Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE

1934 - ***

Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue whether he never quite 'got' narrative pacing or dialogue, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, whips, furs, clusters of oppressive goose symbolism, ambient noise and Wagnerian gesture, all of which nearly suffocates the first half of arguably his best and worst of the Dietrich collaborations, SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the stuffily regimented duty and sickeningly sweet yet brutally-regimented playtime of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with overlapping montages of DeMille-level lurid tortures endured by the Proletariat at the hands of the fur-hatted Cossacks in frigid Russia. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like the first ever tall black shadow (with sable cape highlights) in the stuffy otherwise treacle-and-posey-filled brightly-lit Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, to claim her for Russia's inbred maniac Peter (Sam Jaffe). Sexual sizzle seems in the cards, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time clearing. One of Austria's unbearable matriarchs pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and you want to go on a regicidal rampage; and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow --and has her to himself, warming her up within all the en route lodges, between one controlling reptilian old broad and the another--that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps without the worry we're going to get hit on the head with a fan. Louise Dresser overplays with vulgarly Americanized bossiness as the seated "dowager empress" trying to urge Peter to get into that marital bed and give this doe-eyed Austrian a go, but he prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like a whispering Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than the marital boudoir. Catherine's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male heir to the throne, making Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of demure compassion. If Peter won't perform, surely there are good little soldiers who can get the job done --provided they can be discreet, let Peter claim paternity and let the real father ideally not be already one of the dowager's many lovers, which include-- ewww!-- John Lodge. That's earning your sable the hard way.

It should all be salacious fun, but there are too many symbols, the film is choked with them: endless horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"); dehumanizing intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"); Vaseline-lensed nature shots; lockets falling gently down the length of vast fir trees; interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches (enough grand high Orthodox Christian processions to bore even Eisenstein); endless ringing bells; and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at every turn. Sure, those sculptures are awesome but still, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded. If not for Lodge's low-key, strangely modern performance in the handsome lover role we might never feel, for a second, a moment of human realness. He's like the first cool person we meet at a strange school.

I imagine one day, if the right restoration comes along (in Blu-ray remaster rather than the high-contrast Criterion DVD we currently have - nice as that is), all that fussy Von Sternberg lighting over those rippling swaths of sable will finally pay off. For now we can only get the occasional glimmers of highlight along the sheer black - elsewhere it's just a black dark blob. But I'm sure he put it there, Josef was crazy as Masoch over that shit.

Still, high contrast and a reliance on historical montage or no, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic sex of Franco or Rollin, for example) you might forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera. Then you can sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and just lean back and watch Dietrich the actress seem to age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty he inflicted on his icy, incompetent star. She starts the film gorgeous as she was in the first films--Morocco, Shanghai Express--and ends with the hardness of feature we get in her subsequent films. Indeed. her face in the final shot--wild eyed and triumphant in white--clanging the bells after storming the palace (forever)--is terrifying--it should have been the last image in their collaboration, but instead there was The Devil is a Woman next, a film in which Dietrich overacts as a Spanish peasant gold-digger mining Lionel Atwill--it looks gorgeous but the oversize hair combs are horrid and with her fake tan and brassy overacting, she's almost 50s Crawford-level shrill. The old glowing Dietrich starts out broken in Devil - we have no idea what Atwill or Romero sees in her. Watching it today, you can tell it was Scarlet that broke her. Dietrich seems to age five years for every one of Catherine's.

Still, if you watch closely during the big wedding scene you can see the same painterly glistening and angles on the face of Dresser that Von Sternberg gave to Dietrich in certain scenes of Dishonored. But by the end of the film Dresser is dead and Dietrich isn't the wide-eyed super cool innocent hipster super-seductress anymore (and certainly not the overly wide-eyed hammy innocent, way too gorgeous and reverently-lit for an inexperienced ingenue), but a steely woman with the ability to freeze her face in a malevolent 'chaotic neutral' smile and a slowly-but-inexorably developing knack for a more raucous kind of comedy that would find its post-code place, finally, in Destry Rides Again. 

