Cimarron, or how to erase feminism

Posted on 21 October 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

Cimarron won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production in 1931, beating East Lynne, The Front Page, Skippy and Trader Horn. I haven’t seen or heard of any of the others. I have seen City Lights, which was released in the August 1930-July 1931 eligibility window, and is a far far better film. It did not get a single Academy Award nomination. Cimarron was the first film to be nominated in every eligible Oscar category, and won two of the others – Best Writing and Best Art Direction. Here is a recent trailer:

Cimarron is the lowest-ranked of any winner of the Oscar for Best Film by IMDB users. So at least the only way from here is up. I too thought it was awful. It was received with great critical acclaim when first released, but has not aged well. It’s the story of a young couple who settle in Oklahoma after the land rush of 1889Southern family and has some difficulty adapting to life in the new town of Osage. The story takes us from 1889 to the present day (ie 1931) and, no apologies for spoilers, she gets elected to the U.S. Congress from Oklahoma and ends the film in a chance encounter with her long-estranged husband when he is killed in an industrial accident on one of them new oil fields.

The very set-up of the film is to present the massive theft of land from the Indians as a great civilisational step forward – and actually the opening scene of the land-rush is pretty thrilling and well done cinematically, if you can ignore what it actually meant. As with all previous films I have watched in this sequence, the world presented by Hollywood is a white one – there is one young black character, who is horrifically casually disposed of in a gunfight. The Indians are portrayed as noble savages willingly moving aside for the white settlers, though it gets a bit awkward when our protagonists’ son marries the maidservant (who is the daughter of the local chief).

The star of the film, Richard Dix, playing the erratic Yancey Cravat, does rather well with somewhat odd material. His best moment is an electrifying defence of the leading sex worker in town, who is on the verge of being thrown out of Osage despite her contributions to society. But I couldn’t really understand what his wife and the other townspeople see in him; for some reason, he is invited to preach at the town’s first religious meeting in a early scene, and shoots a recreant dead from the pulpit, withourt further consequence.

Irene Dunne, as the heroine Sabra Cravat, doesn’t get to do much other than look appalled and horrified by the wild society that she has been dragged into, continuing to run her husband’s business in his absence until her political success at the end of the book. I didn’t feel her heart was in it. She went on to greater things, apparently.

The whole film is jarringly episodic, skipping decades in a blink. I was mystified by its success.

And then I read the book by Agnes Ferber, on which the film was based; it was America’s best-selling novel of 1930. To get the basics out of the way, here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter.

Twice a year, chaperoned by old General “Bull” Plummer, the Indians swept through the streets of Wichita in their visiting regalia—feathers, beads, blankets, chains—a brilliant sight. Ahead of them and behind them was the reassuring blue of United States army uniforms worn by the Kansas regiment from Fort Riley. All Wichita, accustomed to them though it was, rushed out to gaze at them from store doorways and offices and kitchens. Bucks, braves, chiefs, squaws, papooses; tepees, poles, pots, dogs, ponies, the cavalcade swept through the quiet sunny streets of the mid-western town, a vivid frieze of color against the drab monotony of the prairies.

Cimarron is a really good book, a feminist text (the words “feminist” and “feminism” are actually used) whose guts were torn out of it by Hollywood. The central character of the novel is Sabra Cravat, daughter of a Southern family who moved to Kansas after the Civil War; having married Yancey at a very young age, she is swept off to Oklahoma by him. She breaks away from the stereotypes of her Southern parents, and gets over many of her own hangups, to build a new version of society in the town of Osage, to the point where she herself is elected to Congress. Cimarron was the best-selling novel in America in 1930, and the film’s popularity must surely have been a reward for its insipid reflection of the popular original text. I was struck that the opening titles featured the characters and actors playing each, which looked like an assumption that many viewers would already be familiar with them.

However, we are a long way from intersectionality, and the book is still pretty racist, if not quite as racist as the film. There is still only one named black character (who suffers an even more horrible end than his screen version), though it’s also clear that there are lots of others in the town. While Sabra’s view of the Indians is pretty bigoted, the unreliable Yancey is totally on their side, and preaches to her frequently about the disgrace of the Trail of Tears and the awful things that white men have done; this is somehow dropped from the film. (Also worth noting that the Vice-President of the United States at the time the film was made was actually descended from the Osage tribe, and remains the only Native American to have served at the top of the executive branch.) The one Jewish character is sympathetically treated in both book and film, but the nasty anti-Semitism of the baddies in the book doesn’t make it to the screen.

