Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • I’m No Angel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wesley Ruggles (1933)

    The opening sequence has a barker for a circus doing a big introduction for a singer-dancer called Tira.  The NFT3 audience isn’t going crazy for the star of I’m No Angel to make her entrance in quite the same way as the hordes of men yelling for Tira (they include all social classes and some great mugs) but the excited anticipation is basically the same.  And Mae West, from the moment she appears, puts on a wonderful show.   A show is what I’m No Angel is – as a comedy story it has its longueurs – but Mae West makes such a criticism irrelevant not just through her power as an entertainer but because of her amazing ability to look and sound avid and tired at the same time.  Even at the start, when Tira is singing and dancing to the circus crowd (she then becomes the show’s main attraction by putting her head in a lion’s mouth), her shimmying and come-ons are perfunctory.  You yawn during the dull bits – Tira, the lion-tamer who drives men wild, gets involved with New York socialites and sues one of them for breach of promise – but it feels all right to be intermittently bored because ennui, in eternal combination with lust, is a necessary part of Mae West.  She has more opportunities in I’m No Angel than in My Little Chickadee to express fatigued desire (she gets the sole story and screenplay credit here – although Lowell Brentano is credited with ‘suggestions’).  You hear this quality especially in the throaty little moan she gives before saying ‘You fascinate me’ to one of her suitors.

    To object that Mae West’s performing style is samey would also be to miss the point.  She’s very intentionally samey:  you see her getting herself into position to walk the bawdy walk that can call to mind an indolent tank.  West was forty when she made this film and she looks it – her seen-it-all overripeness is of course essential to her persona, as are the unvarying tone and tempo of her readings.  It may be the fact that she delivers all her lines in the same way that throws the words into relief and makes you appreciate them more.  The technique works especially well here in Tira’s repeated instructions to her black maid, culminating in the famous ‘Beulah … peel me a grape’.  Mae West always seems to hold back the punchline – her slow delivery, and the way she conveys quick-wittedness by drawling, are part of the magic.  (Talking about the film afterwards, you quote the lines and try to do it in her voice – and you always feel the line has come out of your mouth too quickly.)

    Mae West seems to be having more fun here than in My Little Chickadee.  As Sally said, you sensed a running competition there between West and W C Fields, which the star has no need to worry about in I’m No Angel.  She looks to be enjoying herself particularly – occasionally just about corpsing – in the banter with Beulah (Gertrude Howard) and her other attendants (Libby Taylor and an uncredited Hattie McDaniel as a manicurist).   She also revels in her scenes with a young Cary Grant, as Jack Clayton, the fiancé whom Tira sues.  On the evidence of this film Grant, even at this early stage of his screen career, had a charming lack of vanity, combining the matinee idol looks with a willingness to appear foolish (and terrific wit).  In the comic climax to the film – the breach of promise court hearing, where Tira ends up cross-examining a succession of ex-lovers called as witnesses for the defence – Clayton can’t stop smiling at her singular forensic technique.  You can tell it’s the actor as much as the character who’s having a good time.

    All the supporting cast – Edward Arnold, William B Davidson, Nigel De Brulier, Ralph Harolde, Russell Hopton, Gertrude Michael, Gregory Ratoff, Kent Taylor, Walter Walker – are good.  The songs are considerably better than in My Little Chickadee – particularly ‘No One Loves Me Like a Dallas Man’.   (We notice, as she puts the record on, that Tira’s collection also includes ‘No One Loves Me Like a Frisco Man’ and so on.)  The director Wesley Ruggles sometimes seems as much a spectator as the rest of us but he just about keeps things going and I enjoyed the camera movement down a series of shelves on which Tira keeps miniature framed photographs of the many men in her life next to ornaments of the animals they remind her of, including a skunk.