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT

1933 - ***1/2

"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike a boxier version of famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo, below right). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and, though she never came out of the closet publicly, it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking an alleged fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented at Warner Brothers, where butch masseuses and flaming tailors (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at and cajoled but never taunted or humiliated, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear even deeper back into the closet until Hollywood could peer over Fellini's shoulder to learn what to do with them.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

But were speaking of LADIES. The bulk of this snappy prison film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in self-sacrifice and scathing honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty, to burn him. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to let him help her get paroled. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted shots at the chin of numb-nuts patriarchy, the same target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered the jaw of with Babs' same level of affinity (Stone seemed to try to be what Babs just was). Coolest of all is how the huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends; the bull-ettes are nice if you behave. Hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar, but when Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that, after the lights go out, things have gotten pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2

It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and vaguely racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and then affixes himself to an incoming British socialite played by Myrna Loy. She's contemptuous and somewhat bitchy/imperialist but nowhere near as bad as her future Brit mother-in-law. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, totally unallowable. Unless... hmmm except that she has some Middle Eastern blood, like her mother's side, some eastern branch royalty with a "family tree a mile long" maybe that's okay (though even that would be out for the post-codes). This was to be the genealogy then, of a lot of (white) socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs in the pre-code era. Here Loy has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead, saving any social awkwardness amongst the white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny), his unbearably controlling mater (Blanche Friderici) and--luckily for this slightly half-caste debutante--Metro's king of 'harrumph' C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is nudging its caravan along the same path trod by a pair of 1932 miscegenation fantasy hits, Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Universal's lurid expressionism or even Columbia's humanist handball. Still, the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene is alive with rear screen magic.

The plot, on the other hand, is straight out of a bad romance novel and there's way too much Egyptian being spoken one presume phonetically once she's off the reservation as it were. First Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British, and then turning the tables once he abducts her into the desert (where it's revealed he's a slumming prince). If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of GENERAL YEN, well then you've seen a lot of these movies, so you'll have no problem realizing the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene is slightly sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or he will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders. But he won't be, you knew that, right? He'll go on to half-heartedly croon through his pages of romantic moon-gazing nonsense. The desert moon beckons and one thing MGM does right here, is to let the prince win. "He'll kill her!" shouts the Brits when they realize Emil has spirited Diana off once again; "oh no he won't," says the more liberal aunt. If they weren't still laboring under the idea they could make Nararro another Valentino (or that anyone in the pre-code era even wanted one), he's surely have to die for love, for the sins of loving not wisely but too well, and always seeming like he realizes the best way to hide the fact he doesn't even believe his own sincerity is to go through the Egyptian moon poetry in a kind of half-asleep trance. Still, if you're a fan of stock types singing Arab songs in front of rear screen projection deserts and hazy flocks of camels wafting around the pyramids, then you'll love it, as I mostly do.  

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the 'other man' who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in India, and always squarely on the MGM backlot. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim as nymphomaniac Damita's aesthete husband, lolling languidly in the surf of her lover Adolphe Menjou's discomfort upon realizing his lame opera alibi won't wash (he got the title wrong). It turns out Erich's not mad; he's expecting these things. His habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou a whopping $10,000 because "porcelain is... expensive."

Though porcelain collecting seems a rather insipid hobby for a man like Von Strohieim, we root for him all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. Like Novarro was a Valentino MGM were hoping Damita could be a kind of earthy Garbo. She can be charming in the right lighting, but when she's not 'on' her A-game she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting on the hot set all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady and it's the tenth take. Nice legs, though. And a nice racket for Erich. Too bad another of Damita's lovers (Lawrence Olivier) later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings). This all proves a sufficient climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots the men out onto the street, for conformity's sake. In short, it's a lot of familiar (for the era) love triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor... in shards!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce--still scandalous, risque and oh-so progressive--was enough of a subject for entire films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers. Here novelist Julian (George Brent) pesters newly-divorced (rich) socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. Ick! She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably. Trouble is, Brent always presumes. In every role he's ever played, he ignores women's attempts to evade him, wading in to range, nose first.  I despise him on principle--his whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of many a stalker. If he likes you, you're his. Your opinion is decided for you. You're a girl - you like a man to take charge. After all, who are you to bust up a beautiful, inevitable romance? Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works in movies, until maybe the very end (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's middle-aged investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at the ritzy clibs he's regularly dragged out to by his energetic, younger Paris Hilton-esque trophy wife. Chatterton comes back to NYC and throws her weight around to keep his business afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and saccharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest most sincerely romantic string of words ever uttered. Sister Bette Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with material this thin. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced she's pregnant but doesn't want to keep the baby (since it would ruin her figure), she's instantly killed in a car wreck, but at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

The Luxury of Desperate Gamblers: Andrzej Zulawski's "L'Amour Braque" (1985)

