shot at point blank range, and the sickening scene in Man of the West where Julie London is forced to strip. Mann was always after the root of our worst impulses, and in The Furies, a very messy, provoking film, he came a little closer to those roots than he ever would again, even in the justly lauded movies of his maturity.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: There’s been a meticulous clean-up of the image, especially in the many outdoor scenes played in soft, nearly out of focus grey half-light, and the sound is good, though there’s a bit of hiss on the track towards the end. There’s a brief interview with Mann himself, a touching interview with his daughter Nina, who emphasizes how personal his movies were, an excellent commentary track by Jim Kitses, and Niven Busch’s original novel, a lurid blueprint for the film where Juan is more clearly Vance’s lover. Best of all, there’s a superb essay by Robin Wood on Mann’s westerns and The Furies in particular. All in all, this is one of the essential DVD releases of the year.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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The Criterion Collection #412: Sawdust and Tinsel

By Dan Callahan

Ingmar Bergman made eleven films before his breakthrough, Summer with Monika (1952), where he seemed to be stimulated by filming his lover at the time, Harriet Andersson, a bluntly carnal brunette. Andersson is also crucial to his next film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), marketed in the US as The Naked Night. There’s no real nudity in the movie, though Andersson’s breasts often threaten to burst out of her period clothing and, as always, her big, wet, striated lips are so central to the images that they should have their own special billing. In the famous flashback that comes at the beginning of the film, Alma (Gudrun Brost), a coarse, aging blond desperately trying to prove that she’s still attractive, cavorts nude in the sea with a regiment of soldiers. Her clown husband (Anders Ek) pulls her out of the water, covering her nakedness with his body. But there’s no covering the nakedness of his emotions under his heavy clown make-up, and no possible way to cover up his wife’s disgrace.

Sawdust and Tinsel is Bergman’s first film where the idea of humiliation, specifically sexual humiliation, becomes crucial to his conception. It was a theme that obsessed him throughout his career, and it has no more painful expression than in this flashback of the clown and his big Fellini-esque wife, which is shot in a deliberately over-exposed way, as if harsh light was pounding down on everyone and everything. This flashback evokes Murnau, Eisenstein and even Welles; at bottom, it is an homage and an intensification of a German silent film like E.A. Dupont’s Variety (1925), with its strobe-like effects. You can feel Bergman finally realizing the full possibility of what a camera can do and, even more importantly, what sound and its absence can convey. We don’t hear any words when the people talk or shout on the beach, only the soldier’s derisive laughter on the track, and unsettlingly hollow, phallic canon bursts at irregular intervals. Looking at this scene and the best scenes in Sawdust and Tinsel is a little like listening to the modernist music of Stravinsky, or Alban Berg (the score by Karl-Birger Blomdahl is aggressively modernist and tense). Bergman’s new, bursting talent for Expressionist editing and composition helps distract us from the fact that the basic situation between the clown and his wife is more than a little bit corny.

Bergman is not always successful in masking the trite aspects of his screenplay when the story proper kicks in, as we watch the bull-like circus owner Albert (Åke Grönberg) laid low in tried and true Emil Jannings fashion by Andersson’s petulant, teasing mistress. Andersson walks down a street like she just loves being good-looking and looked at; very rarely has a film actress been so brazen about her own beauty. Bergman attempts to take her down a notch in her dealings with an aging, pretty boy actor (Hasse Ekman), but not before she makes him get on his knees and bang his head on the floor at her feet. Later, they have an arm-wrestling contest that he just barely wins; there is some black humor in this literal battle of the sexes. Bergman once called the theater his faithful wife, while the cinema was his “costly, exacting mistress.” When we watch him watch his mistress Andersson, we can only be glad that he paid the price for such pleasure, cinematically speaking.

