The King of Kings (1927)

The King of Kings (1927)

dir. by Cecil B. Demille

So I've never seen a Cecil Demille film before this. I knew that he was one of the heavy-hitters of 20th century film, specifically with his work on epic films like The Ten Commandments but I don't know that I'd ever actually seen an epic film either. If King of Kings is any indication of what they're like, I think they can be interesting films, though not necessarily my cup of tea.

King of Kings basically tells the story of the last weeks of Jesus's life--the passover entry to Jerusalem, the last supper, the trial and crucifixion, and the resurrection--because of the nature of the plot I'm not really going to go over whether or not I was surprised by the events of the story. I think Demille probably expected his audience to know the story going in and was more using this as a technical achievement for scale of a work than for any real innovation to the Christ tale.

So how are the technical achievements? Well they remind me a lot of Georges Méliès actually. There are lots of people on camera during shots all just sort of milling about, although where in Méliès it could sometimes be difficult to know where the focus of the shot was supposed to be, it's always pretty obvious in Demille, with the shots usually focused around a central structure (either architectural or a person standing amidst a crowd) and the extras sort of radiate out from there. Additionally, it was interesting to see the film use color. First time I've seen it during this project and while it's only there for the opening scene and the scene of the resurrection near the end, it's done pretty well.

That said, there's a very "of its time"ness about this movie. I didn't really see anything patently offensive around (though I may be overlooking something) but the new testament as presented in this film is very much the one that I think a lot of folks nowadays inherited from their grandparents. It shows a Jesus who is infallible, confident in his actions, and pretty much has this whole "being god's son" thing figured out. He kind of goes through the motions, really, and it is always clear to the audience that he's the one in the right being set upon by the droves of old-time Israel. I've not seen this other film, but from what I understand The Last Temptation of Christ is sort of the go-to example for a more modern interpretation of Jesus, and while it's tempting to just think of the portrayal in King of Kings as a relic, it's still a distressingly pervasive one, at least in the southeastern US where I'm originally from. There's no choice here, it's portrayed as so patently obvious that Jesus is in the right that anyone who chooses not to opt into this belief system is given a sort of villainous paint-job that removes all nuance from the situation.

Some other examples of this? Dear word, why didn't the other apostles throw out Judas Iscariot from the get-go? He's always scowling and looking like he's taking no joy in anything. Raising the dead? Bah! That's boring! Where's my gold? 

Like, I know he's supposed to be the traitor, but it seems more like that role has determined everything else about the character, rather than the character growing into that role. Again, this is probably unfair to the film, which is clearly more classical than modernist in its presentation, but it just seems like aside from the technical achievements, that this film was aiming for an older audience even at the time of its release.

There's some impressive stuff here--the sets are well-designed, the music is pretty good and the large crowd scenes are very well-done, but at 2 and a half hours runtime (seriously, there are some scenes here that go on about as long as scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey), I'm not exactly chomping at the bit for the next Cecil Demille piece I'm going to be watching, which will be The Greatest Show on Earth.

The Freshman

The Freshman




dir. by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor

Overall: Well, this was sweet.

So given that this film was done by the same creative team as Safety Last!, I think it's a little bit obvious to compare the two. The two films, despite sharing the same directors and the same lead actor are very different in their tone and approach to comedy. Safety Last! feels more like it comes out of the Chaplin school of slapstick comedy, whereas this seems much more within the framework of standard trope comedy. The plot is very much a "young student wants to become the popular person on campus" story. I imagine it may've actually launched a number of these tropes which still crop up in American pop culture today.

Harold Lloyd again plays a young man named Harold, this time an aspiring young student who wants to become a popular student at the fictional Tate University. He's planning to model himself after one of his favorite movies, "The College Hero," and begins preparing his shtick, including dancing a jig before he introduces himself to everyone and coming up with the nickname "Speedy." It's really kind of awkward humor, which I usually don't like, but I guess the fact that the movie knows it's awkward humor and it's so far removed by time that I don't have much problem with it.

As was also the case in Safety Last!, this creative team has a really colorful way of giving a characterization by presenting anecdotes about the characters who show up. Tate University is described as "a football stadium with a college attached" which... wow if that's not still the case in a lot of places. There's also the football coach, who is "so manly he shaves with a blowtorch" and the dean who is so prim that "never married because he was afraid a wife might call him by his first name." Harold accidentally slapsticks his way into being on bad terms with the dean, and is unknowingly made the butt of a joke by an older student who continuously sets him into situations that make him appear foolish. Eventually, Harold develops something of a reputation as a clown in the school.

The only person who's not boarding that train is Peggy, a young woman who Harold met on the train to Tate and who turns out to be the daughter of his landlady. Peggy tries to tell off Harold's bullies, and several times comes close to telling Harold that his "friends" just see him as the butt of a joke, but she can never bring herself to do it because he just seems so darn happy. Eventually, Harold finds out about this and is dejected, but determines to win the student body over by playing a role in The Big Game against Tate's rival university.