Niche film fans of all nations and genres can rejoice with the release of three borderline hysterical (in all senses of the word) Andrzej Zulawksi films onto DVD, via the amazing Mondo Vision. The first of them I've seen is 1985's L'AMOUR BRAQUE, an insane, coked-up little miracle which prefigures the anarchic Joker scenes in LE CHEVALIER NOIR (below), including the maniacal burning of mass amounts of money and gleefully lysergic/anarchic assaults on the conventions of the bourgeoisie and capitalism! Did Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger see this movie? Or are they and Braque's director Andrzej Zulawski birds of a feather? Or is Zulawski way beyond even BATMAN? I'd normally never mention Batman and Zulawski in the same sentence, but times have changes. Post-modernism has erase the borders of high and low, regardless of what the petit-bourgeois may think. Also, the Ledger Joker is, like Hannibal Lecter before him, something new -- almost legitimately dangerous, threatening to grab us and pull us into the screen at any moment. Being European, an ex-pat Parisian out of Poland (?), Zulawski seems a slavering psychedelic/crystal meth poet, known for either hypnotizing (or maybe drugging?) his actors and driving them to and beyond the brink of madness for their performances. L'AMOR BRAQUE is kind of an 'if an ensemble of meth-addled actors from Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty crashed into a Luc Besson French crime film, thinking they were still doing Artaud's adaptation of Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT and that the crime film mise-en-scene around them must be 'the drugs talking'. 

Or  to put it another way, is Zulawski's yen for heedless kineticism, surfeit de style and spastic physicality rooted in something, or did someone just dump LSD into the Parisian water supply?

Any way you slice him, what a real treat to find such a worthy yet under-explored canon, all presented so lushly we can go excavating in air conditioned style. A whole catalog of Zulawski's awesome films-- few of which (other than POSSESSION) have been seen at all here in the US-- are coming our way on beautiful DVDs. MondoVision plans on releasing nine in all! Jokers, start your burning!

Though L'AMOUR BRAQUE carries a 1985 French action movie glossy punk style (ala the violent late-80s/early-90s nocturnal neon decor of films you might know like SUBWAY or LA FEMME NIKITA) it's actually an art film, or a drug film, Brechtian... of course, with great gobs of classical Russian literature references that, I don't mind saying, were partially over my head. Tcheky Karyo stars, or co-stars! SUBWAY! It may look on the surface enough like a normal 80s French action movie movie, but it would probably weird out a whole room of relatively un-intoxicated bros if they were expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity in addition to the Luc Besson-ish glamor, especially with the subtitles off. And action fans who wondered--as I did--if Karyo was just a dud actor with his stone-faced performance in NIKITA can now know for sure, as his character in BRAQUE is wayyy out there. Not even the same guy, if I can paraphrase William Demarest in THE LADY EVE. 

I glean what I can get, and figure I'll finish the Karamazovs when I can. Until then, those cheesy 80s synth stabs and and Mondo Vision's lovely transfer and well-written subtitles all fuel the rush of Zulawski's poetic post-structuralist approach in a way that echoes the accidental poetry of old HK movies, the old kind of fractured English subtitles and plots so rapid and crazy that to even think about what's going on for a half a second means to be lost for the next two minutes, but if trust your instincts, stop reading the subtitles and 'hear' the dialogue (using the subtitles in tandem with the language) and let go of the rails, you just may experience a giddy and unique cine-high. See, Zulawski has a weird way of feeding you his movie plots subliminally. Somehow or other, you're pulled along by the scruff of your neck. With no time to get your bearings, you realize that, if you don't think about it too much (as with the aforementioned HK films), you know what's happening on an unconscious level if not a conscious one. This is especially true if you had to read Dostoevsky's The Idiot once. Or even did intentionally. 

Francis Huster is the hero, a down-for-whatever Czech refugee named Leon, who finds himself spontaneously adopted by the drunken (coked up?) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of laughing, joking, Nietzsche-quoting Arab terrorists on the run after robbing a bank dressed in Disney masks. Huster and Karyo bond on the train, but then beautiful Sophie Marceau shows up as Mickey's--and soon Leon's--obsession, ensuring neither man can ever leave the other alone for a minute for the rest of the film, lest he gain ground in the race to her bed. 

A perennial 'lost soul" rich girl using Micky and his terrorist friends as dupes; acting coy and lost and doomed so they practically kill each other jostling to be the one to wipe out her enemies; cockblocking and seducing right and left; the two men chase, and are chased by, and adore each other as Marceau proves more and more sociopathic and manipulative. 

And then there's Leon's only slightly-less-hot-than-Marceau (who isn't) cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean, below) who competes for Leon's attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull".

