1930s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[swo17]

Out of curiosity why did you list Les misérables when it's already listed as one title on IMDB. I figure that miniseries or serial rules take over from there.

It's technically a three-part film, which could be confused for a trilogy. Maybe it's obvious but I just want to make sure everyone's on the same page. We don't always abide by how IMDb groups serials/multi-part films (i.e. Lang's Spiders, Feuillade's Fantômas).

[tojoed]

Just a word for "The Miracle Woman", which will make my list. In fact, any Capra from the thirties is worth watching, before he became the corn merchant.

Also, when submitting a list, do we have to put the year of release and the name of the director? I can't remember.

[swo17]

Also, when submitting a list, do we have to put the year of release and the name of the director? I can't remember.

It's probably not crucial that you do this, though it might make my job a little easier in some cases.

[zedz]

I don't have any problem with making calls here on disputed imdb datings, and I've voted for some films in defiance of their datings in the past. But I wouldn't want to see this applied to your common or garden 1939 vs. 1940 turf war, since God knows how many of those there might be, but it's certainly understandable for a case like when they dated Len Lye's absolutely 1950s Free Radicals (or was it Particles in Space?) as a 1980s film.

Que Viva Mexico! is possibly the best example of a referee call, considering how messy its production history is. I think I ended up voting for Time in the Sun in my 40s list last time, and I'm probably still a little queasy about voting for the film in the 30s, assuming some kind of Einsteinian ideal assemblage, since it would mean I'm voting for a film I've never seen and which doesn't exist. But that's just me!

The two-part / three-part film rules are well established, but there are always complications, and it makes sense to clarify those as well, as voters won't necessarily have bothered to check how imdb calls certain films.

And swo probably feels he can't really say, as I didn't when I was collating, but including years and directors on your lists makes things a hell of a lot easier for the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. It helps to sort out variant titles of a single film, for one thing, but it also allows for a lot more interesting statistics to be extracted, such as decade spread, director popularity, possible instances of major vote-splitting, countries of origin etc. It's extremely laborious to have to look up those things yourself for every film that gets a vote.

[knives]

With no one seeming to have Juha I guess now is the time to start pushing favorites that I suspect will go the way of the dodo if I don't push them like hell. so here's this great proto-noir called Varastettu kuolema or in English Stolen Death that I'm going to bring up in every post until I'm assured it's not an orphan.

As best as I can tell the movie is about a group of revolutionaries who are planning and big action while at the same time working hard to forge papers and visas to escape to (if I read this right) Japan. The plot is as standard as the description above indicates, but it's delivered just left of center. The movie is directed like an episode of The Twilight Zone and I mean that in the most positive way possible. Occasionally the direction can feel stiff, but it's only really noticeable in one talking scene and that might be the fault of not understanding what was being said as it was the most talk heavy scene of the whole movie, but most of the times it walks this exquisite line between Jodorowsky and Dreyer if that makes sense. Angles are odd, the landscape is a barren white within black, and actions get just one little item added to them to make the scene standout (and nearly every scene stands out). My particular favourite of these examples is when three of the main group dresses in their Sunday best to carry some trees. A gag involving a fashionably dressed woman wearing enough bullets to blow up a small town is pretty great too.

[swo17]

Do you happen to have an English subbed copy? If not, how much would you say you miss without understanding the dialogue?

[knives]

The copy I've found is Swedish subbed and a few words overlap with English so it's easy to get a general idea, but I didn't find the dialogue vital to understanding the film.

[Tommaso]

I agree with knives two posts above: it's time to finally push some favourites, and I'll try to do this regularly in the coming weeks. But I'll start off with a little detour...

