In the beginning, the pictures didn’t move, but as technology pushed art forms forward and things started flickering at twenty-four frames per second, a prestigious European festival adapted in order to celebrate the results. La Biennale di Venezia began with an International Art Exhibit in 1895, and in the 1930s, added festivals for music, theatre and, in 1932, history’s very first film festival. It was called the “Esposizione internazionale d’arte cinematografica” and it was held at the Hotel Excelsior from August 6 to the 21st of that year, kicking off what would become a worldwide market phenomenon. However, in its first year, it featured nowhere near the arthouse masterpieces that would become synonymous with film festival exhibition. Rather, an American genre piece, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, would follow its half-Oscar win for lead star Fredric March by occupying the rare position of being the first-ever film festival selection. Also screening at the first Venice film festival were Leontine Sagan and Carl Froelich’s provocative Mädchen in Uniform, René Clair’s À Nous la Liberté, Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth, and Hitler’s beloved Leni Riefenstahl with The Blue Light.
As would become standard in later decades, Venice featured a heavy quotient of Hollywood product from the beginning, including the year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, Grand Hotel; James Whale’s Frankenstein; and the Sin of Madelon Claudet. Until the last few years, it was more likely to feature selections from the upcoming awards season roster than Cannes usually did. There was no jury in Venice in 1932 and there were no official awards, but a poll was taken from the audience and it yielded winners, among them the year’s Oscar winning performances, March in Hyde and Helen Hayes in Claudet, and Clair winning “Most Amusing Film.”
There was no festival in 1933, but two years later, the modern festival was in early stages of forming. In 1934, there was no jury (that I could find), but there was an Official Competition and a prize, the Mussolini Cup. More troubling was that there was also a Mussolini, and his increased interference began to suggest to the European film world that it might be time to start another film festival somewhere else. Three years later, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion was predicted to do well with the jury, but its pacifism incensed the fascist overlords. In 1938, Riefenstahl’s Olympia tied for the best film prize because instructions had come down from head office to choose it. Making this manipulation even more obvious was the fact that Olympia didn’t qualify for the top prize according to the rules at the time, which didn’t allow for documentaries to win the Cup. The festival organizers were told to ignore this. As a result, anti-fascist minds cooked up the Cannes Film Festival, though funding issues and the Second World War got in the way of it from really getting going until 1946.
All that was in the future, however, as the 1934 festival, which ran from the 1st to the 20th of August and was the first to resemble what we now think of today as the standard experience of screenings and trophies, hadn’t yet reached this point of crisis. As was the custom of the time, the top prize was split in two, one for an Italian film: Teresa Confalonieri by Guido Brignone) and one for a foreign product (Robert J. Flaherty’s Man of Aran, which passed for documentary at the time.
Reviews are by Bil Antoniou.
MUST-SEE
It Happened One Night
Dir. Frank Capra
“Ever hear of the word humility?” The question was on the minds of the kind of everyday American suffering during the Depression, the audiences that Frank Capra concerned himself with when he made his highly popular comedies. The “mythical patriotism,” as Farren Smith Nehme puts it, that Capra injected into his films is mixed with the twinkling fantasy of Hollywood romance. This recipe is most evident in the instant classic that earned him his first of three Oscars for directing. Released stateside in February, it had been conquering American screens for months by the time it came to Venice, where it didn’t pick up any prizes despite a generous assortment of awards being handed out. In roles that came to define their very successful careers, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert make sparks fly as opposites who attract in at first dire and eventually very sexy ways–he a reporter on the outs with his editor and she the spoiled, rebellious heiress who has run away from her father in Miami to meet the man she married in secret, who her dad thinks is a gold digger. Stuck together on an overnight bus, they eventually find themselves losing money and possessions as they also lose their ride and have to hitchhike, before eventually stealing a car in their determination to make it to the Big Apple. Among the most memorable moments are the “Walls Of Jericho” in the autocamp (before there were motels) and the revelation that Gable, at his physical peak, didn’t wear an undershirt (sales plummeted after the film’s success). The repeat of the blanket motif in the film’s final scene, which celebrates the joy of (married) sex, is the hottest that it ever got for Capra. The success of this film can’t be understated: its taking the “Big Five” awards at the following spring’s Academy Awards made it the first film to have an Oscar record (a feat only repeated only two more times since) and it would set up its elements as standards of screwball comedies to come: the rich girl who learns that humility is freeing, the newspaper man as the voice of the people (especially in Capra films) and the magical stardust of unforgettable supporting characters (in this case, a warm and wise Walter Connolly as her father, and Roscoe Karns as a bus passenger who annoys her enough to help bring the stars closer together).
