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The Bride Wore Black
[La Mariée était en noir]
 1968 Fra Dir Francois Truffaut Cast Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michael Lonsdale IMDb
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Two years before making this film, Truffaut was conducting his lengthy interviews with Hitchcock, published in a book I’ve owned for several years but have only begun reading after viewing this film. It’s clear Truffaut admired his work for some considerable time, but this seems to be his first film in that vein, and having reacquainted myself with Hitchcock briefly I’d like to revisit this to see just how he may have exploited or adapted the ‘rules’ explicitly set forth in the course of their conversations. For that matter, I’m long overdue to revisit Hitchcock himself: he was the first major filmmaker I looked at in some depth as a movie fan, and I’ve hardly reconsidered him since that early green stage.
In any case, on first and superficial glance this is a wonderfully exciting film, striking a kinetic balance between Truffaut’s flowing, subjective camera and Moreau’s ice-cold, perfectly centered performance as a widow remorselessly hunting down the five men involved in her groom’s killing on their wedding day. The entire set-up for the film is preposterous, not only for what that brief synopsis tells but for the fuller explanation that comes halfway through the film. Indeed, the real circumstances of the murder, and the improbability of her task, diminishes the film somewhat: one wishes her husband had been implicated in some clandestine spy ring as he would have been in a wartime Hitchcock, any absurdity in preference to this logical impossibility. In the course of a first viewing, I wasn’t much bothered by it; the episodic revenge sequences are too delightfully staged, giving the audience all the glee of the chase and resolution where Moreau remains resolute and impassive, punctuating her deeds with the simple act of ticking a name off a list. The ending is wonderfully satisfying (although does not follow the Hitchcock ‘rule’ about staying one jump ahead of the audience: one sees it coming, but there’s pleasure in following it through). All in all one of the two or three most purely enjoyable Truffaut films I’ve seen.
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The Second Awakening of Christa Klages
[Das Zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages]
 1978 Germany Dir Margarethe von Trotta Cast Tina Engel, Silvia Reize, Katharina Thalbach IMDb
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Margarethe von Trotta’s solo directorial debut, less technically accomplished and visually pleasing than Katharina Blum, is a similar female-centered political critique. Here the protagonist is guilty of a crime, the film starting immediately after a bank robbery planned to help a struggling kindergarten stay afloat. An almost embarrassingly forgivable motive for a crime, except Christa’s daughter belongs to it, and through her own life choices she rarely has the opportunity to see the girl; one assumes her future is in jeopardy if the kindergarten is forced to close. One after the other Christa’s accomplices are picked off, and nothing in the plan to transfer the money works out. She is dependent upon two friends, who can only do so much; but exploring these relationships is where the film really shines. Eventually Christa is forced out of society and completely isolated; her response to her steadily deteriorating circumstances is human and compelling. The other narrative followed intermittently is that of the bank clerk Christa held hostage on that day, who for reasons one can only speculate about is drawn to find and personally speak to Christa. Her character and motivation are left purposefully vague, but enough interest is generated that her final action gives the film all its thematic resonance, in a satisfying and jarring finale on a similar note to Katharina Blum’s.
A political invective that doesn’t require background knowledge of 70s Germany to follow, so pervasive and continually relevant is this attack on yellow journalism. Katharina is a young divorcee with a modest job serving a wealthy couple; she’s so straight-laced her friends call her “the nun.” One night, rather at random, she decides she wants to get drunk at a party she’s been invited to, altering her usual routine to take the bus, and once there meets, flirts and dances with, and finally goes home with an attractive young man. The next morning, the police raid her apartment, interrogate and incarcerate her. The man is under investigation for terrorist activities, and she is accused of harboring and protecting him; the detectives seize on every unusual detail of her behavior that night and taunt her with sordid distortions of the facts. Soon the story is picked up by a sensationalist reporter who hounds her family and friends, makes up quotations and events, and drags her name through the mud. Her situation develops slowly but deliberately into a nightmarish existence of lurid phone calls and hate mail, building to a violent climax and jarring conclusion. It is a matter of slowly wearing away her personal honor, her sense of self, from the start when she insists what passed between her and her lover was “tenderness” and not “an advance” to more serious and intimate details; from all sides, the attack — and it is an attack — is personal and vicious. The film is powerful if not subtle, but one hardly expects it to be, based on events the novel’s author Heinrich Böll endured and born of resistance movements and youthful outcry against government power.
