ENGLISH 1301 paper

56 CINEASTE, Fall 2017

isn’t unreasonable to say this is a film about patriarchal law’s last gasp, especially since the killing of an older man is at the center of the narrative. Thomas shouts at his models, at one point grabbing one physically to push her into position. The image of James Stew- art holding a camera with an outsized lens (in Rear Window) became a much-used sym- bol for film studies of the impotent, voyeuristic male. Thomas takes this much further, using the camera as a phallus as he unconsciously mimes intercourse, complete with shouts of “Yes!, Yes!” as he photographs the leggy, then-trendy model Veruschka; as usual, the male achieves “orgasm” (Thomas collapses on a sofa) while the female is merely a receptacle left on her own.

The moment, reproduced on virtually every poster for the film, might be a bit ripe, but the point is made. It is later repeated, with emphasis on Thomas’s sadism, in the famous nude romp with two giddy, aspiring teenage models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills), who end up as servants, dressing David as he stares at his mysterious pho- tographs. As in Red Desert, the sex act is achieved, but it is poisoned, bringing no ful- fillment to male or female.

The film opens with a car full of mimes, the famous Rag Week troupe, barreling around the drab urban citadel of The Econo- mist magazine. At the film’s end, Thomas spots them at a tennis court in Maryon Park, about which he continues to obsess. Two of the troupe’s members “play” tennis without rackets or balls. When they hit a “ball” over the fence, they beckon to Thomas, who joins in the mimed game, picking up the invisible ball, tossing it back. He enters the realm of metaphysics as he watches the game with a small smile—he even seems to hear the ball being struck. This object is invisible, yet it becomes the reason for unity—until Thomas’s smile turns to a frown. The mimes’ society is too marginal and bizarre to offer consolation. Thomas actually fades into the landscape as the camera pulls back, consciousness shutting down.

When I first looked at the Criterion Blu- ray of this film, I was startled, thinking I had time-warped back to my initial viewing in 1966. Every print of the film since then has been inferior, my measure being the deathly greenness of Maryon Park. I find no fault with this magnificent 4K edition, yet another of Criterion’s sterling achievements. The supplements are rich and plentiful, includ- ing Garner’s substantial remarks as well as those of photo and art historians Walter Moser and David Alan Mellor. There is an intelligent 2016 documentary on the making of and legacy of Blow-Up, conversations with Antonioni (pretty slim), David Hem- mings, Jane Birkin, and a lengthy recent interview with Vanessa Redgrave. The pack- age also includes an essay by David Forgacs and Stig Björkman and the famous—but marginally relevant—short story by Julio Cortázar.—Christopher Sharrett

His Girl Friday Produced and directed by Howard Hawks; written by Charles Lederer from The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur; photographed by Joseph Walker; art direction by Lionel Banks; edited by Gene Havlick; starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, and Billy Gilbert. Blu-ray and DVD, B&W, 92 min, 1940.

The Front Page Produced by Howard Hughes; directed by Lewis Milestone; written by Bartlett Cormack, from the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, with additional dialogue by Charles Lederer; photographed by Glen MacWilliams; production design by Richard Day; edited by W. Duncan Mansfield; starring Adolphe Menjou, Pat O’Brien, Mary Brian, and Edward Everett Horton. Blu-ray and DVD, B&W, 101 min, 1931. A Criterion Collection release, www.criterion.com.

The first thing most moviegoers associate with Howard Hawks’s classic 1940 comedy His Girl Friday is speed—not just swift, effi- cient storytelling, although that’s definitely there, but dialogue, plot twists, and visual gambits that flood the screen at a pace any old-time newshound on a deadline would envy. In a video extra accompanying the Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray and DVD edition, film scholar David Bordwell notes that some sequences have characters rattling off lines at the astonishing rate of three hundred words per minute. It’s just as astonishing that almost none of those words

are redundant, extraneous, or lost in the shuffle, and that the stellar performers— from stars Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy to outstanding character actors like Roscoe Karns, Ernest Truex, and Billy Gilbert—match the celerity of the speech with gestures, movements, and expressions no less fluid and precise. And all the while Joseph Walker’s camera vigorously tracks, pans, swivels, and frames multiple actions in graceful deep-focus compositions. Have you noticed this is a rave review?