The feminism of the book is completely erased by the film, in that Yancey is given much more screen time and better lines (though his defence of the Indians is removed), and we are cut off from Sabra’s internal dialogue, which is the loudest voice in the novel; it is replaced by Turner’s sighs and meaningful glances. The sub-plot with the sex workers in the book is explicitly a dialogue about different visions of womanhood in the new society that is being built, but becomes just a humorous set of vignettes in the film (apart from Yancey’s courtroom defence of Dixie Lee, which in fairness is actually done better on screen than on the page). I’m not especially well versed in the early twentieth century history of American feminism, but it seemed clear to me that the makers of a Hollywood blockbuster did not feel able to reflect the feminism of their source text.

I enjoyed the book much more than I had expected to, and the film’s success was surely in large part a homage to the work it was based on.

The next film in this sequence is Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, also based on a book which I guess I will also get and read.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film and 1928 book)

Posted on 14 October 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

This is the first of the Oscar winners for Best Picture (in this case, “Outstanding Production”) that I had actually seen before. It beat four films I have not heard of, The Big House, Disraeli, The Divorcee and The Love Parade in the Academy vote, and also tops the IMDB ratings for the relevant time period. Lewis Milestone also won the Oscar for best Director. It is also interesting (to me anyway) that the top film of 1930 was based on the top book of 1929 as measured by Publisher’s Weekly.

If you don’t know, it’s a film about a young man who signs up for service in the first world war, and discovers that military life is not as glamorous or honourable as he had been led to believe, with his friends gradually becoming casualties until he himself is killed reaching for a butterfly in the last scene. The fact that it’s set in Germany (due to being based on a German book) enables the questions about war and peace to be put to non-German audiences without challenging their own patriotism, other than perhaps raising the uncomfortable question that other people’s patriotism may be just as valuable as your own. The film (and the book) offered nothing but disillusion and defeat from militarism. It’s notable that most of the extras were genuine German army veterans who had emigrated to California after the war.

(The film itself was banned in Germany under Hitler; when it was first shown, the Nazis, still three years from power, disrupted cinema showings.)

Here’s the trailer.

It’s a far, far better film than Wings or Broadway Melody, and I can’t bring myself to treat it in the same way as I did them. (Though even here there is whitewashing – there are black soldiers in the book, colonial troops on the Allied side, omitted from the film.)

The dialogue tips towards the earnest at times as well. But in general it is well done, and some elements have found there way into most war films since. There’s a clear parental relationship to Blackadder Goes Forth, 59 years later and 28 years ago:

Albert Kropp: Ah, the French certainly deserve to be punished for starting this war.
Detering: Everybody says it’s somebody else.
Tjaden: Well. how do they start a war?
Albert Kropp: Well, one country offends another.
Tjaden: How could one country offend another?
Tjaden: You mean there’s a mountain over in Germany gets mad at a field over in France?
[Everyone laughs]
Albert Kropp: Well, stupid, one people offends another.
Tjaden: Oh, well, if that’s it, I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t feel offended.
Katczinsky: It don’t apply to tramps like you.
Tjaden: Good. Then I could be goin’ home right away.

It’s sad to note that Lewis Wollheim, who as Katszinsky steals the show from Lew Ayres’ romantic Paul Bäumer, died only a year later in 1931 at the age of 50.

At 133 minutes it’s quite slow going, but the buildup is worth it as the really good scenes come towards the end. First, Paul and two friends manage to buy the affections of three French girls near the battlefield, bartering food for sex. Most of this is told by nudges and hints but it’s all the more effective for that. Then Paul returns home for a confrontation with the teacher whose rhetoric encouraged him to sign up in the first place.

Professor Kantorek: You’ve come at the right moment, Baumer! Just at the right moment!
[to students]
Professor Kantorek: And as if to prove all I have said, here is one of the first to go! A lad who sat before me on these very benches, who gave up all to serve in the first year of the war. One of the iron youth who have made Germany invincible in the field! Look at him. Sturdy and bronze and clear-eyed! The kind of soldier every one of you should envy! Paul, lad, you must speak to them. You must tell them what it means to serve your fatherland.
Paul Bäumer: No no, I can’t tell them anything.
Paul Bäumer: You must, Paul. Just a word. Just tell them how much they’re needed out there. Tell them why you went, and what it meant to you.
Paul Bäumer: I can’t say anything.
Professor Kantorek: If you remember some deed of heroism, some touch of humility, tell about it.
[encouraging murmurs from the students]
Paul Bäumer: I can’t tell you anything you don’t know. We live in the trenches out there, we fight, we try not to be killed; and sometimes we are. That’s all.