I've been trying to come to grips a little more with the French cinema recently, and ended up with some more Julien Duvivier films. First, Maria Chapedelaine (1934): a nice film set in French Canada about a young woman torn between three men, one of them Jean Gabin in one of his very first leading roles and already really impressive. Great images of the Canadian landscape, an exciting montage sequence when one of the characters talks about the life in the big city reminding me of Murnau, and fine acting and cinematography all around. Next, La charette fantome (1939), Duvivier's take on the same Selma Lagerlöf story that spawned Sjöström's "The Phantom Carriage". This isn't bad, well acted and filmed again, but it did impress me considerably less than the silent version for some reason I can't really fathom. Third, one of Duvivier's few American films: The Great Waltz (1938). This is Hollywood's take on the story of waltz composer Johann Strauss', and as a biopic it's probably nonsense (the composer torn between his wife, played by Luise Rainer and a lover, played by the great singer Miliza Korjus in a ravashing performance which got her an oscar nomination), but the film is a marvellous invocation of the old Austrian world seen through American eyes. A brilliant sequence in which Strauss gets the idea for one of his waltzes by picking up sounds he hears in the forest, an equally brilliant montage moment involving an outdoor dance, and finally an end sequence directed by Josef von Sternberg (uncredited). The film has style a-plenty, and would be one of my favourites if it were not for the fact that nobody did films on Vienna better than the Viennese themselves, which brings me to my topic...

The Great Waltz was co-written by the celebrated Austrian scriptwriter Walter Reisch, and Reisch also wrote the script for one of my favourite films ever: Maskerade, directed by the great, great Willi Forst in 1934. Hang on, you say you've never heard of Forst? Well, Forst was probably the foremost exponent of the genre of the 'Vienna film' in the 30s and 40s, first as an actor and singer, and especially as a director a little time later. His first film as a director, "Leise flehen meine Lieder" from 1933 was famously quoted by Ozu in "Late Spring", but it was really his second film Maskerade which brought him international acclaim (it was hugely successful abroad and was even remade in an English version) and fame. And for a reason. I wrote a little bit more extensively about the film elsewhere, so I don't want to repeat myself too much here, but let me say that the film heaps layers and layers of meaning on its apparently 'light' plot, and at once lovingly recreates and mercilessly analyzes all the nostalgic ideas about the 'old Vienna'. And it's absolutely stunning visually: glorious sets, a fantastic ball scene right at the beginning, camerawork that can only be called amazing and easily rivals anything that Ophuls did both in the 30s and later in his final quartet of films (Ophuls is indeed the only real comparison I can think of). And then there's the actors: Paula Wessely became a big star with this film, but even more impressive is Anton Walbrook (still named Adolf Wohlbrück at the time), who probably gives the greatest performance of his career here, or at least one that is as subtle and stylish as those in "The Red Shoes" and "La ronde".

Really, it's a film that not only warrants repeated viewings, but perhaps even requires them to come to terms with all the subtleties of Reisch's script and Forst's direction, and all I can say is that Maskerade will certainly be among my Top Three for the list (it has even managed to push down "La regle du jeu" to the fourth place...). The film is available on dvd from the Austrian Hoanzl label without any extras, but thankfully with a very good transfer. Unfortunately it's unsubbed, but a custom-subbed version is floating around, too. Try to see this by all means, folks, it's a real treat.

[swo17]

Thanks, Tommaso. I was just about to have a Duvivier session this next week, and I already had seven of '30s films on a "to watch" list, but I guess I'll have to add a couple more. Never seen any of his films before, so I guess this will be one of those initiations by fire.

[the preacher]

Really, it's a film that not only warrants repeated viewings, but perhaps even requires them to come to terms with all the subtleties of Reisch's script and Forst's direction, and all I can say is that Maskerade will certainly be among my Top Three for the list (it has even managed to push down "La regle du jeu" to the fourth place...). The film is available on dvd from the Austrian Hoanzl label without any extras, but thankfully with a very good transfer. Unfortunately it's unsubbed, but a custom-subbed version is floating around, too. Try to see this by all means, folks, it's a real treat.

Don't worry, Maskerade remains high on my list since the translation into Spanish.

[knives]

I agree with knives two posts above: it's time to finally push some favourites, and I'll try to do this regularly in the coming weeks. But I'll start off with a little detour...

I hope this means you've seen my little Finnish masterpiece. I'm basically going to spend all of the final month hunting down the Duvivier's and the occasional Borzage with this and the next month having me attempting to get through my kevyip (about 20 features strong with a large number of shorts). I really hope that when I do look Epstein's Chanson d'Armor is findable. No matter what though I have over a hundred more options now than when we started this part of the project.

