If everything had gone to plan in 2010, this would be the post where I announce the Katie-Bar-The-Door nominees for the movie year 1936. Okay, so I'm a bit behind. But here are ten subjects I swear I'll write about before the calendar year is done.
Les Vampires Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford Pola Negri Rudolph Valentino The Thin Man Bette Davis Clark Gable Katharine Hepburn Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Alfred Hitchcock
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, here.]
From Stage To Screen After the success of I'll Say She Is!, the Marx Brothers had no shortage of producers willing to back their next Broadway show. They chose, however, the one producer who didn't come calling. Sam H. Harris was one of Broadway's most successful producers, with songwriters George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin in his stable and award-winning playwright George S. Kaufman recently put under contract.
With half a dozen hits in five years, Kaufman was one of the leading young playwrights working on Broadway and his quick wit turned out to be a perfect fit for Groucho, who years later referred to Kaufman as "his God." (He later went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes.) Kaufman built the play around the then-ongoing real estate boom in Florida and those of you familiar with the movie know the basic plot—with the help of a couple of disreputable guests (Chico and Harpo), the owner of a ramshackle hotel (Groucho) attempts to con a wealthy society maven (Margaret Dumont) into buying a worthless real estate development. As always, though, the plot of a Marx Brothers production is simply a framework for a lot of gags, and The Cocoanuts featured some of the best of the Brothers' career.
"Think of the opportunities here in Florida. Three years ago, I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now, I've got a nickel in my pocket."
"That's all very well, Mr. Hammer, but we haven't been paid in two weeks and we want our wages!"
"Wages? Do you want to be wage slaves, answer me that."
"No."
"No, of course not. Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Remember, there's nothing like Liberty—except Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. Be free, my friends. One for all, and all for me, and me for you, and three for five and six for a quarter."
To Kaufman's consternation, the Brothers also tended to ad lib throughout the show—"I think I just heard one of the original lines," he quipped at one performance—and in fact the "why a duck?" sequence evolved from just such an ad lib.
The show also featured an Irving Berlin song score—alas, not one of his best (it was the only show he ever wrote that failed to provide a hit song, although as I explained here, that wasn't necessarily his fault). In fact, the primary differences between the stage and film versions of The Cocoanuts centers on the elimination of many of these musical numbers, including two Groucho songs—"Why Am I A Hit With The Ladies" and a duet with Margaret Dumont called "A Little Bungalow." There was also a "black face" number involving members of the cast other than the Brothers and a subplot involving Harpo's scheme to defraud Dumont.
The Cocoanuts opened on the road in Boston, followed by two weeks in Philadelphia, an out-of-town tryout that revealed serious flaws in the production, not least of which was its gargantuan running time, with shows running well past midnight. After some cuts and restructuring, the show opened on Broadway at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street on December 8, 1925. (For those unfamiliar with the precise meaning of the term "Broadway show," the reference is not to a precise street location but to the size of the theater. To be consider a "Broadway" production, the theater must hold at least five hundred patrons. A theater with between 100 and 500 seats is an "off-Broadway" show, and one with fewer than 100 seats is "off-off Broadway.")
The Cocoanuts ran for 377 shows before heading out on the road, a stripped-down production Groucho called "inferior," by which he meant that the chorus girls were neither as pretty nor as willing as their Broadway counterparts. The audiences weren't inferior, though. The road show version of The Cocoanuts was big business, and the Los Angeles opening was attended by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo.
The Cocoa- nuts, by the way, marked the beginning of the end for Zeppo. Where in I'll Say She Is! he was part of the comedy, in Kaufman's new play he was relegated to straight man and occasional crooner. I have heard tell that Zeppo was actually a very funny guy and that from time to time he successfully understudied for Groucho, but the fact that the Brothers let Kaufman stand Zeppo in the corner without protest leads me to believe that either he was never that integral to the act or that he was already tired of performing and was looking forward to the day when he could work behind the scenes. He left the act after Duck Soup in 1933 to become a theatrical agent. A mechanical whiz, Zeppo also invented a watch to monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and founded Marman Products Co., which designed and manufactured, among other things, the Marman Twin motorcycle, and the Marman clamp which held the atomic bomb inside the B-29 used on the U.S. raid on Nagasaki.
