Monthly Archives: June 2019

  • Madame de…

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Max Ophüls (1953)

    As the ellipsis suggests, we never know the full name of the aristocratic title character, though we do know she’s called Louise.  Max Ophüls teases to the very end:  the closing shot, in a church, shows a shrine containing a lighted candle, a pair of earrings and a card which reads ‘a gift from Madame de-’.  The frame cuts off the rest of the name.  In the film’s opening sequence, Ophüls tantalises in a different way.  While Louise’s voice is heard from the very start, she takes time to appear.  She’s a pair of hands – appraising and caressing her jewellery, furs and gowns – until the camera gradually reaches and reveals the beautiful face of Danielle Darrieux.  Louise, who needs urgently to raise money to pay debts incurred by her extravagant lifestyle in Belle Époque Paris, is struggling to decide which of her possessions to sell – she’s so fond of them all.  She eventually decides on a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings, a wedding gift from her husband.

    She leaves the house hurriedly and heads for the bijouterie where her husband made the purchase some years ago and she’s become a valued client.  After initial hesitation, quelled by the first in a series of tactical fainting fits that Louise resorts to, the jeweller Rémy (Jean Debucourt) agrees to buy back the earrings.  The narrative of Madame de… is based, like the change-partners carousel of Ophüls’s La Ronde (1950), on a leitmotif:  the earrings’ journey – from one owner to another, across Europe and back.  They repeatedly return to Rémy, who repeatedly sells them to Louise’s husband Général André de … (Charles Boyer).  André delivers a key line when he tells his unhappy wife that, ‘Our conjugal bliss is a reflection of ourselves:  it’s only superficially superficial’.  That last phrase applies to the film’s opulent surface and to its story, which describes the transformation of a shallow, pampered (and childless) woman into one who eventually is passionately desperate.  Each exchange of the earrings seems to mark a further deepening of her emotional involvement.  In the climax to Madame de…, as Louise arrives, too late, to intercept a duel between her husband and her Italian lover, the high-ranking diplomat Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio De Sica), she faints for real.

    Critics as hard to please and inclined to disagree with each other as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris concurred on the outstanding excellence of Ophüls’s film.  BFI has included it in this month’s programme, marking the centenary of Kael’s birth, of films that she championed.  She described Madame de… as ‘perfection’; Sarris went still further in calling it ‘the most perfect film ever made’.  It flows meticulously and is hard to fault – unless, that is, you find Louise’s plight uninvolving.  I have to confess that, as I watched, I kept wondering if I’d seen this supposedly unforgettable masterpiece before.  (If I had, it wasn’t that long ago; it would have been at BFI and therefore between the start of 2003, when I joined, and early 2008, when I started writing notes on what I saw.)  It wasn’t until the sustained familiarity of the pistols-at-dawn climax and Louise’s collapse that I was reasonably sure this was a second viewing.

    Why so lukewarm?  I guess partly because of the classism, which not only assumes engagement with the romantic torments of the highly privileged but also characterises the lower orders, when they do appear, at best perfunctorily and at worst derisively (a couple of guards having a conversation about ‘beans for dinner again’).  Danielle Darrieux’s physical development as Louise is remarkable:  she ages outside and inside.  As her insistently possessive husband, Charles Boyer is, as often, impressive:  he has a strongly expressive moment when André, after seeing his wife off at a railway station, walks back along the platform.  Both performances are easier to admire than to feel much about, though.  The charms of Vittorio De Sica’s well-fed, somewhat vain Donati eluded me.  The actor I enjoyed most was Serge Lacointe, who appears briefly as the jeweller Rémy’s teenage son, and looks rather excited that a lady has fainted in the shop.  The film was released in the US as The Earrings of Madame de…  The screenplay, by Marcel Achard, Ophüls and Annette Wadamant, is adapted from a 1951 novella by Louise de … Vilmorin.

    12 June 2019

  • Emil and the Detectives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Emil und die Detektive

    Gerhard Lamprecht (1931)

    Erich Kästner’s famous children’s novel was published in 1929 – this was the first screen adaptation of Emil and the Detectives and also one of the first sound films made in Germany, by UFA.  Kästner’s story is fairly simple and straightforward; Gerhard Lamprecht’s version runs a brisk seventy-three minutes.  As well as being very enjoyable, it’s visually impressive in various ways.

