Jean Renoir's The River – Reviews #238

A few thoughts on a fascinating film.



The River (Jean Renoir, 1951) – Shot entirely on location in India, this was Renoir's first film in colour and his favourite of his works; Scorsese called it, along with the The Red Shoes, "the most beautiful colour film ever made". Its making launched Satyajit Ray on his career, author Rumer Godden preferred it to the celebrated screen version of another of her stories – Black Narcissus – and it was the primary influence on Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, which lifted liberally from The River.

For all of those reasons, and having seen a couple of clips from the movie, I’d wanted to see it for years. And it's nearly great, even partly great, with its passages of visual poetry, its affecting vignettes, its painterly approach – as close as the director ever came to homaging his father, the great impressionist painter, Auguste. But it falls frustratingly short of consistent and total greatness, and I think that’s because of Renoir's standing at the time.


Patricia Walters (left) severely out of her depth in Renoir's exquisite film.

Sacked by RKO and out of favour in France (who saw his taking of American citizenship as a betrayal), he couldn't afford to bring first choice Marlon Brando out to play Captain John – the one-legged soldier who inflames the passions of three very different adolescents – and so this pivotal role was played by Thomas E. Breen, who could draw on his real-life experiences to play the part, having lost a leg in the war, but was unfortunately crap. The central character was also handed to a non-professional, Patricia Walters, whose realisation of the bookish innocent, Harriet, is stilted to the point of acute embarrassment. Everybody's.


Burnier's extraordinary dance sequence.

There's so much here that's staggeringly impressive, from Claude Renoir's vivid three-strip cinematography to the heartfelt, nuanced supporting performances from Nora Swinburne (as Harriet's mother) and Radha Burnier (playing the mixed-race teenager Melanie, singularly uncomfortable in her position between worlds), and a succession of outrageously impressive artistic decisions. That includes a fantastic, fantastical story-within-a-film featuring Burnier as a dancing goddess, Renoir's limited equipment (no dollies) forcing her to provide the shifting perspective in a way that makes it much more interesting and exciting.

Elsewhere, he presents a glorious montage of riverlife focusing on the multitude of banks of steps leading down to the water, while the director's decision to incorporate passages of rich Godden prose is an inspired one, with June Hillman's lyrical delivery enhancing the film's steady, backwards-looking mythos, charged with romance, poignancy and pain. Godden, who despised the studio-bound artificiality of Powell and Pressburger's erotic adaptation of Black Narcissus, was heavily involved on set, scripting, advising on shots and even incorporating a new character, Melanie, whose initial fate was dismissed by the observing Ray as "unrealistic and sentimental" and so junked. His involvement with the film was actually less than often suggested, though - he had no official role and only attended the set on weekends (due to a day job in advertising), and when he finally saw the finished film more than 15 years later, he declared that there was very little of value, except background colour and a climactic scene concerning Harriet. (Certainly there are many who've lambasted the film for presenting a 'colonial' view of India but, y'know, India was a colony and the book is based on a story by an Englishwoman who lived there, so...)


Adrienne Corri as the cruel, insecure Valerie.

I'm in a big Renoir phase at the moment. I feel a great personal connection to his films, particularly the understated humanity he captures in grace notes and vignettes, and this film's preoccupation with the loss of innocence is something that really speaks to me. The atmosphere, layered with beguiling imagery and diegetic Indian music; the gentle rhythms; the unexpected, imaginatively-devised set-pieces; the adorable little kid, Bogey; Adrienne Corri's tantalising characterisation as the cruel, flirtatious, insecure Valerie; Arthur Shields' brilliant monologue near the close (which is cut oddly short - shades of Ray Collins in Welles' butchered Ambersons); its circular ruminations on death and rebirth – The River slowly casts a spell on you.

