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

[knives]

Pabst's Kameradschaft is playing on TCM at 3:00 A.M. EST today.

[Tommaso]

Interesting, I'd like to know whether they found a print that looks better than the German dvd (which is pretty bad) and which gets the 1.19 ratio right. There are lots of chopped heads on said German disc.

[Sloper]

Confession time: I think Oh Mr. Porter is funnier than any Marx Brothers film, and that the trio of Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt are a more cohesive and endearing comedy ensemble than Groucho, Chico and Harpo. A lot of great comedians adopt an inept, bumbling, awkward, tactless persona, but I'm not sure I know of one (at least from this era) who made a living embodying the kind of seedy, corrupt hypocrite that is Hay's stock in trade. He's like an ugly Inspector Clouseau, and with less professional credibility. Of course he still saves the day and foils the criminals at the end of every film, but he remains so gleefully contemptible and small-minded throughout it all; and it's this, weirdly, that makes you (or at least me) adore him and root for him. The same can be said for Marriott's proto-Old Man Steptoe and Moffatt's bolshy fat kid. I normally despise people who say things like this, but there's something very British about films that celebrate the (often quite accidental) triumphs of people who are basically rubbish in every respect. They're the sort of characters we ordinary rubbish spectators can really identify with. But it's hard to put into words what's so good about these films: ultimately, it's just down to great jokes (and some self-consciously awful ones) beautifully delivered.

Am I alone here? I know that Hay is one of those 'love him or hate him' figures, and it may well be that my fondness for him has something to do with the fact that I was a big Russ Abbott fan when I was seven. But as the deadline looms over the horizon, I urge everyone to at least try and see Oh Mr. Porter (a cut above the rest for its lovely evocation of a small train station in Ireland), or Ask A Policeman or Convict 99 (Where There's a Will is the only dud I've come across so far).

[matrixschmatrix]

I've just watched Freund's Mad Love, and my God, it's a killer.

I'm not generally entirely sold on 30s horror as a genre- I think I might be the only person around who couldn't find anything remarkable in Ulmer's The Black Cat- but this one had me in the first twenty minutes. First, it shows what is effectively an audience at a horror movie, largely smiling and enjoying themselves at theatrics that look suspiciously like something Universal might crank out on a lazy day, and then backhands you that both by showing the genuinely unsettling Gogol- half in shadow, looking like Orson Welles in old man makeup for Kane, staring out of his big alien eyes- and by contrasting the silly artificial horror of the stage with the genuine (and surprisingly hardcore) horror of a train wreck a few minutes later.

The movie won't let you gain your footing, and won't let you be the audience in that theater, laughing along because everything's been worked out and you know exactly how things are going to work. Here, the mad doctor is also a genuinely decent and compassionate man- his desire to help the little girl seems absolutely sincere (though less strong a drive than his insane lust for Yvonne)- as well as a fairly accurately drawn portrait of a stalker, and a man fixated on death. The murderer in the train, who is apparently so infused with evil that his hands will carry it out on their own, shows no outward sign of villainy whatsoever- he's not a bad guy, he's friendly, he just happens to have a different take on life and death than other people. The reporter, who seems like he should probably feel like as much a villain as anyone, comes off instead as a friendly guy trying to earn his living just like anyone else- he's a jerk, of course, but he's a jerk in an understandable way, and gets to be almost a hero by the end. There's a Renoir-esque refusal to judge anyone (aside from maybe Orlac's father) that hovers over the whole movie, and it feels both delightful and hugely unusual in the context of a horror movie.