After the success of The Cocoanuts, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind set to work on a follow-up, added by songwriters Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar. Concluding that the Marx Brothers played best as a collision of anarchy with high society, they set the play on Long Island at the estate of a stuffy socialite (Margaret Dumont again). Groucho, as African explorer Jeffrey T. Spaulding, was the guest of honor, with Chico as Emanuel Ravelli and Harpo as The Professor providing the weekend's musical entertainment.
"I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"You're Emanuel Ravelli?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance."
"Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike."
"Well, if you do, it's a tough break for both of you."
The play included some of Groucho's most famous monologues, including a description of his most recent safari ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know"), a letter to his lawyer, and a spoof of the Eugene O'Neill play Strange Interlude, with Groucho addressing the audience directly.
There are also subplots involving the socialite's daughter, a painter named John Parker and a wealthy art collector who in a previous life was Abie the fish peddler. Unlike the movie version, there is also a journalist character modeled on gossip columnist Walter Winchell, several songs and a final act revolving around a costume party.
The play opened on October 23, 1928, at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and played 171 performances. As with its predecessor, Animal Crackers acquired several gags along the way, including this speech which a despondent Groucho ad libbed the night his savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929:
"Living with your folks. Living with your folks. The beginning of the end. Drab dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows. Hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures, strange figures, weird figures: Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138..."
While performing Animal Crackers, the Brothers signed a deal with Paramount Pictures to make a film version of The Cocoanuts. United Artists had first approached the Brothers a year earlier about turning The Cocoanuts into a film (imagine the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin working out of the same studio), but balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000 for the film rights. Paramount's Adolph Zukor balked, too, but then found himself upping the offer to $100,000 during dinner with a particularly eloquent Chico.
Actually The Cocoanuts was the Marx Brothers' second film, their first being something called Humor Risk, an attempt at a Chaplinesque "comedy with pathos" which the Brothers filmed in 1921. In it, Harpo played a dapper detective named Watson—according to biographer Kyle Crichton, making "his entrance in a high hat, sliding down a coal chute into the basement"—with Groucho as the villain, Chico his henchman and Zeppo a nightclub owner. Though a couple of reels were completed and exhibited, the film was never completed and was soon after lost, perhaps in a fire set by Groucho himself. Despite later attempts to find the film, including Groucho's offer of $50,000 to anyone who could locate a copy, Humor Risk has never turned up.
Frankly, I'm not sure I can imagine how an act that relied on quick verbal humor and musical interludes could succeed in a silent film. Apparently after one viewing, the Brothers couldn't imagine it either.
In January 1929, with the Brothers still performing Animal Crackers on Broadway every evening, filming of The Cocoanuts began at Paramount's Astoria Studio on Long Island, New York. Paramount's east coast studio had been used for years to film New York-based acts such as W.C. Fields, but it had yet to fully convert to sound (especially sound proofing) when principle photography began and most of the filming took place early in the morning before the noise of traffic made sound recording impossible.
As a finished product, The Cocoanuts suffered from all the problems associated with early sound pictures. Primative sound recording equipment required the camera—and thus the actors—to remain rooted in place, a particular problem for Groucho who had trouble finding his marks anyway. In addition, early microphones picked up sound indiscriminately. To muffle the sound of crinkling paper, every telegram, letter or map you see was soaked in water before each take (there was no muffling the sound of the crew's laughter, however, which ruined many takes).
The initial cut of The Cocoanuts ran nearly two-and-a-half hours, quickly trimmed after a preview to 96 minutes, mostly by dropping musical numbers. The film premiered in New York on May 3, 1929. The Brothers, who were performing down the street in Animal Crackers missed the show, but their mother Minnie was in attendance.
New York's critics were, at best, mixed in their reviews—prompting the Brothers to offer to buy back the negative from Paramount so as with Humor Risk they could burn it—but in the rest of the country, The Cocoanuts was a sensation. Only two years into the sound era, movie audiences had never before seen, or more to the point, heard anything like Groucho's nonstop wordplay, and the film wound up grossing $1.8 million on a budget of $500,000, enough to rank seventh on the year's list of top-grossing films. (Adjusting for differences in ticket prices and the population of the United States, a $1.8 million gross would be something like $103 million today; or looked at another way, the seventh ranked grossing film of 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, grossed nearly $300 million domestically, more than $700 million worldwide. But however you put it, The Cocoanuts was very successful.)