And finally he returns to the Front, and to his doom. It’s a gut-wrenching sequence, which stuck in my memory from the first time I saw the film on late night TV as a teenager. Tremendous stuff, and I’m glad to have found an excuse to revisit it.

I was sufficiently interested by the film to track down the book by Erich Maria Remarque (an interesting character whose lovers included Marlene Dietrich and who ended up married to Paulette Goddard; meanwhile his sister, who had stayed in Germany, was executed by the Nazis basically for being his sister). He wrote a number of other books, including a sequel to All Quiet…, but it’s on this that his reputation rests, quite rightly. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ich nicke. Wir werfen uns in die Brust, lassen uns auf dem Hof rasieren, stecken die Hände in die Hosentaschen, sehen uns die Rekruten an und fühlen uns als steinaltes Militär. I nod. We strut about, get ourselves shaved on the parade-ground, put our hands in our pockets, look at the new recruits and feel as if we have been in the army for a thousand years.

It’s a tightly constructed first-person account of the awfulness of the war, apart (necessarily) from the final paragraphs. The film adds and takes away. Most notably, it has a clear narrative from start to finish, whereas the book starts in medias res with the story about the soldiers demanding double rations because only 80 of the 150 men have come back from the latest action and there is therefore some over-catering.

The book dispenses with scene-setting – Professor Kantorek’s recruitment of the eager students is disposed of in a flashback paragraph, and his later fate is to be humiliated as a member of the Home Guard; Bäumer has no disillusioned return to the schoolroom. On the other hand, the book includes much more graphic details than could be filmed – the death of horses; the latrines; the blood of the battlefield (in the film nobody seems to bleed much when they are shot).

The passage with the three French girls is played completely differently in the book and the film. In the film, Paul is an innocent grabbing a first and last moment of sexual comfort near the battlefield. In the book, it’s clear that he, like all his fellow soldiers, has been a regular client of military brothels, and the encounter with the French girls is wordless and desperate, and not really sweet.

I was pleased though that the dialogue I quoted above from the film is rooted strongly in a similar passage from the book:

Tjaden erscheint wieder. Er ist noch immer angeregt und greift sofort wieder in das Gespräch ein, indem er sich erkundigt, wie eigentlich ein Krieg entstehe.	Tjaden comes back. He is still worked up and joins in the debate again straight away by asking how a war starts in the first place.
»Meistens so, daß ein Land ein anderes schwer beleidigt«, gibt Albert mit einer gewissen Überlegenheit zur Antwort.	‘Usually when one country insults another one badly,’ answers Kropp, a little patronizingly. But Tjaden isn’t going to be put off.
Doch Tjaden stellt sich dickfellig. »Ein Land? Das verstehe ich nicht. Ein Berg in Deutschland kann doch einen Berg in Frankreich nicht beleidigen. Oder ein Fluß oder ein Wald oder ein Weizenfeld.«	‘A country? I don’t get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a forest, or a cornfield.’
»Bist du so dämlich oder tust du nur so?« knurrt Kropp.	‘Are you really that daft or are you just pretending?’ grumbles Kropp. ‘That isn’t what I mean. One nation insults another…’
»So meine ich das doch nicht. Ein Volk beleidigt das andere -«
»Dann habe ich hier nichts zu suchen«, erwidert Tjaden,»ich fühle mich nicht beleidigt.«	‘Then I shouldn’t be here at all,’ answers Tjaden, ‘because I don’t feel insulted.’
»Dir soll man nun was erklären«, sagt Albert ärgerlich,»auf dich Dorfdeubel kommt es doch dabei nicht an.«	‘It’s hopeless trying to explain anything to you,’ says Kropp with some irritation, ‘it’s got nothing to do with a yokel like you.’
»Dann kann ich ja erst recht nach Hause gehen«, beharrt Tjaden, und alles lacht.	‘In that case I can certainly go home, then,’ insists Tjaden, and everybody laughs.

Anyway, reading that has been an unexpected bonus for this project.

Next up in the Oscar films list is Cimarron, of which almost the only thing I know is that it’s a Western and was like All Quiet on the Western Front based on a best-selling novel.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Broadway Melody (1929)

Posted on 30 September 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

I was a bit surprised by the number of people who pushed back against my plan to watch all the winners of the Oscar for Best Picture from beginning to the present day. Sure, I take the point that the Oscars have not always got it right. I also take the much more serious point that they are heavily slanted towards Hollywood with very little input from the world outside the United States (and certain gaps within it). If I wanted to watch the 90 or 100 best movies ever, there are a large number of potentially better sources to go to than the list of Oscar winners.