Masquerade in Vienna
Dir. Willi Forst
Forst had a successful career as an actor and director in Viennese (and German) cinema before the war but made very little impact internationally, which is likely why his career has largely been forgotten in the decades since. His second feature, which screened at this festival, is an indication that his having been dropped from cinematic memory is a grave injustice, as what he displays here is the style of Ophuls and witty sophistication of Lubitsch, but with much more generous substance than both. It also showcases a young and very handsome Anton Walbrook (still billed as Adolf, two years before he would start using his middle name professionally) as Heideneck, a womanizing painter whose artwork thrills Vienna but whose love affairs thrill its gossipmongers even more. Anita, a woman newly engaged to a schlubby conductor, is still obsessed with Heideneck after they’ve broken up, and is furious when her future sister-in-law Gerda, the wife of a surgeon who is the conductor’s brother, escapes a masquerade ball for a few hours to pose for him. The painting, of Gerda fully undressed but for a mask and Anita’s chinchilla muff, is in the newspaper the next morning, and both she and Anita must avoid being linked with the artist in order to save their relationships. Heideneck tries to help but makes things worse when he invents a name off the top of his head as to the identity of the model, which turns out to be the actual name of a lower-class woman named Leopoldine who serves as a companion to a dowager princess in belle epoque-era Vienna. Untangling this mess, which only becomes more complicated when Heideneck falls genuinely in love with “Poldy,” is a delicious task for the audience to enjoy in this gorgeously photographed and not easily forgettable souffle.
Twentieth Century
Dir. Howard Hawks
This rollickingly good screwball comedy features John Barrymore at his richest and Carole Lombard being deliciously zany. They play a theatre director and actress who have had success for years on stage in one Broadway hit after another while enjoying a stormy romance off the boards. When Lombard has finally had enough of his jealous rages, she walks out on him and straight into a career in Hollywood, while Barrymore’s theatrical enterprises languish until he is practically broke. After boarding a train on his way towards an attempt to turn his fortunes around, he learns that she is on board and it provides plenty of opportunity for fighting, career offers and possible restitution. The title is the name of the train they ride, but it is also a comment on the evolving society that the filmmakers are looking to satirize: work and romance intermingle in the modern age in ways they never had before, and the result is time bombs of comedic passion that explode throughout the entire film. Lombard would get even better with her letter-perfect performance in My Man Godfrey, but it’s easy to see why her work here transformed her from a better-than-average romantic leading lady into a comedy genius superstar, while Barrymore was rarely more appealing or sympathetic.
WORTHY
Ekstase
Dir. Gustav Machatý
Machaty’s controversial bit of erotica had been playing (or most definitely not playing) on screens for over a year before it arrived at the Venice Film Festival. Since then, its notoriety has not abated over the decades despite the fact that its imagery is relatively tame for today’s standards. Well before she escaped Nazi-controlled Europe and came to Hollywood to become a huge star, an eighteen year-old Hedy Lamarr plays a newly married bride who is disappointed when her intellectually astute husband turns out to be a dud under the sheets. She loves and admires him but can’t deal with his lack of passion, which then drives her into the arms of a hunky engineer she meets after her horse gallops away with her clothes during an afternoon swim in the lake, sending her running across the countryside completely, and visibly, naked. The sight of her bare breasts, followed by a very satisfying orgasm on screen (which isn’t nearly as graphic as the angry mob would have you believe) turned this film into a target for censorship around the globe. Without its ability to shock today, is it still worth the excitement? The dramatic narrative, which involves Lamarr’s husband seeking revenge, is soapy melodrama and the conclusion is a softer version of the kind of punishment usually wrought upon women who break the rules of sex and marriage. What still stands the test of time, however, is the film’s style, technically made with synchronized sound but for the most part shot silent and with all the elegant lighting that Hungarian cinema was known for before the war. Lamarr hasn’t fully taken control of the image with which she would amaze audiences in the future (while inventing Wi-Fi and helping the Allies to win the war, I might add) but she has a confidence in her stance and a lack of inhibition about her body that is sexy and enchanting.