[Siddon]

What a great topic, at first I thought that their would be no way I would come up with 50 titles from the 30's but as it so happened I was trying to watch all the best picture nominee's from the 1930's for the last few months and I have seen 70 out of the 90 eligible films. I didn't think I could go through but I found this time period to be really addictive and the quality of films to be much higher than in the 1940's and 1950's.

The thing that really surprised me was how good films that today would be considered "racist". A film like Anthony Adverse which is an epic tale in every sense of the world, but one of the twists in the story is that the character becomes a slave trader. You then have films like The Good Earth and Captains Courageous where the lead actors, Paul Muni and Spencer Tracey changed race. Both films are great, Captains may make my top ten. And then you have Paul Robeson's The Emperor Jones, written by Eugene O'Neill, that on one hand is very offensive but on the otherhand, is a really epic and interesting film.

[reno dakota]

I was trying to watch all the best picture nominee's from the 1930's for the last few months and I have seen 70 out of the 90 eligible films.

We have a list project for that, too, in case you're interested.

[movielocke]

Here's one of my favorites of the thirties, a very underseen fascinating American made studio financed film.


Eskimo, the first film to win the best editing oscar is an absolute treasure of a find. W.S. Van Dyke shot the film almost entirely in the native language of the Inuit. Intertitles are used instead of subtitles and like the late-silent films from Ozu, these intertitles are used while people are talking, meaning they often start a sentence, keep talking while it flashes to the intertitle, and then back into the scene. It's disrupting at first, but works tremendously by the film's end.

The film presents a title at the beginning which says other the Mounties, all the people in the film are non-actors speaking in their native language. And then the film goes on to incredible scene after scene. The lead actor, playing Malu/Kripik delivers a remarkable coherent and complete performance, he’s aided by a story that gives his character a powerful dramatic arc. In many ways, the film reminds me of the neo-realist films of Italy's post-war period.

The film features two editing showcases: scenes hunting caribou and whale (or perhaps a manatee, it was hard to tell). The whale hunt in particular is impressive as we see them reel themselves into the whale they've harpooned (which is still swimming away, until their boats are literally on top of the thrashing, exhausted whale, and once it is so worn out it is defeated, one of the Inuit jumps out of the boat, onto the whale to deliver the killing blow.

But it is the story that is phenomenal for the thirties—especially for a Major Studio (MGM) film--I'm going to describe it in detail because the film is so hard to find. Note, the presentation of the Inuit sexual customs is dubious at best, but I won't cast judgement on it without knowing more.

Mala and his wife journey to meet a white man's ship to trade furs for new goods. Mala gets a gun and cartridges, his wife wants iron needles for sewing. The white captain decides to keep Mala's wife overnight, though Mala has not offered this or been asked.

Mala is furious but relents, as another Inuit (who speaks English) says to him, "White Man always right." We then see the captain forcing copious alcohol down Mala's wife until she is drunk and laughing and then topless in bed, trying to protect her necklace from the rapacious captain (you don't see anything more than bare shoulders, naturally). She stumbles back into Mala's igloo the next morning, still drunk. Mala wants to leave but is convinced to stay; he extracts a promise that no white man is to touch his wife from then on.

Spoiler

Mala is off whale hunting, and after the hunt is successful the ship celebrates. The captain, drunk, orders his sailors to go steal Mala's wife from their igloo, he says, brazenly, "I promised him nothing." since we heard him promise explicitly to leave Mala's wife alone, this is an especially jarring presentation (and feels exceptionally authentic and realistic). After dragging the screaming woman back to his ship, the captain pushes her against a wall tilts her head back and pours alcohol down her throat. She slinks away the next morning from the captains bed, still staggering and does not head back to the igloo, instead she heads out onto the tundra and collapses across a snow bank.

One of the younger Inuit is out hunting, he sees her laying there, and from his perspective she looks like an animal (all furs) he shoots her, twice and then despairs over what he's done.

Mala returns from his hunt, finds everyone silent. He finds the Inuit who killed his wife in his igloo. The Inuit tells him that the white men had taken Mala to the ship and then shot her and left her in the snow.

Mala is furious. He goes to the ship with a steel harpoon he had just traded for and tells the captain, "I came to return your harpoon" then lunges and fatally harpoons the captain with it. The captain manages to get his knife into Mala, which Mala pulls out and lets fall to the floor.

