Rich Mitch
I'd been meaning to see more Guy Madden films before they leave the Criterion Channel on July 31, but somehow got sidetracked by Death Takes a Holiday. I mean--Fredric March as The Grim Reaper? I know Madden is an important experimental filmmaker with a high reputation and what films I've seen (Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary; The Saddest Music in the World; Archangel) reveal a cineliterate talent with a taste for silent film exuberance and, in the case of Dracula, the influence of Gerardo de Leon's The Blood Drinkers--but morbid romances are impossible to resist. Besides there's a cadaverous quality to March--his performance here suggesting an antediluvian theatrical style irretrievably lost--that makes him the perfect Death.
And yes the film is creaky at times melodramatic at times but there's an intriguing...something...as if Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe collaborated on a script Roger Corman decided to direct in black and white. The special effects may not be all that special but when director Mitchell Leisen sticks to simply lighting and framing an image--when his camera tilts up at such an angle a grandfather clock looms like a great horned owl over an empty hall--he can be eerily effective.
Leisen's probably best known for Death; otherwise he's a largely forgotten filmmaker, remembered if at all as the costume-designer-turned-filmmaker who butchered the early scripts of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, cutting away their dialogue in favor of the striking image. "He was a window dresser," Wilder once sneered; makes me like the poor man right there.
Midnight is Leisen directing a script by Wilder and Charles Brackett, showcasing dialogue and plot twist over visual style. You're reminded of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, wealthy folks 'dancing on a volcano' (Renoir's words), though Leisen's frothy satire doesn't even begin to touch Renoir's masterpiece, or attempt anything like Renoir's apocalyptic subtext (to be fair I don't think anything Wilder has done begins to touch Renoir either). Have not done a page-by-page comparison of what Wilder wrote or what Leisen changed but I'm guessing if Leisen's alternations were so damaging then his subsequent films without Wilder shouldn't be as good--which I'd say isn't the case at all.
Kitty is considered one of Leisen's best, a Pygmalion with sex actually involved not just suggested (What was that again about Shaw and sexuality?). Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland) discovers young pickpocket Kitty (Paulette Godard) and grooms her to be the wife of rich and powerful men; problem is she'd rather be his wife not theirs.
David Melville puts the film on the same shelf as Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, an ambitious comparison. The two films share similar time period and location (England in the 1700s), and while Leisen doesn't have Kubrick's teutonic monumentality--the latter's ability to make every shot, structure, and narrative plot point feel (for better or worse) like a momentous occasion--Kubrick doesn't have Leisen's light comic touch ("Goodbye old chap; I'm going to miss you like sin." "Exactly like sin."), or his ability to couch barbs in what looks like a comforting romantic comedy, till you press too hard and the sharpened points sink home.
I'll argue that Leisen has also been honing his visual chops--witness the long largely wordless sequence of the 10th Duke of Malmunster receiving news of a male heir's birth. Servant comes out of the nursery announcing the good news to a second; second with candelabra in hand walks swiftly forth, camera retreating before him. The sequence becomes a relay of torchbearing footmen, one passing the message to the next through one long hallway after another, down a staircase so vast you imagine there was a different microclimate for each floor. Finally the Duke receives word and, following yet another of his candlelit employees, makes his interminable way towards the nursery, the camera recording what turns out to be the rest of his life. It's sly satire on the ridiculous amount of flooring and steps required by the privilege to signify their high status; it also happens to be the Duke's undoing, as at one point he starts panting desperately from his exertions.
Then there's the finale where Kitty, Hugh, and Brett (Patric Knowles) all stand in a row, one looking at the other then turning to a third to clarify their feelings. Leisen could have played it any number of ways, including grouping them in a single shot and letting everyone hash out their differences MMA style, but this way when one does an about-face so does the plot, one lover's fate determined by the caprices of another. Nothing spectacular mind, but the choreography is there if you care to see it, effectively serving narrative and dialogue.
To Each His Own won Olivia de Havilland the first of two Oscars, despite which I insist it's a marvelous performance: woman bears child out of wedlock (a scandalous premise in '40s Hollywood), through a chain of freak circumstances loses custody of the child, scrambles as she watches her child grow up from a distance. De Havilland was likely handed her award for the spectacle of a suffering mother but even more harrowing is the elaborate web of self-delusion she weaves around herself--the belief, for one, that a limitless fortune and strong-arm tactics will win her son back from the woman currently raising him. Much of Leisen's direction can be considered by-the-numbers Hollywood melodrama, only a few sequences--a conversation on a crumbling rooftop, a seduction by biplane--betray his real game plan: to visualize specific moments in the woman's life with such dreamlike intensity that the rest of her life feels bland and unconvincing in comparison. No wonder she obsesses over her absent aviator, and the son conceived with him.
(De Havilland incidentally gained twenty pounds over the course of the shoot to look convincingly older--and pregnant--for the film, some thirty-four years before Robert De Niro ever thought of putting on a pair of boxing gloves)
No Man of Her Own starts with a Cornell Woolrich sitch: pregnant woman with no husband and no hope mets pregnant rich woman on a train; train derails with nearly everyone killed, no-hope finds herself mistaken for rich girl, lives happy life with rich family until someone starts sending threatening letters. The miracle of the film isn't that Woolrich and Leisen make such a good combination, the miracle is that no one saw this coming. Leisen's films like Woolrich's novel are full of impersonations (Death posing as a Hungarian prince; Kitty posing as a highborn aristocrat; Jody Norris pretends to be her own son's aunt), doublings (Hugh and Brett as aristocratic rivals for Kitty's affection; John Lund playing both de Havilland's son and lover), and unlikely coincidences (Kitty's husbands fall dead exactly when it's convenient for her that they do so; Jody puts her son up for adoption at the same moment a richer family is seeking a child to adopt).
Think The Magnificent Ambersons meets Shadow of a Doubt, only where in Shadow Uncle Charlie is the source of all corruption here the threat is more vague. O a pushy male might refuse to answer a door, or drag his reluctant ex-lover to the marriage bureau, but the film's true villain (as in any Woolrich novel) is the world itself--hostile, malevolent, prone to outrageous elaborate machinations designed to pull a man down with as much irony as possible.
Leisen gilds the toxic atmosphere with an elegant visual style, steeped in the nostalgia of small towns, tainted with a sense of dread. "...summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. But not for us; not for us"--as our heroine (Barbara Stanwyck, unforgettable as Helen Furgeson / Patrice Harkness) speaks we approach the lovely three-story Harkness residence with its trimmed lawn, white porch, softly luminous windows, seen through the lens of a camera gliding stealthily up the front door.
The ending is often described as 'ridiculous' and a 'dilution of the original' but thinking about it Leisen may have captured the Woolrich spirit better than any filmmaker before or since (skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen the film). Where in the book the married couple is left with an ostensibly happy life full of uncertainty, in the film the couple's guilt is squared away by the action of a third party, in as ingenious and unlikely a manner as possible. Yes the Harknesses are safe--proven innocent, even--but the manner of their acquittal is as capricious as the manner of their entrapment; if they can fall into this much trouble and just as easily fall out of it who's to say the cycle won't repeat itself the very next day? A man (or woman) bent over an executioner's block waits resignedly for the axe to fall; should she feel any better if the blade remained suspended above her head? Life (we are told by Leisen and Stanwyck) can be as crazy-complicated as a Woolrich noir, with pleasures on display both seductive and ecstatic...but not for us; not for us.
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