After the success of The Cocoanuts, there was no question that the Marx Brothers would produce a film version of Animal Crackers. Filmed in Queens, New York, production began shortly after the road show in April 1930 and the film premiered at the Rialto in New York City on August 23, 1930. This time the critics were universal in their acclaim and the film grossed $1.5 million on its initial release (ticket prices were falling during the Depression), enough to rank fourth on the year's list of top grossing films.
In technical terms, Animal Crackers is far superior to The Cocoanuts—better sound, better sets, more movement—but where you rank it in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre depends in no small part on what it is you value in a Marx Brothers movie. Animal Crackers is the most quotable of all their films, with every line, particularly those from Groucho's monologues, a winner. And in terms of having worked out in advance what they were going to do, it's the most polished film they made before moving to MGM in 1935—personally, I rank it third behind Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera. But if what you respond to is the sense that anything can happen, as it often did when the Brothers were ad libbing, subverting not only the society the Brothers moved in but the conventions of film itself, then you might find the anarchic quality of their subsequent Paramount era pictures more to your taste—perhaps one of those the Marx Brothers made next, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.
Postscript: Did you know that color test footage was shot for Animal Crackers, with sixteen seconds being rediscovered in the mid-1990s. Note, there's no sound. That's Harpo sans wig in the bath robe:
The Monkey will be busy with family matters for the rest of the week. Rather than rush the essay on the best actress of 1932-33 (comedy/musical), I'm declaring a brief hiatus from blogging. But fret not. I should be back with another indigestible three thousand word nugget on Monday.
In the meantime, I leave you with the last big screen appearance of the great Douglas Fairbanks, the 1934 comedy The Private Life Of Don Juan. Directed by Alexander Korda and co-starring Merle Oberon, it's the story of an aging legend not quite sure how to fill the hours now that he's retired.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of Douglas Fairbanks, I thought I'd mention that today is Katie-Award winning actor Lon Chaney's birthday today. He is a robust 127.
I've written about him many times, and his dust-ups with Fairbanks in the pages of this blog are legendary. Perhaps you can take this as an opportunity to use the nifty search feature on the right hand side of the page and read all about it. You won't be disappointed. Unless, of course, you are.
In his honor, here is a public domain copy of perhaps his greatest performance, 1925's The Phantom Of The Opera. Enjoy.
It's March 23, 2010, and we here at the Monkey are celebrating the first anniversary of being able to say "We here at the Monkey." I don't know if you're getting anything out of all this blogging business, but I sure am: a chance to re-watch old favorites like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, discover new favorites like Anita Page, Douglas Fairbanks and René Clair, and hear from movie fans, both the living and the dead, from all over the world.
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are keeping the celebration pretty low key, just the usual collection of jugglers, bikini dancers and session musicians in gorilla suits. We might even squeeze in time for a movie or two.
If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by. We'd love to see you!
You'll be glad to know that on NCIS tonight, not only was the great Douglas Fairbanks mentioned, but two of the characters, Tony and Ziva, sat down to watch the silent Fairbanks classic The Black Pirate at the end of the show. (Yes, the Monkey occasionally watches something other than movies.)
Perhaps Doug has been courting the writers of NCIS with the same enthusiasm with which he lobbies his case here at the Monkey. Or maybe they, like us, know quality when they see it.
Anyway, why should two fictional characters have all the fun? Pull up a chair and join Anthony DiNozzo, Ziva David and yours truly as we watch this legally-available copy of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler classic, The Black Pirate.
"But Mr. Monkey," I hear so often on the street, "while it's true our lives rise and fall on the rhythms of your wonderful prose poetry, a movie blogger can never aspire to the status of cultural icon without posting an end-of-the-year top ten list." And even as I'm running away, I'm thinking, yes, it's probably true, I must write an end of the year top ten list. So as the decade of the 'Naughties comes to a close, I give you a list of the ten best movies I not just mentioned but wrote full essays about this year (thus the absence of The Kid, Safety Last, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis and many other).
As always, my choices are a reflection of my values and are in no way binding on the universe as a whole.
