Love Me Tonight

[This essay written for the Romance countdown at Wonders in the Dark. I posted there a couple days ago - then got distracted from posting here by the anniversary of the Fall of Atlanta. Anyway - here it is.]



Love Me Tonight starts with the ringing of bells, then fades in to shots of Paris, rooftops, streets, the Seine. We see a lone bicyclist, hear the swish of his tires on the street, then see an overhead shot of one street, with a man pushing a wheelbarrow. We hear its wheels; he stops, tosses his tools into the street (clank, clank), and he starts working, pounding a steady rhythm. We cut to an overhead shot of a bum, asleep, snoring. Then to a woman sweeping; to steam whistling from a chimney; to windows opening, a baby crying, to a man with a sawhorse, kids in the street, another man opening a store; women hanging out clothes, flapping them off their balconies; two cobblers sit down to their work, pounding nails (bang: tap/tap - bang: tap/tap); a knife grinder grinds, there's traffic in the streets, there's a woman pounding a rug, a car horn sounds - all of it mixes together, layered on everything else, a symphony of sounds, finished, so to speak, by a woman opening her window and turning on her gramophone, the whole street come together in music. And the camera goes into one room and finds Maurice Chevalier, dressing for the day, trying to shut out the noise, but not able to resist it - give him a second, and he'll be singing along.



And after that? It's all like that - Love me Tonight is a fairy tale, about a tailor who goes to collect a debt from a profligate Vicomte, and meets a princess, locked in a tower, surrounded by (mostly well meaning) jailers - mostly old men, though Myrna Loy is along as a bit of a comic foil; do they fall in love? does he rescue her? does he rescue him? It's hardly a mystery, as the whole film is a vast celebration of music and love, of community and life, and the wonders of film. It's a light, joyous story, and the film - everything - music, dialogue, performances, filmmaking - is as exuberant as the story.

Rouben Mamoulian directs, and he pulls out the stops. It's a trove of cinematic devices - musical and theatrical as well, and all together. The opening sequence with its natural sounds incorporated into music; the "pass-along" songs, especially Isn't it Romantic?; the way dialogue slips into lyrics and back, conversations sung, or half sung, rhymed at any rate; strictly cinematic tricks, like fast motion, slow motion, split screens, 180 degree cutting, animation, double exposure; theatrical tricks like direct address to the audience, use of shadows and mirrors, visual jokes. It's all there, for the joy of it all - but also working, all the time, to pull everyone together - especially the lovers - but everyone. It's a film of choruses, mostly - the streets of Paris, the people Isn't it Romantic passes through, the reprise of Mimi, the ensemble performance of The Son of a Gun is Nothing but a Tailor. Plus a duet or two, and complimentary songs for the lovers when they meet.

Everything in the story brings the lovers together; everything in the filmmaking brings them together; the whole affair works to make sure they fall in love and all is well. Right off the bat - Maurice sings in Paris - Isn't it Romantic? - and the song makes its way across France to Jeannette MacDonald, locked in her tower.



The usual complications arise - he runs her off the road; he charms and annoys her with a song; at the Chateau, the Vicomte has to pass him off as a Baron to keep him around long enough to scare up the money, and Jeannette takes a dislike to him. Myrna Loy tries to take him for herself; Charles Butterworth's count (who imagines himself a suitor for Jeannette) suspects him - but there is no way around it. Everything is against them - or with them - whatever it is. Her maiden aunts weave spells for her:



Cupid - cupid isn't subtle about it:



And Maurice can charm wild animals and wild men - saving a stag, and then sending the hunt away in slow motion, in a scene worthy of Cocteau:



How else could it end?



Though that is not the end. Our lovers come together, kissing in the garden, pledging love - whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you are - united in their dreams (in song; in bed) - but there is more. He is a tailor - she is a princess - how can they be wed? But that can't be the end either - so if the prince can't ride up and save the princess from her tower, she will ride out and save him.



And that? Might be that. So back to the chateau and the three aunts, sewing, and their tapestry - which just happens to exactly reverse (in gender and angle) the actual end of the film. (Mamoulian doesn't miss much.) But someone rescues someone and everyone is happy, and so are we. It is a marvelous ensemble - the fantastic, inventive filmmaking, the outstanding Rogers and Hart songs, the witty, sexy dialogue, and an inspired cast - it's a joy from start to finish.