Lorre, of course, is marvelous. I'm not sure I've seen him in this place before, a presence in between his babyfaced murdered in M and the gaunt, insinuating man he was by the time of The Maltese Falcon- he has a weight, and a self-assured confidence that isn't part of either of those poles. The childish side pops out sometimes, though, when Gogol is excited or pleased with himself, and you get the impression of a brilliant man whose personality has still some childish softnesses, because he has never been around anyone intelligent enough to challenge him. The line about being of peasant stock is key- the man has unlimited faith in himself, and none in anyone else, because he has essentially already done the impossible in overcoming class barriers. He can be cruel, and arrogant, because he has no sense of an outside check on his actions: it is clear from Lorre's performance that his Gogol would be baffled by the idea of asking anyone's opinion before doing much of anything. He lies without compunction about the hands, because he never considers that he might owe his patient the truth (or even that the patient might have an inner life of his own.) It's not that Gogol is a sociopath, or even the stereotype of the arrogant doctor who thinks he's God, he just constructs the world differently- just as the murderer does- because he's lonely, and isolated, and couldn't figure out what was going on in other people's heads if he remembered to try.

Gogol's narcissism is reinforced by the parallels with Pygmalion, of course- though he tells himself otherwise, he doesn't want a living Yvonne, he wants a vessel he can fill up with himself (although it's hard to feel otherwise about anyone who claims to be in love with someone they've never really met.) One of the cruel ironies of the movie is that even if Yvonne could return Gogol's love, and come into his life, he wouldn't be able to see much difference from the wax dummy- one way or the other, it's all in his head.

Obviously, in a Freund movie, things are going to look gorgeous- and this movie absolutely does, particularly with Gregg Toland behind the camera- but that's something that all the 30s horror classics I've seen did well, regardless of whether they grabbed me, so that doesn't seem as remarkable as it might. But this movie felt smart, and quick, and as deeply felt as any drama, and I didn't feel at any time that I had to put myself in a bubble of trying to enjoy it on terms other than my own. I had thought my list might wind up eschewing horror altogether, but this will certainly be on it, somewhere or other.

There's more I want to talk about- the terrifying metal hands and neck brace when Gogol is pretending to be Rollo (which recall Rotwang, but also have a special power in themselves), the motif of mirror shots, the way Orlac and his hands fit into the scheme of sympathy for every character, and the transpositions between real and simulacrum, the nasty jokes that are sketched in at the margins (like the cut to the police captain telling the car to slow down) - but this thing managed to do so much in its barely-over-an-hour running time that I'm going to have to watch it again just to figure out how it all fits together. It even managed to squeeze Porphyria's Lover in there.

I have to wonder, though, why in God's name is this so little known relative to the big tentpole horror classics? Not enough monsters? Colin Clive's terrible haircut?

[knives]

I absolutely love this movie, but the thing that unsettles me the most is those hands. I'm sure this has more to do with the plot than anything else, but Lorre's hands are so white and puffy like a marshmallow they cause me to stand in terror each time. Just the very silent movie way the story twists into a real fiction (appropriate enough since it was also a silent movie previously) is just so grotesque when you take even just a few seconds to think about it it becomes perfect. We were talking about the usage of real science earlier and by having a very real science at the center of the movie only makes it worse. Can you imagine a transplant changing you in any significant manner? That's just one of those primal fears that any exploration of will cause the spine to creep even when it's not done as great as here. I mentioned with Journey's End, but Colin Clive really is the only human to ever make these sort of hero roles compelling and boy does he succeed here. The performance nearly matches Lorre and I can't do it justice with words. Watch the film the four of you who haven't.

I also want to give a shout-out to The Devil-Doll which it shares a disc with for being great in a totally opposite sort of way. I honestly see it as Browning's masterpiece of the absurd freaks he always loved. The final scene between Barrymore and his daughter is the most touching thing in any of these early horror movies. That it hits these emotional and horror high notes so effectively while being a comedy in several respects (no one knew they wanted Barrymore in drag) is amazing. I'm the first to drudge sound Browning through the dirt, but his work here is so tonally perfect that the fact it makes no sense is practically an asset. Honestly it's worth several veiwings just for Barrymore who might even be a better muse for Browning's personalty than Chaney here. That whole set is golden really (though Doctor X bores me aside from the climax).