But that spell is rudely interrupted at regular intervals by the nondescript Breen (who reminds me of abysmal Hollywood comedian Red Skelton) and the horribly miscast Walters. Either Renoir had Truffaut's problem of not being able to tell when an English-speaking actor was giving a bad performance, or he didn't have the resources to do anything about it. The film, after all, was being bankrolled by a florist. The severe problems in performance are also accompanied by a few instances of bizarrely functional staging amidst the majesty, reminding me of film historian Joseph McBride's complaint that director Mervyn LeRoy, after taking over Mister Roberts from John Ford, essentially just made the cast stand in a line.



For all its brilliance, then, Renoir's favourite of his own works isn't mine, though I defy anyone not to find moments of greatness within it. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading. Two of my favourite Renoir films are reviewed elsewhere on the site: Partie de campagne (which is also in Part 1 of my all-time top 100) and French Cancan.

Silent film special: City Girl, Clara Bow and cross-dressing - Reviews #159

As promised, here are some films without any audible talking.



City Girl (F. W. Murnau, 1930) - Murnau's follow-up to Sunrise is a pictorially stunning comedy-cum-melodrama that reunites the leads of Frank Borzage's The River, made at Fox the previous year. Charles Farrell is a mummy's boy who travels to the big city to sell his family's wheat crop, where he meets waitress Mary Duncan, her incredible emotional attractiveness (in a kind of proto-Jean Arthur vein) not even hampered by her subliminally Satanic hairdo: the numbers "666" spelled out in big curls across her forehead. They fall in love, amidst much sweet interplay and gentle comedy, and decide to marry. But uh-oh, what's this? Farrell's dad is a complete twat? And he hates her? What's he going to do, make a film about how all girls from the city are pure evil, and call it Sunrise?

Some great European filmmakers never quite fulfilled their potential in the States: Lang and Renoir moved too late, finding a studio system that shackled visionaries. Not Murnau, he pitched up at just the right time, and in just the right place, being given carte blanche by producer William Fox, and creating films in an altogether different league to those that had come before. 4 Devils no longer exists (apparently Mary Duncan lost it!), but Sunrise and City Girl are vastly superior - far more nuanced, engaging and entertaining - than his German movies like Nosferatu, Faust and The Last Laugh, one of the worst films to have ever attained "classic" status. I think part of that is down to the extraordinary speed of technical advancement during this period, part of it is down to the talents and resources he was surrounded by, and part of it is attributable to both his thirst for innovation and his growing desire to tell human stories.

City Girl - which is essentially Sunrise, if the characters had made different choices - can't equal that earlier film, but that's hardly a criticism: Murnau's first American film remains one of the enduring high-points of soundless cinema. City Girl is still a remarkable achievement, a slight sagginess in its mid-section compensated for by Mary Duncan's terrific performance and some astonishing direction, including a dizzyingly brilliant "bringing in the harvest" montage, the central couple's joyous run through a wheat field - one of the most intoxicating things I've ever seen on screen, the score rising to meet it - and the entirety of the final reel, a vivid, painterly portrait of a rural idyll lit by lamp-light.

In The River - or what remains of it - Duncan gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen, starring as an eye-wateringly seductive "kept" woman who's watched over by an absolutely terrifying crow. Here her pet bird is rather cuter, and she is too, instantly entranced by her visitor, then repeatedly brutalised by the environment that she has idealised for so long. There's a definite parallel with Sjostrom's The Wind - perhaps the greatest silent film of them all - but whereas Lillian Gish was a virginal waif, Duncan is a pure-hearted but hardy sort with a smart mouth and a Suarez-sharp set of teeth. Duncan didn't really make the transition to talkies, and jacked in movies when she got married (one of her final films was 12 Women, a notorious entry in Myrna Loy's "ethnic psycho" oeuvre, that also starred Irene Dunne and the tragic Peg Entwistle), but City Girl shows just what she was capable of.