Crossing the Line

I want to add a bit more about the style in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Of all the tricks Mamoulian pulls out - the roving camera, the first person shots, all the fancy transitions (radial wipes, lateral wipes, lap dissolves and such), and holding those transitions halfway through, all the special effects and makeup and whatnot - I want to pick out one - the 180 degree cuts, especially between closeups. I suppose those things are just made for me - Ozu fan that I am - seeing it here, in a Hollywood film, is quite wonderful. I like the variety you get, too - the shot opening this post is a reverse angle on the shot opening yesterday's post on the film - that is, a cut between fairly long shots of the audience and Jekyll at his lecture...

Then there is this - starting with a profile shot of Jekyll and a girl at his clinic:



Cutting in to these shots - the girl, starting to walk, and Jekyll encouraging her:





...And later - in the love scene between Jekyll and his fiancee, Mamoulian repeats the series of shots, pushing it even further - starting, again, with a profile two shot:



Then cutting at 90 degrees to Rose Hobart, then 180 degrees to March, then back to Hobart closer, and so on:









It's pushing the principal about as far as you are likely to see. Of course, Mamoulian establishes frontality from the beginning of the film - the subjective camera device justifies it at first, but it doesn't take long for the motivation to disappear, as seen in the shots above.



And all of it sets up and pays off the doubling theme, playing on the image of a man looking in a mirror - and allowing for mathced images across time. Jekyll in the mirror -



...becomes Hyde in the mirror...



And from there - you can expand the principal - Jekyll slicking his hair back -



...to Hyde slicking his hair back (in a mirror, naturally, with Ivy on hand, as before...)



... and so on. A clever, innovative, piece of work indeed, and all its tricks integrated into its story and themes - films like this just make me sing...

Look.... Look... Look

I have said before, I rather dread October in the blog world - a solid month of horror film posts - blah... It's not that I don't like horror films, I think it might be a certain generic resentment - you don't see whole months devoted to melodramas do you? westerns, screwball comedies, the color blue? I suspect if you did, if ever February were given over the romantic comedies, say, I would soon get tired of that, too... I start here with ritual condemnation because this complaint is particularly disingenuous this year. I am positively steeped in horror related art just now. There is that vampire class - so it's a book and a movie a week about vampires. (Though we seem to have left the horror section behind - doesn't seem to be a lot of horror left by the time you get to Anita Blake or Dead Witch Walking - they seem a lot more Stan Lee than Bram Stoker.) And that aside, I keep watching horror films, and thinking about horror films when I'm watching other kinds. Did I mention that Mark Zuckerberg sometimes seems like a vampire? Who wouldn't think about vampires watching Inside Job? Or Carlos?

Though more directly - I'm certainly attentive to the overlap between vampire stories and other kinds of horror films. Questions of sympathy - watching vampire films and books pick up on the idea of the tragic monster. It's interesting that of the wave of horror classics in the early 30s, at Universal mainly, but elsewhere too, Dracula is probably the least sympathetic to its monster - Dracula is a monster, with some charm, perhaps, but not much in the way of pathos. Compare him to Frankenstein's monster - to the Mummy, or the Invisible Man - or to other studio's horror characters, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They all have their reasons - they are all, in some sense, driven to their evil, and we are made to feel the loss when they go wrong. (And in a couple of them, we are brought very close to seeing them as not evil in the least.) In Dracula, we get that with Renfield - though he's a secondary character - not so much the Count himself. But from the first sequel, it's there, even more overtly than in some of the others - Dracula's Daughter is a sympathetic, self-reflective, guilt ridden vampire who fights her legacy, her nature, her evil nature, her needs. It is a very sad film, full of ironies that you can't quite ignore - the way she keeps begging people for help and no one understands her, no one is willing to help her, and when, inevitably, she acts - they carry on like she has been a demon from hell. This is, in fact, something of a trademark for at least one strand of horror films - it obviously goes back to literary sources, Dr. Faustus or Dr. Jekyll, good men who found that evil was present with them, any number of doppelganger stories and temptation stories and stories of overreaching or too late repentance...