In chronological order and suitable for mounting on your refrigerator door:
The Thief Of Bagdad (1924)—Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Gold Rush (1925)—A 72-minute comedy about a gold prospector in the wilds of Alaska, chock full of laughs, action and some of the most inventive bits of business ever committed to film. I mean, there is something pretty entertaining about watching a man eat his own shoe. This is also the movie that introduced two oft-imitated bits, the one where a starving man thinks his partner is a chicken and the one where Chaplin spears two dinner rolls with forks and does a little soft-shoe with them under his chin. Throw in a little romance, an attempted murder and a happy ending and you've got the recipe for a real good time.
The General (1926)—Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which [Buster] Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)—Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer to murder his wife then becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption. The exaggerated story is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)—The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—This Buster Keaton comedy is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl. The most unforgettable sequence of Steamboat Bill, Jr., perhaps the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through. Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)—In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either. These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.
City Lights (1931)—Released more than three years after The Jazz Singer's premiere ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp carries around with him throughout the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot. A masterpiece of comic timing and invention, on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.
Le Million (1931)—A musical comedy about a struggling artist, in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee, but she's given the jacket to a beggar on the run from the police and soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket. Director René Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
M (1931)—Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade. Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. If you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.
Released more than three years after the premiere of The Jazz Singer ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. It's also my choice for the best picture of 1930-31.
(Because this essay is likely to run four thousand words or more, Katie-Bar-The-Door suggested I post it in pieces. Part Two will follow as soon as it's ready.)
Introduction: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Born in London in 1889 to a pair of music hall performers, Chaplin's parents separated when he was an infant and, after his mother was institutionalized, Chaplin and his brother Sydney, like characters in a Dickens novel, were packed off first to a workhouse and then an orphanage. Amazingly, the experience did not leave Chaplin angry or bitter, but it did leave him with an abiding sympathy for the downtrodden, a sympathy that became a hallmark of his movies and was one of the keys to his astounding world-wide popularity between 1914 and 1931—that, and his sublime technique as a comedian, mime, actor, writer, director, producer, you name it.
Chaplin first performed on stage at the age of five, singing the popular tune "Jack Jones" to calm a hall full of drunken customers who had just booed his mother off stage. In 1910, he toured the U.S. with Fred Karno and his "army," a troupe of comedians that included not only Chaplin and his brother Sydney but also Stan Laurel and which (according to the infallible Wikipedia) invented the pie-in-the-face gag.
Legendary comedy director Mack Sennett, he of the Keystone Kops and many others, spotted Chaplin while he was performing with Karno and signed him to a movie contract. While working for Sennett, Chaplin developed the character of the Tramp, not only the single most recognizable figure of the silent film era but perhaps of all movie history. Rising from obscurity to stardom in less than a year, Chaplin departed for Essanay Studios in 1915 where he directed fourteen shorts, then for Mutual a year later where, working with complete artistic freedom, he made twelve of the greatest comedy shorts of the silent era, including One A.M., The Cure and The Immigrant.
Chaplin later called the Mutual period the happiest time of his life and his success there led to a million dollar contract with First National, where he had not only artistic control of filming and editing but also for the first time control over the pace at which his films would be released, freeing him to work on more expansive projects such as Shoulder Arms, The Pilgrim and, most importantly, The Kid, which I would call one of the four best movies Chaplin ever made (along with The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times).
In 1919, Chaplin teamed with three of the biggest names in Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, to form United Artists, an independent film distribution company designed to put more money in the pockets of the people audiences were paying to see and giving those stars more artistic freedom in the process. Chaplin directed three movies for United Artists—A Woman of Paris, a drama starring longtime co-star Edna Purviance; The Gold Rush, one of the greatest comedies of the silent or any other era; and The Circus, in the words of Daniel Eagan a "delightful, unassuming film" which won an honorary award for Chaplin at the first Oscar ceremony—before turning to his next and perhaps greatest project, City Lights.
Forecasting With His Heart When Chaplin began work on his next film project, the sound era was already a year old. Chaplin publicly stated that the new medium—for sound was not just a new technology but a new medium—was nothing more than a passing fancy and would be forgotten within three years. As Danny Peary put it in the book that inspired this blog in the first place, Alternate Oscars, Chaplin was "forecasting with his heart," never a good idea when money is on the line. In fact, as we now know, by the end of 1928 sound had but drowned out silent movies and by the time of City Lights' release in 1931, only a handful of directors—Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, Yasujiro Ozu—were still standing firm against the new medium.