I feel like the plot of The Freshman is a bit of a formality in retrospect. It almost certainly cemented a number of these tropes in the pop cultural consciousness but that's just the issue! These tropes are so embedded that going back it's kind of easy to predict where a scene will go. That isn't to say it's not fun. I don't need things to be new or innovative all the time, but there's a certain desire to just ignore the plot in describing this. Yeah, Harold Lloyd's acting is great (honestly the best parallel I can think of is probably Mickey Mouse from some of the early Disney cartoons. There's an earnestness to the character that carries them through the various scrapes they find themselves a part of. However, Harold's also got a bit of a Daffy Duck component to him where it's notable that he only ever barely scrapes by).

Even still, fun movie and I'm glad it didn't have any of the weird racial components that were there in Safety Last! The Freshman is a fun movie overall and worth the watch.

Body and Soul

Body and Soul
directed by Oscar Micheaux

Overall: Ugh... let me try to break this down into parts

oh and spoiler warning for the movie Brazil, not gonna rot13 because I'm too pissed off..

TW: rape, abuse by an authority figure, some talk of race.

THE GOOD:

• This movie is one of Oscar Micheaux's "race movies." Movies that were directed usually with all black casts and made for black audiences. Back in the 1920s these films were very controversial and in the case of Body and Soul, there was trouble screening them. The original director's cut of Body and Soul has been lost to time so it's an impressive act of film preservation to cobble together a cut of the film at all.
• The new jazz score by Wycliffe Gordon is awesome. Seriously, I'd play this movie again just to have the score as background music for whatever I was doing.
• This was the first film that Paul Robeson starred in. Just for the record - I don't blame Paul Robeson for the bungle of a plot that's in this movie.
• Even though the film is largely remembered for Paul Robeson, the protagonists of the film are actually two black women, which I imagine was exceedingly rare at the time (hell, it's rare now).

THE BAD:

• I'll get to my major complaints, but a minor one first: Paul Robeson plays two characters in this film: The crooked reverend Isaiah Jenkins (AKA, the criminal "Black Carl") and his twin brother Sylvester, who is barely in the film. Honestly it's kind of confusing to keep track of why they even had the two as brothers considering it really doesn't come up. It just seems like needless recasting.
• This may be the first movie in the Criterion Collection that I've come away from disliking the plot of the film. I mean, don't get me wrong - The Phantom Carriage had a messed up "forgiveness" creed to it too, but at least there the film didn't linger so long on it as to really annoy me. Here though... well I'll just give a rundown
• So the plot centers around the arrival of escaped prisoner Black Carl, who is passing himself off as the Rt. Reverend Isaiah Jenkins and hopes to scam a small black community out of their money. The members of this community tend to fall for Carl's ruse except for a young woman named Isabelle. Isabelle, who is hoping to marry a young inventor named Sylvester (also played by Robeson), is openly suspicious/contemptuous of the reverend, but her mother Martha Jane just believes that Isabelle is being sinful, and hopes to make a match for Isabelle with Jenkins. Jenkins pays a visit one day at Martha Jane's behest, and it's heavily implied that he rapes Isabelle while Martha Jane is out. Isabelle runs away to Atlanta, leaving a note behind where her mother's funds were hidden away telling her mother of what she's done.
  Martha Jane soon takes off for Atlanta and manages to locate Isabelle, who is on her deathbed. Isabelle tells Martha Jane the truth - that she had been raped once before by Jenkins and that when he came around to the house earlier in the film, he had Isabelle tell him where the money was hidden under threat of raping her again. She gave him the money and then ran away, knowing that her mother would not believe her.
  Isabelle dies and Martha Jane returns to her town where she confronts and exposes Jenkins in front of the congregation. The people form an angry mob and begin hunting Jenkins down while Martha Jane returns to her home. While on the run, Jenkins turns up at Martha Jane's house and has the audacity to beg forgiveness of her - and she forgives him.... Following this, Jenkins leaves and appears to escape? He seems to kill one of his pursuers and disappears off into the distance, at least. Then we return to Martha Jane, and she hears a knock at the door.
  It's Isabelle... and Sylvester... and the money's back.... and it was all a dream.
  I'm serious.
  The film ends after Sylvester and Isabelle have married. They return home from their honeymoon and happily play the piano with Martha Jane.
• Woof
• Just woof
• Like, how do you even begin with this thing? If you try to untangle one knot, two more show up.
• For starters - using rape as a dramatic center of a character's journey... even if it isn't one's own, is an unfortunately common trope in storytelling - I don't mean to say here that it should be downplayed when it does happen (although sometimes I think the question of necessity does arise), but only that it's too often used as a motivating factor for action in storytelling.. I've got a few other films/stories down the line that'll probably be more fertile ground for exploring this topic, but for now I just want to register my distaste.
• And then! And then it's all a dream in the end? Okay so I thought of a few things when I saw this - 1) I think one of the only stories that gets to have the "It was all a dream" bit tacked on is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Here it seems to undermine all of the drama of the film and even seems to make the earlier abuse of Isabelle into just a plot device!
• Alternatively, the ending may be like the ending to Brazil, where Martha Jane's gone into a sort of catatonic reverie. Honestly, I could buy that possibility, but there's no hint of it given in the film other than just how bizarre the ending is in general. But jeez this would be an absolutely Kubrickian film if the ending is that bleak.

