22: The Mortal Storm

         I can’t understand why it took me so long to find The Mortal Storm (1940).  It showed recently on Turner Classic Movies, and I was thankful to view it there.  As a Margaret Sullivan/James Stewart vehicle one would think it would be readily available from rental services such as Netflix.com.  Perhaps the buyers for such companies felt that one Sullivan/Stewart film from that year was enough, and settled for The Shop around the Corner (also 1940).  What a pity.  While I can’t definitively say that this film is better than that one, both certainly warrant easy accessibility.  As fantastic examples of studio-era filmmaking before U.S. involvement in WWII, these films represent the range that was required of the performers of the day. 

            The Shop around the Corner is a light but engaging romantic comedy in which Stewart plays the plainspoken charmer that he’s become in all of our minds.  He and Sullivan light up the screen in a scenario that has since been rehashed numerous times, but has never been bested.  In The Mortal Storm, released five months later, the two again play lovers, but this time against the more serious backdrop of the fascist takeover of Germany.  One of the few films released prior to the U.S. entering WWII that took a direct stand against Nazism, The Mortal Storm prompted Hitler to ban the screening of the movie and all subsequent MGM productions in occupied Europe.  According to one story this response was predicted by the German ambassador to the U.S., who urged Louis B. Mayer to reconsider releasing the film.  Upon viewing, it’s clear that simply reediting the picture for European release would have been impossible, as critiques of Nazi symbols and “Heil Hitler” salutes are plainly employed throughout.

            The film opens on the day of Hitler’s election to the chancellorship, an event that polarizes attitudes at the birthday party of a well-respected professor (Frank Morgan) of science who teaches “in a small university town at the base of the Alps.”  While many of the young family members and friends of the professor are enthusiastic about the rise of National Socialism, the professor himself, along with his wife, daughter Freya (Sullivan), and a student, Martin (Stewart), are hesitant to embrace the forthcoming changes.  As months pass, Martin becomes increasingly isolated from the professor and his family, particularly his sons Otto (Robert Stack) and Erich (William T. Orr) who have joined the Nazi Party.  He’s convinced one evening by Freya to join them for drinks, but is disgusted when he sees another of his former teachers being harassed for “non-Arian” behavior.  In this, the film’s most powerful scene, Martin and Freya slouch, bewildered, as their friends and siblings stand at attention and sing out their loyalty to the Third Reich.           

            Martin’s opposition to the state of Germany’s national politics makes him an outcast, and each attempt he makes to meet with Freya, who is still living with her swastika-clad brothers, becomes more and more dangerous.  Nevertheless, their relationship blossoms after her break-up with a fiancé whose position in the party is compromised by her own political dissent.  As forces continue to mount against the professor and the ideas he holds which contradict the tenets of the Final Solution, it becomes clear that escape from Germany is necessary for not only his safety, but for Freya’s and Martin’s as well.  The film’s final half hour is both exciting and moving, and as the picture closes Robert Stack breaks free of the confines of his role for a last moment of poignancy.  The script, well adapted from Phyllis Bottome’s novel, deserves ample credit for most of the movie’s finer moments, but the work of Sullivan and Stewart, as well as the strong supporting cast of Stack, Morgan, and Maria Ouspenskaya as Martin’s mother, drives the point home.  

Since the film’s release, contradicting stories have posited that un-credited producer Victor Saville actually directed much of the final product, but subscribers to the auteur theory place the film nicely in the canon of credited skipper Frank Borzage.  While such stories often run rampant about studio films of the era, there is one truth that cannot be denied regarding The Mortal Storm.  The film should be held in higher esteem, and not relegated to second class status in the Stewart collection.  While it certainly isn’t his best work, it serves as a reminder that he was a solid performer who brought depth to almost every role, not just the characters for whom is so often remembered.  The Film should at least be easily available for online rental, but like so many good films of the studio era it remains at arm’s length for the millennial generation.

Language: English

Runtime: 110 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off 

23: Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol—Original Portuguese title)

            Sometimes, context really is everything when it comes to viewing films.  Such is the case with Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964).  I’m willing to believe, as the 1001 text assures me, that the film was received as a fresh and energetic declaration of a new Brazilian cinema upon its initial release.  However, I doubt that many contemporary audiences would apply either of the adjectives I used in the previous sentence to the film today.  Nearly fifty years removed from its premiere, it feels more like homage to better films than a work of startling originality.  Clearly Rocha was influenced by Eisenstein (as 1001 notes) and the French new wave—which certainly seems like an interesting combination—and it’s possible that Sergio Leone barrowed elements for the “Man with No Name” films he was working on at the time in Italy.  It also plainly seems to have influenced Jodorowsky’s El Topo* (1970).  But even with all of these connections Black God, White Devil failed to peak my interest. 

            The film’s action centers on Manuel, a laborer who kills his abusive employer and then goes on the run with his wife, Rosa.  The two set out into Brazil’s badlands where they fall in with a Black mystic.  They join his cult-like following, participating in his odd religious rituals.  Overcome by jealousy, Rosa eventually tries to free Manuel from the mystic’s control.  The two escape when a hired gunfighter is paid by the government to break up the rouge religious sect.  They eventually join up with a White bandito whose legend has endeared him to the people only enough to sustain a meager existence, but he too is on the bounty list of the gunfighter. 