Murnau never actually finished the film - his assistant completed it, after the director had a row with the studio - but his fingerprints are all over its many and varied highlights. The blissful, stunningly-directed rom-com opening is like a mini-film in itself, completely at odds with anything else Murnau ever did, and oozing with invention, romance and charm. While the film does dip a little in the middle, as its penchant for unsmiling melodrama becomes almost self-parodical, I was still absolutely entranced by it, especially the way Duncan's displacement from the cruel city to the cruel country is so evocatively and heartbreakingly rendered. Then, after a slightly iffy passage in which some of the plot threads are tied up in less than convincing ways, Murnau drops the big one: a finale that's among the most intensely moving and beautifully-shot I've ever seen. (3.5)

***

Clara Bow:



Mantrap (Victor Fleming, 1926) - Ah, Clara Bow. Often you'll find yourself watching a '20s movie, and see all the men in it cooing over some pan-faced woman with bad hair. "Well, tastes have changed," you'll shrug conciliatorily, because you're a nice guy. Eighty-seven years on, though, and you can still see why Clara Bow was the defining sex symbol of her era: it's not so much her looks, though these have never gone out of fashion, it's more the erotically-charged way she carries herself: her kittenish manner, the way she winds men around her little finger, or just jumps into their lap.

Here she's at her absolute best as a combustible bundle of sex who heads to the country, and proceeds to drive all the men completely wild, including her new husband (Ernest Torrence) - a gurning lunk of a man - and an uptight New York divorce lawyer (Percy Marmont), who's driven to distraction by her coquettishness. And also her legs. Mantrap may be the name of the town where she pitches up, but really it refers to the woman who arrives there, and from whom there appears to be no escape.

Such heroics, though, wouldn't be worth much if the film as a whole didn't pull its weight. It does. Mantrap is a comedy, with a few concessions to drama, and it's a marvellous one, full of clever gags, witty intertitles and solid comic characters. Torrence, who began as a singer, became a stage comedian and was then reinvented as a towering bad guy in the immortal Tol'able David, is ideally cast as Bow's husband, who becomes an awkward "aww shucks" kind of patsy in the city, but is in his element back home. Marmont's character is interesting in that he performs none of the roles you would expect if this film had been made 10 years later: he isn't terribly dashing, but nor is he devious or a disposable idiot: instead he's a moderately charming man whose mannerisms (and money) make him stand out in an uncouth environment, and whose relationship with Bow becomes impossible to predict as a result. In support, there are bit parts for two actors who would make a successful transition to talkies: the ever-popular Eugene Pallette - whose gravelly voice and big belly were yet to be unleashed on audiences - and Tom Kennedy, the character comic who appeared in countless films of the '30s and '40s, including the Torchy Blane series, and my favourite movie, Remember the Night, where he played Fat Mike.

As well as being amusing and well-acted, the film is also breathtaking to look at, thanks to the work of director Victor Fleming (who had made his name helming Douglas Fairbanks vehicles and would go on to direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind) and - more importantly - his cinematographer, the incomparable James Wong Howe. Some of the interior sets and shots are a bit bland, but when the film ventures outside it looks absolutely phenomenal, right up there with Louisiana Story, The River and, yes, Tol'able David, as a pastoral fantasy. The finest sequence is a gobsmacking journey, the same one taken by Torrence, in which Howe's ever-moving camera takes us from the bucolic tranquility of a boat on a lake, to a train flying past fields, then past houses, before the footage melts into a city scene, following at first a car and then a streetcar, before showing Torrence's shambling figure trying to avoid being run over. Several films of the period, including Murnau's Sunrise and City Girl, vividly juxtaposed city and country living, and Mantrap, despite its modest intentions, does it as well as any.