Credit for the top-flight gestalt of His Girl Friday goes also to playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose 1928 play The Front Page inspired the production. Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer brilliantly rewired the stage comedy by giv- ing protagonist Hildy Johnson a gender reassignment, turning a newsman named Hildebrand into a newswoman named Hildegard and making her the former spouse of Walter Burns, her hard-boiled editor. Apart from this grand transforma- tion, the outline of the plot remains the same: Walter wants Hildy to keep pounding out copy for the Morning Post instead of heading off to dullsville with her terminally respectable fiancé, and Hildy can’t resist grabbing her typewriter when a condemned prisoner about to be hanged escapes right under the pressroom’s collective nose, thanks to a dull-witted sheriff and an inept “alienist” who bungles a sanity examination.

Newspaper movies were a Hollywood staple in the Thirties, reaching a high point with His Girl Friday and then Citizen Kane, which ushered in their baroque period in 1941. The genius of His Girl Friday was to

Newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and former wife and star journalist Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) trade barbs in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday. (photo courtesy of Photofest)

CINEASTE, Fall 2017 57

conjoin that popular genre with the screw- ball comedy, which Hawks had previously aced with the witty Bringing Up Baby (1938) and the raucous Twentieth Century (1934), adapted by Hecht and MacArthur from another of their plays. The result may be the greatest specimen of what film philosopher Stanley Cavell famously calls the “comedy of remarriage,” in which reconciliation and forgiveness ultimately transcend lower val- ues of desire and disdain.

Justified though they are, the lasting accolades for His Girl Friday have tended to obscure the 1931 screen version of The Front Page, which retains the title of the Hecht–MacArthur original. Directed by Lewis Milestone, fresh from the very differ- ent triumph of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), it was adapted by screenwriter Bartlett Cormack after Hecht and MacArthur proved too pricey for producer Howard Hughes, and Lederer contributed additional dialogue. Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou play Hildy and Walter, both heavier on toughness and lighter on charm than their 1940s counterparts, and the gifted likes of Edward Everett Horton and Slim Summerville spice up the support- ing cast. (There’s also a mildly engaging 1974 version by Billy Wilder, with odd cou- ple experts Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in the leads.) By pairing His Girl Friday with its 1931 predecessor, the two- disc Criterion release allows for swift com- parisons between the two. And according to a “Hawks on Hawks” video included in the package, Hawks himself once made that comparison, alternating reels of his version with reels of the 1931 film to confirm his hope that as fast as the earlier film was, his was faster.

Most important for cinephiles, the Crite- rion release presents Milestone’s movie in a version closer to Milestone’s intentions than any that’s been circulated since the Forties. And therein lies a tale worth stopping the presses for, fascinatingly recounted in a video extra detailing the restoration of the 1931 film. Briefly summarized, the Academy Film Archive set out to restore The Front Page from a 1970 print located in the Hughes film collection. When they obtained a Library of Congress print to fill in potentially damaged portions, they discovered that the contents of the two prints were significantly different, and turning to Milestone’s papers in the Academy library, they figured out why.

In the early sound film era, directors often shot and edited their films in three simultaneous versions intended for Ameri- can audiences, British audiences, and “gen- eral foreign” audiences. Lo and behold, pretty much all post-1940 film and video copies of The Front Page derived from the “general foreign” version, which the original film- makers considered the least desirable of the three, tweaked as it was for easy consump- tion in far-off markets. The situation isn’t

quite that simple, since foreign versions were sometimes less heavily censored—for instance, a reporter’s dismissive hand wave in the U.S. version becomes a conspicuously hoisted middle finger for viewers in other markets. Usually, though, the American ver- sion wins for finely tuned rhythms and niceties of performance and dialogue, as Michael Sragow observes in a Criterion leaflet essay citing examples from the third- best version we’ve been stuck with until now, where the sexual slur “lizzies” turns into “use lipstick” and a reference to the American icon Pocahontas morphs into the more widely famed Lady Godiva.