Harriet Andersson has always been an odd woman out in the Ingmar Bergman gallery of females; she’s clearly a little slutty, a little low-class, and in Sawdust he has her mock the “pale, flat-chested actresses” that Ekman’s actor (and Bergman himself) is used to working with. As is his wont, Bergman drops a heavy dollop of Strindberg into this bit of sexual autobiography. The actor debases Andersson as she has debased him (Ekman holds her down on the floor at one point: as she struggles, never has the unshaved hair under a woman’s arms looked more enticing). With his lined, sneering face, Ekman personifies one of Bergman’s keener insights: the emotional vampirism of actors. But Bergman abandons Ekman and his sadomasochistic contest with Andersson and throws the whole ending to Grönberg’s circus owner. It’s difficult to feel much of anything for this standard, Germanic brute, even when Ekman is kicking dust in his face in front of an excited audience. The ending is heavily symbolic and a bit pompous, with the clown longingly explicating a dream he had about curling up in his wife’s womb, but Sawdust and Tinsel is still a key early Bergman film that anticipates his major works of the sixties.

Image/Sound/Extras: Aside from two brief vertical lines, the 1.33:1 pictureboxed image is spotless, doing very well by the tricky overexposure in the nightmare flashback, and the mono sound is bracing. There’s a brief intro by Bergman where he speaks of his affection for this film, saying that he likes its “wildness,” and a solid audio commentary by Bergman biographer Peter Cowie, who reports Andersson’s latter-day tales of Bergman’s intense bouts of jealousy during the shoot. “I was bloody faithful!” Andersson insists. Maybe she was.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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The Criterion Collection #408: Breathless

By Dan Callahan

We can’t really look at Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless with fresh eyes, any more than we can see Citizen Kane or Sunrise for the first time. The jump cuts are no longer startling, though they still work in a visceral, jazzy but somehow gentle way. No one since has used these snippy quick cuts with such fluid style, and all the sunny Parisian natural light makes us hungry for vanished late afternoons in the Hôtel de Suède, where Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend the whole center of Breathless talking. They are playing Michel, a French hood, and Patricia, a 20 year-old American student, but Godard has no patience with characterization, even in his first almost-narrative film, where he actually lets Martial Solal’s magnificent score play without once cutting it off, an alienation effect that he would favor in every film he made thereafter. “I want to know what’s behind your face,” Seberg says to Belmondo. She shuts her eyes and says she wants everything to go black, but light keeps creeping in, whereas Belmondo kisses her with his eyes open, trying to reconcile her image, created by Otto Preminger, with her face and body. Preminger also created the Seberg we see here: hurt, wary, smart, maybe lacking a central, animating component, which makes her wistful.

Belmondo spends the whole Hôtel de Suède scene in white boxer shorts, while Seberg stays covered up. His hangdog sexiness is still appealing, if not as unusual as it was in 1960 (very few men had abs then, as he does). He keeps calling her a coward, and she tenderly pokes fun at the French, but the scene deepens and becomes despairing as Godard holds his camera on Seberg, who is asked to carry the entirety of the film’s existential burden, which she does with real grace under pressure. Belmondo keeps up an endless stream of talk about girls that only lets us know his lack of real experience with them, a central theme in Godard’s work that will take on gut-wrenching connotations in his later films with Anna Karina. Michel is something of a self-portrait; he blithely steals money, as Godard often did in his youth. Later, when Godard turns up as the man who identifies Michel to police, we can only feel that he is, as always, pointing the finger at himself and his own failings. “After all, I’m an asshole,” is Michel’s first line, and no one can say Godard didn’t put his cards on the table for us right from the beginning.

