Conductor 71

Liliom (Borzage, 1930)

My Summer Movies # 10

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Two things strike the attention of a viewer who watches Liliom today. The first is the extent to which the movie presents the action from the point of view of the young girl Julie (Rose Hobart) rather than that of the titular hero, played by Charles Farrell. The film begins with an astonishing close up of Julie gazing dreamily into space as she puts away glasses in the house where she works as a servant girl. The film’s subsequent action all develops out of this opening shot; the adventure Julie will undergo is itself the fulfillment of her romantic longings, the fantasy come true of one great love whose memory will last throughout her life. By contrast, Liliom serves mainly as a foil for her passion—not a bad move, since Farrell, decked out with an unconvincing wispy mustache, makes a curiously effete Liliom, especially in comparison with the gutsy performance of Charles Boyer in the same role, in the French version directed by Fritz Lang in 1933. Nor does the movie attempt to depict him as a goodhearted rogue as did Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II in Carousel; although Liliom attempts to steal money so that he and Julie can emigrate to the United States, he not only physically abuses her but refuses to listen when she tries to tell him she is pregnant, and dies without ever knowing he is about to become a father. In this way, Liliom upsets the usual conventions of the genre, making the man the passive object and the woman the lover who invests the relationship with her most profound emotions.

Unlike Rodgers and Hammerstein’s execrable musical play which blares out the “Love Conquers All” moral of its librettist that lumbers through all their collaborations, Liliom emphasizes the fragility and transitoriness of love, threatened on one side by the vagaries of human emotion and on the other by the forces of authoritarianism. Writing of Borzage’s later anti-Nazi pictures, Andrew Sarris commented that for the director “What Hitler and all tyrants represented most reprehensibly was an invasion of the emotional privacy of individuals, particularly lovers….” But Liliom, made before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, presents the opposition between instinctual gratification and social repression unencumbered by political references, with a directness only possible in pre-code days. In one amazing episode early in the film Liliom and Julie go to a park above the amusement park where he works: the two lovers sit on top of a knoll with the lights of the carnival in the distance when suddenly two bodies rise up and block the frame, those of two policemen who have come upon them. There is nothing benign or humorous about this intrusion; the abruptness with which the two figures enter the frame gives the visual gesture the effect of an act of violence. A scene like this, not to mention Liliom’s outsider status as well as the union unblessed by the bonds of matrimony, make the film as much an attack upon conventional morality and respectability as a glorification of the power of love. In the coming years, the combination of these two themes would play an increasingly important role in numerous films, but in no other genre would it figure quite so prominently as in the exotic.

The other thing about Liliom that would strike a viewer’s attention today is the film’s powerful visual stylization, both in cinematography—by Chester Lyons—and decor. Rather than striving to recreate Budapest on the Fox lot, the film’s designers decided to create sets which suggest a vaguely Central European setting, a wise decision as comparison with the movie Budapest of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop around the Corner reveals. The latter picture’s sets neither look like Budapest nor do they, as do the sets in Liliom, allow free play to the viewer’s imagination; more than anything else, they look like sets created for an MGM movie—a minor but distracting flaw in a great movie. The distance between the two movies, only a short one if measured in years, demonstrates how much the creative freedom of the silent era continued to exist into the early sound period. By the end of the decade, it would have been virtually eliminated by the standardization of production, relegated to such genres as fantasy and the musical. (More here.)

(image via shangols)

Lucky Star (Borzage,1929)

My Summer Movies # 9

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In October of 1915, Motion Pictures magazine wrote that as an actor Borzage “has the reputation of having better control of facial expression than any other screen artist before the public today.” That same year he directed his first film, a two-reeler called Pitch O’ Chance, in which he also co-starred as he would continue to do for the next two years while also directing himself. As a director, the face assumes for Borzage (as it does for so many filmmakers) a privileged role, what Sarris has termed Borzage’s “emotional Eldorado.” (p. 140) As already noted, these faces are most often beautiful ones and the camera is as likely to be taken with male beauty as it is with female: Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms as much as Loretta Young in Man’s Castle (1933), Alan Curtis in Mannequin (1938) as much as Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now? (1934). Borzage’s tendency in filming the face is one which aims towards an effect of slight immobility, the features not so much in motion and continually connoting thought as they are poised between movement and stasis, between the expression of emotion and the withdrawal of it. The frequent close-ups of Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven and Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now? often seem suspended above the direct unfolding of the action, assuming a form of portraiture of infinitesimal movement specific to the cinema. Through the act of looking into these faces, the eyes often assume a central role, becoming the culminating moment in facial contemplation, from the large and sad liquid eyes of ZaSu Pitts in Lazybones to the ravaged beauty of Gail Russell’s equally liquid eyes in Moonrise (1948). At the end of History Is Made at Night (1937), Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur are going down on what they believe to be a sinking ocean liner. As they gaze at one another’s faces, as though attempting to take them in for one final time, Arthur asks Boyer, “Did you always look like this, your eyes?”

It is inevitable, then, that these beautiful and impassive faces of Borzage’s call out to be touched and throughout his body of work we find images in which the face is not simply an object of contemplation for the camera but also one in which the face is literally being touched by others. In Little Man, What Now?, for example, Douglass Montgomery repeatedly touches Margaret Sullavan’s face with his handkerchief, a gesture paralleled and somewhat parodied in the same film by DeWitt C. Jennings performing the same actions to Montgomery’s face. While in History Is Made at Night we find a merging of face and hand as first Boyer and then later Arthur draw a face directly onto their own hands which then assumes the role of a character they name Coco. But the hand in Borzage also assumes its own expressive functions through the subtle and expressive use of gesture. In Lucky Star (1929), the act of Charles Farrell washing Janet Gaynor’s hands for their first lunch together becomes a major step in bringing the two together and in Gaynor’s transformation from child into woman. Lazybones is among the most interesting of Borzage’s films in this regard in which gesture not only serves its immediate emotional function within a sequence but acquires structural meaning over the course of the narrative. In particular, the film draws a strong link between Pitts’s repeated gesture of placing her hand to her mouth at moments of emotional crisis and the same gesture being performed by her illegitimate daughter who is otherwise unaware that Pitts is her real mother. (More here)

(image via White City Cinema)

L’avventuriera del piano di sopra (Matarazzo, 1941)

My Summer Movies # 4

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(Raffaele De Berti, Dallo schermo alla carta, Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 2000)

Treno popolare (Matarazzo, 1933)

My Summer Movies # 1

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Steven Ricci, Cinema and fascism: Italian film and society, 1922-1943, University of California Press, 2008, p. 114