Chaplin's choice to film another silent picture was not born so much of arrogance or nostalgia as of anxiety. He was convinced, rightly I think, that the Little Tramp couldn't survive the transition to sound. Once the Tramp began to speak, he would no longer be an Italian or a New Yorker or a Jew or whoever else was sitting in the theater, but would become what in fact he was, a somewhat fussy Londoner with a polished stage actor's accent. Not to mention that Chaplin was largely a pantomimist, his character existing on some impossible ethereal plane. To have the Tramp speak would be to ground him too firmly in the real world, a place he could never actually exist. So Chaplin set out to make his next feature a celluloid monument to the art of pantomime, the future be damned. If he was going out, he was going out on his own terms.
Chaplin decided the new movie would center on the theme of "blindness," initially toying with the idea of a blind clown before settling on the idea of a blind flower girl. The last scene, which I will discuss below after a "Spoiler" warning, came first in Chaplin's conception, one of the greatest final scenes in movie history. The problem though was not the ending but how to arrive there. The journey would take him over three years.
The first task was to cast the flower girl. As he often did, Chaplin cast his lead actress on impulse, choosing Virginia Cherrill on a whim after spotting her at a boxing match. Although Cherrill protested she was not an actress—aside from City Lights, she's best remembered now as Cary Grant's first wife—an amateur was exactly what Chaplin wanted, preferring to mold his co-star's performance without her having to unlearn someone else's methods.
Indeed, Chaplin preferred to mold everyone's performance in his movies, right down to the expressions of the extras in the background, acting out everyone's part and then shooting the scene over and over until everyone had copied him to his satisfaction.
Nor did Chaplin work from a script, preferring instead to draft the story on the set, using film the way another artist might use a scratchpad, to doodle ideas, taking dozens, sometimes hundreds of takes of a scene as he worked out the precise action. Whether measured by today's standards or those of the time, Chaplin's work methods were borderline insane, taking months and even years to complete a movie and spending what for the time was an enormous amount of money. These methods might have made sense when, for example, he was spending First National's money to produce The Kid and was all but certain of a blockbuster hit; when he was shooting City Lights, he was spending his own money—some $2 million—with no guarantee the finished product would ever find an audience. It was a tremendous risk.
The first meeting between Chaplin's Tramp and Cherrill's flower girl was the key to the movie. Crossing the street, the Tramp cuts through a parked limousine where the Girl sits on a park wall. She hears the slamming of the door as Chaplin gets out and mistaking him for the limousine's owner, asks him to buy a flower. If anything, the Tramp is annoyed but he can't resist her smile and gives her his last dime, not realizing until he knocks the flower from her hand that she is blind. When the real millionaire climbs into the limo, the girl mistakes the slamming door for her customer's exit and in order to preserve the illusion—for the girl's sake, rather than his own—the Tramp sneaks away to watch her from a distance. He's hopelessly smitten and the unfolding love story provides the narrative backbone upon which Chaplin would hang some of the best comedy bits of his career.
It's a sweet, simple scene and in the finished film, takes up just under three minutes of screen time. In reality, the sequence took 342 takes spread out over two years as Chaplin struggled to find the right device by which the blind flower girl would mistake the Tramp for a millionaire.
Using outtakes from Chaplin's own archive in their documentary Unknown Chaplin, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill show the director trying first one trick, then another—perhaps something with a watch chain, maybe a second flower, maybe more comedy, perhaps more feeling—Chaplin becoming visibly frustrated as he fails to work out a satisfactory solution. Chaplin kept the crew and cast hanging around the studio for months on end, Cherrill saying later she sat in her dressing room alone reading day after day, as he waited for inspiration to strike.
Cherrill had never made a movie before and made no effort to hide her boredom with the process—for example, leaving the set one day to have her hair done. Her indifference dismayed Chaplin and he eventually fired her, replacing her with Georgia Hale, his co-star from The Gold Rush. Eventually, however, Chaplin reluctantly rehired Cherrill. Not only had he shot too much footage with her to start over, he also realized that Hale (or any other actress he could have cast) was too professional and couldn't help but give the role of the flower girl a third dimension, making her a fully-fleshed human being when what the part called for was a fantasy figure.
