Foolish Wives

Foolish Wives

1922

Director: Erich von Stroheim

Starring: Erich von Stroheim, Miss Dupont, Maude George, Rudolph Christians

Erich von Stroheim has done it again!  Jump with joy for the anticipation of an overlong, completely over the top morality play!  Oh thank goodness, because there really isn’t enough of that in my life at the moment.

“Count” Sergius Karamzin (von Stroheim) is a con artist masquerading as an aristocrat, preying off of the gullible upper class in Monte Carlo with the aid of his “cousin,” Princess Olga Petchnikoff (George).  When an American dignitary (Christians) and his much younger wife Helen (Dupont) arrive, the tricksters immediately set their sights on fleecing the couple for everything they have.  Sergius sets to work charming Helen, slowly, of course, and trying to keep the husband relatively unaware.  Ultimately, however, Sergius’ womanizing ways catch up with him.

  

As I watched Foolish Wives for a second time, I kept on trying to put my finger on what the story reminded me of.  Was it soap opera?  No, soap opera moves slower than this.  Was it crappy romance novels?  No, crappy romance novels have a hero, and Foolish Wives has no hero, just ridiculous naïve characters and Evil Villains of Evil.  And then it finally hit me.  I thought to myself, “Sergius is Don Juan.”  Which then made me think Don Giovanni, (in particular, Mariusz Kwiecien in Don Giovanni… mmm, Mariusz Kwiecien…) Mozart’s operatic reimagining of Don Juan.  And that’s precisely what Foolish Wives is: it’s an opera plot without the actual, y’know, opera.

Now, I am a definite fan of opera.  Like, pretty darn big time.  All my students know it.  All my friends know it.  Opera rocks, man.  I will preach this from the highest hilltop.

But Foolish Wives does NOT rock, despite this association I made.  Why?  The last thing I’m looking for from my opera is plot, and that’s ALL that Foolish Wives has going for it.

The plots of operas are not the point of the opera itself.  If you wanted interesting story development, no one in their right mind would think, “I know!  Let’s all hit up Il Barbiere di Siviglia tonight!  That’s got one crackerjack plot!”  The operatic plots are mere scaffolds on which fantastic music is hung.  What’s more, they are usually simple to their core.  Any opera I’m familiar with can be summed up in two sentences, three at the most.  If it’s a comedy, it’s “mistaken identities prevent the hero and heroine from proclaiming their love for one another while a baritone gets in the way.”  If it’s a tragedy, “everyone makes bad decisions then dies.”  Yes, I’m oversimplifying, but not by much.  And opera plots are notoriously slow to progress.  Because the plots are so simple, there isn’t a tremendous amount of plot progression, and the story can move rather slowly.  The arias are rarely about plot progression in an opera, instead being about the fabulous music.  Even my mother, whose only experience with opera is when I’ve tied her down and shoved some Juan Diego Florez in her eyeballs, noticed that “everyone tends to repeat themselves in the songs, just singing the same thing over and over.”  Yes, exactly.  And what they’re repeating is usually something straightforward, like “I love her.” Or “I hate him.”  Or “Wow, I’m so happy.” 

 

To bring this back to Foolish Wives, imagine now that simplistic plot that operas have, where everyone says the same thing over and over again, where the plot is ridiculously slow to progress, and then remove the awesome music from it, and you have this movie.  A plot so utterly simple – con man corrupts gullible wife – and a story that moves so damn slowly – I don’t understand why this has to be two and a half hours – that is absolutely full of the characters doing or saying the same thing over and over again – how many scenes do we need of Sergius being a smarmy bastard to Helen?  Add them all together, and you get Foolish Wives, the non-opera opera story.  I don’t watch opera for plot, I watch it for tremendous singing and amazing music, both of which Foolish Wives lacks, making the whole movie rather dull.

What is impressive about Foolish Wives are the sets.  Watching this through, I assumed it was partially shot on location somewhere; if not Monte Carlo itself, then a spot that looks like Monte Carlo.  But no, it wasn’t.  Nope, von Stroheim being the egotistical bastard he was, he built Monte Carlo, complete with a fake lake, in studio backlots.  Alright, von Stroheim, I’ll give you your due, that’s rather amazing.  Although not perhaps as grand as some of the set work in Intolerance, it’s pretty close.  