Award: Best Director (Machatý)
Little Women
Dir. George Cukor
Until Gillian Armstrong released the 1994 Winona Ryder/Susan Sarandon version of Louisa May Alcott’s timeless tale of sisters getting through their harshest days during the Civil War, Cukor’s version and the Mervyn LeRoy remake of 1949 were the two big-screen options that film fans argued over. I grew up watching LeRoy’s Technicolor indulgence that, admittedly, is far more sentimental than this earlier film but, combined as it is with memories of staying home sick from school on cold winter days, is still the one I cherish the most. Cukor’s Oscar-winner, the first major sound version of the story made in Hollywood, has a tighter script and captures Katharine Hepburn at the beginning of her stardom, filmed around the same time as her first Oscar-winning performance in Morning Glory. (Venice agreed and chose her as their Best Actress, but for a different role.) Hepburn’s second of an eventual ten collaborations with Cukor has her starring as Jo March, the spirited lass who loves to swear (“Christopher Columbus!”) and dreams of being a famous writer, though her rebellious ways never take her far from her love for her three sisters: Meg, the eldest and most elegant; Beth, frail in health and shy; and Amy, brazen and vain. Well before Greta Gerwig would rearrange the plot as a series of flashbacks, we watch a picaresque selection of conflicts and confusions that gradually take these characters from their challenging young years through to the reward of their maturity. No one involved in this production has reached the apex of their skills yet, both Hepburn and Cukor would eventually be so much more polished at their crafts, but there are almost no false notes struck in this film. Given that every subsequent version would more or less follow its manner of adapting Alcott’s novel, it also cannot be underestimated how influential it truly was. Essential reading for all who love Little Women in any form is the brilliant J.E. Smyth’s essay comparing all four major American film versions, in which Cukor’s comes out on top.
Award: Best Actress (Hepburn)
Man of Aran
Dir. Robert J. Flaherty
Flaherty’s interpretation of the word “documentary” would generally not be accepted today without controversy. Showing up on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland with the intention of filming its rough, primitive life, and disappointed by the fact that its inhabitants had more or less caught up with the modern world, Flaherty filmed real life denizens of the “three wastes of rock” in various old-world activities that they were often faking for the cameras. The most significant and visually memorable of these is a gorgeously shot sequence of a group of people hunting a basking shark for its oil. (An Inuit hunter had to teach them how to do it as Aran inhabitants hadn’t hunted these creatures for many generations). This hilariously unavoidable issue of integrity aside, however, the film is a fascinating and beautiful portrait of a highly challenged rural life. The high level from the sea upon which the Aran rocks reside causes for very rough weather that makes life a constant battle, and while Flaherty, considered the grandfather of the documentary film, is fudging the details, one gets the impression that he is putting forth some manner of reality. It’s certainly charismatic enough to hold your attention, and the visuals are constantly beautiful.
