Old Yorker

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle (1935)

    Neil Brand’s introduction in BFI was interrupted by a shout of ‘Get on with it!’  This was a lone heckler and Brand wasn’t thrown as Philip Kemp had been in NFT1 a couple of years ago[1] but you felt for him all the same.  There really is no justice:  this was one of the most polished, audible and informative intros I’ve heard among many at BFI – the impatient man in the audience didn’t know how lucky he was.  Neil Brand placed A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of Warner Brothers’ more usual and commercial products of the mid-1930s.   I guess that, in order to have any chance of box-office success, the Dream had to be spectacular:  viewed at this distance in time, its visual effects are unusual enough to be magical.  Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle and the cinematographer Hal Mohr (who won an Oscar for his work, as did the editor, Ralph Dawson) create an Athens wood with imagery that is phantasmagoric and somewhat Teutonic:  it occasionally suggests a live action Fantasia (which Disney made five years later).  You’re made to feel that you’re within the wood rather than observing it from a distance.  The rationing of the poetry, in the adaptation by Charles Kenyon and Mary C McCall Jr, is well judged.  There’s sufficient verse to mean that the words don’t take a back seat (although one or two of the wordless passages go on a bit too long); not so much of it to make the audience impatient with a film that’s all talk and hasn’t enough to meet the eye.   Some of the names on the credits reinforce your sense of witnessing a remarkable artistic hybrid:   Bronislava Nijinska choreographed the fairies’ dances; Mendelssohn’s music was re-orchestrated by Eric Wolfgang Korngold.

    Neil Brand explained how some of Warner Brothers’ contract players were given this opportunity to extend their range, most notably James Cagney, as Bottom.  He’s best when he acquires and eventually gets rid of the ass’s head – in between, there’s not a lot of substance or continuity of character.  There are moments during the Pyramus and Thisbe sequence when you feel it’s Cagney rather than Bottom who’s too full of his own importance as a performer.  As Puck, however, the fourteen year old Mickey Rooney is in every sense fantastic.  He has a young boy’s body but his physical and vocal agility get across the anarchic, quasi-malign aspects of Puck.  The fairies are played by children – some of them very young (Helen Westcott as Cobweb was only seven years old) and with individual personalities:  that helps to implicate the supernaturals in the story in a way that wouldn’t have happened if they’d been purely etherealised (and so neutralised).  Rooney has a belly laugh which, although overused, is extraordinary; his natural, self-confident line readings are a lesson to all the RSC and National Theatre actors (and directors) who – three-quarters of a century on from this movie – more crudely try to make Shakespeare ‘accessible’.  I thought the same of Dick Powell’s readings as Lysander, even though it seems from Wikipedia that everyone at the time (including Powell) thought he was miscast.  The lovers complement each other physically and temperamentally.  Olivia de Havilland, in her film debut, isn’t particularly likeable as Hermia but she contrasts effectively with the placid, very pretty Jean Muir:  her Helena is over-elocuted at first but Muir eventually builds a charming character.  Ross Alexander (who committed suicide only two years later, aged thirty) is Demetrius.   Victor Jory is a striking and impressive Oberon, Anita Louise a rather dreary Titania.   The Theseus (Ian Hunter) is also stronger than his other half Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale).  Along with Rooney’s, the standout performance is Joe E Brown’s:  as Flute and Thisbe he’s the true clown that Cagney tries and largely fails to be.

    20 June 2011

    [1] See note on Diary of a Country Priest.

  • Diary of a Country Priest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Journal d’un curé de campagne

    Robert Bresson  (1951)

    Philip Kemp’s introduction in NFT1 caused audience reaction like I’ve never heard at BFI before, with people voicing their annoyance that he was telling us too much about the themes and the story (and others, even more vociferous, telling them to shut up and ‘show some respect’).  I had mixed feelings about this.  Journal was being shown as part of the ‘Passport to Cinema’ season designed chiefly for students of the National Film and Television School and both the BFI’s monthly programme booklet and the handout for the film made clear that there would be an introduction.  On the other hand, it’s typical of hopeless BFI organisation that their guest speaker presumably hadn’t been told that the handout also carried the usual ‘spoiler warning’.  The hapless Kemp was at first inaudible, then discursive, then – after the audience participation – more or less bullied into a rushed, lame ending to his intro.