Mala leaves, returns to his people; he is distraught and haunted. He successfully leads his people in a massive caribou hunt (probably the film's most impressive feat of editing) but he does not want a new wife. He goes to a hilltop to pray. There a hawk flies by, calling "Kripik!" Renewed, he takes this hawk cry as a new name for himself, Mala is no more. And he takes a new wife as well. A woman he had previously refused because he still felt for his wife.

Cut to the Mounted Police establishing a base in the region. They ask of any outstanding crimes. An argument ensues, one Scottish man says there's naught they should be investigating, besides, the Inuit code of morality is superior to White Man's. This incenses a Canadian seated next to him, who tells the story of a dumb Savage Indian named Mala who killed a white captain. The Mounties head out to arrest Mala.

Kripik goes out on a hunt with a companion and they see a wrecked sled. They begin digging and uncover two white men, the mounties. Kripik, disgusted, gets up to leave, his companion runs after him and says, "they still have life!" Kripik says, "So?" then relents and they rescue the men. Kripik and the men become great friends until the Inuit who spoke English arrives at the village and points out the Kripik is the Mala the mounties seek. The mounties say, "it's a dirty trick but we've got to do it, tell Mala that unless he comes back with us our Great Leader will cut off our food and we'll starve." And Kripik, to protect his Mounty friends, relents and agrees to accompany them.

Cut to some time later the superior officer arrives to question Mala. He's disgusted his men are out of uniform and that prisoner is not secured, rather Mala is out hunting, which has what kept the outpost from starving. The superior officer is not amused. Just before Kripik returns to the outpost he gets word from his people that game has been scarce and most of the village has left to go to the white men, but his family has stayed behind and is slowly starving.

Kripik returns to his outpost to tell them he has to return to provide for his family, the commander is outraged and orders the Mounties to clap Mala in irons that night. Kripik is betrayed, and overnight bloodily (which we indeed see and it's fairly grusome for the thirties) works his hand free from the manacle. He takes a gun, but grabs the commander's by mistake (which we heard earlier was a smaller caliber weapon than the standard weapon used by the Mounties and Kripik).

Unable to hunt, Kripik has to kill his sleigh dogs one by one to try to make the 500 mile journey back to his family. Finally he collapses, walking across the tundra, no dogs left and a lone wolf comes to attack him, they have a vicious hand to hand fight and the exhausted Kripik manages to kill the wolf with his bare hands before collapsing next to it.

The next morning his family discovers him and takes him back to the village. But the Mounties have nearly caught up and the next morning the Mounties are seen approaching.

Kripik bids a tearful goodbye to his family and says he will go to his death as a hunter, and prepares to walk out onto the ice to die. His wife comes next to him and says she will go with him. They walk towards the ocean. The mounties chase them and call after. Kripik and his wife go onto an iceberg and begin floating out to sea, one of the Mounties, who Kripik had earlier saved, raises his gun and prepares to fire. his finger tightens on the trigger. Then he lowers his gun and says he can't do it. Kripik and his wife sail into the sun, to die together. (incredible they got away with what amounts to a suicide!).

For a mainstream MGM film this film is remarkable and one of the essential films of the 1930s. Absolutely incredible and unexpected in every respect, it’s a pre-code film in the post-code era. The Editing oscar for Conrad Nervig was extremely well deserved!

[ArchCarrier]

Totally off-topic, so please forgive me, especially because Eskimo sounds like a great movie, but whenever I read about Inuit and movies I'm reminded of this funny story from Jean-Jacques Annaud about Quest for Fire:

[...] So the voices of the Ivaka - that's all Inuit in the film?
Entirely, yes. And Anthony Burgess never knew that! He kept telling everyone he invented that language. He didn't. It was Inuit! [Laughs] Now for the best part of the story. I'm scouting locations in Greenland several years later and I discover that in most houses people have only a few videos but thev usually have Quest for Fire! So I'm very flattered. I'm big in Greenland! [laughs] But then, after a while, I see so many of them I'm intrigued, because even in small Inuit settlements near the Arctic Circle, if there is a television set and a VCR, the one cassette they seem to have is Quest for Fire. So, I start to let it be known, diplomatically, that I'm the guy who made that film! And then I start asking around.