And yet, it’s always going to be a bit arbitrary, isn’t it? And I have to be honest and say that my interest isn’t (or isn’t only) in the potential of cinema as a medium. I am also interested in the history of culture in the Anglosphere, and in the Oscars as a political process. Any set of Best Films that I choose to pursue is going to be someone else’s choice; I choose the Academy Awards, not because I expect them all to be good but because I expect them to be interesting.

So, having got my throat-clearing out of the way, on with The Broadway Melody, which won the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture presented in 1930. There were seven awards in total that year, and every one went to a different film, the first and last time that has ever happened; this also means that The Broadway Melody was the first of three films to win Best Picture (or equivalent) and no other award on the night. For context I will note that the other films in contention that year were Alibi, In Old Arizona, The Hollywood Revue (which featured the first performance of “Singin’ In the Rain”) and The Patriot. None of the other Outstanding Picture nominees places higher than 30th on IMDB’s ranking of the 1929 films. The IMDB rates The Broadway Melody as the second most popular feature film of 1929 after Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (which was presumably too British to get nominated for the Academy Awards) or possibly third after Pandora’s Box (presumably too German). I have not seen, or even heard of, any of the above.

The Broadway Melody was apparently the first real musical film, with both a plot and songs that made sense in the context of that plot, taking advantage of the brand new talkie technology. Apparently it was also the first to use sound dubbing and had a brief colour segment (which does not survive); more on that later. So my expectations are somewhat shaped by nine decades of subsequent Hollywood musicals, of which the most recent one I have seen is Les Miserables, or maybe The LEGO Movie. Even so, it holds up pretty well – sometimes ground-breaking stuff loses because of subsequent treading on that ground, but this is not one of those cases.

As before I’ll run through the bits that struck me in reverse order of favourability.

Whiteness: This is a film set in the musical world of New York. Not a single black face to be seen, not even among hotel attendants.

Comic disability: A character with a speech impediment which is awfully funny.

Plot and script: Boy is engaged to girl; boy meets girl’s pretty young sister and instant spark ensues; pretty young sister allows herself to be distracted by a cad but ends up with boy. Meanwhile they are all on stage, or trying to get there, apart from the cad who picks up stage girls as a hobby. Characters all speak in grating Twenties slang which must have sounded cool at the time. There are no particularly memorable lines.

Acting: This is a mixed bag. Bessie Love is really really good as the older of the two sisters, who eventually accepts with fairly good grace that her man has fallen for her sibling. I was really surprised that I had never heard of her before. (Also striking that this is two films out of two where I felt the female lead was by far the strongest of the performers.) Anita Page as the younger sister has a really rocky start – in her first couple of scenes I wondered if she was even awake – but livens up considerably as it goes on. Unfortunately she can’t dance, mostly but not completely disguised by cunning direction. Charles King as the chap they both love is a good singer and plausible heart-throb. Kenneth Thomson as the cad is a bit flat.

Music: With the exception of “Love Boat”, whose words I simply couldn’t make out, the songs are an excellent combination of talents by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. (And one by Willard Robison). The title number is ridiculously catchy.

Several references suggest that the same song is used again in Singin’ in the Rain, but as far as I can tell the music for that film’s amazing “Broadway Melody” dance sequence is quite different. Singin’ in the Rain does however recycle a lot of the Brown and Freed tunes (as noted above, the title song was used in another 1930 film) and perhaps the best is You Were Meant For Me. (Edited to add: As pointed out in comments, Gene Kelly does sing the “Broadway Melody” 75 minutes into Singin’ in the Rain, but it’s really a case of blink and you miss it, as I did.)

Cinematography: After Wings, I thought this was another well-made and beautifully shot film. The opening sequence, set in the office of Mr Zanfield (a thinly disguised Ziegfield) is particularly good with different groups of musicians in different corners rehearsing:

The stage shows are well done, but in particular the director pulls off the feat of reminding us that there are human beings involved with putting on these spectacles, without breaking the mood created.