The Hôtel de Suède sequence is the heart of the film, and Godard returned to and intensified it in Contempt, where Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot try to connect for at least a half hour. This man/woman battle is really completed, though, in Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou, which brings the struggle to it logical, May of 1968 destruction (it has been rumored that Rivette based his hotel nightmare with Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon on an actual incident between Godard and Karina toward the end of their relationship). The scenes before and after this long hotel sequence have nimble charms, especially the press conference with Jean-Pierre Melville’s famous writer, where Godard seems to be sending up a certain kind of nonsensical French discourse based in paradoxes that he will later serve up straight, along with his maddening propensity for random quotation, which is blessedly absent from Breathless. In the last half-hour, though, Godard isn’t interested in police chasing Michel; no suspense is created, and things get thin, especially in the penultimate scene between Michel and Patricia, which is a bit of a mess. Belmondo and Seberg keep looking straight into the camera, him playfully, she with increasing anxiety, until that last, mysterious final close-up of Patricia, where Seberg suggests a half-dozen different emotions from behind her hard, robot-like beauty. Godard wanted Seberg to go through her lover’s pockets looking for money, but the actress refused. If Breathless is maybe his most human movie, surely it is due to Seberg and what she brought to the camera.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The high-definition digital transfer was supervised by the cinematographer, Raoul Cotard, and it’s as beautifully sun-drenched as you’d expect, while the Mono sound is no doubt as clean as it can be. The most interesting special feature is Godard’s short film Charlotte et son Jules, where Belmondo hurls a stream of invective at his girl, who remains cheerful and silent, even when he roughly pushes her down on a bed. The nastier Belmondo gets with her, the more vulnerable he seems, and this feels more honest than the somewhat glamorous portrait of male vanity in Breathless. There’s a featurette about Jean Seberg by Mark Rappaport, nice, but no substitute for his superb From the Journals of Jean Seberg feature with Mary Beth Hurt. The most irritating special feature is an eighty-minute documentary called Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède, where the filmmaker looks at old Breathless locations and annoys Godard by calling him twice on the phone to ask questions; during the second call, Godard has never sounded wearier as he says he needs to get back to work. What is he doing? Writing a prickly text about the war in Iraq, or staring at photos of Anna Karina, Louise Brooks, Falconetti….

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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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The Criterion Collection #403: Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos

By Dan Callahan

A seamless story about memory and fantasy blurring together, Cría cuervos is unquestionably Carlos Saura’s greatest film. He made fine movies before it, and some fine ones after it, but he would never again work at quite so high a level of skill and feeling. In his first decade or so as a director, Saura had had to work against the draconian censorship of the Spanish government, but these restrictions were coming to an end while Cría cuervos was shot: General Franco was on his deathbed. Naturally, the film was seen as a metaphor for the last gasps of Franco’s totalitarian regime, and it's suggestive on that political level, but it works equally well as a universal portrait of childhood as a mysterious country where we are led from one darkened room to another and can’t really understand ninety percent of what we see and hear.

As the protagonist, a small girl who has lost both of her parents, the uncanny Ana Torrent is so intimidatingly serious that she puts the instinctively tricksy ploys of almost all other child performers to shame. Saura dotes on Torrent’s ability to focus any chaos surrounding her back onto the void of her enigmatic, watchful face; he knows that he’s found a nine-year old Garbo, and so we see the film entirely through her lustrous brown eyes. Saura casts his leading lady and lover of the time, Geraldine Chaplin, as both the spectral figure of Torrent’s dead mother and as Torrent herself as a grown-up, still haunted woman. Chaplin differentiates the two women visually (the mother is a flirty, miserable mess, the daughter a distant fortress) and Saura dubs in a Spanish voice for Chaplin when she plays the older Torrent; this ventriloquism stands in for the often-disorienting passage of time.

Cría cuervos is very much a film about trapped women, with the matching gazes of Torrent and Chaplin united together in silent reproach against the philandering, fascist Spanish male. Each woman on screen is complexly delineated, especially the proudly sensual housekeeper Rosa (Florinda Chico) and the rigid but not unkind Aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall), who tries to raise the orphaned Torrent and her two sisters. Paulina is the film’s most interesting character: at every moment we see her, she seems a soldier-like, well-meaning person who is trying her best, and yet we understand exactly why Torrent hates and cannot accept her dutiful, insincere efforts at parenting.