    5 March 2010

  • Ilo Ilo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anthony Chen (2013)

    In an ‘Academy Conversations’ piece on the AMPAS website, the thirty-year-old writer-director Anthony Chen, whose first feature this is, explains the autobiographical element of Ilo Ilo.  Chen tells the interviewer Brian Rose about the Filipino maid Teresa (‘Terry’) who worked for Chen’s family in Singapore for much of his childhood and whose eventual return home to the Philippines upset him deeply.  Chen says that he wanted to explore how it was possible for someone who wasn’t a blood relative to become so emotionally important to him.  (It seems wholly unsurprising for a child to get attached to anyone who’s a constant presence in their formative years but never mind.)   Jiale, Anthony Chen’s alter ego in the film, has his tenth birthday halfway through the story, which takes place in 1998 – when Chen himself would have been fourteen years old.   Chen has made this adjustment in order to make the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s a central element of Ilo Ilo.   The film is engrossing but relentlessly downbeat.   Each of the principal roles – Jiale, his mother Hwee Leng, his father Teck and the maid Terry – is well written and played.  None of the events that occur is in itself implausible.  But the cumulative effect of these events, in combination with the persuasive naturalistic acting, is to make you not only feel unhappy but also realise that Chen is determined to have nearly everything go wrong for the family and for Terry.   His decision to fuse the recollection of sadness in his own life with the larger traumatic experience of recession in one of Asia’s tiger economies is symptomatic of this piling on of misery.

    Ilo Ilo’s contrived pessimism is a serious limitation but this doesn’t detract from Chen’s handling of the cast or from his and their achievement in developing interesting characters.   The way in which Jiale and his mother, neither of whom is at all sympathetic at the start, become more complex and engaging, without undergoing a dramatically convenient personality change, is particularly impressive.  Jiale, an only child, is badly behaved at school and home – demanding, selfish, insensitive, perhaps borderline OCD.   (It’s for the audience to decide how he got to be like this; whether this is how Anthony Chen recalls his boyhood self or Jiale is seeking attention because his mother is pregnant or is responding to the tensions between his parents – or a combination of all three.)  The bond that develops between Jiale and Terry is convincing because the boy doesn’t turn much nicer as a result:  it’s just that you become more aware of his emotional neediness and what he’s prepared to do in order to satisfy this need.   Chen directs twelve-year-old Koh Jia Ler, who’d never acted before, with great skill:  the boy is both expressive and closed off.   Yann Yann Yeo is superb as his mother:  a secretary in a shipping firm, Hwee Leng spends much of her working day typing letters for her boss to send to other employees in the firm telling them their services are no longer required.  Hwee Leng realises at an early stage that her rather hopeless husband (Tian Wen Chen) has lost his job as a salesman – he gets paid-by-the-hour work as a security guard instead – although Teck doesn’t know she knows until much later.  The unsmiling Hwee Leng seems cold and humourless:  it’s hardly surprising that Jiale is increasingly drawn to the warm, amiable Terry (Angeli Bayani).  But Yann Yann Yeo gradually reveals layers of anxiety, resentment and a strong sense of responsibility behind Hwee Leng’s sullenness.  This makes the character compelling.

    There’s a particularly good moment when Hwee Leng sits on a bench in the street and a wind blows some leaflets around her feet.  She bends to pick them up:  the impulse to do this may be just an expression of this tetchy, tidy woman’s irritation at the mess the leaflets have made but when she looks at them they contain details of a self-help scheme that catches her interest.   Each of the four main characters attempts to find a way of making the money they need for their life to be happier.  Hwee Leng, to her chagrin, proves herself as much of a sucker as her husband has already shown himself to be.   For his part, Jiale reckons he’s found a key to winning the national lottery and Terry is trying to earn money in Singapore sufficient to fund the upkeep of her own son back home.   (I assume the film’s title refers to the province of that name in the Philippines.)   Although I found Ilo Ilo overdetermined, I’ll be interested to see what Anthony Chen and his fine cast, especially Yann Yann Yeo, do next.

    11 May 2014

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