Mr. Hulot's Holiday

    For some inexplicable reason, I decided yesterday to watch the 1953 debut of Jacques Tati's screen character Monsieur Hulot, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, known to English-speaking audiences as Mr. Hulot's Holiday.(1) I haven't seen it since I wrote about it ten years ago on this blog in a post I called "A Brief Vacation." But I remember the experience of watching it for the first time in a theater almost forty years ago. I felt then that it was charming - sufficiently delightful to justify its reputation. It is a bonafide classic - which means that most people accept it unquestioningly as an untouchable masterpiece, to place proudly alongside Chaplin's City Lights or Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. But what, then, is a "classic"? In his 1975 piece, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," Vernon Young makes an oh-so-necessary point: "If the word classic has any value left (after being attributed to movies which are merely old and, if truth be said, often inhumanly tedious), Here Is Your Life and the brace of Emigrant films are classics; they define with unique richness the material of which they are composed."(1)

In his 2004 essay for Criterion, David Ehrenstein called Mr. Hulot's Holiday, "One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made."(2) Really? Even Roger Ebert had reservations. "The first time I saw Jacques Tati's 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday,'" Ebert wrote in 1996, "I didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to. But I didn't forget the film, and I saw it again in a film class, and then bought the laserdisc and saw it a third and fourth time, and by then it had become part of my treasure. But I still didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to, and now I think I understand why. It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular."(3)

In my experience of Tati's film, the trajectory was reversed: the film has shrunk with each subsequent viewing. I get Ebert's point about the film's evocation of "memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer." The film is dripping with the mood of summer vacations - even of the strange compulsion to have them once a year, along with everyone else in the Western world. The crazy rush to the train station, the panic and congestion and the long journey off the been track to arrive - at last - at the beach. I am there completely. And the wistfulness of the end - it hurts a little every time I see it.

But after seeing it again on home video in the '80s, then on laserdisc, and DVD (every new medium gives us an excuse to watch all these old films again), it got smaller, thinner, less substantial each time. The word "charming" continues to rise to my fingertips. But I feel less obliged than ever to call the film great. Sixty-six years after it was made, if the word classic still has a meaning, Mr. Hulot's Holiday is not one.


(1) But why the Anglicism "Holiday" when Vacation is closer to "Vacance"?
(1) Vernon Young, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," reprinted by permission from Jan Troell, edited by Lars-Olof Lothwall (Stockholm: The Swedish Film Institute, 1975).
(2) "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," David Ehrenstein
(3) "Great Movie: Mr. Hulot's Holiday," November 6, 1996.

Leap Year

Lord Chief Justice. Your means are very slender, and your waste is
great.
Falstaff. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater
and my waist slenderer.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I


Mack Sennett, the father of American film comedy, had an eye for talent. He made millions of dollars with his one-reelers that were shown everywhere that films could reach. But he could never hang on to his talented performers because he refused to pay them more than he was making. One by one, his most successful comics, including Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, left Sennett for more lucrative contracts with other movie studios.

In his groundbreaking essay, "Comedy's Greatest Era" (1949), James Agee concentrated on the Big Four - the four most dominant silent film comics, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Walter Kerr's book The Silent Clowns (1976) does the same, while granting additional space to the silent films of Laurel and Hardy, as well as a forgotten clown named Raymond Griffith, whose reputation failed to benefit from Kerr's attempt at rehabilitation. One silent clown, however, has been in desperate need of rediscovery since he suffered a catastrophic fall from stardom in 1921. The standard texts on the subject of silent film comedy mention the name Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle only in connection with Chaplin, who worked with him in a handful of Mack Sennett one-reelers in 1914, and Buster Keaton, who first appeared in Arbuckle's films from 1917. For a short time, once he escaped from Sennett, Arbuckle was as popular as Chaplin, writing and directing several films a year. His physical size was matched by his value to producers when Paramount enticed him away from Sennett in 1914 with a $1,000 a day contract and 25% of the profits from his films. He was teamed with Mabel Normand for a string of comedies of which he had total creative control. In 1916 he formed his own company, Comique, and his fame continued to soar. In his two-reeler The Butcher Boy (1917), Arbuckle introduced to the world a Vaudeville performer named Buster Keaton, and when, in 1918, Paramount offered Arbuckle a $3M contract for three feature films, he gave Keaton controlling interest in Comique.