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Orlando
 1992 UK Dir Sally Potter Cast Tilda Swinton, Quentin Crisp, Billy Zane, Charlotte Valandrey IMDb
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Ah, this is Woolf done right! or better, wonderfully reenvisioned. Orlando traipses through four hundred years of British history, eternally young and trying on every sex and gender identity (though, being English, everyone pretends not to notice). It retains Woolf’s situations and themes without being a bit tied down to her prose; the book’s biographer-narrator cannot carry the film, it knows: Orlando him/herself must assume the first person. The same effects are translated in spirit with Orlando’s “fourth wall” reaction takes punctuating every incident. This is Woolf in a time that has caught up with her, through the lens of Butlerian “gender trouble” and further warped by postmodernism, a time prepared to believe it more readily when Orlando regards her female body for the first time and pronounces herself “the same person.” Tilda Swinton (and oh, she’s wonderful) is not perfectly androgynous, neither in reality nor to the extent she is made up here, and the he-Orlando segments are naturally infused with plenty of gender tension and irony. The film also takes Orlando past Woolf, to a modern London of skyscrapers and publishing deals; Orlando drives a motorbike and sidecar and thinks perhaps she has found a place and time for her daughter. This is not to suggest the film posits any kind of sociological idealism and ignorance; it remains daffy and fantastical to the end. And, one supposes, Orlando’s adventure through time and identity is hardly over… This is hilarious, immensely creative, and absolutely a great work in its own right to stand next to Woolf’s.
To paraphrase beloved Virginia:
Very few people have the brains to make a really bad film; whereas anyone can turn out a respectable dull one.
But that’s just it. A respectable dull adaptation will not do; Woolf is not suited as is say Austen and Dickens to the pleasant if stuffy Masterpiece Theatre presentation of British manners and customs — it is offensive to try; one would prefer a flailing ambitious failure. I don’t know if justice could be done to Mrs Dalloway, but for a start there needs to be some rhythm in the image to match her prose, overwhelming dread and passion, a clock to chime every hour, and a really insane quality of seeing-things and hearing-things (the birds must sing in Greek chorus!). Oh, but how could film ever duplicate her manner of floating along with her characters, a sort of presence, a — yes, the unseen – which follows and flits one to the other? This film certainly does not have that knack, the transitions rather awkward and stark where they should be seamless, flowing. But fundamentally the film lacks the essential thing the novel possesses: sheer reverence for life and death.
It begins to get it, perhaps, in the party scene, or in any case chooses a cop-out which succeeded in exciting me: for really all I need is long takes of Vanessa Redgrave emoting to a voiceover of Woolf verbatim to be excited. The film avoids voiceovers for much of the runtime which is admirable, but I don’t see how else you do it; you do it, but creatively. The party scene begins to build an energy. But still it won’t really do; you cannot turn her words so easily to this purpose; “Here I am!” will not substitute for “For there she was.”
I especially wanted to respect this when I saw Eileen Atkins — whom I adore — tried her hand at the screenplay; it tries to retain too much literally while losing sight of the larger things. The skywriting scene, so essential! loses all meaning when nothing behind it is shared. Why include it if you cannot include her words? It is literary, not cinematic. The point is not that everyone is looking at it. The point is that everyone is thinking about it. And so it goes…
It’s lovely to look at, though, I must say that; lovely, and it was nice to see many scenes played out. Performances are great in general — you feel the actors get it, as if they’ve studied and understood Woolf, but haven’t a way to put it across — although Rupert Graves is just awful as Septimus; really an awful actor, and he was given all the best parts imaginable throughout the 90s.