[matrixschmatrix]

As much as anything, Mad Love highlights the way that Clive's character really is profoundly affected by a change in his hands, and damn any mystical tendencies towards murder- he's lost his means of expressing himself. It's fairly subtly expressed, but from the accident up until the climax where his new skills come in handy (har!) he seems unable to think or feel anything coherently- he lived through his hands, so the change is like a lobotomy to him.

(tangential: I'm listening to the commentary, and it reminded me that Pauline Kael had also seen some connections between Mad Love and Kane. It also goes on a long, weird digression about how much Raising Kane sucked. What is it about critics taking whatever chance they get on whatever platform to go after Kael?)

[swo17]

I just rewatched Mad Love as well, and it is great. Another '30s horror film I love, which also doubles as a saucy pre-code, is Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I really like the source story to begin with, of a man struggling to reconcile his dignified impulses with his base ones, but Mamoulian's direction really cinches it for me. All of the POV scenes and especially the transformations are just done so inventively with more or less seamless special effects that are far more advanced than you'd expect for 1931. (Or rather, like a good magic trick, they are often shot in such a way that you are distracted from any lack of technical sophistication.) March is incredible in this, of course, and I really like the scenes of him and Hobart making love to each other (in '30s parlance) where their heads are so unnaturally close, even for two people having an intimate conversation, that it lends the scenes a sort of eerie, surreal (or, if you will, surreeeralie) quality. Not to mention, Miriam Hopkins was never sexier.

[knives]

Before I discuss the film I have to vent on Intermezzo's DVD which necessitates a remote. The main menu is just the chapter listings with no information on the setup. This is especially bad given that it defaults on no subtitles. What's worse is that there are four subtitle options. Luckily plain English is the first one, but all the same very annoying.

As to the actual film I think I liked it far more than it's qualities should allow. How the personalities of the characters are expressed through their hobbies just got me excessively giddy. We are introduced to everyone through an activity and how they're doing it puts the whole of their person on the table. Given that most of the characters play music the delicacies of the personality all the more clear. Long before I got to know Bergman's character I understood who she was in how she played the music. I wonder if this movie had a deep impact on the other Bergman since he does the same exact thing to an even larger extreme in Autumn Sonata? The sad seriousness of the father's first play at the violin does more to explain who we are watching than anything else throughout the film. In an instant I understood everybody.

Beyond the marvelous characters and how they are sketched the story provides such a great opportunity for the unhappiness of a gifted life to be expressed without it seeming like a bunch of rich people whining. The first really great scene is the birthday party which starts on an absolutely depressing note and with the help of some comedy is driven straight to the ground. We have this little girl celebrating her birthday as a bunch of drunken adults poke her with questions like a zoo exhibit and nobody her age is around. I'm sure this aspect was accidental, but the bizarre isolation of this child hurts me on such a level that I was forced to view the entire rest of the film through her eyes.

Things only get worse at the party when she's forced on stage to perform for these wild jackasses. Her father playing along only seals the deal and makes it a truly painful experience. This combines with the personality stuff allowing for the music to explain the characters' relationship perfectly. The little girl has to play catch up even as it's painfully clear that the father is the one that needs to slow down. It's as tense a scene as one built around music can be and only gets worse on the reprise. The moment repeats itself only with Bergman in place of the little girl ( a great segue into the rest of the movie) and again it's a painful experience for the female party. This time though it's based on passion, not talent. It not only affects the two playing, but also the little girl and that they can match each other makes it worse. Every beautiful not made me wretch and begging for someone to screw up. This syncing was unbearable and accomplished everything.

This lone scene may be the best movie I've seen for the list, but the rest of the movie has a hard time catching up. It's not that the love story is bad, but I find the potential of the Anne-Marie story to be so much greater. I shouldn't fault a film for not being the story I want though and in regards to it's wronged love story (poor, poor Bergman) it's absolutely fabulous covering all the bases and making me feel love for each character (even the father who I detest somewhat). This is as a great a film as they get.