Zulawski loves the Russians, even if they indirectly ruined two years of work on his would-a-been masterpiece On the Silver Globe. 

Meanwhile, a strange cop follows the gang around, and in one sun-dappled grilling scene, notes that Mickey and company carry on with the "luxury of desperate gamblers", a telling phrase I bothered to write down and thought a most clever title, because it describes most of the film--indeed most of Zulawski's blade-running / hot tin roof-dancing output. There's very little stopping to regroup or fortify positions here. If you've ever been on a manic high for any length of time--basking in a spiritual awakening, blessed with an almost supernatural level of good fortune--you know implicitly that if you to go to sleep or nurture negative thinking, your luck will change; your whole holy mindset will crash into nothingness and despair (and hangover). So you drinking, gambling and laughing like a maniac, desperate to keep the the wave alive enough to surf upon, even after it breaks and recedes along the shore. Until there you are, standing on your surfboard on the beach while kids make sandcastles around you and the tide goes out. Finally you've no choice but to pay the kids to dig you a hole, then crawl inside and sleep the rest of the day, until the evening tide comes in and mercifully drowns you.

If things get rough with this film, may I suggest good way to get through the weirdness of the onscreen action (if you're not going to 'roll' along on the last of your Pervatin stash) is to ground it in other movies you may be more familiar with, like bizarro world remakes in a vein of post-modern ultra-violent satire we Americans have hardly seen except for Kathryn Bigelow.  When you see the robbers in their Disney masks knocking off a bank in the opening sequence you might think of POINT BREAK, but when you see them horsing through an impromptu number on their getaway route, they're like a dozen Harpo Marxes on a blood bender or the Groucho-guerrillas in the films of Emir Kusturica. But these names just locate the onscreen insanity in some kind of loose contextual framework, because otherwise, goddamn it, this stuff is so fucked-up in its deconstructed avant garde madness, so far ahead of the Luc Besson curve, even your bourgeois art film expectation of a night of modernist subversion may be frustrated. Just where do you situate Zulawski and his panic-attack-meets-ecstasy-overdose clenched jaw freak-out in the canon of 80s filmmaking?

Also, it's very long: two hours of nearly nonstop shouting, kicking over vases, affronting the mores of capitalism and frothing at the succulently lipsticked mouth. You'd think it would grate on one's nerves, but Zulawski is such a master of pace and rhythm that he never gets you too worn out or cranky. And what works too is that, though these guys are all insane--and maybe this is just the French way--all the passers-by and authority figures go along with their gags, like it would be rude not to, the way the bourgeoisie in Bunuel movies look upon their children's destructive savagery with bemused tolerance. Etiquette dictates that when a crazy Marxist sticks a gun to your temple after crashing your dinner party, it's considered declasse' to panic or plead. One must do the right thing and smile and pat the man's hand in encouragement and calmly ask if he would like some wine. When sudden gunfights erupt, cars get smashed and people run around throwing smoke bombs and breaking windows, all it gets from the gendarmes is that famous Parisian shrug. They crowd surf into total candy-coated confusion; they roll around on tables laden with food and the waiters don't bat an eyelash; they spazz out and sing at the top of their lungs while being chased by cops in riot gear; and it would all just be posturing if Zulawski didn't capture a realistic sense of Parisian hustle and bustle like he's a freakin' Oscar-hungry auteur riche. When you're wading deep into a well-crafted, lit, Parisian street corner, man, you're into some fucked up architecture. If you're seeing it on a good HD screen, you can see right up into the cobwebbed corners between the gargoyles. 

One of my biggest regrets as an actor/filmmaker was in QUEEN OF DISKS (2007), when a Clare Horgan as the Queen of Disks stuck a knife to my throat as I was drinking coffee I missed a chance to do a spit take! My innate decency and worry about spilling coffee on my ratty jeans stopped me from doing one and/or dropping the coffee cup, just letting it spill all over me and crash to the floor and break. You know how impossible those things can be to do intentionally? Like when someone pays you to pee in your pants, and you just can't do it, no matter how hard you try?

These guys in this film? They don't have that problem.

It all makes you realize that while someone like Godard's a great one for deconstructing genre, he's a bad one at capturing the momentum of genre itself-- poor Jean Pierre Leaud or Belmondo, for example, always seemed to carry an inherent decency that stops them from peeing on people's trousers or throwing grenades into dining rooms or dropping coffee cups full of coffee on themselves and letting the cup shatter on the linoleum floor. If they did, it was often just to a picture of a comic book "Bang!" or riot footage that exploded. Not in this film, baby. That's action like Van Damme! Zoot alors!  A+