Why all these people are so interested in Early Man...?
Exactly! Well, I find out why and I realize something: that those guys, those Inuits, I brought down to Toronto to do my looping had a great time! What they looped was not what I had told them to say, but the worse possible insults and dirty language you can imagine - in Inuit! And that's why everyone loves Quest for Fire up there. It's the only movie they've ever seen that has Inuit in it, and all the Inuit is about fucking seals!

[Tommaso]

I agree with knives two posts above: it's time to finally push some favourites, and I'll try to do this regularly in the coming weeks. But I'll start off with a little detour...

I hope this means you've seen my little Finnish masterpiece.

Not yet, though I've seen that you made it a swapsie officially, so I guess I'll have to, even if it's unsubbed. But that means that you will also have to see at least one of my two swapsies (forthcoming, Maskerade isn't one of them, although it has my highest recommendation...).

Anyhow, I watched Hecht's Crime without passion last night and am rather amazed, quite regardless of the Vorkapich opening, as the film is certainly very intense and extremely dark and cynical in mood. Rains' consience (or rather 'dark spirit') seen as a vision is more than just a nice touch, as it furthers the intensity quite a lot. The 'Furies opening' is also more than a gimmick, because it considerably creates a frame of mind and expectation for the viewer. As this is a Paramount film, I really wonder why it wasn't included in Universal's pre-code set, as it would have been a real jewel among the mostly mediocre films there. And pre-code it must be, despite being released in 1934; both the Vorkapich sequence and Rains' character would have been completely intolerable under Hayes, I suppose.

[swo17]

I've seen that you made it a swapsie officially, so I guess I'll have to, even if it's unsubbed. But that means that you will also have to see at least one of my two swapsies

Actually, I listed it in the first post given the strong language knives used to describe it and nothing more. (He is free to ask me to change this if desired.) Just to clarify, I only ever meant for the swapsie section to be a place where strong recommendations were shared between list participants, with no formal requirement that you reciprocate in watching or commenting on other members' picks. (Though it is of course strongly encouraged that you try to seek out all the ones that are available to you.) Hopefully to avoid further confusion, I've changed the name of this section to "Forum Member Spotlights," which I stole from the Western list project.

[knives]

I'm fine with that, it's not top ten material (I say that now) but it's so good that everyone should give it a try.

[matrixschmatrix]

I know I'm really going to have to explain La Marseillaise though. Basically for me it's the movie that proves Renoir's reputation. More than anything else it paints a humanist picture where no man is truly a villain, they're just stuck in unfortunate beliefs or situations. A character can act like a real bastard, but when push comes to shove he'll tip his hat to those who put forth the effort. An other way of phrasing things is that it's absolutely shocking for a Frenchman to make a movie about the revolution, pick a side, and than give just as much warmth to the opposition.

I finally cracked open my Lionsgate Renoir set, so I've just finished La Marseillaise- I think it's probably my least favorite Renoir that I've seen so far, but it was interesting enough that I'm glad to have watched it.

There were parts that seemed especially strong, and enormously Renoir-esque (is that a word?)- I particularly liked the way pettiness kept overcoming people's broad, revolutionary sentiments. Louise Vauclair, the speaker during the revolutionary meeting, beginning her speech with a seemingly sincere wounded anger, and slowly becoming delighted by her own eloquence and the crowd's reaction to it, the revolutionary who's zeal to march on Paris is borne mostly out of a desire to hang out with his buddies and see the sights, etc- there are a lot of little grace notes that change the impact of something like the aristocrats more concerned with the gavotte than with the war in Prussia, which would normally be a sort of stereotyped symbol of decadence, into a trait that is actually fairly charming.

The familiar Renoir sense that even when people are shitty, it's just because they were put in a position where that was what they needed to be- that's all over the place, and it's always nice to see a historical drama where there's a greater focus on people than on recreating battles and big events. It's interesting to put this next to the Grand Illusion, too- it's a similar conflict of aristocrats, lower classes, and Germans, with the sides a bit reshuffled, and there's a similarly distanced approach to the actual fighting.