Award: Best Foreign Film
Queen Christina
Dir. Rouben Mamoulian
Greta Garbo credited John Gilbert with teaching her the ins and outs of acting in Hollywood films, as well as how to behave in Hollywood itself after they first co-starred in Flesh and the Devil in 1926. After a brief romance and two more films, they shot their fourth and final collaboration in 1933. This sumptuous costume epic is another example of Mamoulian’s lush, silvery images. In a wildly historically inaccurate tale, Garbo plays the seventeenth-century Swedish queen who was raised as a boy by her father Gustavus Adolphus and ascended to the throne at the age of seven after his death in the Battle of Lützen. Christina is fully devoted to affairs of state and is annoyed by her court’s obsession with her producing an heir, resisting all suggestions of marriage until she finds herself in the throes of passionate love with the most unlikely source. While taking a break from court life in disguise as a man at a rustic chateau, she shares a room with a snowbound Swedish envoy (Gilbert) and enjoys a few days of escape with him. (It’s before the enforcement of the Production Code would require screenwriters to come up with a complicated narrative to justify their being locked, In the Realm of the Senses-style, in one room for a week.) When she returns to her castle, she finds a population that is furious with her for even considering a marriage to a foreigner. They threaten her safety if she doesn’t concede to their wishes. She responds by saying that, as a mere woman, she cannot help but give up her title in order to pursue the love affair that now defines her. Gilbert’s character Antonio Pimentel de Prado is an invention and, in reality, Christina abdicated because of growing public frustration with her perceived indulgent ways and her desire to convert to Catholicism. The film version presents a woman in power who understands that women shouldn’t be in power, and that aspect of the story is very much at odds with the confident manner in which Garbo portrays her. Undisturbed by a busy schedule and equally adept in both pantsuits and gorgeous Adrian Gowns, she enters rooms like a knife cutting through butter, the opposite of Dietrich’s glorious swaying, and pulls no punches in announcing what she wants or what she wants her men to do. The idea that she can’t have both this and romance is a foolish fantasy that only a movie studio could think up. For all its flaws, however, it’s an easy film to sit through and one whose two most celebrated sequences make it well worth watching: Garbo wandering through her cozy cabin memorizing every piece of furniture to save for a future reverie is filmmaking (and acting) at its finest, and the concluding shots of her sailing off to her destiny are unforgettable.
By Candlelight
Dir. James Whale
Paul Lukas is delightful in a rare light role as the butler to a playboy prince who knows not only how to serve breakfast and lay out evening clothes, but how to help his boss arrange seductions. Somewhere during a dinner date at home, for example, the electricity conveniently shorts out and Josef (Lukas) must bring in candles by which the prince and his date can enjoy some close canoodling. When the prince sends Josef to open and prepare his Monte Carlo villa, he meets Marie (Elissa Landi) on the train and mistakes her for the countess that she works for. She does the same, thinking him the Prince and not the butler, and they have a lovely date that turns to love before their union is threatened by the truth. Whale, more famous today for his horror movies, enters into and takes masterful control of Lubitsch territory with this light and sophisticated romance, sexy but demure and touched with fantasy in its presentation of the smart set.
Death Takes a Holiday
Dir. Mitchell Leisen
A narrative overflowing with a sense of melancholic romance is treated to a rich visual look and a cast of committed, to the point of hammy, actors in this adaptation of the 1924 play La morte in vacanza by Alberto Casella. (It would later be adapted as the disastrous Meet Joe Black by Martin Brest in 1998.) In it, Death is a character who claims human lives on the regular but cannot understand human emotion, curious about the fear with which he is greeted and this notion that love is an emotion powerful enough to make people want to keep living. Deciding to become human for three days to explore the topic, he impersonates a visiting prince and embeds himself with a wealthy family at their Italian villa, inspiring varied reactions from the ensemble but finding himself particularly drawn to a young woman named Grazia, whose perpetual state of dark foreboding makes her the perfect romantic partner for him. Little has been added to the stagebound setting and it mainly takes place in one location, the majority of the action taken up by an elegant soiree on Death’s last night of his trip, but the images that Leisen, who would go on to shoot some of the most beautiful studio products of the decade, gets from the limited action is really quite dazzling. If for no other reason, watch it for the film’s most exquisite sequence, when the black-robed Death first appears, almost as if from nowhere, to speak to his host after the others have gone to bed.
Award: Special Recommendation
Dood water (Dead Water)
Dir. Gerard Rutten
The combination of elements on display here should make for a giant mess, but somehow this early Dutch sound feature by Rutten comes together as something, if not fascinating, at least memorable and impressive. The opening act, a lengthy documentary on the building of the Zuiderzee dam, is set to operatic singing that celebrates the grand technological achievement of saving the Netherlands from drowning under sea level. After this begins the dramatic portion of the film, where we visit a small fishing village whose industry is undermined by the dam thanks to its now creating “dead water.” It may be good for Holland in general, but for this group of people it could mean starvation if they cannot pivot towards the changes necessary to survive. Among the characters who debate what to do about it is an angry citizen who does his best to raise a rebellion that could destroy the five years of work that put the dam into place. Filmed only a few years after the dam’s completion, this film doesn’t rewrite the book on film as an exploration of labour injustice, and the melodramatic acting often veers on the same level of corny as the operatic singing that opens the project, but it does have some impressively photographed sequences and a strong command over the power of image and sound to get its message across.
