Old Yorker

  • 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

  • Late Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nisha Ganatra (2019)

    At the start of Late Night, Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is receiving some kind of lifetime achievement award for comedy.  In her acceptance speech, she expresses obligatory astonishment, asking why America should bestow such an honour on an Englishwoman.  The audience at the ceremony laughs contentedly even though Katherine’s knowing, borderline scornful tone makes for charmless delivery.  It’s hard to tell whether this is part of her performing persona (and recognised as such by her audience) or just the effect that Emma Thompson usually has when she’s doing sardonic.  At any rate, it’s the first in a succession of puzzles in Nisha Ganatra’s comedy-drama, written by and co-starring Mindy Kaling.

    Katherine, who first came to public attention as a young stand-up, has become an institution and a phenomenon – the only woman to host a long-running late-evening talk show on US television.  Its ratings have been in steady decline, though, and it’s not far into the film when the new-broom head of the TV channel (Amy Ryan, miscast again) informs her that the current season of the show will be Katherine’s last.  Committed to ‘excellence’ and implacably opposed to dumbing down, she has for years chosen to interview academics and serious politicians in preference to popular celebrities – but increasing numbers of people don’t want to watch, let alone listen to, Doris Kearns Goodwin or Dianne Feinstein.  Those two examples of her guests might suggest Katherine is keen to give air time to women with something to say yet she also has the reputation of not liking her own sex.  She strongly denies the charge, which appears to be based entirely on the team of scriptwriters for her nightly opening monologue being all-male.  She fires these writers at the drop of a hat, however.  When the latest vacancy occurs, Katherine, without enthusiasm, instructs her long-suffering producer Brad (Denis O’Hare) to hire a woman to the team.

    That’s how Molly Patel (Kaling) enters the picture – just at the moment that Katherine herself is told she’s fired.  Molly, who looks to be in her mid- to late thirties, has no previous experience of TV scripting. she works in quality control at a chemical plant in Pennsylvania but she does amateur stand-up, for which she writes her own material, and is an avid fan of the show.  Brad is interviewing Molly and it’s not going well for her until he takes a call from Katherine midway through.  In order to be able to say he’s done as she told him to, Brad hires Molly on the spot.  Once in the job, Molly is the only member of the team with constructive ideas of how the host might transform her public image and the show’s fortunes.  She recommends that Katherine, in spite of her aversion to all things Internet, should start doing person-in-the-street videos that can go, and might go viral, online; exploit social media; and, in her monologues, express her own views rather than speak the words that others have written for her.

    Emma Thompson, although she is throughout on top of her character rather than inside it, has some of her best moments in Katherine’s reactions to Molly’s nervous but determined and admiring attempts to persuade her to try new things.  When Molly tells Katherine how inspiring she’s found her comedy (at one point, Molly watches video of the young Emma Thompson doing stand-up, presumably in the 1980s, on her laptop screen), Katherine awkwardly replies, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but your earnestness can be very hard to be around’.  Mindy Kaling is likeable and shows in her face, though subtly, how often unkind remarks penetrate her defences.  There’s more authenticity in her acting than in her screenplay, though.

    Katherine’s alleged misogyny isn’t explored but serves a dual purpose that reflects Late Night’s approach more broadly.  It’s a handy set-up, designed to emphasise Molly in the scheme of the film.  Although introduced as one of Katherine’s idiosyncrasies, it also functions as a criticism of how American television actually and generally operates:  according to The Guardian, ‘Of all genres, US late-night TV remains [the most] dominated by male writers and hosts’.  Molly is a diversity hire – as was Mindy Kaling, born in America to Indian parents, when she joined the cast and writing team of The Office in 2005.  Kaling clearly knows what she’s writing about but her use of Katherine as a vehicle for critiquing media politics raises confusing issues that she and Nisha Ganatra, a Canadian who’s also of Indian descent and may well have faced issues similar to ones that Kaling has faced, aren’t interested in exploring.  Since Katherine is herself a woman in a man’s world and likes getting her own way, why does she have only men (and only white men) in her team of writers?  Because it provides a means of showing Molly isolated among male colleagues most of whom treat her with suspicion and derision.  It’s also a getting-your-own-back tactic:  these men are repeatedly humiliated by a strong female boss.

    The crisis of her impending sacking triggers urgent meetings between Katherine and the writers.  We’re meant to believe she hasn’t met the team for years – except to dismiss or, in one case, have sex with members of it (see below).  Even now, she’s so impatiently uninterested in them as people that she calls them not by name but by a number that she assigns to each.  There seems no good reason why the striving-for-excellence Katherine would have let her show go stale or not have kept urging the writers to do better.  It would make more sense if she’d got into showbiz through being, say, a media academic so eccentric fronting documentaries that she got her own chat show.  It makes no sense for someone with roots in writing comedy.  But Katherine’s reducing the men to numbers does resonate with the script’s conception of them.  Expected to function as an untalented, sexist male collective, they’re allowed just one or two characteristics each.   If they have two – as in the case of the entitled, self-styled senior writer Tom (Reid Scott) or the apparently sympathetic Charlie (Hugh Dancy) – it’s only in order that they can show a different side when the time is right.