That Chaplin concluded this reveals (to my mind, at least) that the audience is seeing the flower girl not as she is but as the Tramp sees her. Both characters are blinded in their own way, she by a physical impairment, he by sentimentality, and both proceed to act based on assumptions that have no basis in reality. This is what I meant in my essay on Chaplin the actor when I said that there's a difference between Chaplin the artist being sentimental and Chaplin the actor playing the Tramp as a sentimentalist. The Tramp may be blind to reality but Chaplin always saw the world as it was.
[To read "Best Picture Of 1930-31: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin), Part Two: A Comedy Romance In Pantomime," click here.]
Jen of both Silent Stanzas and Flappers and Flickers (I can barely write one blog, she writes two, both about the silent movie era) stopped by earlier today to say, "There can never be enough Brooksie!" Yer durn tootin', Jen!
In her honor, I am adapting a variant of a meme floating around the movie blogosphere ("meme"—I'm not even sure what that is unless it's plural and has the word "screaming" in front of it): Twenty Favorite Movie Subjects I Have Previously Mentioned In My Blog So Far.
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford
Frances Marion (the Silent Era's best screenwriter)
German Expressionism (here, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
Charles Chaplin
Lillian Gish
Buster Keaton
Greta Garbo
Harold Lloyd
Lon Chaney
Clara Bow
The Joan Crawford/Anita Page Flapper Trilogy (throw in Dorothy Sebastian on the left and you've got the cast of Our Dancing Daughters)
Happy New Year.
After the success of I'll Say She Is!, the Marx Brothers had no shortage of producers willing to back their next Broadway show. They chose, however, the one producer who didn't come calling. Sam H. Harris was one of Broadway's most successful producers, with songwriters George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin in his stable and award-winning playwright George S. Kaufman recently put under contract.
"Think of the opportunities here in Florida. Three years ago, I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now, I've got a nickel in my pocket."
The Cocoanuts opened on the road in Boston, followed by two weeks in Philadelphia, an out-of-town tryout that revealed serious flaws in the production, not least of which was its gargantuan running time, with shows running well past midnight. After some cuts and restructuring, the show opened on Broadway at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street on December 8, 1925. (For those unfamiliar with the precise meaning of the term "Broadway show," the reference is not to a precise street location but to the size of the theater. To be consider a "Broadway" production, the theater must hold at least five hundred patrons. A theater with between 100 and 500 seats is an "off-Broadway" show, and one with fewer than 100 seats is "off-off Broadway.")
The Cocoa- nuts, by the way, marked the beginning of the end for Zeppo. Where in I'll Say She Is! he was part of the comedy, in Kaufman's new play he was relegated to straight man and occasional crooner. I have heard tell that Zeppo was actually a very funny guy and that from time to time he successfully understudied for Groucho, but the fact that the Brothers let Kaufman stand Zeppo in the corner without protest leads me to believe that either he was never that integral to the act or that he was already tired of performing and was looking forward to the day when he could work behind the scenes. He left the act after Duck Soup in 1933 to become a theatrical agent. A mechanical whiz, Zeppo also invented a watch to monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and founded Marman Products Co., which designed and manufactured, among other things, the Marman Twin motorcycle, and the Marman clamp which held the atomic bomb inside the B-29 used on the U.S. raid on Nagasaki.
"I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?"
The play opened on October 23, 1928, at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and played 171 performances. As with its predecessor, Animal Crackers acquired several gags along the way, including this speech which a despondent Groucho ad libbed the night his savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929:
While performing Animal Crackers, the Brothers signed a deal with Paramount Pictures to make a film version of The Cocoanuts. United Artists had first approached the Brothers a year earlier about turning The Cocoanuts into a film (imagine the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin working out of the same studio), but balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000 for the film rights. Paramount's Adolph Zukor balked, too, but then found himself upping the offer to $100,000 during dinner with a particularly eloquent Chico.
Frankly, I'm not sure I can imagine how an act that relied on quick verbal humor and musical interludes could succeed in a silent film. Apparently after one viewing, the Brothers couldn't imagine it either.