Award: Best Cinematography.
The Invisible Man
Dir. James Whale
This classic adventure features state-of-the-art visual effects in telling the terrifying story of a lab scientist (Claude Rains in his film debut) who tests out his new invisibility potion on himself and, when it succeeds, loses all morality. Ruthlessly harassing, robbing and eventually murdering people, the power-mad scientist can only be stopped by a caring colleague (Henry Travers) and his beautiful daughter (Gloria Stuart), with whom the villain was once in love. Rains’ face is never actually seen until the film’s closing shot, but until then his voice and figure are enough to chill you right to the bone. Whale is better known for having gotten a century of Frankenstein films off to a start, but his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ story is also the blueprint for how later versions (including Leigh Whannell’s excellent reimagining of the tale from the victim’s point of view) would be told. It’s incredibly entertaining, and completely awe-inspiring considering how effortlessly the very complex special effects are pulled off.
Award: Special Recommendation
Three Songs About Lenin
Dir. Dziga Vertov
A great deal of our modern day sense of montage and mythmaking comes through images that Vertov gave us. Man With a Movie Camera is the one that shows up most often on Best-of lists, but this film, meant to mark the accomplishments of the Soviet Union twelve years after its creation and ten after Lenin’s death, represents one of his most personal works. As the title suggests, it is structured around three patriotic songs that speak to what the late leader represented and takes us through lives being lived at every corner of the empire (with a great deal of emphasis on women). It’s understandable that watching something like this isn’t on par with juicy melodrama, but this is an opportunity to appreciate the development of the artform by seeing one of its chief architect’s thoughts and (to whom it applies) memories that makes this a still very potent effort.
Jolly Fellows
Dir. Grigoriy Aleksandrov
“Maker of Stalin’s favourite film” isn’t a title we all aspire to, but such was the destiny for Aleksandrov with his 1938 film Volga-Volga, which was made when he was already on a roll throughout the decade. This earlier film, which premiered at Venice and went on to have enormous success in its home country, is a delightful, zany comedy that still has the power to please. Its loose plot is of a shepherd mistaken for a famous conductor who falls in love with a high-born lady who can’t sing, but he is rebuffed and instead attracts the attention of her golden-throated maid (played by Aleksandrov’s wife Lyubov Orlova, whose talents he often highlighted in his films). The execution is anything but straightforward, a tower of songs and hijinks that incorporate the musical libretto styles of Rene Clair and Ernst Lubitsch into screwball antics worthy of the Marx Brothers (with a twist of later Bunuellian surrealism). Among the best sequences are an invasion of a fancy party by a herd of farm animals and a concert that goes horribly wrong. If you watch it on Tubi you have no choice but to look at the 2010 colorized version of the film, which is a shame. It actually looks great, but colours are as much a directorial choice as anything else and the film would still be a visual treat without this flourish.
The Earth Sings
Dir. Karel Plicka
Slovakian peasants in the Carpathian Mountains are observed living, working and singing by Plicka’s documentary cameras in this exhilarating, wordless documentary. The Youtube version currently available does not translate the intertitles but it’s no matter, as the images are to be absorbed for their towering beauty in what plays like the European version of a Robert Flaherty “ethnographic” film. It could be said that Plicka is telling us about our loss of a more natural way of life, and particularly the way these peoples’ lives move in tandem with the seasons, but this doesn’t feel like something that is digging deep for meaning or themes (certainly not when the women harvesting their fields are always smiling because they know they’re on camera).