Oh, it’s a decent try, but wants to be respectable rather than passionate; it is Richard Dalloway rendered cinematically, it crushes and confines Woolf and drains all the life out of her as he did to Clarissa in creating Mrs Dalloway. But I have higher hopes for Orlando and The Waves to come: they may yet be Peter Walshes or Septimus Smiths rendered cinematically. They may dart and dash and live and die and understand and impart — or be really bad. After this, one can only hope!
This is far and away the most blunt and emotionally invested treatment of Nazi Germany I have seen from Hollywood prior to the US entering the war. So much so that at times it comes off as raw and histrionic and righteous, a fault in most other films especially as I would say it threatens to overwhelm the sense of the story once or twice. But it is so affecting now, and one realizes the purpose it served then, so that I can hardly fault it for that. This is not the Borzage emotionalism of other films, patient and knowing, but with rage underpinning it; a current of humaneness runs through them all. Counterpoints are obvious, but compellingly realized: first a college unites for the venerated professor’s 60th birthday celebration, then riots in his classroom after he continues to teach the science of physiology in defiance of Hitler’s statements. It just happens that his name is Roth, and nothing in his fate is shied away from — nor is that of the rest of our characters, as war leaves none untouched. Yes there is a grand romance in this tale, but war overtakes that, too. I can’t help but feel this is one of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen, put into context.
Loden stars, directs and writes here in one of the classic American independent films of the 70s — a favorite of Cassavetes, and I imagine it inspired him a bit in his work during the decade. It plays like a quieter Cassavetes film, all grainy realism and incisive character study, and I can just hear Peter Falk barking all of Mr Dennis’ strange outbursts (”Why don’t you get a hat?” “No slacks! When you’re with me, no slacks!”). Every Cassavetes fan should see this. Having rejected her role as wife and mother, and without the financial means to do much else, Wanda more or less wanders from one thing to the next, from bumming around her sister’s house through coal mines to borrow money from her father, around town from shops to bars to movie matinees, and eventually in the low-key adventure that comprises most of the runtime, she takes up with and wanders about with small-time crook Mr Dennis. He’s hard around the edges and no good, but his place in life has brought him to this, too, and in a strange way they are the only new and positive thing that’s happened in the other’s life for perhaps a very long time. She softens him; he gives her some confidence. But sooner or later she’s bound to end up right where she started… A truly heartbreaking and authentic working-class/feminist examination of the kind of life too many are forced by circumstance to live.
Note: I’ve been meaning to write this for months now, and my ideas may yet need refining. It was intended as a companion to a long Awful Truth review with a thesis on McCarey’s abiding realism, even in screwball comedy, even in heady romance. Hopefully that will come in time, but finally getting my hands on a good print of this one gave me the drive to begin writing something…
People forget how light and really funny this film is — or at least I had, by the time I sat down for my second viewing sometime last fall. I’ve seen it more times than self-respect allows me to count in the months since, and it never fails to delight me. But what one remembers is the tragic accident and misunderstandings that keep the two lovers apart, and even though I haven’t seen it I think one’s mind can’t help but first go to the final scene in An Affair to Remember, played more earnestly, more in the key of melodrama, by Grant and Kerr. This always sticks in one’s mind as a sad story of star-crossed lovers. Really, it’s bright and bubbling like pink champagne, just as Michel Marnay initially propositions Terry McKay — here played by the underrated and overshadowed Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, of course.
But to the extent it’s a comedy, it’s a comedy really of and about life, for adults, played by adults. I mean by that two things. Michel and Terry are real people, fleshed out and motivated, hardly the juvenile types found in most contemporary comedies or one-dimensional figures in the average romance. Between Lucy Warriner in Awful Truth and Terry McKay here, Leo McCarey gave Dunne two of the very few real women she played in her whole career. Terry is her own age for one thing (a rarity), and as such, facing middle age with a life of relative disappointment and regret behind her, one can actually believe in what “wishing” (the film’s watchword) means to a woman like her; it means something as she and Michel both begin to put their lives into perspective. And by “film for adults” I also invoke the usual meaning: from the word go it’s quite frank and saucy for a prestige film released right in the middle of the Code era. The two meet when Terry intercepts a radiogram from Michel’s latest lover, dreamily recounting the magical nights spent at Lake Como. “Do you think it’ll ever take the place of baseball?” she wonders, with characteristically suggestive raised eyebrows.