[Wu.Qinghua]

A month ago or so, I claimed, that Salt of Svanetia is to be found on youtube, but only in incomplete form. This is no longer true. The owner of the channel has obviously uploaded the missing third part in the meantime. Kalatozov's film is definitively not my favourite 30s documentary (Misère en Borinage is leading my list at the moment), but I endorse zedz' recommendation.

[knives]

The Real Glory is horrifically and horribly racist with such think colonialism running through it's veins that when it turns into an anti-prejudice and slavery tract at the end it's impossible not to laugh at it. For the most part the movie plays out like the stupid older brother to Black Narcissus with Cooper as the one who is sympathetic to the natives in the worst possible way, but at the half way point when he gives this rousing speech on throwing off the shackles of oppression that these foreigners have placed on the natives and to run into the society of the Americans one has to wonder if this was all written with a straight face. There's no indication of otherwise, but damn if that isn't a more logical reason.

Beyond that though this is one of the better Hathaway films with Cooper and Niven giving typically charming performances even though the former has to spit out a hundred monologues and the later seems to be gliding on minimal effort. The main story manages to be really tense with PTSD (here just called fear) posing interesting complications and ample opportunity for military bureaucracy to do what it does best. The main love story isn't bad either coming about naturally enough and adding to the themes of the film in a way that the subplot doesn't feel token. Outside of those problems that just come with the setting the film is all together perfectly reasonable and I guess goes to show that the last year of this decade is really the best.

[colinr0380]

I did manage to watch Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Donbass) over the weekend as well, and will certainly be placing it highly in my 30s list. While it hasn't totally sunk in yet on just a couple of viewings (and one peruse through of the excellent Peter Kubelka re-synchronisation demonstration) I would probably not place it as highly as Man With A Movie Camera due to the more didactic nature of the material dealing with the exhortation to back breaking labour and overfulfilling your quotas in order to made Stalin's first Five Year Plan a success.

Yet the imagery is in some ways much more powerful - I particularly like the way that being a sound film lets Vertov use the whines and whistles of machines (or the thump of a giant hammer) as score. The first section of the film was quite astounding in its condemnation of the 'old world' (religion) about to be swept away by the new (the young and new technology such as the radio, bringing a wider world to their attention), especially when the believers in the churches were intercut with homeless people drinking themselves insensible - the scenes of the camera bowing along with the believers kneeling to kiss the feet of Christ followed by shots of a drunkard on a park bench struggling to stand upright and waving the camera away were full of passion and joy in their liberated blasphemy!

Then there are those scenes of the spires on the churches being pulled down (which, while it is not explicitly equated with them, get replaced with pollution belching chimneys in the later stages of the film - showing the new religion of industry taking hold) and the churches themselves stripped bare (I particularly love the way that the huge paintings of icons are being carried out and yet the viewer can barely see the people carrying them, so these religious figures looks as if they are gamboling out of the church of their own accord, as if they know that they are not wanted or appreciated by the crowd of onlookers they are pushing their way through!)

Some of the scenes calling the youth to action and "shock workers" made me think of the ironic way that extreme left and right wing ideologies both end up telling people that they have to take on the responsibility of working for themselves (I'm waiting for David Cameron to inevitably create groups of 'shock workers' for his Big Society project).

I think the most impressive sequences though are near the end of the film, when old ideologies have been removed and new ones have taken their place and have been accepted and Vertov can get down to the hypnotic fusion of man and machine together in harmonious performance of their tasks. This final section feels as if it is an expanded version of the 'work' sequence from Man With a Movie Camera, particularly the sequence from that earlier film of the woman folding up the cigarette boxes faster and faster, her actions sped up in camera so that she almost becomes a machine herself, and is happy to become a cog in the machine. In Enthusiasm I could really feel the intense effort being expended by all the workers in the factory and almost felt the heat from the foundries or the soot from the chimneys - the sense of the sheer human effort working towards one goal was kind of amazing, as well as rather frightening too in the single minded intensity with which it is presented. Although the film itself is always celebratory of the individuals involved in all the separate areas ofproduction that it focuses on, there never seems to be any interest in what is being produced - the end result, or understanding of the worker's role in a larger system, appears to be considered of less importance than the collective action itself and the celebration of the individual's small tasks within that process, as if to reaffirm that this task encompasses their whole world and everyone is happy for it to be so.