FOR THE CURIOUS
Le Grand Jeu
Dir. Jacques Feyder
They don’t all age well and, while this story of sexual heat in the tropical colonies has its moments of visual ripeness, it hasn’t retained a great deal of what made it so popular when it came out in 1934. The performances are somewhat overwrought and the pace isn’t thrilling, but it’s a juicy melodrama about an overextended Parisian playboy (Pierre Richard-Willm) who drives himself to ruin over his love of a beautiful but selfish woman (Marie Bell). His family agrees to cover his debts but only on condition that he leave the country, prompting him to join the Foreign Legion and head to North Africa where he makes friends with the characters at a dive bar. Among them are the bar’s lecherous owner (Charles Vanel, later made immortal in The Wages of Fear), the owner’s card-reading wife (Francoise Rosay), and a vulnerable sex worker and singer (also Bell) with whom he begins an affair thanks to her resemblance to his former love. There’s violence, there’s betrayal, there’s a lot of implied sex, and it boils down to the most ridiculous ending. It’s not a pleasure to sit through but it makes up for its most nonsensical elements by being committed to its air of poetic fancy, if you don’t take it seriously that’s because it really doesn’t mean for you to. Future Children of Paradise auteur Marcel Carne served as assistant to Feyder, and the property was later remade by Robert Siodmak as Flesh and the Woman with Gina Lollobrigida in 1954.
The Private Life of Don Juan
Dir. Alexander Korda
Korda brings the great lover to cinematic life and treats him with cynical humour in this comedic exploration of the romantic legend of Don Juan. Ladies merely hear his name and run to their balconies in the hopes of getting a rose and a kiss from the man famous for his erotic potency, their excitement for him based purely on reputation and no actual knowledge of who he is and what he looks like. A young man pretending to be the real Don Juan jumps from one railing to another, stealing the hearts of married women whose gruff husbands ignore them, while in another part of Seville, the real Don Juan (Douglas Fairbanks in his final film) is aging, tired and hiding from the litigious wife he jilted some years earlier. When the young pretender is killed in a duel, our elder hero takes the opportunity to get out of town and live elsewhere under an assumed name; sometime later he decides to return and reveal himself to be still alive, but when he does he finds that people are far more interested in diverting lies than harsh truths. While not particularly lengthy in running time, this comedy is sometimes awkward to sit through, the plotting isn’t smooth and is, despite the silly nature of the story, hard to follow. Merle Oberon is dazzling as a flamenco dancer with great ambitions, but it’s hard to know where her character fits in to the overall experience. Fairbanks was never as comfortable in talkies as he was in silent films but he has a pleasant, jokey demeanour that makes him wonderful to watch, and a few sequences do zing, particularly the grand conclusion during a performance of a play that he interrupts. Vincent Korda’s gorgeous sets still dazzle the eye, more than making up for a musical score that is not the least bit memorable.
Award: Best World Premiere
Viva Villa!
Dir. Jack Conway
The famed Mexican revolutionary is given a highly fictionalized, often entertaining treatment in this combination of biopic, exploitation and expressionist action film. Wallace Beery is engaging in one of his most expressive roles as the man who is orphaned as a child when the country’s cold-blooded aristocrats kill his parents and set him on the path of vengeance. Growing up a lawless bandit who easily turns a gun on any oligarch looking to keep the common man down, Pancho Villa’s tactics are eventually brought into line by future president Francisco Madero (Henry B. Walthall), who puts Villa at the forefront of an army that saves Mexico from its oppressors. The two men don’t see eye-to-eye for long and Villa is banished by Madero from the country until the politician’s trouble with “General Pascal” (played by Joseph Schildkraut, likely based on Pascual Orozco) sees him overthrown and the country in need of saving by Villa yet again. Howard Hawks was fired from the picture after an off-camera incident that involved Lee Tracy’s being arrested during filming in Mexico and replaced by Stuart Erwin, and it’s possible that his interest in the project was inspired by his disillusionment over Scarface: a film he meant to as an exploration of the corruption of power and violence ended up making gangsters glamorous and, here, the story doubles down on this effort to show an anti-hero in a negative light. Having Beery and his preening mug play the lead character makes Villa adorable, however, and is an uncomfortable blend with Ben Hecht’s vicious screenplay, which emphasizes a display of the abuses that come with any kind of power. Hecht doesn’t always make Villa’s most violent acts redeemable or even logical (and is shockingly honest about his polygamy) and yet there’s also a jokey familiarity we are meant to have with the character when he pulls off the odd bit of screwball antics (like a running joke about wanting to be depicted as a bull and not a pigeon). The film features shocking sequences for a movie made within view of the Hayes Code, women shot in the stomach, dead bodies dragged into a courtroom, a man who is covered in honey and fed to fiery ants, all of this included in a raging experience that eventually goes on a bit too long and has an uneven tone between cartoonish comedy and violent drama. None of the cast is actually Latine and seeing actors in brownface won’t be easy for modern-day audiences to take (at the time, ironically, Villa’s widow said it was her favourite portrayal of her late husband), but some members of the roster turn in admirable performances, particularly Fay Wray as a glamorous society woman who tries but fails to remain on Villa’s side of things.