Arbuckle was one of an old tradition of rotund comic figures. Shakespeare's Falstaff is one of the oldest examples, and John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley are a few of the newer ones. Arbuckle was certainly aware that his size had something to do with his fame, but he bristled at being called "Fatty", insisting that "I have a name." But his size would become a part of the undoing of his career, when a false accusation and three outrageous trials, accompanied by a torrent of unsubstantiated gossip, ruined his reputation and convinced the powers in Hollywood to never allow him to work again in front of the camera. A young woman named Virginia Rappe turned up at a party that Arbuckle threw in San Francisco over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, and she died three days later. Evidence from her autopsy suggest that she must've died of peritonitis brought on by a botched abortion. But none of this evidence emerged until much later. Within days of her death, a friend of Rappe went to the police with a manufactured story accusing Arbuckle of raping Rappe. Tabloid news took this slander against Arbuckle and ran with it, and before long they were printing the story that it was Arbuckle's heavy girth that had crushed Rappe, causing the peritonitis by rupturing her internal organs. None of it was true.

Charged with manslaughter, Arbuckle's first two trials ended with hung juries. The third, however, ended with a unanimous verdict of acquittal and an apology from the jury foreman. But the tabloid circus had already done its damage. An enormous moral backlash was sweeping America since the passage in 1920 of the notorious Volstead Act, which brought about the Prohibition era. The intolerable rumors about Arbuckle's wild party, as well as other high profile Hollywood scandals, caused such concern among movie moguls that it led to the formation of the Hays Office, headed by former congressman Will H. Hays, a self-censorship organ that cracked down on sexually explicit and even suggestive content in movies. Despite Arbuckle's vindication, six days later Hays ordered that he be permanently banned from working in the American film industry, and that his previous films should be suppressed. This led to the wholesale destruction of every print of an Arbuckle film that every company and distributor had in their possession. Virtually broke, Arbuckle had already sold his house and automobiles to pay for his legal defense. To help support him, Buster Keaton, who stood by Arbuckle at the risk of own career, signed over 35% of all profits from his own production company. In December 1922, the ban was lifted, but Arbuckle worked thereafter under an assumed name (William Goodrich) and only as a director.

Fortunately for all of us, the effects of the scandal didn't reach Europe, where Arbuckle was still considered the equal of the Big Four and his films were preserved. In Leap Year, completed just prior to that fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921, Arbuckle plays Stanley Piper, nephew of tightwad millionaire Jeremiah Piper, who is in love with the old man's nurse, Phyllis Brown, who has a "sanitary hair-cut" that predates Louise Brooks's by a few years. Jeremiah fires the nurse and sends Stanley to Catalina Island to get him away from women. Of course, Catalina is crawling with women and Stanley, who still wants to marry Phyllis, finds that he has to fight them off.

As played by Arbuckle, Stanley isn't at all like the useless rich guy played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator, who can't even shave himself. Stanley's weaknesses are a stammer that can only be relieved by a drink of water, and women, most of whom find they can't resist him - when they know what he stands to inherit. When three women on Catalina, to whom he turns for love advice, mistake his confidences for marriage proposals, his response is the same: he jumps up and down like he's standing on hot coals and he runs away like Seabiscuit. The film varies his avenues of escape. The first time, he's on a golf course with a tiny black kid as his caddy. When the girl tries to embrace him, he grabs the kid by the hand and makes a mad dash across the green, with the kid hanging on to the golf bag. Mercifully, in mid-course, Stanley stops, grabs the kid, deposits him in the golf bag and drags it the rest of the way to the hotel. On the second occasion, he runs away from another girl straight into the ocean. When he swims past a yacht anchored offshore (his straw hat still affixed to his head), a third girl invites him aboard. When he confesses his love for nurse Phyllis and the girl thinks it's a proposal to her, Stanley dives overboard and swims back toward shore.