Both come with years of sexual baggage behind them, and I admire the film for addressing it so forthrightly, because it’s only natural that the characters would: and again, it doesn’t engage in that strange and false illusion of chastity too many of its contemporaries do. Michel is a world-famous seducer about to bite the bullet and marry a redeemingly rich girl; Terry is essentially a kept woman, rescued from the nightclub circuit by a guy who doubles as her boss (”He sends me on a buying trip once in a while,” she explains, fingering her pearl necklace, and the arrangement couldn’t be clearer). But initially, neither sees any reason to be embarrassed or remorseful. These are the lives they have chosen, and they’ve done quite well: here they are on a luxury cruise, all tuxes and furs and pink champagne. And the change isn’t so simple as suddenly seeing the truth in one another’s eyes; it is more like, in telling their stories to one another, they hear themselves really saying it for the first time.
But realizations and renewed perspective come slowly; the first part of the film, aboard the ship bound for New York, is fast-paced and flirtatious, playing the blossoming romance largely for laughs. McCarey’s great instinct for natural dialogue and physical interaction is well on display here, for so often Terry and Michel’s most revealing moments come in wordless, awkward fits and starts, and where there is dialogue it’s well peppered with the ‘um’s and pauses and trailing mumbled phrases of real speech. His insistence on improvisation and spontaneity pays off, too, Dunne a veteran of his methods and Boyer picking it up quickly (he was never so unaffected) — many scenes were shot with only a rough outline of the action, an idea of what the characters must say, and the specifics unrehearsed, and succeeds in feeling completely unstaged. And yet, with a cast and crew of consummate professionals, the final project is as polished as it is authentic.
McCarey captures so perfectly, so revealingly, the intimate moment. When his characters are sparring or chatting idly the camera flows beautifully (that reminds me: quite an interesting comparison in editing could likely be made between this and Awful Truth), but in intimate moments it stops, as time seems to, and focuses as intently on those involved with a minimum of cuts, except where the gaze is meaningful. Onboard the ship, from their very first moment, Terry and Michel are shot medium and close up any time they are being quite honest with one another, filling the screen as one gathers each fills the other’s eyes in that intimate moment. Only when they are playing more broadly comedic or keeping one another at bay (rather the same thing) does the camera pull back. And in between, as indeed the two vacillate between enforcing a certain distance and drawing closer, there is this wonderful flow as McCarey waits for a character to enter a shot and follows them on their path. Much could probably be said about his rhythm and the film’s treatment of time and decision-making: in any case, it is thoughtful.
Speaking of his intimate moments, the richest come when the ship docks for four hours at the island of Madeira and Michel takes Terry to visit his grandmother Janou. Their reunion illustrates for the first time a really tender side of Michel, locked in a close and happy embrace, for a moment seeing nothing in the world but each other. Terry is at first an outsider, not only several paces behind but isolated from the conversation, as they excitedly exchange words of love in a language she cannot understand. Janou quickly notices and includes her; Michel explains laughing that she asked if this was the girl he was going to marry. Later, after Michel visits and the girls bond and the boat whistle gives its first warning blow, the three gather around the piano for Janou to play a song. So much is said and felt in this moment, an instinctive intimacy having developed between the three, shot and edited so meaningfully: they gather in a triangle but soon each are shown by turns, close up, exchanging glances. Janou makes her approval of Terry clear with one look to Michel; Michel can hardly look away from Terry, his gaze brooding and full of desire; her eyes are locked on Janou, safe and comforting, and her eyes dart away shyly when for an instant they meet Michel’s.