  

Many silent films do not translate well with modern audiences.  There are some that do, and some that are still spectacular today, but most feel dated in many ways.  Time has not been kind to Foolish Wives.  The story is one that modern audiences would barely register an interest in, and when you throw on von Stroheim’s ego in insisting this be an “epic” in terms of length, what results is a product few would find compelling. 

Arbitrary Rating: 4/10

Ride Lonesome

Ride Lonesome

1959

Director: Budd Boetticher

Starring: Randolph Scott, Pernell Roberts, Karen Steele

Ugh.  Westerns.  Up to this point, the westerns that I’ve written about have had something a little special going for them, something to make me like them despite my protestations that I’m not a big fan of the genre.  Goodness me, it was starting to sound as if I actually *enjoyed* westerns.  And then I decided to watch Ride Lonesome for a second time in order to write about it.  And then I remembered just how much “typical” westerns don’t work for me.

Ben Brigade (Scott) is a bounty hunter who opens the film by capturing smarmy criminal Billy John (James Best).  But Billy John has a brother (Lee van Cleef) who doesn’t want to see him hang, and Brigade knows the clock is ticking on getting Billy to Santa Cruz.  Along the way he picks up a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who sulks, pouts, and wields a shotgun (Steele) and a pair of fun frenemies in Boone (Roberts) and Whit (James Coburn) who want to take Billy from Brigade in order to collect the bounty – and the amnesty that comes with it – themselves. 

From a critical standpoint, Ride Lonesome is, at first glance, very classic Western with a capital W.  Our hero struts about with his chest thrust out (wearing a tasseled shirt, nonetheless) while speaking little.  Indians randomly come and attack our band every now and then for utterly no reason (other than the whole “stole your land, infected your people” thing).  The token female looks unnaturally clean for living in the middle of nowhere and goes through the classic “I hate you… no wait I love you!”attitude change towards our hero.  The night scenes are even shot day for night, something I’ve always found jarring (really, does the moon cast a shadow THAT dark?).  There are shoot-outs aplenty, runaway carriages, and classic fifties dialogue like “That tears it!”  Oh yes sir, this is most definitely Classic Western.

And yet, I will give Ride Lonesome its due and say that it has a few novelties in term of character development and setting that made me understand how it could help bridge the gap between the westerns that predated it and the Leone-esque westerns that followed.  For one, I love that Ride Lonesome wasn’t filmed in Monument Valley.  Instead, we have a much more varied landscape than I would expect in a fifties western.  Interesting rock formation, distant mountain ranges, bleached white desert sand, and sparse, arid forests are the backdrops for Ride Lonesome.  I can see how Sergio Leone would have seen this and preferred this style of location over the earlier westerns that can’t seem to think past Monument Valley. 

The team of Boone and Whit is fun in terms of never really knowing what they’re up to.  Are they helping Brigade?  Are they going to kill him?  Their cheerful, morbid banter certainly gives the film a little bit of sorely lacking spice.  And Billy John is likeable in his ridiculous smarminess – he’s a bad guy you want to see get his due, but you also don’t mind him being a constant needle in Brigade’s side.

But that’s about all I can say about Ride Lonesome that’s good, and it was hard for me to come up with that much.  At 73 minutes, this is definitely a short feature film but holy crap it felt four times longer to me.  I had pause it at least three time to take breaks to do other things, that’s how incapable I was at making it through the film in one go.  And that’s sad.  Absolute, utter tedium.  The fun with Boone and Whit is good, but it’s not nearly enough to get me through the soporific rest of the movie.  I got bored about ten minutes in and started checking my email.  Then making lunch.  Then playing with my cats.  Then grabbing my copy of 1001 Movies to read just why I was watching this movie, because I’m a bit flabbergasted at the moment.