Back at Piper Hall, just when the plot begins to grow tedious, Stanley feigns fits to scare away his three fiancées, and Arbuckle gets to show off his skills at physical comedy - pratfalling and back-flipping like a landed fish. But none of his stunts succeed in scaring the girls away. After a climax involving his rejuvenated uncle, his butler becoming a Lord, multiple magistrates, marriage licences, and a chase in and around Piper Hall, all's well when the film ends, with Stanley and Phyllis shaking hands at their engagement.

Leap Year (a meaningless title) isn't up to Arbuckle's best work, which can be seen in his two-reelers like Love and The Hayseed. The problem wasn't Arbuckle but the script, credited to Sarah Y. Mason and Walter Woods. Arbuckle was formerly cast as a working class character, not as a silly heir to a tightwad millionaire. Despite his size, his performance is tightly controlled. Arbuckle's agility - his strength - was remarkable for a man his size. His movements often have the grace of a dancer, and in Sennett's knockabout comedies he became a virtual acrobat, since knowing how to fall was half the battle. But he simply doesn't look at ease in riding boots or golfing togs. And the business of Stanley's stammer (cured with a glass of water) becomes tedious after its third or fourth appearance.

All this is academic, however, when you consider that Leap Year was never released in the U.S. It finally premiered in 1924 - in FINLAND. Considered lost for decades, a print was found in the 1980s and the film was finally given its first American theatrical release in 1981, 60 years after its completion. In the November 1920 issue of Screenland magazine, Arbuckle wrote of his Paramount "five-reelers": "I am satisfied and hope everybody else is satisfied,and that I am on the right track. And I hope the public is going to devour these new five-reelers as a small boy devours jam. They are clean and wholesome, just as my pictures always were. They are made for the whole family - and that's what is needed in these days of the silent drama."(1) A year later, embroiled in a legal fight for his reputation and his freedom, Arbuckle's words perhaps came back to haunt him.


(1) "FROM SLAPSTICK TO LEGIT: Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle tells how it feels to work in Five Reelers," Screenland Magazine, November 1920.

Von

When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.

But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.

The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.

Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.

No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.

His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."

In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.

Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see? 

After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.

Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."

Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)


(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.

Sight Unsound

In 1962 , Dwight Macdonald - political radical and cultural conservative - was asked to contribute to a poll being conducted by Sight & Sound for, to use their own words, the ten "best films of all time." Macdonald duly submitted his list (1) with the following comment, "What no Chaplin, no Stroheim, no Dovchenko, no Pudovkin, no Clair, no Pabst, no Murnau, no De Sica, no Rossellini, no Visconti, no Fellini, no Ford, no Wellman, no Flaherty? Well, it's your idea." He then wrote a piece for Esquire about the poll, comparing the previous list from 1952 to the results of the 1962 poll (2).

Since I like exercise for its own sake, and since there have been four more Sight & Sound Critics' Polls since Macdonald compared the first two, I will try to bring Macdonald, who has been dead - and sorely missed - since 1982, up to date by examining the polls, their consistencies and inconsistencies. I have expressed my own opinion of such polls elsewhere (3), but there is a mania for them among critics and filmgoers, which is a direct reflection of the absense of serious thinking and discussion about films.

The point of conducting the critics' poll only every ten years is, I suppose, meant to bestow on it some sense of historicality. But by waiting so long between polls, during which time a new generation of critics has appeared with their own pet peeves and axes to grind, not to mention a new generation of filmmakers that has its own ideas about what a film should be, the very notion of consensus is challenged. I am, for one, rather glad that there were no pollsters in the 1940s, '30s and '20s to remind us what a wilderness the film world was before De Sica and Kurosawa, Renoir and Carné, or even before sound was added to sight. Trying to imagine what a 1932 Critics' Poll would have looked like (4), with its purists hanging on tenaciously to the lost art of the silent film, while newcomers dismissed them as prehistoric, is proof of how far film has come in a relatively brief period of time. But even such attempts at comprehensiveness have not prevented the poll from being topical.