While 1927's It remains the definitive Bow vehicle: the one that engraved her on the public consciousness and lives on in the public memory, Mantrap was her favourite of her films, and you can see why. It's lovely to look at, zips by in a flash and has at its centre one of the funniest, sexiest and most startlingly charismatic performances I've ever seen. (4)



It (the marvellously named Clarence Badger, 1927) - Clara Bow is in luminous form playing the embodiment of "it" (sex appeal) in this legendary silent movie, which popularised the concept of the 'It Girl', first mentioned in Cosmopolitan. Bow plays a salesgirl who wants to marry the boss (Antonio Moreno), and decides the best way to go about this is to basically just throw herself at him, if a little slyly at times. In the judgemental Hays Code days, her character would have been a villain - women using sensuality as a weapon usually met terrible or risible ends - but here she's the heroine, a good, moral person who just happens to drive men to distraction with her plunging neckline and come-hither-now-get-in-my-bed-let's-do-a-sex expression. The film has a qualified reputation as a crucial pop cultural artefact that's likely to disappoint, but the criticism regularly levelled at it - that it's boring, dated, disposable - is a little unfair. Certainly it's no cast-iron classic: its baggage includes a daft walk-on by the author, a love rival who actually seems quite nice, and a slew of melodramatic improbabilities, but it has greatness in it.

I'm happy to stomach a silly ending and that unintentionally amusing scene in which Bow essentially goes off on one about how terrible it is that her prospective husband thinks she might have had an illegitimate baby - right in front of her mate, who's had an illegitimate baby - given what other treats the film provides. There's that iconic set-piece in which Bow first catches Moreno's eye, after snagging a date at the Ritz, the fairground sequence, shot with an intoxicating joie de vivre that elevates it almost to the level of similar passages in Sunrise and Les quatre cents coups, and an aggressively sexual scene in which Bow cuts her work clothes to shreds with a big pair of scissors - whilst wearing them.The BFI cassette also comes with a stunningly beautiful Carl Davis score (from the Thames Silents run); what a wonderful composer he is.

Moreno is bland as hell, his pleasant best mate gets a raw deal and the plot degenerates into complete nonsense (partly courtesy of a young Gary Cooper, in a bit part as a reporter), but this romantic comedy is well-filmed, good fun for the most part, and has a game-changing, near-mythic performance at its centre: bubbling with life, individuality and "it". Not bad considering I was expecting a film about a scary clown who worked in computing. (3)

***

Early Lubitsch:



*SOME SPOILERS*
Die Puppe (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) - One-of-a-kind Lubitsch comedy, supposedly set in a toybox, about an aristocrat who's so scared of girls that he decides to marry a life-size doll - but marries the model instead.

Like the baron's son, the film takes a little while to get warmed up, but once Ossi Oswalda appears, it sparks into life. She's simply wonderful as the impish heroine, walking on tiptoes, dancing on command (or whenever she feels like it), and finagling her way into the heart (and pants) of her frigid husband. When's she's not playing a doll, there's something charmingly natural and unmannered about her acting and, when she is, she resists the temptation to over-do the part, a restraint that few comedians of the period would have exhibited.

Lubitsch, too, is at his most playful, introducing the film by (supposedly) assembling the set before our eyes, and including cartoon inserts, dotty chase sequences (which aren't particularly funny) and even a "hair-raising" gag that Harold Lloyd used in Hot Water five years later. I don't know whether Die Puppe was ever screened in the States: if not, it's merely coincidence that the aristocrat is forced to flee on foot from a large group of prospective brides, as in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances. It's a shame that Chaplin didn't get in on the act by nicking that bit where a group of monks all stand around a cardinal, rubbing his head.

The film pokes fun at the titled, the greedy and the Catholic Church, but those satiric elements feel rather unnecessary and a little strained: the film is at its best when telling its slight story, and throwing in a bit of silliness alongside. The inventor's amorous assistant - not unlike Pepi in The Shop Around the Corner - is hilarious (at least until he toys with the idea of breaking his boss's neck), the gag with the pantomime horse is wonderfully surreal, and there are some very funny sex jokes that Lubitsch wouldn't have got away with in his later Hollywood career, as well as an, erm, climax in a monastery that he couldn't have tried even before the Code.