It is in this meeting with Janou that the concerns they’d only begun to become aware of in their first conversations can be put into perspective. They come to a certain silent understanding, and the change is irrevocable. Earlier in Madeira, Terry enthusiastically and Michel somewhat reticently visit the private chapel Janou has constructed next to her home. It is one of the most beautiful images in 30s American cinema, and loaded with emotion and meaning. Terry clearly has a powerful experience, the particulars of which are not spelled out for the audience, but I imagine she is in some way reevaluating her whole life, confronted with its ugliness in a way she has not been in some time. She is moved by a spiritual experience, while Michel, uncomfortable in the room, is plainly moved by her: he can’t take his eyes off her transcendent face, struggling to know what she is thinking and praying. She crosses herself and leaves slowly, reverently; he follows suit quickly, straightening his tie as he completes the gesture.
Between Janou and the place a profound change has occurred: time takes on more meaning, and it menaces as much as it promises. The appeal of the shipboard romance is its quality of being out of time, apart from reality, so that all one sees is this other stranger, and so it has been with Michel and Terry. Being on land (and this particular land) and with Janou (awaiting, as Michel explains, her impending death) has brought time and reality into their relationship. Terry reflects in wonder that she would love to spend her life in a place like this; Janou says — almost admonishingly — it is a wonderful place to be with one’s memories, but Terry still must create hers. It is clear to Terry then for the first time that she hasn’t really been living, and time marches on all the while. Janou represents a natural order of things, a fulfilling sort of tradition, which both Terry and Michel have avoided and missed out on. It is with Janou that Michel realizes he loves painting and does experience real affection; Terry’s instinct toward a certain natural domesticity kicks in, and in helping Janou prepare the tea, her taking the tray seems almost a passing of the torch. In many ways, Michel is childlike, but Terry could be for him into adulthood what Janou had been in his boyhood. Yet time is not to be trifled with: Janou cringes to hear the boat whistle again: time brings endings too, and it can run out. Now time defines the chances they have: four hours in Madeira, seven days on the cruise, and, tempting fate, six months until they meet again.
That night, Terry and Michel share their first kiss by moonlight, taking nautical metaphors to extreme (”we changed our course today” … “we’re heading into a rough sea”), and seven days later, before arriving in New York, they assess the situation. (I find seven days of missing time frustrating, but can only conclude it’s titled Love Affair for a reason, and no real way to both work within the Code and satisfyingly represent how they passed them.) Again, I admire the frankness: Michel admits he has never worked a day in his life, only flitting from one wealthy girl to another to finance his lifestyle; Terry confesses she’s grown too fond of furs and things and has also forgotten what it’s like to live honestly. They seriously wonder if they can make the transition from pink champagne to beer, and whether it’s fair to ask the other to cast their lot on such an uncertain proposition. So it’s not a mere plot device or romantic notion for them to decide they will wait six months while they break off their entanglements and learn to make a life on their own: it is sheer good sense.
In the middle section, when they are separated, the viewer feels an absence, too. It’s not that the film drags or becomes less interesting, but the shift in tone is jarring (if appropriate): the clock and calendar rule their separate lives back on land, and even now they are not quite living, but wishing. When the time comes for them to meet again, July first, on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, they are sure of their feelings and their worthiness to pursue them, but the tone takes another decidedly sharp turn, ever more serious, putting ever more distance between them… The circumstances of this tragic delay to their reunion are I’m sure well-known, but not played as melodramatically as it probably sounds on paper. Again, it’s not just a plot device, but revealing of their characters: it is pride that prevents Terry from telling Michel the truth, and that prevents Michel from seeking it out. They fall back onto bad habits, though Terry is rather patronizingly praised by her doctor for making a “good and sensible” choice and she keeps her head high, she’s nearly throwing away her chance. They haven’t learned their lesson yet.