THE UGLY:

• Okay, so the concept of forgiveness that shows up in this film is an odd one. I remember a couple of years ago I listened to an episode of the podcast This Week in Blackness Prime, a news and culture podcast hosted by Elon James-White, Imani Gandy and (at the time) Aaron Rand-Freeman, in which Elon's mother, a devout Christian, addressed the concept of forgiveness as it applied to her own abusive stepmother. She seemed to imply that in the context of Christianity (and perhaps black American Christianity more specifically) forgiveness acts as a kind of way to not let the perpetrator of a crime have power over the victim, with the expectation being that justice will be meted out in some other fashion. From what I've gathered after talking to a few people, this is supposed to be something of an empowering act on the part of the wronged. I wonder if there's a reading of this film that reads Martha Jane's actions as good in this regard. I'm conflicted, of course, because it seems to ignore Isabelle's wishes, but then again Isabelle is dead at this point. It just seems like a messy component that's wrapped up in cultural idioms I am not really that well-versed in, so if anyone has any sort of commentary or insight into this they'd like to put out there for the purpose of understanding, feel free.

Final note: If you've experienced abuse at the hands of a religious figure (and you're in America, I guess) the National Domestic Violence Hotline can help you locate resources in order to get you help within your local area: their number is 1-800-799-7233.

Safety Last!

Safety Last!
directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor

Well this one's a little bit less thought-provoking than Nanook or Haxan. Still though, it's an interesting and at-times pretty serviceable comedy picture.

Harold Lloyd stars as a young man named Harold (called "The Boy" in the credits) who is set on making it big in the city. He leaves his family in the country and tells his fiancee that once he's made enough money they'll buy a house and get married. Unfortunately, his job does not pay as well as he'd like and he's having to pawn off his possessions and avoid paying rent in order to keep up the appearance that he is making money.... which, I mean, could just be avoided by being honest but whatever.

This early portion of the movie is probably the part that I find the funniest. It's mostly filled with slapstick as Lloyd attempts to go through his work day and must be quick-witted in order to avoid the ire of his managers. It's really reminiscent of Chaplin. However, while Chaplin seemed to almost stumble into and away from his problems, Lloyd has a little bit more thought given over to them. His ideas come across like schemes, and the humor comes from misdirection in that oftentimes the schemes appear to fail, only for Lloyd to quickly adapt and change the means by which he accomplishes his task.

After this opening bit of to-do with the daily grind, though, the movie begins to take a little bit of a downturn for me. Maybe this is just a personal thing, but I tend to dislike scenes in movies where a character has to maintain a charade, pretending to be someone they are not in order to keep another character in the dark about something. Particularly when it's a situation like this - Lloyd's fiancee comes to visit him in the city and Lloyd, afraid to have her figure out that he is only a salesman and not a manager or anything, contrives various ways to fool her into believing he is much higher on the organizational chain than he is. The whole thing reeks of class prejudice and although there's some cleverness in the way that the scene escalates, it's just not really my kind of thing in terms of comedy.

The final sequence of the movie though, and probably the most iconic, is really interesting. In order to try and make some money quickly, Lloyd proposes to his manager that he can pull in one hundred customers by staging a public stunt in which his friend/roommate Bill will climb the department store building to the roof - twelve floors. Bill is confident that he can do this, as he's demonstrated that he's pretty good at climbing buildings earlier in the film when he does this in order to escape a police officer who he and Lloyd prank. On the day of the event, however, the police officer is present and hopes to catch Bill, meaning that Harold has to take Bill's place. The plan is made that Harold will climb up a floor, go into a window and switch outfits with Bill. Bill will then climb the rest of the way up. This goes awry, however, when the police officer notices and starts chasing after Bill, meaning that with each floor Harold attempts to make the switch but can't, pressing him to climb further. I'm sure that one could look at this as some kind of hopeful symbol for American can-do-itiveness, but for me it reads more as really nice suspense... also it reminded me a lot of Bob's Burgers for some reason (Harold = Bob, Bill = Teddy). While each floor of the building becomes more difficult, with several close scrapes with death occurring, Harold eventually makes it to the top of the building where his fiancee has arrived. It's never made clear whether or not Harold comes clean, as the two walk off into the sunset, and Bill is pursued across rooftops by the officer.