A child can suddenly, and rightly, be afraid of just about anything, and Torrent is bedeviled by the film’s most forceful character, the shuttered, crumbling house that is her world during summer vacation, an ordinary, static place that begins to vibrate with sinister possibilities. The camerawork by Teodoro Escamilla has a contradictory sense of movement that creates a lot of tension: the camera moves seem tentative but also relentless, childlike in the best possible way. Once you yield to the rhythm and logic of Torrent’s dreams and recollections, you can accept just about anything Saura wants to show you: this is a magical movie. It lasts a little under two hours, letting us into a hermetically sealed, completely believable, recognizable world. Quite frankly, I could have watched it forever, and I think that’s because Saura discovers and dramatizes such hidden, nebulous feelings without once being obvious or doctrinaire; his tact and deep insight makes you feel like you’re finally grasping something you’ve lost. All childhood is a ghost story that we try to understand for the rest of our lives. What we, and Torrent, eventually learn about death and sex seems to bear little relation to what we have overheard about these two primal subjects as children, but this yawning gap between imagination and experience is closed, miraculously, by the film itself and its vision of remembered innocence.

Cría cuervos deals with a lot of painful emotions, but it’s an exhilarating work because its complete evocation of our beginnings signals a kind of hope for the future, for Spain, yes, but also for our damaged, adult selves. There’s such relief when Chaplin’s grown-up Torrent says, “I remember childhood as an interminably long and sad time.” Admitting this is a simple and cleansing way of putting space between the past and the present, yet the grown-up Torrent seems to want this interminable and sad childhood back to swim around in; this perverse human impulse comes as a surprise to most of us as we get older. Death is everywhere in what we see of Torrent’s childhood, yet death is just a game she can play with her sisters out in the country, forcing them to play dead, then making them come back to life. The child in Cría cuervos is both God and film director, as far away from the movie’s silent, dignified but helpless grandmother (Josefina Díaz) as you can get. Saura’s masterpiece reclaims childhood as a time of radical invincibility, interminable, sad, both loathed and longed for for the rest of our lives.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Every dark corner of that metaphorical house is visible in Criterion’s spot-free transfer (1.66:1 anamorphic), and the murmurous soundtrack (Dolby Digital mono) is clear as crystal, which gilds the film’s repeated use of the compulsively listenable pop track “Porque te vas,” sung by Jeanette. On a second disc, there are interviews with Geraldine Chaplin and Ana Torrent. Chaplin, who is so movingly fragile in the film, is surprisingly robust and candid in her interview, an obviously intelligent woman with decided opinions about Cría cuervos. She reveals that Torrent couldn’t stand her, and that it took a lot of doing to get their erotic mother/daughter scenes right. This DVD is worth viewing just to see what Torrent looks like as an adult. Her face has lengthened, of course, so that she isn’t just a pair of dark eyes anymore, and the famous eyes themselves seem more relaxed, less turbulent. Torrent continues to act, and she is a definite European-style beauty, but it’s hard not to miss the child she was and to look for that child in vain; luckily, this extra meta-textual reflection matches up with the themes of Cría cuervos perfectly. An excellent documentary on Saura (Portrait of Carlos Saura) and a good, critical piece by Paul Julian Smith ("The Past is Not Past") make up for the lack of an audio commentary.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies

By Dan Callahan

Most dedicated film lovers are familiar with the elegiac '50s family dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, classics like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953). Much as they are cherished and respected, even his most fervent admirers have admitted the sameness of these films, in which a constantly smiling Setsuko Hara beams from her tatami mat and says, “Life is certainly disappointing!” After her pronouncement, Ozu cuts to a boat chugging along a river; he then cuts back to Hara, who has a measured shot/reverse shot conversation with one of her parents. Mom or Dad smiles finally, then reflects, “My dreams of youth are gone!” Then Ozu cuts to laundry flapping in the breeze against a mackerel sky, etc. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, Ozu prefers to suffer and understand rather than to fight and enjoy. His Zen resignation is like a drug to some, but it must be said that Ozu’s basic attitude can seem complacent, even maddening, especially to American viewers whose birthright has always been the urge to tell someone off, make a change, start again. Of course, this “anything is possible” point of view has led to a lot of pain for most of our ambitious American strivers, so a pinch or more of Ozu’s philosophy can be beneficial to us.