How Randolph Scott became a western star is beyond me, because the drive-thru attendant at McDonald’s speaks with more passion and feeling than him.  It’s laughable how monotone he is.  Every single line, EVERY SINGLE LINE, is delivered with the exact same vocal inflection.  And he has only one facial expression.  He looks stern for the entire film and spits out his lines with slow deadpan diction.  I thought Hayden Christensen was wooden in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, but jesus christ, Scott makes Christensen look like Laurence Olivier, what with his emotional range of absolute nil.  It doesn’t help matters that he was getting a bit long in the tooth by the time he filmed this one (he was 61 in 1959) and the “love interest” between him and the little piece of very much younger cheesecake felt absolutely ridiculous and completely forced.

  

And the story is hardly cohesive.  Ride Lonesome suffers from a distinct lack of central tension.  It’s as if the film can’t make up its mind – is it going to focus on the apparent war between our gang of heroes and the Indians?  For twenty minutes or so, that seems to be it.  Yeah yeah, Indian wars, yeah, that’s what this movie is all about.  But then, NOPE NO MORE INJUNS!  WE’RE DONE WITH THEM!  Okay, what about the conflict between Brigade and Boone?  After all, Boone wants to take Billy in himself.  Oh yeah, we should come back to that and keep having Boone make these rather random death threats against Brigade.  Yep, THAT’S our central tension.  Oh wait, no… no it’s not.  Darn it, we forgot about Billy’s brother, the guy who’s supposedly tracking Brigade down in order to free his brother.  Forget all that other stuff, THAT’S the main point of the plot.  That’s what we’ve been building towards throughout the film even though we only just remembered to mention it about twenty minutes out from the end. 

I don’t even know.  And frankly, I don’t care.

There are westerns I like, really there are.  But Ride Lonesome is very, VERY much not one of them. 

Arbitrary Rating: 4/10.  The central music motif is nice, if not rather derivative of the Grand Canyon Suite.

Intolerance

Intolerance

1916

Director: D.W. Griffith

Starring: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge, Alfred Paget

Oh, D.W. Griffith, you so crazy.  You get all mad when people bust on you cuz they don’t understand yo politickin’ in Birth of a Nation, so instead you get all up in their business with Intolerance, yo!  You all, ‘yo people always be beatin’ on the downtrodden, it’s in the history books, man!’  And you make a crazy whack movie that’s fifteen hours too long to prove it!  What up with that!

OK, I’ll stop that now.  Somehow D.W. Griffith is much more amusing to me if I picture him as a ghetto thug. 

Made in direct response to those who dared point out the racial controversies aplenty in Birth of a Nation, Intolerance tells four separate tales, each dealing with the theme of intolerance, and usually set against the backdrop of a love story.  We have classic episodes from Jesus’ life, a story in Ancient Babylon about a Mountain Girl (Talmadge) who falls in love with Prince Belshazzar (Paget), a tale of doomed love during the Catholic/Huguenot tensions in sixteenth century France, and a modern tale following Dear One (Marsh) as her life goes from poor to poorer to poorest, all in the name of the “Social Uplifters” who honestly believe they’re improving society.  Throughout it all, we continually cut to Lillian Gish who sits rocking a cradle as the “Eternal Mother.”

This = epic, especially for 19-freaking-16.

  

There are a few reasons why you should commit three plus hours of your life to watching this silent film.  First of all, as my husband even managed to intuit, D.W. Griffith was groundbreaking in his development of what we call “the language of film.”  In Intolerance, just as in Birth of a Nation, we have a sense of altered shot composition to build dramatic tension.  He cuts, and frequently.  He doesn’t simply set up a static camera and let the entire scene unfold.  We go from close-up to mid-shot to crowd shot to reaction shot throughout the entire movie.  There is a definite storyteller’s sensibility to Griffith’s work.  He knows how to edit and compose, and it’s easy to understand why the Soviet filmmakers of the twenties and thirties, like Eisenstein, were inspired by him.  Furthermore, Intolerance essentially single-handedly invented the concept of telling multiple tales at the same time.  The four stories mentioned above are constantly intercut throughout the film.  This had never been done before; several intertitles at the beginning of the film explain that this is the structure because shoot, the audience would realize that’s what Griffith was doing!  The idea of intercutting between parallel stories is a technique so familiar to us nowadays, so give credit where credit is due.  Griffith invented it.