It is a very problematic film in some ways to assess from a modern perspective, but if you can accept the difficult ideological position of it, it is an extremely valuable one.

[swo17]

goes to show that the last year of this decade is really the best

This is perhaps a silly way of looking at things, but I just checked my provisional top 50 (presently more like a top 70) and an overwhelming amount of them come from 1931 and 1932. Like, it isn't even close. Couple this with how the pre-1920s and 1920s lists were heavily skewed toward the tail ends of those periods (1919 and 1929 especially) and you can see a pretty clear indication that movies just kept getting better and better until the Hays Code got in the way. This is of course just based on my own tastes though, and it will be interesting to see how the final list comes out in this respect. I know conventional wisdom is that 1939 was the best year ever or whatever. We'll see about that I guess.

[knives]

Probably because an overwhelming amount of the films I've seen have been from '39 I just get a better sense of balance for it and I value balance. Like the film I mentioned is only good, but I haven't had the chance for much good from '31 or '32 which seems to go to the extreme of best thing ever or Doctor X. I'll be able to be more scientific in about two weeks when I put together my provisional. Still have 18 in my Kevyip and who knows how many rentals.

[Wu.Qinghua]

It is a very problematic film in some ways to assess from a modern perspective, but if you can accept the difficult ideological position of it, it is an extremely valuable one.

I have to re-visit Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm yet, but I've recently seen Three Songs about Lenin anew and hold the opinion, that that essay is superior to 'Entuziazm'. I think, it's better organized, still very powerful and therefore it actually ranks in my top ten. You find it on an old Kino DVD as well as on Youtube.

Talking about documentaries and essay films, I'd also like to recommend these:

Misère au Borinage (Joris Ivens & Henri Stock, Belgium 1933)
I remember zedz having recommended Ivens' 'Philips Radio', but, like the director himself, I prefer this 30s documentary on the everyday living conditions of Belgian miners and their families as well as the repression by the police and the mining company they were suffering from, after they went on strike in the early thirties. In my opinion, this is the most impressive documentary on living conditions and social struggles which has been made during the depression (or the third period?) in the west (Though I beg you not to hesitate, but to contradict and relegate me to other films). Second in rank on my list at the moment, only beaten by Wu's Shennue/The Goddess.

Spare Time (Humphrey Jennings, UK 1939)
I am not that fond of 'SS Ionian', which has been recommended elsewhere, but I do like 'Spare Time' with its depictions of British working-class everyday leisure activities very much. I am not that happy with Jennings focussing on the respectable side of working-class activities that much, but I can see reasons for this and I do love watching (and hearing) that Mancunian Tommy Talker band rehearsing imperial postures anyway. Essential viewing, in my eyes, that is, if you can get hold of it - like 'SS Ionian', it's to be found in Volume 2 of the BFI's GPO box sets.

[zedz]

I concede that I will likely be alone in my appreciation of S.S. Ionian - it's a boring film, after all - but I fully endorse the recommendation of Spare Time (and Borinage, while I'm at it). It's a landmark British documentary and probably a much more plausible lightning rod for Jennings support in this decade. Fortunately, we should have the Complete Jennings on hand for the 40s list.

[knives]

Spurned on by Swo's comments I decided to set up my provisional and now I really hope he's right. Working just to a handful of films from 1932 I've already got a pretty amazing top 50 (Taris taking that last spot to give an idea). For probably the first time for one of these lists I'm really dreading having to actually dreading (well maybe that's an exaggeration) submit this thing.