Awards: Best Actor (Beery); Special Recommendation
Beyond Bengal
Dir. Harry Schenck
Schenck took British scientist Joan Baldwin and a film crew to the jungles of Southeast Asia, hiring local guides to explore the landscape and film nature at its most savage. What results on the screen does reflect this, it’s 67 minutes of non-stop danger but, given what we know of other documentaries of the time (like Flaherty’s “ethnographic” films), one does wonder how many of those animals were served up intentionally to predators or, worse, if the situations the humans find themselves in (including being attacked by crocodiles) was also pre-arranged (or possibly just staged). Either way, it’s a curiosity that bears the hallmarks of its time, including a dated attitude towards the colonized people of what was then French Indochina, and as the footage hasn’t been preserved the film stock looks terrible (at least on Tubi), but it has its moments.
Going Hollywood
Dir. Raoul Walsh
It’s amazing to think that there was once a time when a movie like this was what got sent to film festivals, but considering that Venice was the forefront of there even being film festivals, thinking about it in context does make a little more sense. It’s an enjoyable, slim and silly little number that, like many of his films, is an excuse for Bing Crosby to sing a few songs (and, considering that his name is still billed below the title, was also part of his career building up to its climax in the next decade). He plays a romantic crooner whose voice rings out across the radio waves and into the bedroom of a French teacher (played by Marion Davies, in what you could easily say is one of the movies that Gary Oldman witnesses her making in Mank) who is the bane of her college director’s existence. Where her institution believes in almost convent-like, prudish discipline, Davies longs to experience love and adventure and, unable to suppress her desires anymore, is inspired by Crosby’s voice to quit her job and head over to his studio. Her plan is to thank him for pushing her to her next move in life but, at one glance, she falls madly in love with him and boards his train heading to Los Angeles, where he is set to make musical film with his French girlfriend (Fifi D’Orsay). Upon arrival in California, D’Orsay exasperates cast and crew with her impossible behaviour and it allows Davies to slip into her position in the lead role, not an unusual Cinderella fantasy that movies often sold to Depression-era audiences about the ease with which anyone can become a star (a fantasy sold much more effectively by having middle-of-the-road talents like Davies and Ruby Keeler enact them). Davies is something of a stifled, undercooked presence on screen, and her terrible singing is thankfully kept to a minimum; it’s no surprise that history knows her best for her personal than her professional life, but she’s amiable and enjoys a friendly chemistry with her co-star.
Groza (The Storm)
Dir. Vladimir Petrov
Style over substance is acceptable when a familiar tale of woe is told with such expressive visuals and unapologetically overdrawn performances. Set in an invented town in early nineteenth-century Russia, it’s about a woman married off to an insensitive lout thanks to her father’s laying down a generous dowry for her. She suffers under the harsh thumb of her exacting mother-in-law and can’t help but dream of a better life when she meets a merchant’s sensitive, book-smart nephew who has come to live among them. The results are Tragedy Writ Large and we know this because the thunder claps loudly every time our heroine has an emotional revelation. This is the sort of heavily symbolic storytelling that Soviet Cinema would indulge in with increased skill and control in the years to come, though it should be pointed out that Petrov already shows an impressive command of the technology this early in the years of sound cinema.
The Wedding of Palo
Dir. Friedrich Dalsheim
Writer Knud Rasmussen’s explorations of Greenland inspired one of what were then called “ethnographic” films. The most famous forms of such films were Robert Flaherty’s works at the time, and what was being presented as primitive ways of life in far-flung places was usually staged and contrived scenes that involved people who had long ago left their traditional practices behind. That’s probably a lot of what happens in this tale set in what was then called Angmagssalik (today Tasiilaq), in a fishing village where we see men fishing and children playing before a drama begins between two men who love the same women. Their rivalry plays out first in a highly amusing drum sequence before ramping up to something violent and dangerous that shocks their community and is then resolved by Mother Nature herself. Gorgeously filmed and directed, with intertitles explaining the post-dubbed recording of the language made by Rasmussen before his death in late 1933 of pneumonia, this one’s being set in the past at least helps soften whatever is problematic about its peering into a little-known cultural experience with Othering eyes.