All versions of The Front Page have a touch of the exotic in the Internet age, when traditional newspaper movies are a semi- forgotten breed and the sardonic, case-hard- ened characters memorialized in Hecht and MacArthur’s play seem like relics from a vanished realm. Reporters of that era rarely had bylines; rewrite desks sculpted prose far from the scene; and many journalists were little more than scouts, snoops, and look- outs. That was certainly so in the Chicago where the play takes place and where Hecht and MacArthur chased news until the mid- Twenties, when both moved to New York, started collaborating on theater scripts, and eventually got into screenwriting, where Hecht distinguished himself more than his sometime colleague.

Looked at another way, the play and the movie adaptations amount to a sort of jour- nalism in themselves. They take place largely in the bedraggled pressroom of Chicago’s fabled Criminal Court Building, and the dialogue is crammed with references to actual persons, places, and things. Hildy Johnson is the name of a real crime reporter, the jailbreak is based on the more successful

escape of one Tommy O’Connor in 1921— which Hecht had drawn on when writing Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 Underworld— and the practical joke that closes the story was apparently played on MacArthur by a Chicago editor. Hawks’s movie omits many Twenties-specific references but compen- sates with in-jokes about Bellamy’s bland persona and Grant’s unfortunate real name, Archie Leach.

And then there are the social and politi- cal evils that rumble through all versions of the comedy—a hefty catalogue of “iniqui- ties, double dealings, chicaneries, and immoralities,” as Hecht called them in his epilogue to the play. The most obvious one is the death penalty imposed on Earl Williams, a mentally challenged loner who fancies himself a radical; he shot a “colored policeman” in a fit of confusion, and when a reprieve from the governor arrives before his scheduled execution, the corrupt Chicago mayor (based on William Hale Thompson, a corrupt Chicago mayor) suppresses it to score African-American votes in an impend- ing election.

Only in Hawks’s film does Hildy meet with Earl in the death chamber, showing a slippery sort of compassion as she speaks to him with kindness and wrestles his jumbled thoughts into a quasi-political notion that doesn’t make sense but promises to make good copy. This is the slowest, quietest scene in His Girl Friday, acknowledging the seri- ousness of the issues at stake and signaling a fundamental decency beneath Hildy’s any- thing-for-a-story pragmatism.

His Girl Friday benefits from the thoughtfulness of this moment, but it’s related to a less-appealing element in all ver- sions of The Front Page—the treatment of Mollie Malloy, a stereotypical hooker with a

From left, Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien), Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou), Mrs. Grant (Effie Ellsler), and Diamond Louie (Maurice Black) in Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page. (photo courtesy of Photofest)

58 CINEASTE, Fall 2017

heart of gold who met Earl the day before his crime, offered him a bit of warmth and sympathy, and was rewarded by a barrage of phony stories slandering her as a brazen mistress planning to marry Earl on the gal- lows. Most of the reporters (except Hildy in Hawks’s film) spew additional derision when she arrives at the press room to berate them, and neither the play nor the adapta- tions go far enough in explicitly censuring their sexist cruelty, although when Earl lies hidden in a press room desk and Mollie makes a near-fatal leap out a window to dis- tract the reporters from finding him, Hildy does seem genuinely upset about her fate. Apart from the female Hildy of 1940, no woman comes off very well in this story— the pressroom is a male fortress, Hildy’s prospective mother-in-law gets hauled off the premises by Walter’s in-house thug— and even if we laugh our asses off, as Bord- well says he does each time he watches His Girl Friday, these signs of unreconstructed patriarchy may dampen the merriment.

The larger point is that gender politics, electoral politics, and death penalty politics are worth keeping in mind when revisiting these films. Ditto for media and “fake news” politics, which make the narrative as timely as it’s ever been. Whatever your attitude toward today’s allegations of journalistic fakery, mostly but not exclusively leveled by right-wing forces more comfortable with “truthiness” than facts, you have to admit that the old Chicago pros pulled vastly fewer punches. Listen to what they holler into their phones when Earl is discovered hiding in the desk: “He put up a desperate strug- gle…the police overpowered him…tried to shoot it out…trying to break through the cordon of police….” And all the while the meek little man is wilting with exhaustion and befuddlement, hardly able to stand, much less make a break for it. That’s really fake news, and it was everyday business not so long ago.