    The drama in Late Night focuses largely on a scandal that engulfs Katherine just as her ratings, thanks to Molly’s innovations, are rapidly on the rise again.  Shortly after her much older, emeritus professor husband Walter (John Lithgow) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Katherine had an affair with Charlie.  Here too, Ganatra and Kaling take a media hot potato and set Katherine up as the guilty party so as to move the plot forward.  But they know their audience knows that abusing a position of power in a working relationship in order to pursue a sexual one is more likely to be something a man does to a woman than the other way round.   By the time the affair between Katherine and Charlie is a major issue in the story, he has already been shown as exploitative, vain and promiscuous:  he’s tried to hit on Molly, is miffed not to get an instant grateful reaction and rejects her when she responds at a time that’s inconvenient to him.  He’s even suggested to Katherine that they resume their fling, even though she regrets it ever happening and firmly says no.  Once allegations of the affair hit the headlines, Charlie disappears from the script team and the film.

    Katherine is remorseful about being unfaithful to ailing, nicer-than-nice Walter but effectively exonerated of the charges the press makes against her.  Her redemption is confirmed when, after taking a break from the show, she returns to it with an opening speech in which she admits the affair did happen and tells her viewers it’s just as reprehensible for a woman to do what she did as it would have been for a man.  (Viewers of Late Night know better – know how reprehensible Charlie is in the matter.)  Katherine’s mea culpa is striking too in relation to an earlier showdown with Molly, in which Katherine complains that the younger generation has an obsession with catharsis, that this is a form of narcissism, that there should even be a new word for it – ‘catharsissism’.  When Katherine comes clean on camera, it’s catharsissism, all right.  Has she decided that, in this respect too, if you can’t beat them join them?  Or is Nisha Ganatra just deciding to forget what was said earlier and expecting us to follow suit?   It seems the latter.  When the TV studio rise to their feet to applaud Katherine and she smiles gratefully back, there’s not a hint of cynicism in front of or behind the camera.

    The film is consistently evasive.  Katherine reluctantly interviews a YouTube sensation called Mimi Mismatch (Annaleigh Ashford), assumes she’s as inane as her videos, treats her derisively and is startled when Mimi articulately fights back and gives her an on-air dressing down.  We also see Katherine go spectacularly off-script when her guest is the feebly scatological young comic (Ike Barinholtz) lined up by the channel to replace her on the show – she makes him look the fool she knows he is.  We never see her talking to the intellectually high-powered people she has traditionally interviewed – a pity because it’s hard to imagine how her inherently combative style would adapt to conversation with someone she admires.  When Brad, shortly before hiring Molly, desperately asks Katherine if a gay man would do instead of a woman, she snaps back no.  Nisha Ganatra cuts and moves on at this point, presumably in the hope we’ll just laugh at Katherine’s cross reply and not dwell on whether Brad is as ignorantly homophobic as his question sounds.  It hardly makes sense anyway, given that the single characteristic of one of the existing team (played by John Early) is his camp manner.

    Late Night is inviting comparison with well-known films like James L Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987) and David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006), for understandable reasons.  It shares with the one themes of sexual politics in the TV workplace, crowd-pleasing style vs thought-provoking substance, and so on.  Like the other, it describes how an unexpected and initially despised newcomer wins over a woman boss-from-hell, who comes to depend on her.  Although it appears to deal with weightier matters, what’s remarkable is how sentimental and weakly conciliatory this new film is compared with the Frankel movie.  The Devil Wears Prada included much less than Late Night about the dragon lady’s personal life; Emma Thompson is excruciatingly false expressing Katherine’s tearful contrition towards her husband.  Frankel’s protagonists finally parted company and both knew it was the right thing to do.  ‘One year later’, Katherine’s show is still on the air and Molly still working for her and alongside Tom, who’s turned out to be really nice after all.  The bland, smiles-all-round conclusion implies that Katherine has changed for the better, though we’ve no idea how – or how that’s impacted on her show’s style and content.  Late Night has potentially strong themes which Mindy Kaling’s personal experience and investment in the subject matter might have reinforced.  The film that’s resulted is interesting as itself a reflection of the current landscape of the entertainment industry.  It’s hamstrung by its conflicting desires to be politically incisive and commercially safe.

    9 June 2019

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