In spite of all the interesting aspects, though, I don't think La Marseillaise is a great movie, the way almost all the other Renoir I've seen is. I think the vignette style doesn't play to what I see as one of his major strengths- though he does hop back to a few different characters repeatedly, you don't really get to see his mastery at nuanced characterization, nor the elegant design of something like Rules of the Game. It feels disconnected, and overlong, as though you could cut quite a few pieces out without greatly reducing the impact of the movie. It also feels somewhat like it's reaching for something it never quite grasps. In the second half, it also falls into a pattern of historical moment followed by comedically petty moment, over and over- it's a technique I like, but it got a bit redundant, and in some cases the petty moments were pushed far enough to seem childish, rather than more broadly human.

Spoiler

There's also a sense of Hollywood melodrama when Bomier dies- he's the only character we've seen discussing his future, the only one with any relationships outside of the other soldiers, and the bit at the very end has a 'let's win one for the Gipper' sense about it.

But I'm glad I watched it. If nothing else, I always enjoy the bathos of looking at a huge historical moment and focusing on someone in the background bitching pettily- and it's sort of fascinating to me that Renoir manages to mix that with scenes of genuine grandeur, like crowd of soldiers singing the title song (which has one of the first really interesting camera moves of the movie to go along with it) without making the whole thing seem like a farce. The end is interesting, because it contains both a sort of ultimate statement of Renoir's humanism- standoffs between troops that end in hugs and joy rather than bloodshed, and a sense of revulsion at all deaths, regardless of side or justice- but it's also really easy to read as a warning about the Nazis, an admonition to push past France's internal disagreements and go and fight the Germans, which isn't something I expect from Renoir.

[the preacher]

I wonder if anyone has in mind a Sirk film, Zu neuen Ufern in particular is a favorite of mine.

[Tommaso]

I actually like Sirk's, or rather Sierck's, German films a lot. Not a big fan of Zarah Leander, though, so Zu neuen Ufern isn't a particular favourite of mine, though it's fine. The easily available Das Hofkonzert is rather standard light Third Reich operetta fare, but it has its charms. Anyhow, I would certainly recommend Stützen der Gesellschaft, a visually impressive Ibsen adaptation with Heinrich George, and also the later Leander film La Habanera with its wonderful evocation (certainly idealized) of Spain. And I hear nothing but good things about Schlussakkord, which I finally managed to track down in an unsubbed copy recently, but I haven't watched that one yet.

[the preacher]

I'm dying to see Schlussakkord too.

[Murdoch]

Anyhow, I watched Hecht's Crime without passion last night and am rather amazed, quite regardless of the Vorkapich opening, as the film is certainly very intense and extremely dark and cynical in mood. Rains' consience (or rather 'dark spirit') seen as a vision is more than just a nice touch, as it furthers the intensity quite a lot. The 'Furies opening' is also more than a gimmick, because it considerably creates a frame of mind and expectation for the viewer. As this is a Paramount film, I really wonder why it wasn't included in Universal's pre-code set, as it would have been a real jewel among the mostly mediocre films there. And pre-code it must
be, despite being released in 1934; both the
Vorkapich sequence and Rains' character would
have been completely intolerable under Hayes, I
suppose.

I agree with you about the precode set, not
including Crime Without Passion was a real missed
opportunity. I like your take on the opening, it
makes the film into a sort of Naked City style "this is
just one of many crimes within the city" and
certainly sets the right tone. The film may be the
darkest precode I've seen, although I'm light in my
gangster film knowledge so there are likely plenty
out there that one-up Rains' sadism here. My
initial disappointment came from expecting the
rest of the feature to match the opening stylistically
although I can't imagine any studio that would
back such a film!

[knives]

Finally got off my ass to see Children in the Wind which is basically L'Enfance nue, but somehow even better and mixed with that Shimizu sympathy that makes the whole world seem stable even as it's falling apart as in here. I don't think I've seen anything from Japan that so accurately and universally describes childhood as this film.

[Steven H]

I've been lurking this discussion and just wanted to say thank for the recommendations, especially to knives for L'idee and Tommasso for Ludwig Berger's work, particularly Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht. I really just want to add that I hope a few more other than I will have hunted down Yamanaka's Tange Sazen & The Pot Worth a Million Ryo because that one will be figuring highly in my list for me (I shared some adulation for it in the Humanity and Paper Balloons MoC thread, which pretty much went like "oh my God! Great! etc!")