In sum, The Front Page packs a serio- comic wallop in all its iterations, and it’s hard to imagine a better presentation than Criterion’s generously stocked package, which includes assorted video essays and featurettes as well as three audio adaptations from radio’s golden age. Nodding to the Earl Williams reprieve that finally gets delivered, Cavell speaks of comedy as offering a “reprieve from the world on grounds of insanity,” and adds that the remarriage genre aims to transform the timeworn insti- tution of marriage into a site of “romance” and “adventure.” Those good things are what Hildy and Walter find when they head back (probably) to the altar at the end of Hawks’s film, and, mutatis mutandis, it’s what the male team has at the end of Mile- stone’s picture. Romance and adventure are gratifications we all need, and in today’s parlous times, a reprieve from the world on grounds of insanity is a mighty tempting prospect.—David Sterritt

Death in the Garden Produced by David Mage and Óscar Dancigers; directed by Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Luis Buñuel, Raymond Queneau, Luis Alcoriza, and Gabriel Arout, based on the novel by José-André Lacour; cinematography by Jorge Stahl Jr.; edited by Marguerite Renoir; sets designed by Edward Fitzgerald; music by Paul Misraki; starring Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, and Michèle Girardon. Blu-ray and DVD, color, French dialog with English subtitles, 99 min., 1956. A Eureka Entertainment/Masters of Cinema release, www.mastersofcinema.org.

In an imaginary Latin American country, a band of diamond miners revolts against the government, which has declared that it will nationalize the mines. The subsequent crackdown by the army affects not only the rebels but also certain peripheral figures: Castin (Charles Vanel), a miner who has amassed a fortune and is suspected, wrongly, of complicity; and Chark (Georges Mar- chal), imprisoned for bank robbery, but now on the lam. These two bribe Chenko (Tito Junco), a riverboat captain, to take them to the border with Brazil. In their flight, they are accompanied by Castin’s deaf mute daughter María (Michèle Girardon); the prostitute Djin (Simone Signoret), who hopes to become a rich widow by marrying old Castin; and Father Lizzardi (Michel Pic- coli), who plans to disembark at a mission on the way. When the army sends a patrol boat in pursuit, the passengers abandon ship, relying on Chenko to guide them through the jungle. Chenko takes off, and they are left to their own devices. The rest of the film, which portrays their efforts to stay alive and to find their way out, will center

on the fugitives’ varied reactions to their perilous situation and on the question of which ones will survive.

The film represents the intent of the French producers to cash in on the huge success of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 The Wages of Fear, which also takes place in Latin America. They even attempted to use the same cast. The lead, Yves Montand, was otherwise engaged, so they were forced to settle for Charles Vanel, who had won Best Actor at Cannes for his supporting role in that film. They also cast Montand’s wife. Simone Signoret had played no part in The Wages of Fear, but she and Montand were celebrated as a couple, and she was famous in her own right. To produce another best- seller, the producers opted to stick to the successful formula and not challenge the conventions of the genre. At loose ends, Buñuel accepted the commission even though he must have agreed with co-writer Raymond Queneau’s judgment that the book by José-André Lacour was “a piece of shit.”

Writing problems would plague the cre- ation of the script to an unusual degree. Que- neau’s participation was not very helpful per- haps because of his diffidence or—co-writer Luis Alcoriza’s take—because the French producers didn’t like Queneau’s dialogues, “although they were brilliant.” Buñuel admits to never having resolved the problems entirely. During the shoot, he woke up routinely in the middle of the night to rewrite what was being filmed the next day and then hand it on to Gabriel Arout to put into good French. Queneau had, by that time, decamped. Whether the difficulties were due to the French producers’ interference (as Francisco Aranda, Bunuel’s nephew and first biographer, claims), to the nature of the project, or to the book itself is not entirely clear.

“Film is a wonderful instrument of expression, but at the same time, because it’s

The principal characters in Death in the Garden, pursued by local authorities for their alleged involvement in a miners’ strike, escape in a riverboat. (photo courtesy of Masters of Cinema)

Copyright of Cineaste is the property of Cineaste and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.