It's interesting in those 30s films. First - those early films seem to have been made for two sets of eyes - like there are two films in one. I mean - most of them are, on the surface, straightforward horror films, with ugly, horrible monsters, doing terrible things to pretty innocents (or not so innocents, but still pretty.) And since films, in those days, played, and then went away, never to be seen again (at least until Henri Langlois came along), this is how they were remembered. But when you see them over and over - you notices how much sympathy most of them show their monsters. Now - after decades of availability on video, DVD, etc. - this probably doesn't come as much of a surprise. But they were always made that way, weren't they? For two audiences - the one that saw them once and twice for the thrills - and the devotees, who would see them over and over and absorb as much of them as they could... And there's another element to this - the more you see these films, the more you notice the complexity of their morality. A film like Bride of Frankenstein (probably the best of the bunch) functions almost as a straightforward bildungsroman - but because the hero is a monster, the film has a surprising amount of leeway in his morality. The monsters have the ability to act out desires that the Hays code forbade - since they are monsters, they will get what's coming to them in the end - but along the way, they can act far more naturally than regular characters could, and the filmmakers usually gave us a chance to sympathize with them. At least, for those who came back, who watched them carefully, for something more than shocks and thrills.



Anyway - these days, films are a lot more free to spell things out. And back in the day, there were films that laid out what they were doing pretty clearly. For example, the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am ashamed to admit it, but I had not seen it until this week - needless to say, it was a revelation. The theme - the good man who does evil - is explicit of course; so is the sense of a more complex view of morality and humanity than the Hays code could handle. It's rather shocking what the film does get away with - not just the strip teases and brutality, but a pretty direct statement of Victorian hypocrisy - poor Dr. Jekyll, saintly and brilliant as he is, is going half mad from lust - he begs to be able to marry his sweetheart NOW, but her father refuses - and he, like many a good Victorian gentleman before him, turns to drugs and whores. (More or less at the urging of his respectable pal, too.) The results are all too predictable. It's interesting that this is, in a way, a reversal of the central moral issue of Dracula - there, it's the horrors of female sexuality - here, it's the horrors of male sexuality. Both the horrors that come from acting on it, and those that come from its repression. It's an exaggerated enactment of the classic Victorian hypocrisy.



Though what really gets me about this film is what a a magnificent piece of filmmaking it is. Gorgeous, and endlessly clever - look at that shot of Jekyll (post-Hyde) and his pal, under the picture of the old Queen... paintings, statues, decor are used throughout to similar effect. Rouben Mamoulian was, I won't deny it, as flashy and thrilling a director as any of his peers - and he had some very impressive peers ca. 1931 (Capra, Lang, Sternberg, Lubitsch, Renoir, etc.) He is as skillful as any of them - and probably flashier than most. This film is really a dazzling display - relentless moving camera, sophisticated sound, brilliant and showy editing, state of the art special effects, superb sense of composition, staging, set design, you name it. There's not much like it in Hollywood at the time - with its 180 degree cuts and innovative wipes and dissolves (he loves holding a transition in the middle - wipes (as below), dissolves (Ivy's swinging leg chasing Jekyll and Lanyon through London)).... It's as showy and strange as a Japanese film of the period....



Though I'll end with another general comment on horror films, especially in the 30s - this is one of their other hallmarks. They held onto a lot of the aesthetics of art films, especially German art films, longer than most of Hollywood, and further down the food chain, if you will. A fairly uninspiring production like the Murders of the Rue Morgue still looks great (see below). And at the high end, Dr. Jekyll, or the Whale horror films, they were as good as anything of the time, and worthy successors to the work of Murnau and Lang and company in the 20s.

Movies Recapped

I think this feature is starting to evolve: more than a list, though still not quite real reviews - something between. The weather has had a definite effect on this post - the rotten heat all last week kept me from doing much of anything, not even making the terrible effort to switch from cable to the DVD player.... And then yesterday, thunder and lightning knocked out internet access for most of the evening. But that takes away any excuse for not writing up blurbs - so...