The Wedding of the Painted Doll: This deserves its own note, as the high point of the film. Apparently this stage sequence was originally filmed and shown in Technicolor, unlike the rest of the film which was monochrome. It must have been spectacular; sadly most of the original colour sequence has been lost. Also apparently when they had to remount it, rather than pay the orchestra to play the music again live, they played back the previous recording, thus originating the practice of soundtrack dubbing. I can’t find an embeddable link but here’s Turner Classic Movies’ presentation, with subtitles:

Apart from the excellent choreography, I think it has a fascinating hint of subversion. The song is in fact in a minor key, rather than celebratory. The lyrics are about people being pushed into marriage by the expectations of society, without much hope for success. It’s a very downbeat note in the story, which casts the rest of it in quite a different light.

Anyway, that’s two films in a row which were more enjoyable than I had expected; rather encouraging for the long term prospects of this project.

Next up is a film I have actually seen before, on TV when I was a teenager: All Quiet on the Western Front.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Wings (1927)

Posted on 16 September 2017 by fromtheheartofeurope

I have a vague ambition to improve my rather dismal knowledge of cinema by watching all of the winners of the Oscar for Best Picture (or equivalent). If I do them at the rate of one a month or so, I should finish roughly around the time of the centennial of this, the winner of the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture of 1927/28 (not yet called the Oscar).

I had no expectations whatever of Wings. I don’t think I’ve ever previously seen a film with Clara Bow, the star, or even with Gary Cooper, who has a small part as the first character to get killed. So, going from bad to good, my totally spoilery impressions were:

Whiteness: I don’t think I spotted a single non-white face. I thought at one point that they were about to introduce French colonial troops, but they were white too.

Plot: It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen as soon as you see the set-up of Mary (Clara Bow) loves Jack (Buddy Rogers), who loves Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), who loves David (Richard Arlen), and Jack and David go off to war, and David takes his teddy bear mascot with him (which obviously means he will be killed). Though getting David accidentally killed by Jack in a friendly fire incident was a slightly unexpected twist.

Also fails the Bechdel test – though there are several women characters, they hardly ever talk to each other, and never about anything except men.

However, one has to give the film a lot of credit for attempting a not too glamorous portrayal of air combat in the first world war less than ten years after it had happened – as recent for the makers and audience as Obama’s first election and the global financial crisis are for us today, and of course still raw and unspeakable for many.

Make-up: I know intellectually that you just have to accept this as part of the conventions of film production of the era, but the vast amount of make-up on Buddy Rogers, playing Jack the hero, including during battle scenes, somewhat threw me out of the zone (particularly since few of the other men seem to wear any). Clara Bow’s make-up is also laid on pretty thick but there’s less of a divergence with other women either on the screen or in real life.

Comic relief: There is a comic German recruit, who is mocked by his fellow soldiers until he shows them his “Stars and Stripes Forever” tattoo. Twice.

Locations: I’ll come to the battle scenes below, but mostly they are set in San Antonio, Texas, which does not look very much like Northern France. There are however some excellent exterior shots set in Paris, presumably a combination of back projection and good set design.

Acting: As noted above, the plot isn’t up to much, but the actors give it their all – I felt in particular that Clara Bow lived up to her reputation, and got quite a lot to do ranging from comedy to deep emotion; and here Buddy Rogers as Jack comforts Richard Arlen as the dying David (who he has accidentally killed) with reputedly the first same-sex kiss in a mainstream Hollywood film:

Richard Arlen, playing David, had actually served in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps, but never saw combat. Both he and Buddy Rogers did some of their own flying, which I’m sure would be regarded as horrendously risky for a major star to do today.

Cinematography The other Academy award won by Wings was for Best Engineering Effects, and that was richly deserved. There is a lot of absolutely breathtaking action in the aerial combat scenes. I griped earlier about Texas pretending to be France, but the air is the air and the clouds are the clouds. It does go on a bit (the film is 144 minutes long – and we complain about film length these days!) but if you have loads of material you may as well use it. In these days of CGI spacehips and dragons, it’s sobering to realise what could be done 90 years ago with basic authentic equipment.

The fights stand out but there is some brilliant work elsewhere as well – this fanvid starts with perhaps the film’s most memorable shot, tracking through a Paris night club until we find Jack getting drunk with the girls (supposedly Buddy Rogers had never touched the stuff before and really was drunk; not sure if I believe that):

Anyway, it took me two evenings to watch it all, but I’m glad I did and it gives me confidence that this project is worth pursuing. Next up is a very different film: The Broadway Melody of 1929.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

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Tag Archives: oscars

Cimarron, or how to erase feminism

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film and 1928 book)

Broadway Melody (1929)

Wings (1927)