In the 1972 poll only five titles survived from the '62 poll: Citizen Kane (#1), Ugetsu (#10), La Regle du Jeu [why the pretense of titles in French but not in Russian or Swedish or Italian?] (#2), Battleship Potemkin (#3) and L'avventura (#5). The rising and falling fortunes of old artists was more to blame than the introduction of new talent. The rest of the list shows the extent to which the reputations of two filmmakers dominated critical thinking then: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (in the shattered edit, tied for #8) and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (tied for #5) and Wild Strawberries (tied for #10). The dropouts were Greed, Bicycle Thieves, Ivan the Terrible, La terra trema and L'Atalante. (5)

The disappearance of Greed from the poll was encouraging. Stroheim's star would never rise again, not even after the 1999 "restored" version was released to some acclaim. Nor would Visconti's, whose La terra trema was a rather unsettling combination of neo-realism and homoeroticism (Visconti had a predilection for casting catamites in all his films). Ivan the Terrible seems almost sclerotic today. L'Atalante is utterly charming and would reappear in the 1992 poll at #5. Periodically, certain films are re-discovered when restored prints are made available, as with L'Atalante, The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vertigo, Sunrise, etc.

Of the new additions in the '72 poll, the most pleasant surprise is Keaton's The General (tied for #8). the realization of Keaton's superiority to Chaplin, even if it does not lessen Chaplin's genius, was one of the most heartening mutations in cinematic taste of the past fifty years. What puzzles me is the rather back-handed tribute paid Ingmar Bergman, whose Wild Strawberries and Persona are considerably overrated. The biggest movement on the '72 poll was the appearance, at #4, of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Not surprisingly, then, by the time the '82 poll appeared, both Bergman films had dropped out, along with Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, although it would reappear in '92 tied for #10. Welles still clung to the cat-bird's seat with his Kane and Ambersons. Between '72 and '82 an unprecedented seven films clung to a place in the polls: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), 8 1/2 (#5), Potemkin (#6), L'avventura and Ambersons (tied for #7) and The General (tied for #10). Three new titles on the '82 poll show the direct impact of the auteur theory: Singin' in the Rain (tied for #3), Vertigo (tied for #7) and The Searchers (tied for #10). That all three are American genre films did not seem to faze the critics who voted for them. The happiest addition was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (tied, unbelievably, with Singin' in the Rain). None of the films on the list happened to have been made during the intervening ten years, which is a trend that continued through the present 2002 poll.

Five titles survived the next decade for the '92 poll: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), Vertigo (#4), The Searchers (#5) and Potemkin (in a four-way tie for #6). Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc reappeared in the tie for #6, along with L'Atalante, which makes me wonder if the critics were beginning to keep tabs on the old polls. Kurosawa, #3 in '82, is replaced by Ozu's Tokyo Story. Though magnificent, it seems to be the token Japanese title of the decade. The victims of the interim decade were Singin' in the Rain, 8 1/2, L'avventura, Ambersons, and The General. Two new titles to the poll were Ray's Pather Panchali (#6) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (#10). The Kubrick film that belongs on the poll is, of course, Dr. Strangelove. But the pseudo-intellectuality of 2001 made the critics seem smarter than they are. The Ray film is obvious lip service, since he died in April of that year.