[Gropius]

I remember zedz having recommended Ivens' 'Philips Radio', but, like the director himself, I prefer this 30s documentary on the everyday living conditions of Belgian miners

I'm also in the camp that prefers Philips Radio, but everything Ivens did was of interest - Nieuwe Gronden and The Spanish Earth are worthy of consideration too, although perhaps a bit news-reely (the latter has a good soundtrack co-arranged by Virgil Thomson, for whom see also the more obviously classic The Plow that Broke the Plains).

As for the Soviets, I remember preferring Enthusiasm to Salt for Svanetia, but haven't seen either recently (and need to look up Three Songs about Lenin). Of the less canonical British entries, Paul Rotha's Shipyard (on the Land of Promise set) will be making my list.

I think one of the things that makes the 30s a fascinating decade is the parallel development of the industrial/social documentary and the frothy studio musical, two apparently diametrically-opposed genres which exploited the possibilities of sound in often similar ways. They also share an emphasis on structures (whether the staging of dance numbers or the processes of heavy industry) that subsume and transcend the individual (most obviously in the case of Berkeley).

[Murdoch]

How would I list Douglass Crockwell's Glen Falls Sequence (available on the Unseen Cinema box, stills here), where the only dates I can find for it are the range of 1937-1946? The animation has different segments but I don't know what dates pertain to each.

[swo17]

I haven't seen that one (can check it out when I get home) but I believe the precedent in the past has been that for all of those films presented in the Unseen Cinema box (or I suppose any other set with a similar issue) with a wide range of release dates shown, we go with the earliest year cited (unless of course the film has a single year assigned to it on IMDb, and that isn't the case here). So yes, Glen Falls Sequence would appear to be eligible for the 1930s.

[Murdoch]

Nice, thanks. As this one will be ranking highly for me I suggest everyone seek it out, Crockwell uses the medium of paint to spectacular effect in it and it reminded me of some of McLaren's work.

[zedz]

Thanks for the tip. I don't remember that film at all. I did rewatch La Cartomancienne from that set, and while the content is pretty much your standard psychodrama psychobabble, there are a number of gorgeous plastic effects and it might well place for me.

[myrnaloyisdope]

I've been sidetracked a bit trying to get through a bunch of slapstick shorts from the 10's to the 30's, as my current schedule doesn't afford me much opportunity to watch features (nothing like watching a film in 20 minute chunks over the span of a week). As it stands the only 30's stuff I've been watching is Laurel and Hardy shorts from the massive UK box and while I generally enjoy them, the best ones seem to be the one's with a bit of malevolence towards others and escalating levels of violence and destruction. They certainly can do other less violent things well, but it seems they are at their best when they join forces instead of dragging each other down. 1935's Tit For Tat is a definite stand out, as the film takes a slow building approach and features Laurel and Hardy going toe to toe with Charlie Hall in the destruction of each others' respective store. The additional recurring gag with the shoplifter is wonderfully done as well and heightens the payoff without detracting from the rest.

Another interesting one is wonderfully bizarre Twice Two, with Stan and Ollie playing dual roles as each others' respective spouses. Neither one is particularly convincing and the dubbed female voices are initially a bit grating, but eventually they really start to fit and it of course builds to increasing tension between all parties and a fine payoff.

[knives]

Is the UK set good. It's one of many I've been considering buying (maybe after I finally get the Fields set).

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha, I've been putting off the Laurel and Hardy set just because I know that if I started getting completist with that I'd watch nothing else for weeks, but the Fields set is fucking killer.

[myrnaloyisdope]

For the price you really can't beat it. The transfers are solid from what I have seen and there is just too much good stuff in it to pass up. The colorized versions are pretty useless and there aren't any extras so that's a knock I guess, but at 25 or 30 quid it's a great price. So it comes highly recommended.