Ozu made a lot of films in the '30s, many of which are silent, some of which are lost, and these early films are seldom screened, so the new Eclipse series release, "Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies", is valuable in that it lets us see the genesis of his refined late style. The initial movie in the set, Tokyo Chorus (1931) has been identified by some writers as Ozu’s first really mature work, and it does have a cohesiveness that some of his other '30s films lack. Chorus opens with a bunch of schoolboys being drilled in marching formation; one of the boys is rebellious, sticking his tongue out at the headmaster and making a face at him. This boy is also dreamy and contemplative: we see him sitting and staring at trees shivering in the wind, an image that haunts the rest of the movie. Then there’s a jump ahead in time, and the boy (Tokihiko Okada) is now an office drone with a wife and two small children. Okada’s daughter is played by a seven-year old Hideko Takamine, who grew up into a major actress for Mikio Naruse and other Japanese directors in the fifties. Takamine is instantly recognizable here; it’s startling to see her famously pinched, wary face on top of a little girl body. And she’s already a nag: “Daddy’s a liar!” baby Takamine whines, at one point.

There’s an earthy, even scatological humor in Tokyo Chorus that Ozu would gradually pare away from his films, by and large, but his sense of resignation was present from the beginning. As Okada sits in a park, at loose ends and out of a job, a friend tells him that a bear has escaped from a nearby zoo. Okada smiles at his excited pal and says, “A bear getting out isn’t going to change our lives.” This “what will be will be” vibe is fine for some situations, but Ozu always takes it too far. After all, the bear might be right behind Okada and ready to eat him; the least he could do would be to get up and leave the area, but no, it doesn’t matter, he says, for nothing matters to him at this moment. At its worst, Ozu’s seemingly serene acceptance of life is actually close to do-nothing, harmful nihilism. Still, it’s hard to argue with the long scene where the desolate family tries to forget their problems with an extended game of patty cake; we can actually see Ozu’s anxious cheerfulness visibly burning away his characters’ worries. In the end, though, Ozu asks us to weep for his hero, forced to take a demeaning job with his old schoolmaster. Naruse also knew that his people had to make sacrifices to go on, but I’ll take the grown-up Takamine’s wry, almost humorous confrontation with her hated job at the end of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) over Ozu’s more adolescent and not at all funny look at defeat in Tokyo Chorus.

I Was Born, But... (1932) is Ozu’s best-known early film, and it fully deserves its reputation. We watch two young boys doing ordinary things like cutting school and playing with other kids for a while before the real subject of the movie rears its ugly head. About an hour in, the boys sit and watch their wage slave father, Yoshii (Tatsuo Saito), make the same dumb faces and gestures over and over again, in movies that are being projected for some of his co-workers. Watching the co-workers’ reactions, Yoshii’s sons understand instinctively that their father is a figure of fun to the other adults. To a kid, especially a boy, there’s nothing worse than a realization like that, and their violent reaction at home later on is both grueling and fair. “You tell us to become somebody, but you’re nobody!” one of them shouts at Yoshii. Their father doesn’t defend himself, and their mother is an even weaker presence. “I give up,” says Yoshii, grabbing a bottle of liquor, as many Ozu men will do in later films. This scene of fatherly self-deprecation is unthinkable in an American movie, and it says a lot about Ozu’s essential despair, just as the final, small act of kindness on the part of one of the boys’ friends, which ends the film, says a lot about his appreciation of life’s small mercies.