Having lived with the choices for the latest poll, published in 2002, for seven years, I am as astonished at the persisting critical reason represented by Kane (#1, as usual), Rules (#3), Tokyo Story (#5), Potemkin (tied for #7), and 8 1/2 (tied for #9) as I am at the growing critical aneurism that put Vertigo at #2, The Godfather(s) at #4, 2001 at # 6, and Singin' in the Rain at #9. But where discrimination is most needed, and most to be expected, as when a person involved in the life of international film who has some knowledge of its history and the ability to distinguish between the films that conform to his subjective tastes (gustibus) and those that take powerful exception to them, is called on to submit his list of the Top Ten Films, it is sorely lacking in at least half of those critics consulted by the British Film Institute. But like all the other arts, the talent necessary to make a great film, and to a lesser extent the faculty needed to recognize it, is a matter of only a few. The size of an audience for, say, The Passion of Joan of Arc is miniscule compared to the number of viewers who flock (which best describes it) to see the latest X-Men or Tarantinto film. In fact, to adapt the Matthew Arnold maxim, you can clear a crowd faster with the word "Ozu" than with a firehose. But many critics like to pretend that there is a middle ground on which a popular film can also be deemed art, and that this extremely narrow ground is as broad as the Susquehanna River Valley.

No music critic who is worth reading would argue that Beyoncé is a good singer. No decent food critic would state that pizza is good food. No theater critic worth a damn would claim that Spamalot is a good play. And yet film critics routinely hand out praise for trash like Inglorious Basterds (or is it Basturds?) and The Dark Knight.

While I understand that such things as the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll is compiled from extremely divergent sources, and that de gustibus non est disputandum, I believe there is good reason to question the sanity of a critic who thinks that Touch of Evil and L'Avventura can be mentioned in the same breath. Placing a film like Vertigo or The Searchers alongside The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story is tantamount to saying that Patricia Highsmith is the equal of William Faulkner or a Japanese manga is comparable to Kawabata.

Singin' in the Rain is a good musical, but it belongs to a genre and is subject to a specialized set of standards that Citizen Kane, obviously, is not. No one would think of judging Seven Samurai according to the quality of its songs or its choreography. And no one would argue, who has any reason at all to argue, that Silk Stockings is a poor musical because its characters and its situations are unbelievable.

So when Sight & Sound persists, as it has for the past sixty years, in proudly publishing the results of its Critics' Poll, with films like 8 1/2 and The Passion of Joan of Arc sticking out between recognizable rubbish like The Godfather(s) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the significance of the poll is seriously compromised, if not nullified.



(1) Macdonald's list: 1. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith) 2. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) 3. October (Sergei Eisenstein) 4. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5. The Gorky Trilogy (Mark Donskoy) 6. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) 7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 8. Les Enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné) 9. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais) 10. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni. (see http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/12/sight-and-sound-ten-best-films-in.html)
(2) The polls can be viewed here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/.
(3) See http://tangodelviudo.blogspot.com/2008/12/critical-cretinisms-top-tens.html.
(4) If I had been around in '32, and lived in Paris, my list would look like this (in no order): The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), M (Lang), I Was Born, But... (Ozu), The Gold Rush (Chaplin), Potemkin (Eisenstein), L'Age d'Or (Buñuel), Sherlock Jr. (Keaton), The Blue Angel (Sternberg), Le Million (Clair), The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström).
(5) A conspicuous lacuna: from 1952 to 2002, there has never been a film from the French New Wave anywhere near the top ten.

Spite Marriage

Buster Keaton's last silent film, Spite Marriage, was released by MGM in 1929, during the terrible interim period in which sound was taking over, and it demonstrates just how ill-served a genius could be by a major Hollywood studio. Keaton's decline after he signed a contract with MGM was precipitous not because he gave up creative control over his work but because the studio had no understanding of his particular talents. Unlike Chaplin, who did everything himself (and took credit for it) Keaton relied on collaborators, people he knew and trusted and - more importantly - who knew Keaton and exactly what his comedic strengths were.