As a finished product, The Cocoanuts suffered from all the problems associated with early sound pictures. Primative sound recording equipment required the camera—and thus the actors—to remain rooted in place, a particular problem for Groucho who had trouble finding his marks anyway. In addition, early microphones picked up sound indiscriminately. To muffle the sound of crinkling paper, every telegram, letter or map you see was soaked in water before each take (there was no muffling the sound of the crew's laughter, however, which ruined many takes).
New York's critics were, at best, mixed in their reviews—prompting the Brothers to offer to buy back the negative from Paramount so as with Humor Risk they could burn it—but in the rest of the country, The Cocoanuts was a sensation. Only two years into the sound era, movie audiences had never before seen, or more to the point, heard anything like Groucho's nonstop wordplay, and the film wound up grossing $1.8 million on a budget of $500,000, enough to rank seventh on the year's list of top-grossing films. (Adjusting for differences in ticket prices and the population of the United States, a $1.8 million gross would be something like $103 million today; or looked at another way, the seventh ranked grossing film of 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, grossed nearly $300 million domestically, more than $700 million worldwide. But however you put it, The Cocoanuts was very successful.)
In technical terms, Animal Crackers is far superior to The Cocoanuts—better sound, better sets, more movement—but where you rank it in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre depends in no small part on what it is you value in a Marx Brothers movie. Animal Crackers is the most quotable of all their films, with every line, particularly those from Groucho's monologues, a winner. And in terms of having worked out in advance what they were going to do, it's the most polished film they made before moving to MGM in 1935—personally, I rank it third behind Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera. But if what you respond to is the sense that anything can happen, as it often did when the Brothers were ad libbing, subverting not only the society the Brothers moved in but the conventions of film itself, then you might find the anarchic quality of their subsequent Paramount era pictures more to your taste—perhaps one of those the Marx Brothers made next, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.
The Monkey will be busy with family matters for the rest of the week. Rather than rush the essay on the best actress of 1932-33 (comedy/musical), I'm declaring a brief hiatus from blogging. But fret not. I should be back with another indigestible three thousand word nugget on Monday.
The first king of Hollywood is a robust 127 today. How will you be celebrating?
From a book of drink recipes ...
At the risk of incurring the wrath of Douglas Fairbanks, I thought I'd mention that today is Katie-Award winning actor Lon Chaney's birthday today. He is a robust 127.
It's March 23, 2010, and we here at the Monkey are celebrating the first anniversary of being able to say "We here at the Monkey." I don't know if you're getting anything out of all this blogging business, but I sure am: a chance to re-watch old favorites like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, discover new favorites like Anita Page, Douglas Fairbanks and René Clair, and hear from movie fans, both the living and the dead, from all over the world.
You'll be glad to know that on NCIS tonight, not only was the great Douglas Fairbanks mentioned, but two of the characters, Tony and Ziva, sat down to watch the silent Fairbanks classic The Black Pirate at the end of the show. (Yes, the Monkey occasionally watches something other than movies.)
"But Mr. Monkey," I hear so often on the street, "while it's true our lives rise and fall on the rhythms of your wonderful prose poetry, a movie blogger can never aspire to the status of cultural icon without posting an end-of-the-year top ten list." And even as I'm running away, I'm thinking, yes, it's probably true, I must write an end of the year top ten list. So as the decade of the 'Naughties comes to a close, I give you a list of the ten best movies I not just mentioned but wrote full essays about this year (thus the absence of The Kid, Safety Last, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis and many other).
The Thief Of Bagdad (1924)—Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Gold Rush (1925)—A 72-minute comedy about a gold prospector in the wilds of Alaska, chock full of laughs, action and some of the most inventive bits of business ever committed to film. I mean, there is something pretty entertaining about watching a man eat his own shoe. This is also the movie that introduced two oft-imitated bits, the one where a starving man thinks his partner is a chicken and the one where Chaplin spears two dinner rolls with forks and does a little soft-shoe with them under his chin. Throw in a little romance, an attempted murder and a happy ending and you've got the recipe for a real good time.
The General (1926)—Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which [Buster] Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)—Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer to murder his wife then becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption. The exaggerated story is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)—The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—This Buster Keaton comedy is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl. The most unforgettable sequence of Steamboat Bill, Jr., perhaps the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through. Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)—In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either. These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.