Additionally, the scope of Intolerance is epic.  Most impressive is the Babylonian sequence.  Griffith had everything built specifically for this film, and when you see the size of the walls and sets, all the costumes and props, it’s hard not to be impressed.  The battle for Babylon is easily the most exciting portion of the film, and Griffith doesn’t hold back.  There are fires, boiling oil, battle turrets being toppled, spears shooting into people’s bodies, and what looks like thousands of extras.  There was no CGI to create an army in 1916, so Griffith, if he wanted it to look impressive, had to actually build everything.  Say what you will about Intolerance, it’s big scale, big budget, in a big way.  Michael Bay would be proud.  

OK, this bit was cool.

However, that’s about all the reason I can come up with for sitting through over three hours of people wringing their hands.  Intolerance may be grand and its storytelling technique and undoubtedly innovative, but it’s not entertaining.  Despite Griffith’s intertitles that help explain what story we’re now moving to, there is still some confusion as to who is who and what’s happening – having a cast so large will do that.  Furthermore, the acting is atrocious.  Lillian Gish is good and likeable in everything I’ve seen her in, but she’s not really *in* Intolerance.  Every twenty minutes or so, we cut back to her rocking a cradle, but really, that’s not exactly an acting challenge.  Instead, I’m subjected to a focus on Mae Marsh in the modern story.  I’ve decided I hate Mae Marsh, and if I never see another movie with her in it before I die, I’ll be happy.  Everything you can possibly imagine about silent film actors overacting, she does, and in spades.  She thrashes around the room in order to convey emotion; it’s as though she’s having an epileptic fit of some kind.  Oh, was that supposed to be joy?  Looked like a drug-induced episode to me, and Talmadge as the Mountain Girl isn’t much better.  There is zero subtlety, but I wasn’t exactly expecting any in a movie from 1916.

I kind of sort of hate you, Mae Marsh.

Furthermore, I see absolutely no reason why Intolerance clocks in at just over three hours.  The amount of dead time in this film is ridiculous.  The Babylon battle is exciting, but at twenty minutes, it could have been edited down by half and been just as exciting.  Nearly every other sequence in the film fits this description – too long.  I’m watching the same thing over and over and OVER again.  I get it!  Move on!  Yes yes, Mae Marsh is making weepy faces at her baby, I don’t need a five minute shot to establish the fact that she’s sad.  Yes yes, there’s a big ceremony in Babylon, I don’t need fifteen minutes of footage to prove this.  Yes yes, the evil Pharisees are evil, I don’t need a protracted Evil Look of Evil that lasts for one minute to get the point across.  Everything moves at a snail’s pace in this movie.  It’s long, and it’s boring, and it’s slow.  Yes, Griffith is smart in his editing to tell his story in a unique visual way, but I just wish he’d realized his audience doesn’t need to be told the same thing over and over again seventeen times in order to understand a point.

And then, of course, there's Jesus.  I don't know even know...

Ultimately, as my husband says, the title of the movie is fairly fitting.  Intolerance is rather intolerable.  Yet again we have a Griffith epic that, while not being as morally repugnant as Birth of a Nation, is no less preachy and whiny and long and dull.  I don’t discount Griffith entirely; there are films of his I actually like.  But this one ain’t one of them. 

Arbitrary Rating: 4/10

Jules et Jim

 

Jules et Jim

1962

Director: Francois Truffaut

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre

I will now pull out what is to become my Standard French New Wave Introduction: Just because I can appreciate, objectively, how the films of the French New Wave advanced filmmaking in the sixties doesn’t mean I have to like the films themselves.  Because I don’t.  In my revisit of Jules et Jim, I remember vaguely having some affection for the film, but that affection began dissipating around the halfway mark of the film.  In a movie so much about three central characters, it is extraordinarily hard to like the movie if you cannot like said characters, a fact that’s even more grating when it’s incredibly apparent that I am *supposed* to like these three people.