One of Chaplin's great failings was insisting on absolute control over every aspect of his films. More than one critic commented, after the release of his near-miss The Circus (1928), that what Chaplin needed was a good director and story writer. He could have made one film a year instead of one every three or more. In the same six years, 1923 to 1929, that it took Chaplin to make three feature-length films, A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus, Buster Keaton made eleven - including at least five masterpieces.(1)

Although we are assured in the opening credits that Spite Marriage is a "Buster Keaton Production," (which, of course, is the only reason why anyone is still watching it eighty years later), far too much of the film's time is taken up with Dorothy Sebastian, who is otherwise utterly forgotten. And she is the worst sort of heroine for Buster - too old and too worldly. Keaton's heroines were always genuine, if a trifle incompetent. But MGM, clearly, paid no attention to Keaton's previous work. Making him, in Spite Marriage, the infatuated dry-cleaner who spends all his money and spare time gazing lovingly at Trilby Drew (Sebastian) onstage in a Civil War melodrama, showed to what extent MGM wanted to alter Keaton's image, and otherwise wreck his career.

Carl Harbaugh and Lew Lipton, two of MGM's trustiest hacks, are credited with the script for Spite Marriage. Keaton's old designer, Fred Gabourie, did the excellent sets. But the scenes on the yacht seem like outtakes from The Navigator. Keaton manages to come up with enough wonderful gags to keep the story moving, but they come at his own expense. And his "happy" ending is not nearly so sweet as those he used in all of his great comedies. Even the last kiss is missing, even if it would have been more than a little unwelcome. The two of them, Trilby and Elmer, walk together through the front door of a hotel. But Buster is being led by Dorothy Sebastian by the hand. And the hand-shaking, hat-tipping gag with which the film closes, and which was used in two prior scenes, was already tired when Max Linder used it in Max Between Two Fires (1915).

Making Keaton into a lapdog was too cruel even for MGM. It is hard to believe that they wanted to ruin him. He was an important property for them. But he was having problems. His films were no longer the hits they once were, and he was personally embittered about the treatment of his old friend Roscoe Arbuckle at the hands of the Hollywood gossip columnists, who effectively ended his career in films. And he was drinking heavily. What might have become of him if he hadn't signed with MGM isn't hard to figure out. He had only two real peers in the late 1920s, Harold Lloyd and Chaplin. But they were much better at handling their fortunes. When Spite Marriage was shunned by critics and audiences, and when MGM found there was nothing they could do with Keaton's harsh midwestern voice, he was relegated to smaller roles in smaller pictures, until, in obvious desperation, he was even paired with Jimmy Durante. And when they had nothing for him to do, the studio used him as a gag man. Typically, it would take thirty years of obscurity before film archivists and critics re-discovered his genius. Some comment that it was because Keaton was too far ahead of his time. It is some consolation that Keaton lived long enough to enjoy a little of his own re-discovery.


(1) Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), Go West (1925), Battling Butler (1926), The General (1926), College (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), The Cameraman (1928), and Spite Marriage (1929). My own favorite of these films is the laconic Go West.

Keaton Takes Us to College

In one of his last great silent comedies, College* (1927), Buster Keaton pokes rather pointed fun at the American worship of sports. Like Chaplin but with a much wider range of variations, Keaton was the eternal outsider trying to get in, having to compensate for his small stature and lack of social skills with acute resourcefulness and extraordinary guts. And he always wins - but in College it is a Pyrrhic victory, as the closing shots reveal.

On winning an "honor medal" at his high school graduation ceremony, Ronald (Keaton) gives an uproarious speech (via title cards, of course) against the "Curse of Athletics":

The secret of getting a medal like mine is - books not sports. The student who wastes his time on athletics rather than study shows only ignorance. Future generations depend upon brains and not upon jumping the discus or hurdling the javelin. What have Ty Ruth or Babe Dempsey done for Science? Where would I be without my books?

Needless to say, Ronald delivers his speech before an increasingly hostile audience - while struggling to keep his cheap suit from disintegrating. The last line is something of an appeal, as Ronald covers his crotch with a book when his flies come undone. By the time his speech is over the auditorium is empty - but a popular girl who happens to like him throws down a gauntlet that Ronald - unwisely one feels - picks up: "Your speech was ridiculous. Anyone prefers an athlete to a weak-knee'd teachers' pet. When you change your mind about athletics, then I'll change my mind about you."