City Lights (1931)—Released more than three years after The Jazz Singer's premiere ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp carries around with him throughout the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot. A masterpiece of comic timing and invention, on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.
Le Million (1931)—A musical comedy about a struggling artist, in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee, but she's given the jacket to a beggar on the run from the police and soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket. Director René Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
M (1931)—Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade. Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. If you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.
Released more than three years after the premiere of The Jazz Singer ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. It's also my choice for the best picture of 1930-31.
Born in London in 1889 to a pair of music hall performers, Chaplin's parents separated when he was an infant and, after his mother was institutionalized, Chaplin and his brother Sydney, like characters in a Dickens novel, were packed off first to a workhouse and then an orphanage. Amazingly, the experience did not leave Chaplin angry or bitter, but it did leave him with an abiding sympathy for the downtrodden, a sympathy that became a hallmark of his movies and was one of the keys to his astounding world-wide popularity between 1914 and 1931—that, and his sublime technique as a comedian, mime, actor, writer, director, producer, you name it.
Legendary comedy director Mack Sennett, he of the Keystone Kops and many others, spotted Chaplin while he was performing with Karno and signed him to a movie contract. While working for Sennett, Chaplin developed the character of the Tramp, not only the single most recognizable figure of the silent film era but perhaps of all movie history. Rising from obscurity to stardom in less than a year, Chaplin departed for Essanay Studios in 1915 where he directed fourteen shorts, then for Mutual a year later where, working with complete artistic freedom, he made twelve of the greatest comedy shorts of the silent era, including One A.M., The Cure and The Immigrant.
Chaplin directed three movies for United Artists—A Woman of Paris, a drama starring longtime co-star Edna Purviance; The Gold Rush, one of the greatest comedies of the silent or any other era; and The Circus, in the words of Daniel Eagan a "delightful, unassuming film" which won an honorary award for Chaplin at the first Oscar ceremony—before turning to his next and perhaps greatest project, City Lights.
Chaplin's choice to film another silent picture was not born so much of arrogance or nostalgia as of anxiety. He was convinced, rightly I think, that the Little Tramp couldn't survive the transition to sound. Once the Tramp began to speak, he would no longer be an Italian or a New Yorker or a Jew or whoever else was sitting in the theater, but would become what in fact he was, a somewhat fussy Londoner with a polished stage actor's accent. Not to mention that Chaplin was largely a pantomimist, his character existing on some impossible ethereal plane. To have the Tramp speak would be to ground him too firmly in the real world, a place he could never actually exist. So Chaplin set out to make his next feature a celluloid monument to the art of pantomime, the future be damned. If he was going out, he was going out on his own terms.
The first task was to cast the flower girl. As he often did, Chaplin cast his lead actress on impulse, choosing Virginia Cherrill on a whim after spotting her at a boxing match. Although Cherrill protested she was not an actress—aside from City Lights, she's best remembered now as Cary Grant's first wife—an amateur was exactly what Chaplin wanted, preferring to mold his co-star's performance without her having to unlearn someone else's methods.
The first meeting between Chaplin's Tramp and Cherrill's flower girl was the key to the movie. Crossing the street, the Tramp cuts through a parked limousine where the Girl sits on a park wall. She hears the slamming of the door as Chaplin gets out and mistaking him for the limousine's owner, asks him to buy a flower. If anything, the Tramp is annoyed but he can't resist her smile and gives her his last dime, not realizing until he knocks the flower from her hand that she is blind. When the real millionaire climbs into the limo, the girl mistakes the slamming door for her customer's exit and in order to preserve the illusion—for the girl's sake, rather than his own—the Tramp sneaks away to watch her from a distance. He's hopelessly smitten and the unfolding love story provides the narrative backbone upon which Chaplin would hang some of the best comedy bits of his career.
Cherrill had never made a movie before and made no effort to hide her boredom with the process—for example, leaving the set one day to have her hair done. Her indifference dismayed Chaplin and he eventually fired her, replacing her with Georgia Hale, his co-star from The Gold Rush. Eventually, however, Chaplin reluctantly rehired Cherrill. Not only had he shot too much footage with her to start over, he also realized that Hale (or any other actress he could have cast) was too professional and couldn't help but give the role of the flower girl a third dimension, making her a fully-fleshed human being when what the part called for was a fantasy figure.