In 1912 Paris, Jules (Werner), an Austrian, befriends Jim (Serre), a Frenchman.  The two form a fast bond and live a bohemian lifestyle together.  Enter Catherine (Moreau), the one woman who captivates Jules in a way the other Parisian women cannot.  But she captivates Jim as well.  As the years pass, Jim and Jules fight in World War I, Jules marries Catherine and has a daughter with her, but Catherine bores of their marriage and takes on many lovers, including Jim.  Her capriciousness and insatiability, however, cannot be contained.

  

Although it’s now been over a decade, I was reminded of reading and discussing D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love in my freshman year of college while I was recently revisiting Jules et Jim.  The two share many thematic elements: complicated love affairs and strong male friendships are obvious, but also a sense of vast discontent with the world at large for pretty much all the characters.  They speak of true love and passions but with emptiness and spite, and view almost everyone else beside themselves as lesser beings whose feelings are not potent enough to matter.  And I had a very similar reaction to Women In Love as Jules et Jim.  These people are rather full of themselves and have an extraordinarily distorted bohemian sense of superiority that appears to be actively preventing them from being happy.

And that’s really my major reaction to the triangle of Jules, Jim, and Catherine.  These are people so utterly narcissistic they cannot ever be happy.  Jules is weak and so besotted with Catherine that he completely prostrates himself at her feet, letting her walk all over him and uselessly basing his own happiness off the scraps of attention she deigns give him.  Jim seems to be stronger than that, but he constantly vacillates back and forth between cutting himself free of his toxic attraction to Catherine and making a real life with someone else.  His inability to escape Catherine is frustrating to the last.  And then there’s Catherine herself, the instigator in all this mess.  Jules and Jim have a pretty decent bromance going until Catherine comes along and mucks everything up with her crazy ways.  Seriously, she’s crazy.  Initially, when we first meet everyone and they are young, her craziness – like jumping in the Seine on a lark – is passed off as a “wild and crazy” youth.  OK, sure, I completely understand the need, when one is young, to act out and do ridiculous things.  The problem is, Catherine never gets any better.  She never grows out of this and slowly eats away at Jules and Jim both with her dangerous impetuousness.  Even when she becomes a mother, she never acts like one.  I can understand that not all women are blessed with maternal instincts, but Catherine takes it too far.  

Look at them... they were so happy before Catherine came along...

The thing that bugs me the most about Catherine is that Truffaut essentially considered her “his ideal woman.”  How?  Why?  Because she’s a trifling narcissist who bends everyone around to her petty whims?  Is that REALLY your idea of an ideal woman, Truffaut?  I understand that Jeanne Moreau is beguiling and certainly has charisma, but Catherine is morally repugnant.  I like that Catherine is strong-willed, but she’s not strong-willed in a good way.  I guess I must simply arrive at the conclusion that my idea of an ideal woman differs greatly from Truffaut’s. 

In terms of the filmmaking itself, well at least it’s Truffaut, and Truffaut is easy to swallow.  Despite the rather ridiculous characters, we get some playing around as is the New Wave style.  A narrator is constantly telling us things both vital and unnecessary to the central story.  Truffaut underlines a point by randomly adding in subtitles in one scene, and he uses some stock footage of both Victorian prostitutes and Nazi book burnings at different points in the film.  It’s interesting, here, that we have essentially a French New Wave period piece, and the costumes of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s seem somewhat incongruous with the thoroughly modern techniques championed by Truffaut’s New Wave, but it certainly sets the film apart from its contemporaries.

"Hold on honey, let me clean my face before I ruin your life."

Unlike Truffaut or so many other critics, I never fell in love with any of the main characters.  I never found their struggles to keep themselves consistently unhappy and beaten down appealing (because really, that’s how they were behaving to me).  I do not see their story as romantic or charming at all, but one full of viciousness and toxicity.  And Jules et Jim is very much based on its characters.  Poor Jules and Jim, neither strong enough to know when to let go of the crazy bitch.

Arbitrary Rating: 4/10.  If Catherine is a manic pixie dream girl, then I don’t understand men.  Heck, I liked Godard’s wacko crazy Weekend more than this!!!