Old Yorker

  • Night Nurse

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wellman (1931)

    Night Nurse was screened as part of BFI’s ‘Hollywood Babylon:  Early Talkies Before the Censor’ season, in a double bill with another Barbara Stanwyck film, Baby Face.  Stanwyck, as the title character, Lora Hart, and her fellow nurse Maloney, played by Joan Blondell, appear in their underwear a few times but the violence is a good deal more startling than the exposed flesh in evidence.   At one point, the villain of the piece, a chauffeur called Nick (Clark Gable), lands an uppercut which knocks Lora out – one of the pieces in the BFI programme note suggests that, while she’s out cold, he rapes her.  William Wellman’s direction is pacy but Night Nurse is an uneasy mixture of the broadly comic and the seriously nasty

    A senior but sinister hospital doctor (Ralf Harolde, with an incriminating twitchy eye) is working, in cahoots with the chauffeur, to kill – through a prescribed diet of malnourishment – the two daughters of Nick’s employer, the alcoholic socialite Mrs Ritchey (Charlotte Merriam).  The doctor wants to get his hands on the money held in trust for the two girls (Betty Jane Graham and Marcia Mae Jones).  Mrs Ritchey, in her more sober moments, is crazy for her handsome chauffeur.    Clark Gable often gave the impression that he could treat a woman rough but the punch to Barbara Stanwyck’s chin (he also knocks a couple of men out in the course of the movie) still comes as a shock.  Gable cuts a dashing figure in his chauffeur uniform and has a nice ambiguous menace as he stands grinning in the shadows but he’s not so good when he opens his mouth.  There usually seems to be a party going on in Mrs Ritchey’s mansion where her children are being starved to death:  the relentless hedonism and the giggling guests – when Lora, in her nurse’s uniform, interrupts the dancing, they ask if this is a costume party – become oppressively repellent.    Thank goodness for Joan Blondell – who’s excellent, in what became her trademark role of the leading lady’s good-hearted, wisecracking best friend – and, especially, for Barbara Stanwyck, who fuses the comic and serious elements of the script (by Oliver H P Garrett, from a novel by Grace Perkins) with complete success.  Radiating sanity and lacking any trace of sanctimony, Stanwyck is a heroine who does the right thing with a combination of tenacity and wit, and is never a goody-goody.

    The cast also includes Ben Lyon, genially innocuous as Mortie, a bootlegger who takes a shine to Lora (she gradually reciprocates).   It’s ‘a couple of guys’ Mortie knows who are responsible for Nick’s eventual arrival at the hospital for admission to the morgue – this DIY bringing-to-justice is another somewhat subversive streak of Night Nurse.   With Charles Winninger as a decent physician (he recovers remarkably quickly from being laid out by Gable), Vera Lewis as the nursing superintendent and Walter McGrail, who has a good cameo as a drunken guest at the Ritchey residence.

    3 May 2014

  • Neighbouring Sounds

    Old YorkerFilm review

    O Som ao Redor

    Kleber Mendonça Filho (2012)

    The title sounds like a translation – awkward and limited compared with the original Portuguese, which you can tell is more mysteriously allusive.   This is the first dramatic feature by Kleber Mendonça Filho and it’s certainly impressive, not least because of how long it remains absorbing, even though most of its 131 minutes feel anticipatory and its abrupt ending is disappointing.  The neighbourhood is a street in Recife, the fifth-largest city of Brazil, whose inhabitants are predominantly middle-class.  A preliminary montage of black-and-white photographs depicts a way of life – rural, impoverished, but with suggestions of a close-knit community – very different from the urban ones Mendonça goes on to describe (he also wrote the screenplay).  The immediate implication is that the world of the photographs is somehow the basis for the world of the city dwellers; the connection is clarified once it’s revealed that a man who still owns much of the property in the neighbourhood made his fortune as a sugar baron.  (Mendonça’s title – which means, literally, ‘the sound from round about’, surely refers to a context larger than the immediate physical environment.)

    You wouldn’t expect a character like Francisco, the property owner, to be a nice guy and this sharp-minded silver fox (W J Solha) is evidently a nasty piece of work.  His scions are more ambiguous.  One grandson, the European-educated João (Gustavo Jahn), is in effect the family’s estate agent but has a gently melancholy air.  Another, Dinho (Yuri Holanda), is a university student by day and a delinquent car thief by night.  As João’s new girlfriend Sofia (Irma Brown) prepares to leave his place next morning, she discovers her car’s been broken into and the CD player removed (a trademark Dinho crime).  The security presence in the street doesn’t until now extend beyond a dog that seems to bark continuously.  This gets on the nerves of Bia (Maeve Jinkings), another of the residents:  on the night Sofia’s car is burgled, Bia has hidden drugs in a piece of meat she throws to the dog, which shuts it up.  The next day, two men from a private security firm arrive to offer their services.  Other characters in Neighbouring Sounds suspect that this pair, Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and his one-eyed sidekick, haven’t appeared by chance:  João asks how they knew about the car thefts, Francisco asks how they knew who he was.  Clodoaldo’s answers are plausible but the viewer too assumes the security men must be there for a reason.

    The film’s name gives primacy to the aural and Mendonça, with his sound designer Pablo Lamar, has created an absorbing soundtrack.  Its overall effect is unnerving but its component parts are various:  you’re reminded how familiar repeated noises can range from the reassuring to the infuriating as well as how unaccustomed ones can be frightening.  Mendonça continues to play sounds throughout the closing credits – you stay with these in case of missing something significant even at this late stage.  You also keep thinking that something horrific is going to happen in Neighbouring Sounds.  It never quite does, although the combination of the sound design, a couple of carefully placed dream sequences (one culminating in a waterfall that turns to blood and covers João) and the odd subliminal image (a dark figure glimpsed in the apartment where Clodoaldo and Francisco’s housekeeper Luciene (Clebia Sousa) are quickly having sex) is disquieting.

    Mendonça is known as a maker of documentaries and the fine naturalistic acting, the spare dialogue he’s written for the cast and the realisation of the neighbourhood give the movie a quasi-documentary anchor.  Occasionally, the film seems to be happening in real time and the effect is both boring and intriguing (a meeting of the residents’ association to discuss how to dismiss a past-it concierge is an example).   Mendonça seems to imply that Brazil’s recent interracial and economic history bred not only the desire for revenge that (as is eventually made clear) the working-class Clodoaldo is looking to take on Francisco but also the dissatisfaction of younger generations exemplified by the well-off but purposeless João, Dinho and Bia.  The last named – as desperately tense as she is bored – is especially striking in this respect.  These people live their lives in apartments that are more than spacious.  They seem vast and the characters are stranded in them.

    1 April 2013

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