The third film in the set, Passing Fancy (1933), is nowhere near as good as the first two movies. It really wants to be a talkie; there are too many titles for all the conversation scenes, and the setpiece sequence, a confrontation between a boy and his drunken, good-for-nothing father, suffers in comparison with the tougher, similar scene in I Was Born, But...; what was true and moving in that film seems maudlin here. Passing Fancy ends with the contemplation of some trees, bringing us full circle back to the daydreaming image at the beginning of Tokyo Chorus. This was a director who stressed such continuity: Ozu’s technical skills are already impressive in these three early films, and his way of looking at life and people is as firm at age thirty as it would be at age fifty. Let us enjoy and even learn from Ozu, but let’s not accept all of his ideas about human forbearance without a dash or two of our own American “get up and go,” seasoned heavily with Naruse’s hardboiled black humor.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Tokyo Chorus is the most visually innovative of the films, so it’s unfortunate that the image is so badly damaged; the entire movie is fighting against a veil of print decay. Donald Sosin’s piano score for Chorus is upbeat and sprightly even when things look bleakest for the characters, which works well at first, but begins to seem strange as the film goes on. I Was Born, But… and Passing Fancy look fine, and Sosin’s scores for both are excellent. No extras, since this is an Eclipse no-frills release.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals

By Dan Callahan

The four Ernst Lubitsch musicals collected in this box set mark a transitional period in his work, a bridge from perfectly judged silent films like So This is Paris (1926) to the risky, spare achievements of later movies like To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Cluny Brown (1946). Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald are the nominal stars of this early talkie series, either together or paired with other players, and you just have to accept and even embrace the former's full-frontal “ooh la la!” chortles and the latter's not-yet-calcified operetta hauteur if you plan to make it through these pictures alive. They both came from the stage, and they have just the right lightly formal quality for Lubitsch’s theatrical bits of business. Though a little of Chevalier’s strenuous Gallic charmboat act goes a long, long way, it must be said that Lubitsch makes MacDonald surprisingly sexy and even touching in her pre-Nelson Eddy salad days at Paramount.

The Love Parade (1929) opens with lots of quick cutting to close-ups of garters and tiny derringers and closing doors, as if Lubitsch is trying to continue the fluidity of his silent films in this early talkie context, much as Hitchcock clung to his montage effects in his first talkie, Blackmail (1929). Then Chevalier starts to sing to the camera, and it’s hard not to recoil from his “oh ho ho’s!” and cartoonish boasting about women, which never appear to have any firm basis in sexual reality. We then see MacDonald rise from her bed in fetching lingerie to long in song for a “Dream Lover.” She’s queen of a country called Sylvania, and gets a kick out of showing off her legs to her dirty old men cabinet ministers until she meets up with supposed lothario Chevalier. Lubitsch sends up the audience’s voyeurism by having all the film’s servants staring at the movie star couple through keyholes and open windows, vicariously thrilling to their anticipatory erotic excitement. The main theme here is the melancholy but also momentous promise of sex; all Lubitsch’s characters have one foot in bed at all times.

In The Love Parade’s scintillating first hour, Lubitsch insists that two people should have sex right away, and that there will be plenty more mysteries to unravel in subsequent couplings. The title song suggests that every woman Chevalier could ever bed is in MacDonald, somewhere, if he just looks at her closely enough over a long period of time. But the fact that she’s a queen proves intimidating. After their marriage, Chevalier is alarmed when he hears a royal cannon firing over and over again; it’s as if he’s afraid he can’t compete sexually with such heavy artillery. This is classic Lubitsch, a romantic dirty joke, but after the wedding night, The Love Parade sags, and the plot requires Chevalier to put queen MacDonald in her place, which gets depressing after a while. Lupino Lane and future tell-all alcoholic Lillian Roth pick up some slack with their acrobatic comic servant routines, but the film is far too long at 109 minutes. At the time, The Love Parade was a big hit, and you can still feel how fresh and inventive it must have felt in that arid, “microphone in the flowerpot” early talkie year.