Die Puppe isn't as streamlined or finely-tuned as Lubitsch's later triumphs, but it's a very fun excursion, with a fantastically stylised aesthetic (partially revisited in Lubitsch's The Merry Widow), some big laughs, and an absolutely lovely performance from that charming vanity-vacuum, Ossi Oswalda. (3)

***



I Don’t Want to Be a Man (Ernst Lubitsch, 1918) - Gender-bending one-joke comedy from the legendary Lubitsch, with Ossi Oswalda deciding that the only way she can party as hard as she'd like is by pretending to be a bloke. It's not Ninotchka, but it's not bad, with a very funny opening scene, a game central performance and a brilliant ending - a clear influence on the denouements of Wilder's The Major and the Minor and particularly Some Like It Hot - that puts the capper on a delightfully unusual final third. And Ossi's right - women have it easy, not having to wear starched collars. (2.5)

Frank Borzage - Reviews #116

I reviewed the films on the BFI's Frank Borzage Vol. 1 DVD here - they're both fantastic (the films, not the reviews). Vol. 2 is more of a mixed bag. The first write-up is very heartfelt and about all high-falutin' things. The other two are mostly jokes:

*SPOILERS FOR VARIOUS BORZAGE FILMS, INCLUDING THIS ONE*
Lucky Star (Frank Borzage, 1928) - "Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me," Morrissey once moaned. "No hope, no harm, just another false alarm." There's surely no-one living who hasn't, before ultimately finding some excellent brunette who also likes Melvyn Douglas, woken up with a hollowness in their middle, wishing those heady, involuntary ramblings of the previous hours were real. It's only Frank Borzage, though, who ever came close to capturing the gentle, lazy, in-sync rhythms of a romantic dream. Yes, his silent dramas feature mad dashes to the finish, with near-biblical love-fuelled miracles that restore mobility, faith and even life itself, but it's the tender mid-sections that are often the most remarkable (Street Angel is the glorious exception), rich in exploration and that most underrated of emotions - fondness - as the characters quietly circle one another in a dance of romance. Love stories in Borzage films honour honesty, patience and selflessness, while celebrating quirks of human behaviour rarely lauded on screen: naivety, innocence and loyalty beyond measure. While the forces manipulating his characters can seem clunky or excessively melodramatic - if in doubt, he tends to just send Charlie Farrell to war in France - the central duo, and the love between them, always ring utterly true. In their purest, sweetest incarnations these characters are played by Janet Gaynor and Farrell. While he was more of a star than an actor, she was unquestionably and invigoratingly both. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actress with such a startling, natural precision of emotion.

The pair's warm, wonderful chemistry dominates Lucky Star, a pastoral film that sees his straightforward wire-fixer and her amoral farm girl initially at loggerheads, only for the war to intervene (quelle surprise). Brilliantly, they truly connect after she takes some belated revenge on him for a spanking by chucking a brick through his window. Two years later. The film's set-up is amusing and the economical war scenes are nicely done (though the trick of intercutting between villain Guinn Williams grinning his head off and Farrell getting blown up is a little heavyhanded), but it's with the budding of romance that the film truly blossoms. The scenes in which Farrell "makes over" Gaynor - both inside and out, washing her hair and admonishing her for telling whoppers - are subtle, beautifully-conceived and wonderfully played. My favourite moment is when Gaynor drops the needle on her new music player, turning with a blissful expression to Farrell's lonely paraplegic, who's cooped up in his house and watching through that broken window. If Liliom (see below) seems to prove right every misconception about talkies (the utter nonsense you hear about stilted dialogue and bad acting does apply to a lot of sound films made before 1931), then the curiously-titled Lucky Star makes those who ignorantly seek to lampoon silent film look utterly ridiculous. The acting is naturalistic, the pace perfect and the baddie just a big guy trying to get his end away. He may be horrible, but he's no moustache-twiddling caricature.