Six more months pass before they meet again, by coincidence or fate. That meeting is brief and strained, but Michel tracks her down the next day, determined to bully answers out of her but finding himself disarmed. This is a wonderfully choreographed ten-minute final scene, allowing the two time to torment one another, settle the score, and ultimately reunite at a natural pace, in contrast to most romances that end in a flash with a shrug and a kiss, a fade-to-black enforcing a conclusion where it never feels like there really is one. For the first time, Terry and Michel are filmed in long shots for an extended period of time, although they share the frame: the rift between them is indeed deep. Michel paces the room as he tries to understand the situation while Terry, of course unable to move, lies still on the couch. The scene is full of wonderful counterpoints, sparkling and natural dialogue, and Dunne and Boyer at their best saying everything between their lines. It’s effective technically — I see that after the absurd number of viewings I’ve put in — but when all the elements come together it’s overwhelmingly magical. At least for this viewer, I yearn and pine with them, not from any coercion but out of a deeply felt, authentically realized moment.
It’s with some bitterness that Michel gives Terry Janou’s shawl as a Christmas present; she had promised it to Terry on their visit, and receiving it brings the realization that Janou has passed away. First, Terry is overcome with sadness; then, clutching it to her chest, she beams up at Michel. He grimaces. This is too painful: he understands that it ought to be the passing of the torch Janou intended, but that it can never be. He had wished for this moment, he had painted her wearing the shawl. It seems it is too late. Michel begins to tell her about the painting, and perhaps trying to appear overcompensatingly nonchalant reveals that he instructed his art dealer to give it to a girl for free because she was poor, and moreover… Well, you know what happens next: one of the most satisfying and hard-won reunions of all Old Hollywood romances.
Believe it or not, I have more to say about this film, but that’s got to be it for tonight… 
Again and again I find material that could play as corny or trite in less sure hands is wonderfully involving and humane in Borzage’s. This is also Fitzgerald’s only writing credit, despite his long stint paying for his high life in Hollywood, and his script was tampered with, of course: most of what I gather was a hard criticism of post-WWI Germany is toned down, but the menace in the streets is there, the tensions are palpable if unnamed, and a vigilante act is well-motivated. Anyway, this is probably one of the most heartfelt examples of both male camaraderie and the weepie’s final self-sacrifice, the story of three war buddies and the woman who changes all their lives. All the performances are first-rate, but Sullavan has the most interesting character as a girl with a life-threatening chronic lung condition who yearns to live wildly and freely — well there you go, it’s silly on paper and would be too on film were it not for Borzage, who I now trust implicitly to keep things light, kinetic, engaging and finally deeply felt. Beautiful photography too and I don’t know how anyone can resist this kind of artificial but grand set design.
Strange and wonderful! Three vignettes illustrate the role of fortune, dreams and superstition in life, with ironic twists. Not quite as out-there as the title and promise of occult themes might suggest, but still a definite oddity in studio Hollywood, made by an outsider and co-produced by Charles Boyer. All three segments are delicious, the real stand-out probably being the Wilde adaptation with Edward G Robinson as a man on the brink of having it all, but driven insane by a prediction that he will commit murder. Love Boyer as the Great Gaspar, the drunken tightrope walker, who dreams Barbara Stanwyck into life. Beautifully and inventively staged and photographed — absolutely delightful.
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About TLC
Films: All reviewed | Favorites
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All films by year
2008 Viewing log
The Woman Accused 1933, Paul Sloane
So Big! 1932, William A Wellman
The Awful Truth 1937, Leo McCarey
Conquest 1937, Clarence Brown
It’s Love I’m After 1937, Archie Mayo
The Mad Miss Manton 1938, Leigh Jason
Algiers 1938, John Cromwell
The Gay Divorcee 1934, Mark Sandrich
All This, & Heaven Too 1940, Anatole Litvak
Mannequin 1937, Frank Borzage
A short digression on Charles Boyer…
Yes, I am endeared. I am, in fact, ensorceled. His inhumanly arched eyebrows, his little winks and half-smiles, and that ability to at once maintain full control of his material while shining the spotlight on his costar: yes, that is talent; yes, this is love. And no, Cluny Brown, it’s not just the cocktails giving you that persian cat feeling… I think we both know too well it has a bit to do with Mr Charles Boyer. Rawr.
Pre-Code Hollywood
» The Woman Accused 1933 Paul Sloane
» So Big! 1932 William A Wellman
» Pre-Code Icons Gallery #1: Barbara Stanwyck
» A Month of Pre-Code Hollywood
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