Lubitsch’s follow-up, Monte Carlo (1930) is the weakest film in the set; even the most famous sequence, when MacDonald sings, “Beyond the Blue Horizon” on a train, is disappointingly truncated and reserved. Lubitsch never goes all-out with this very funny song of liberation; he simply holds a few medium shots of MacDonald singing in profile, then cuts to far-off peasants tentatively joining her as a chorus. The real problem here, though, is the leading man, Jack Buchanan, a big star of the London stage who is so hand-flappingly effeminate on screen that Lubitsch must have felt he had to fill the rest of the cast with even nellier men to make his star look manlier. This attempt at contrast proves disastrous, especially in a number called “Trimmin’ the Women,” where Buchanan and two campy little fellows (Tyler Brooke and John Roche) sing about how they love to get close to women’s hair: they practically fly around the room. MacDonald has to carry the love story all by herself, and the drawn-out plot quickly becomes tedious.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) represents a substantial leap forward, with Chevalier set off by two exciting Paramount women, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins. It’s Lubitsch pleasure without much Lubitsch depth, but diverting all the same. When Chevalier meets violinist Colbert, he tells her he plays the piano, and she suggests, “Sometime we might have a duet.” He leers at her and cries, “I love chamber music!” They’re obviously talking about sex, but Lubitsch toys with our expectations by then cutting to them actually playing music, as if he’s saying, “What did you think they were talking about? Get your mind out of the gutter!” They’re soon singing with each other over breakfast, with Chevalier claiming, “You put magic in the muffins!” while Colbert wrinkles her nose (it’s worth noting that her orchestra is called “The Viennese Swallows”!) Hopkins gives an expertly timed comic performance as plain-Jane royalty with Princess Leia buns on her ears who makes a play for Chevalier; Colbert gallantly helps her out by singing the unforgettable ditty, “Jazz Up Your Lingerie.” The fun evaporates, though, when Colbert tells her, “Girls who start with breakfast don’t usually stay for supper,” an unhappy bit of moralizing that goes against the message of The Love Parade.

The best film is the last, One Hour with You (1932), a remake of Lubitsch’s silent The Marriage Circle (1924), which was prepared by the busy auteur, but mostly directed by George Cukor. When he saw that the film was going to be success, Lubitsch attempted to get Cukor’s name taken off the credits, but Cukor took him to court and wound up with assistant billing. Just how much was done by each director is still in question, but it has more shading and depth than Lubitsch’s previous talkies, and this could be because these gifted men were working in tandem. Cukor gives it a brisker pace and he takes care with performances, so that MacDonald especially brings an emotion and sexuality to her role that she seldom showed elsewhere. On the other hand, it does have the darkening boudoir aspect of Lubitsch’s next film, one of his best, Trouble in Paradise (1932). Whoever is responsible for it, One Hour with You is a delight, especially its ending, which suggests that a little infidelity will never hurt a solid, pleasurable marriage.

***
Image/Sound/Extras (editor's note: click here for more in-depth technical information on this set from DVDBeaver): The Smiling Lieutenant (aspect ratio 1.21:1, monaural) looks the best of the four, almost pristine, but poor Monte Carlo (aspect ratio 1.20:1, monaural) is in bad shape. It even goes soft and out of focus twice before MacDonald sings “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” and the nighttime scenes are barely visible. The Love Parade (aspect ratio 1.21:1, monaural) is spotty, but quite acceptable for a film of its vintage, and One Hour with You (aspect ratio 1.36:1, monaural) is grainy when it needs to shimmer. Nevertheless, this is a valuable set for a quartet of films that have always been difficult to see. Per the Eclipse series mission statement, there are no extra features.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

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