In 7th Heaven, Borzage contrasted the dankness of an inner-city squat with the transcendence of the action within. Here, he makes the countryside a character: the pain of rural poverty drives the latter stages of the story, just as the airy idyll of the house and the trickling stream beyond piles atmosphere upon atmosphere in the film's immersive second act. Always one to place climactic obstacles in the way of his characters (an endless stream of people going in the opposite direction, redundancy, an iceberg), his final trick is to lob a snow blizzard at them; even the weather conspiring against these true lovers. But through it all their affecting romance never falters in tone or integrity. This, Gaynor and Farrell's last silent film together (they'd go on to make nine talkies, mostly musical-comedies), is one of the sweetest and most touching films I've seen. He equips himself notably well in a tough part - the scenes of his stricken soldier fighting to walk seem unusually realistic; well, apart from at the end - she's simply mesmerising, and together they're just a dream. Someone should tell Morrissey. (4)

PS: "I thought I was making you over and... you've made me over. Good as new." Sob.

***

Somebody, please make it stop.

*SPOILERS*
Liliom (Frank Borzage, 1930) - Borzage's first talkie is absolutely dreadful, a lifeless telling of the Carousel story that features much of the worst acting I've ever seen, and moves at the pace of a dead snail. If you cut out all the awkward pauses, it would last about 10 minutes. Charles Farrell is Liliom, a carnival barker and all-round scumbag who snares the heart of a servant (Rose Hobart), while being primed for crime by his pal The Buzzard (my favourite actor of all time, Lee Tracy). Tracy's energetic performance and a few distinctive Borzage visuals are the only comforts in an abysmal first hour, then a celestial train appears - a jaw-dropping piece of invention - carrying H.B. Warner, and you could almost kiss him for injecting some gravitas into proceedings, only for the movie to decide that what it wants to do for an encore is mythologise domestic violence. Oh give me strength. Tracy would go on to become the most outrageously brilliant comic actor of his generation and Borzage would transfer the poetic eye and emotional beauty of his silent masterworks (including 7th Heaven and Street Angel) to extraordinary sound films like History Is Made at Night (a gobsmacking comedy-mystery-romance-cum-disaster-movie), The Vanishing Virginian (a remarkable slice of Americana) and Moonrise (a noir classic). But first, enjoy this complete piece of toilet. (1.5)

***

Psssssst. This next one is on the disc, but it's rarely advertised as such. You'll find it under the 'Extra Feature' section of the menu.

*SPOILERS*
The River (Frank Borzage, 1929) - A quarter of Borzage's tale of fate, flirting and sexual frustation amidst the changing seasons is sadly lost, including the start and the end, but hey, this middle is pretty special. And if you liked La jetee, you'll love the still photos used in the reconstruction of the rest (a similar trick was used in the welcome re-piecing of the 1954 A Star Is Born). Charles Farrell is well-cast as a boyish barge-driver driven wild by vampy Mary Duncan. Unfortunately she's in rather deep with a murderer, who's left a scary crow to keep an eye on her while he's in the slammer. I'm always on the look-out for good movie advice that I can live my life by. What I got from The River is that you can prove your love for someone by chopping down all the trees around their house, and that befriending a hulking deaf-mute man is a good idea if you're expecting a killer to pop round looking for his girlfriend. There are some silly and predictable plot machinations (Mr Deaf-Mute, I'm looking at you - no, sorry, wait, I didn't mean anything by it, I'm not looking at you), but otherwise it's a fabulous film, possessing a stunning sexual charge thanks to Duncan's seductive performance. It's no slutty cipher, either: her one-of-a-kind turn hops between vulnerability, coquettishness, desperation and sauciness in arresting style. The Production Code had its place, but frankly something was lost when a leading actress was no longer able to say "Feel my heart" and get someone to hold her boob. In the mid-section that exists, Borzage doesn't overload on atmosphere - there's that one super set-piece where Farrell performs some overenthusiastic landscape design - but really these aren't the scenes where he would showcase that legendary visual artistry. One can only imagine what he achieved with the opening scene (an idyllic barge ride), Farrell's collapse and the final reel. It's a crying shame that The River no longer exists in its entirety, especially when this loving reconstruction suggests it was another of the director's silent masterpieces. (3.5)