            Admittedly, this synopsis is drawn equally, if not more so, from the review in the 1001 text than the actual experience of viewing the film.  Partly because the print I viewed was a bad 16mm to VHS transfer, and partly because the characters are poorly developed and at points difficult to distinguish from one another, I was utterly lost throughout the film.  The fact that white subtitles had been applied to the b&w film, and that they were often displayed over the hue that desert projects in that pallet, certainly didn’t help much.  Perhaps these factors doomed my potential appreciation for this film from the start, but I can’t really imagine having particularly enjoyed it in ideal conditions anyhow.  The odd religious imagery feels cheaply exploited, and the performances for the most part feel flat.  Had events superfluous to the picture not taken place, I feel that Black God, White Devil might have faded into almost total obscurity.    

            Between the picture’s production and its opening, a military coup resulted in political upheaval in Brazil.  As a violent, subversive, and challenging film I feel that it benefitted from events that it was, to my knowledge, in no way directly connected to.  It felt fresh because it seemed to have predicted the stirrings of dissent and the violent reaction to conventional norms.  This same point could be made about many English-language films of the period as well, as the 1960s brought vast social change throughout the world.  Many American films of the decade were praised as groundbreaking, but comparatively few have retained vaunted status, and only a small number are regarded as cinematic classics. 

            Apart from one distinctly odd death scene Black God, White Devil contains little memorable material.  The film is littered with images that are potentially powerful, but overall it has no sense of urgency.  A few gunfights are punctuated by rapid-fire editing, but this technique ultimately feels unmotivated, and adrift in an otherwise slow picture.  The 1001 write up on the film alludes to a Brazil brimming with potential upheaval into which this film was thrust with the force of a lightning bolt.  Unfortunately, it seems that this force, like lightning, was brief in its ability to illuminate both elements of a country in transition and an engaging narrative.

Language: Portuguese

Runtime: 110 Minutes

Grade: 1 Hat Off

*a film I can’t say that I particularly like, but is certainly better than Rocha’s

24: The Actress (a.k.a. Center Stage, a.k.a. Ruan Lingyu – Original Cantonese title)

            I’ve always been a fan of movies about the movies, but ultimately I walked away from Stanley Kwan’s The Actress (1992) more disappointed by its irony than moved by its insights on the process of creating cinema.  That’s not to say that the film reveals nothing about the compelling subject of the silent Hong Kong cinema of the late 1920s and early 30s.  In fact it does a fine job in this regard, and in its more obvious purpose of chronicling the final years of the silent star Ruan Lingyu.  It even points, in a fair and nuanced fashion, to the possible explanations for her startling suicide at the age of 24.  What it lacks however, and what perhaps is a given for Hong Kong audiences, is an explanation of why she so captivated them in the first place, and why, so many years later, she’s still a relevant figure in HK cinema.

            It’s possible that Lingyu’s power needs no explanation to Southeast Asian viewers of The Actress, or that those explanations contained within the film are lost in translation.  As I’m not overtly familiar with the historical context of 1930s Hong Kong I suspect that I missed more than just this.  Obviously the elements of the forthcoming invasion by Japan play a heavy role in the picture’s dark foreshadowing, but for the most part even this seminal event exists off-screen.  Herein lies what I perceived as the film’s pivotal flaw.  The scope of the picture feels all wrong.  The range of Lingyu’s influence is discussed but never shown.  I don’t even recall a scene of an audience watching one of her pictures. 

            The argument could be made that Kwan wanted his movie to be a character study, and that he wanted to avoid both large set pieces and sweeping statements about the Hong Kong of the era, but many fine films have undertaken in-depth personal explorations and set them on grand stages.  Kwan never even gives us a real sense of the bustling city.  For the most part we are confined to interiors, and windows are often blocked by faux skylines used as movie backdrops rather than the genuine cities that they imitate.  

            This tight approach might work if the film’s structure didn’t so wholly betray Kwan’s own personal feelings about Lingyu’s grandeur.  Indeed, The Actress often employs a film-within-a-film-within-a-film tactic that shows the director speaking with his actors as they compose a scene within a silent picture.  These sequences, often taken on washed-out video tape, also include Kwan’s interviews with his lead Maggie Chung, as well as their conversations with some of Lingyu’s contemporaries, now in their eighties.  Through these scenes we get a clear sense of his own infatuation with both Lingyu and her story, and yet despite his encouragement he never seems to fully immerse Chung in her character’s world.  Is he insinuating that she was detached from it?  Again, this may be lost in translation.

            But this is not the films crippling irony, and I suspect that Kwan is most definitely not to blame in this particular regard.  Many of The Actress’s best scenes concern the cutting of one of Lingyu’s best performances by the censors – severely altering a film that was perceived as critical of the Hong Kong press.  A similar fate has befallen The Actress but for no reason that I could find.  It’s possible that both an explanation of Lingyu’s on-screen appeal and evidence of an ambitious scope are now on the proverbial cutting room floor.  The original 167 minute runtime of the film was cut down to versions ranging between 118 and 154 minutes, and many of the original prints have been lost or destroyed.  The only known remaining full-length cut is owned by an Australian television network, and still occasionally airs on Ausi TV.

            Sometimes stories like this make a film more compelling.  Silent classic like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) feel extra special when we view them because we know that for so many years they were lost.  In the case of The Actress, I suspect that the missing footage itself is what would give the movie more appeal.  In most cases, watching a film that is unenjoyably seems like a never ending process.  You hate the film all the more for every minute of your life that it steals.  This film is the rare exception that I believe I would have enjoyed more had it taken more of my time.  What it contains is good – Chung won Best Actress honors at Berlin in 1993 for her fine performance – but more would have made the film itself shine.

Language: Cantonese (primary)/Mandarin/English

Runtime: 121 Minutes

Grade: 2 Hats Off