One more thing: I am putting stars on these things for convenience, for shorthand, for comparison - but I hate the 0-4 rankings people like Ebert use. That's too narrow a range. I'd rather ignore all the bottom end and stretch the top end. You know - like GPA! 2.0 is passing! (So's 1.0, in some contexts - outside your major, in most places, I think.) So - ** is a passing grade: that's a film worth seeing, without a lot of reservations - though not great. *** is very good, if not great; **** is reserved for the best.... (we've also got ***** for all time greats, one of which turns up in this post!)

So then: last week's movies:

Grizzly Man *** - the story of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor turned grizzly bear enthusiast who got himself and his girlfriend eaten in 2003 - he had shot video footage in the Alaskan wilderness for five years, and it fell to Werner Herzog to make a film out of this footage. That is a wise choice. Herzog, in his documentaries, often seems to play the voice of reason, a role he may not play as director of fiction - he is able to examine Treadwell, what he did wrong, what he did right what he was like - to show Treadwell's personality, his beliefs, as well as Herzog's own ideas. Both men tend to project their desires onto nature - Treadwell idealizing bears and animals and the wilderness, to the point of incomprehension when he finds evidence of nature's cruelty; but Herzog's response, that nature is all cruelty, murder, chaos, is equally distorting. Just the fact that Treadwell spent 13 summers living very close to grizzly bears (and was eaten when he changed his routine) tells you something - as does his footage, showing himself living very well with bears, foxes - and foxes with bears as well - shows that nature contains both, harmony and mayhem....

It's that kind of film - it tempts you to philosophize about what it means - the film, Treadwell's life, his death, Herzog's career... I will leave instead with the note about plot: this film exists, in any form, because of Treadwell's death. It's the "grandma on the swing" rule from funniest home videos - granny on the swing is just cute video - but granny falls off the swing, it becomes a story. Which, itself, is a pure example of the Formalist rule about "making strange" - the strange, resisting element - the death of Treadwell (or a junkie rock star, coming up in Last Days) - catches our attention - and draws our attention to the rest of the material, to the everyday. Gus Van Sant has made three films in a row that exploit this device - the presence of death makes them into stories, but in doing so, gives the mundane, everydayness of the rest of the films weight. The strange element makes everything strange - makes you notice. Now, Treadwell's footage is gripping enough (I mean, he was petting wild grizzly bears, the idiot!), but his death allowed this film to be made - turned nature video into a meditation on the human soul. Really.

The Aristocrats - **1/2 - Documentary about a joke. The joke goes - a man walks into a talent agency and says, I got a great act for you; the talent agent says, what's the act? The man describes it - a string of obscenity and filth - the agent is shocked - my god, he says, what do you call that act? The aristocrats! The kick is the middle part - describing the act. How bad can you get? The film shows a swarm of comics telling the joke, talking about the joke, or other jokes, or just jokes... it's hilarious at times - it also tends to drag at times. Comedy depends on surprise, and to get a surprise out of this old a joke takes a sure touch. The best versions do that - surprise you, or succeed in the details of the scatology (George Carlin's bits about corn, and peanuts, say, make his version of the joke). The worst just list off atrocities and say fuck and suck a lot.

Last Days - **** - Gus Van Sant follows a junkie rock star around his big crumbling manse. Not much happens - there's a quartet of twits hanging around, misbehaving and annoying the star... Mormons come by, a yellow pages representative, Kim Gordon, Ricky Jay in a great turn as a talkative PI.... That's about all. As with Elephant, the knowledge of how it will end focuses your attention on what is happening - which is mostly banal, but given great gravity, because it is Life, and we know that what is coming is Death - and everything suddenly becomes precious. Macaroni and cheese, sour milk, feedback all play their roles. Another marvelous film.

Love Me Tonight - ***** - Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, music by Rogers and Hart. This is very close to the perfect musical - the perfect fairy-tale musical anyway (though it's also anticipating many of the devices of the "folk tale" musical [blame Rick Altman] - making music out of everyday sounds, singing out of talking, dancing out of walking, passalong songs, and so on). MC is a tailor who tries to collect from a deadbeat Vicomte, who passes him off as a baron, to buy time... while MC woos MacDonald, a widowed princess... Class contends with charm, and everything works out in the end - she gets her Prince Charming, who wasn't a prince, but he was charming... A beautiful and completely delightful movie.