    The young hero Emil Tischbein (Rolf Wenkhaus) travels on his own from his home town of Neustadt to Berlin, to visit his grandmother and cousin.  His widowed mother (Käthe Haack), who works as a hairdresser, has saved 140 marks for Emil to deliver to grandma (Olga Engl).  He’s excited about the expedition but conscientious about his mission.  On the train journey, Emil’s compartment empties out and he’s left alone with a (highly) suspicious-looking man (Fritz Rasp), who introduces himself as Herr Grundeis.  Emil nervously leaves the compartment to see to an extra precaution:  he pins the money into the inside pocket of his jacket.  When he returns to his seat, however, he succumbs to an offer of sweets from his sinisterly smiling fellow passenger.   The sweets are drugged; Emil falls asleep – and into a nightmare, in which a shape-changing Grundeis stars, to alarming effect.  The dream has potent flavours of the German expressionist cinema that one thinks of as echt Weimar.  This sequence alone is enough to justify Lamprecht’s film’s place in BFI’s current Weimar season, different though it is in many ways from the classics of the period.

    Emil wakes to find the money in his jacket pocket gone, along with Grundeis, but catches sight of the thief as the train arrives in Berlin and resolves to follow him.  On the street outside the railway station, Emil meets a boy called Gustav (Hans Joachim Schaufuss), who offers to help and is the start of the gradually accumulating pack of children ‘detectives’.  They also include, as an honorary girl member and semi-humorous romantic interest, Emil’s cousin Pony Hütchen (Inge Landgut:  in the same year, she also played the little girl murdered by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M).  Posing as a bellboy at the hotel where the villain checks in, Emil eventually works out that the stolen money is hidden in the bowler hat the thief so seldom removes.  Next morning, Emil slips soporific sweets into his breakfast coffee and, when Grundeis says he wants just water, into his glass.   Emil can only watch in dismay as Grundeis starts to use the water for gargling – it’s the film’s most graceful sight gag.  ‘Operation Emil’ soon succeeds, nevertheless.  Not only does Emil recover the money, which a bank manager (Georg H Schnell) identifies as the boy’s through the pinholes in the notes.  The massed ranks of junior detectives pursue Grundeis as he tries to escape; he’s arrested and identified as a notorious bank robber whom the police have long been pursuing.  Emil receives a thousand mark reward – more than enough to buy his mother the hairdryer she so badly needs for her work.  He returns to Neustadt in triumph, along with his hordes of helpers.  Lamprecht and the cinematographer Werner Brandes capture splendidly this chaotic, happy crowd scene.

    Two problems watching – one minor, one major.  Opening titles explain and apologise that, although the film has benefited from restoration, some technical flaws remain.   These flaws aren’t a major problem but the grey English subtitles, which aren’t a consequence of antiquity, are – a tiring challenge to read.  It’s as well there are plenty of stretches with little or no dialogue.  As a 1931 release with a cast dominated by children and young teenagers, Emil and the Detectives is also inevitably shadowed by what was about to happen in Germany.  There are several reminders of this, thanks to the location filming in Berlin and to the personnel involved.  The screenplay is by Billy (credited as Billie) Wilder, who left Germany for Paris, then Hollywood, when Hitler came to power.  Although uncredited, Emeric Pressburger also had a hand in the screenplay; he moved to Britain two years later.  In May 1933, the works of Erich Kästner, a pacifist and vocal opponent of the Nazis, were among those judged ‘contrary to the German spirit’ and destroyed in book burnings.

    It was striking to see the film at BFI then go home and watch a couple more episodes of the television serial Babylon Berlin (2017).  Another crime story set in the last years of the Weimar Republic, it has themes and tone as dark as Kästner’s children’s victory story is optimistic but Babylon Berlin doesn’t leave the same aftertaste.  Its Berlin is a reconstruction; those on camera and behind it aren’t part of the actual Weimar.  Rolf Wenkhaus, whose blend of exuberance and nous as the ‘rascal’ Emil is delightful, has impeccably Aryan colouring.  He was fourteen when the film was released but his features are already shaping into those of a young man.  (The two things are particularly noticeable in a newspaper photograph of Emil, introducing the story of his and his new friends’ heroism, which appears briefly on the screen.)  In comparison, Hans Joachim Schaufuss’s Gustav is more of a child.  Both Wenkhaus and Schaufuss were killed in action during World War II.

    11 June 2019

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