Having no formal education, Keaton may himself have regarded college as a waste of time and college students as privileged parasites. But he saw the rich comedic potential of playing a college type enough to use it once again in his last great film, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). As portrayed in the later film, college students are naive and completely unprepared for life in the real world.

That Ronald is too poor to afford college is perhaps more than a comedic ploy. It does not, of course, deter him from working his way through school - with disappointing results - as a soda jerk and as a "colored" waiter. Ronald loses both jobs rather than expose his identity (and the shame of having to work) to The Girl. Working in blackface may leave Keaton open to charges of racism today, but when some of his blackface rubs off in one of his patented pratfalls and his true "racial identity" is exposed, it is the black kitchen crew that comes after him - with meat cleavers! In pursuit of more than just cheap laughs, Keaton gives us a glimpse in this scene of the ugly face of Jim Crow.



Nothing, apparently, can stop Ronald from winning The Girl's heart - and social acceptance - by proving that he can excel at athletics. Despite the fact that, as his own stunts proved time and again, Keaton possessed considerable athletic abilities, all that Ronald can prove in College are his inabilities. In a prolonged and often painful scene, Ronald tries out for various track and field events and only manages to succeed at nearly breaking his own neck. One after another, he finds that he cannot run, cannot jump, cannot hurdle, hurl or vault. And the gags that he pulls off, some of them requiring precise balance and timing, soon become more pathetic than funny. Ronald's obvious disregard for his own safety makes his struggle to not fail take on an almost tragic quality. For if this scene of physical failure means anything, it is that trying to measure up to everyone else's standards is foolhardy, and that expecting it of everyone is cruel and terribly wrong. What gives the scene added punch is the presence - unseen by Ronald - of The Girl, who watches with mounting alarm and pity as Ronald risks life and limb to find his inner athlete.



By now the film has introduced us to the college dean - a diminutive (like Ronald) pinch-faced old man who at first welcomes Ronald for his academic achievements. But when Ronald's grades begin to suffer due to his experiments in sports (during which Ronald nearly takes the dean's head off with a misdirected discus), the dean calls him to his office where the following exchange takes place:


Dean: You have been a miserable failure in all your studies and I know the reason why.
Ronald: I took up athletics because the girl I love thinks I'm a weakling. I love her and would do anything to please her.
Dean: I understand, my boy. The same thing happened to me but I was stubborn. That's why I'm a bachelor.

Later we watch the dean, alone, gazing sorrowfully at an old photograph of a woman, presumably the girl who thought he was a "weakling". Whether the dean is meant to be pitied for being "stubborn" is questionable, particularly in light of the film's last few shots.



But College is, after all, a comedy, and by the last reel Buster wins the race and The Girl in his beautifully unorthodox way, discovering practical applications for his track and field experience as he rescues The Girl from the clutches of his adversary (who, significantly, had been expelled for his poor grades). Buster dashes at great speed, hurdles hedges, pole vaults into The Girl's dormitory room throws plates instead of discuses and nearly skewers the bad guy with a lamp pole as he tries to escape. Caught alone with Ronald in her room, The Girl announces to the Dean that they are paying the official penalty for such misconduct by getting married.



Happy ending, right? Then why does Keaton close the film with a montage that could hardly be mistaken for marital bliss? Neatly chronicling the rest of Ronald's life with The Girl, the montage dissolves from the church to a hectic household with three kids, to a quiet old age, finally to a shot of two graves, side by side and overgrown with weeds. In nearly all of his films (Go West being the hilarious exception) Keaton gets the girl. Only in College, near the end of his creative career as America's greatest silent clown, does Keaton show us what getting the girl ultimately means.





*It would be interesting to program Keaton's film with Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925). Lloyd's irrepressibly preppie image is a revealing contrast to Keaton's working student in College.