    Once the film began, I found it continuously difficult to concentrate – well beyond the standard slumber during the first few minutes of a BFI evening – and there’s no point denying that I was relieved when it was over.  But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it (and I was aware of that even when I was fighting to stay awake).   Robert Bresson – with Claude Laydu, the (at the time) non-professional who plays the unnamed young priest of the title – provides, in this adaptation of the Bernanos novel, sustained insights into the workings of a religious sensibility.  He illustrates and communicates how that sensibility causes the priest to experience the world – and what he believes to be God’s presence in his existence.

    We know from his voiceover what the priest’s inner thoughts are – and that they’re mostly miserable – but Laydu’s face expresses those thoughts with extraordinary power, in a way which seems to illustrate, in the priest’s few moments of optimism and sense of connection with his God, the operation and transfiguring effect of grace.   (The priest’s dying words are ‘What does it matter?  All is grace’.)   The other characters don’t seem to perceive what we in the audience can see in the priest and, compared with Laydu’s work, the playing of some of them is conventional or melodramatic.   As screen presences, they are salient but disconnected from the priest.  The effect is to make them seem less like human beings than like incarnations of states of minds or – in the priest’s view of things – souls.   Diary of a Country Priest dramatises psychic experience – the life of a turbulent mind that veers between feeling close to and completely separated from God.   What’s perhaps most remarkable about the film is that this mental agitation really does seem to occur in a type of time that’s different from linear time.  You don’t need to have had religious experience of this kind – or to have religious belief – in order to be impressed by what Bresson achieves.

    The young priest who, at the start of the film, arrives in Ambricourt, his new parish, is, for the most part, separated from the physical landscape in which he exists.  There are sounds of local life going on around him but they are distanced from, peripheral to his being.   The window frames through which he’s sometimes shown, the twisting branches of winter trees, which look to be constraining and confounding him – these too seem to express a spiritual condition.  The images are predominantly tenebrous and, when there are outbreaks of light, it’s not a comforting light – it’s harshly, demandingly bright.   Philip Kemp, responding to the audience complaints about giving away the plot, pointed out that we learn that the priest is ill within a very few minutes of the start of this 110-minute film.    (He subsists on a diet of bread and poor wine – and it transpires that he has inherited alcoholic poisoning:  according to the BFI handout, the disease was widespread in rural France in the first half of the twentieth century.)   It’s much later in the picture that we – and the priest – learn that he has stomach cancer.  The nature of his terminal illness may sound symbolically pat – a malign inner force that’s gnawing away at him – but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re watching the film.  One reason for this is that Bresson leaves unresolved the question of what is eating the priest:  the spiritual life or the viciousness of the material world or the interaction of the two.

    The sequence in which the priest rides as a passenger on a motor bike to the local station, and the conversation that ensues there, is, within the scheme of the film, unusual and really stands out.  It’s Olivier – the son of the aristocratic family at the heart of the priest’s rigorous relationship with the Ambricourt community – who gives the priest a lift.  Riding pillion, his arms round Olivier’s waist and his cassock flapping in the breeze, the priest is briefly in the world of physical sensation and normal human contact.  When they talk at the station, Olivier says he would have liked to be the priest’s friend and it’s a poignant moment:  it suggests to the priest the possibilities of life as a man of the world rather than a man of God.   The priest is leaving Ambricourt to visit a doctor, to learn that he has cancer.

    With Jean Ganet as Olivier;  André Borel (excellent) as the intelligently worldly senior priest who advises the young man;  Jean Riveyre and Rachel Bérendt as the Count and Countess; Nicole Ladmiral as their doomed daughter Chantal.    The impressive score is by Jean-Jacques Grunenwald; the fine cinematography by Léonce-Henri Burel.    Bresson himself wrote the screenplay.

    27 April 2009

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