Wonder Bar
Dir. Lloyd Bacon
A clip from this film has become popular on social media sites, a moment where a couple are dancing on a nightclub floor and a gentleman cuts in, whisking away the male half of the couple instead of the lady, prompting Al Jolson, standing over them in the band, to raise his eyebrows and exclaim “Boys will be boys!” To see this scene in isolation is to mistake this film for one that has aged far better than it has. It’s actually a forgettable plot whose distractions are mainly an excuse to get a variety of characters into its primary setting, a Paris nightclub where all the employees talk like New Yawk grunts, and stage a few musical numbers that range from boring to downright unpalatable. It’s easy to be angry at the past for not being up to code with what we consider appropriate today, and one should do one’s best to see old movies in their historical and social context, but when Al Jolson’s in a musical you cannot help but wince when you see him reach that greasepaint and know that he’s going to perform another of his trademark minstrel numbers. In the final act of this forgettable comedy, he not only does a number, he does an entire sequence called “Goin’ To Heaven On A Mule” (need I say more) that involves a fantasy of the afterlife in which scores of actors are in blackface, and us modern wokesters cringe until we disintegrate. The rest of the cast are phoning in their stereotypes, from Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as drunken top hats looking for fun with showgirls while their wives attract the attention of gigolos, Dolores Del Rio as the spitfire chanteuse in love with the womanizing Ricardo Cortez, and Kay Francis as the wealthy trophy wife with the sad eyes who loves Cortez as well and wants to run away with him. Only go for it if you’re interested in it as a historical curiosity.
SKIP IT
Broken Dreams
Dir. Robert G. Vignola
The technology for sound cinema was making major strides by 1933 and the bigger studios were starting to release films that left the awkward early days of sound behind, but the Poverty Row houses were taking a little bit longer to get there and it’s on display in this corny, minor drama from Monograph Pictures. Randolph Scott plays a doctor who loses his wife in childbirth and can’t handle his grief, refusing to even see the baby and leaving it in the care of his pet store-owning uncle and aunt and heads to Europe to study. Six years later, he comes back a pediatrician with a fancy socialite fiancée but, once he meets his six year-old son, played with overdetermined cuteness by Buster Phelps, he decides he wants to be a dad again. First there’s a custody battle with the boy’s adoptive parents, then there is the struggle of getting his new wife on board, and, most important, there are a few pets (two dogs and a chimpanzee) that cause no end of trouble…all of this in sixty-nine minutes! Martha Sleeper as the second Mrs. Scott is the only performer who gives a performance with shades of humanity, everyone else is shouting as if they’re on a long distance call and there’s very little sympathy left in it after the decades that have passed.
The World Moves On
Dir. John Ford
I include this under the Skip It category because it’s a terrible film, but if you’re curious about what happens when a brilliant director works with an eyesore of a script, then you can call this one a must-see. Ford himself didn’t disagree, insisting on rewrites before being told by head office that he was to film the script exactly as it was laid out (he responded by leaving his producer to take care of the final edit). The story begins in the first half of the nineteeth century with the joining of two old families who go into the cotton business, a situation that introduces a man (Franchot Tone) and a woman (Madeleine Carroll) from either family who meet, feel a spark, but are separated by circumstances that send her back to England. A century later, their descendants (also played by Tone and Carroll) meet, fall in love and get married before the first World War and its twists and turns affects their business and their relationship (which is then followed by a critical take on the prosperity of the twenties and the stock market crash and what it also does to their relationship). At only 104 minutes it shouldn’t feel this endless, and it doesn’t help that Tone and Carroll don’t exactly set the screen on fire together. What it does have, however, is a director who knows exactly how to make movies and who creates a series of sequences that are magnificent in their grandeur. Shots of incredible beauty and camera movements of impressive power make this a film you can’t tear your eyes away from despite the fact that its plot rambles in search of a centre and never really finds one.
Award: Special Recommendation