While I wasn't exactly as big a fan of this movie as I was The Kid, I can see that in some ways the films are coming from different ideas about comedy. This film is very much about the misdirect, while I'd say that The Kid is more pure slapstick comedy. There are more films with both Lloyd and Chaplin on the list, though, and I look forward to seeing more.

A few other notes:

-There's a little bit of discomfort with some portrayals of racial and religious minorities in the film. While all are minor, and the two black characters don't stick around very long, there's a jeweler who I think is supposed to be Jewish, and is played in a very stereotypical, hand-wringy, greedy fashion.
-Harold's snobbish superior, the floorwalker Stubbs, is a great addition. He's all the right kinds of nose-in-the-air self-satisfied villain that works well in comedy movies featuring class dissatisfaction.
-The city in the film is Los Angeles, and Harold and Bill are able to rent an apartment there for 14 dollars a month. Converted to 2017 spending power, that's somewhere between 180 and 200 dollars a month.

Nanook of the North

TW: Discussion of racist/stereotypical presentations

Overall: How do you talk about a film like this?

I've head the name "Nanook of the North" since childhood. Usually some character in a work would be jokingly nicknamed Nanook and I learned that it was some reference to an old movie. The only reference I came across in recent years was from the Legend of Korra, in the form of "The Adventures of Nuktuk: Hero of the South". Where LoK sort of pokes fun at the film, I think it might actually be a good reference for me to check back with in addressing the film's interplay between Flaherty (the director) and Allakariallak (The Inuk star of the film, whose character is named Nanook).

That's a starting point right there, of course - the fact that the film is presented as a documentary is in many ways laughable. The character of Nanook is not real. He is an amalgamation of various Inuit half-truths presented in a manner similar to how some members of the Maasai partake in tourist attractions today. In the 1920's when Nanook was filmed, the Inuit were using rifles and had begun integrating western clothes into their lives. Allakariallak knew what a gramophone was, and didn't need to be told. However, therein lies the rub, I think. Nanook isn't Allakariallak, and this film, though it purports a documentarian stance, is mostly a fictionalized account of a fictional person's life.

There are tons of ethics questions to unpack here. On the one hand, indigenous peoples being presented as ignorant of western society is damaging and a real ugly way to go about making a film. On the other hand, I have to remember that Allakariallak was a star. As far as I know, he and the other people in the film were not forced to do any of the things their characters did - they were cast and paid actors who at the very least were actually Inuit people and not white folks in facepaint.

The film's narrative is almost entirely fabrication - Allakariallak did not die of starvation while hunting two years after production, as the film suggests--he died of natural causes in his home. The igloo that is built was not used for filming interior shots, as the camera could not fit inside. There are rumors that the scene in which Allakariallak wrestles a seal on the other end of a rope actually had no seal on the other end. The film is not a documentary in any "let the cameras roll" sense. It's an ethnographic film, that like an ethnography, purports to make claims about a population based on some minor observation and storytelling techniques. I'd really be interested in hearing various perspectives on this film, as I imagine there are plenty. I think for me the most troubling aspects of the film are the use of the term "e*****" to refer to these people, and the killing of various live animals that took place as a part of the filming. I generally don't like when live animals are used for film narrative purposes, and especially not when they're hunted as a "documentarian" venture. In terms of representation, though, I don't know that it's the worst representation I've seen. It's got its problems, but there is a measure of reassurance in the casting of actual Inuk people.

I realize as I write this that there's not much I can say by way of the film's "plot." It mostly follows the character of Nanook in the daily life of his family. They go about trading, hunting, building an igloo, and trying to survive. There is no real antagonist, except perhaps the elements, and the film doesn't really have a climax as much as it does a final scene in which Nanook's dogs begin fighting one another (ugh) and Nanook settles it down. His family is then unable to start building an igloo because it is too late, but they find an abandoned one to bunker down in for the night.

So I think for documentaries I'm mostly just going to do commentary and avoid plot synopses as I make my way through these collections... so then, like I said at the beginning, let's talk about Korra.

In The Legend of Korra, there's a sub-plot that crops up throughout seasons 2 and 3 surrounding the character of Bolin who becomes a "mover" star in a serial called "The Adventures of Nuktuk: Hero of the South" and while it's obviously a play on Nanook I can't help but draw some wider parallels between the production of Nanook and the production of The Legend of Korra.

Nanook is fake. Allakariallak was a movie star who played a character named Nanook. In the same way, Nuktuk is fake, played by a mover star named Bolin. But let's abstract this a bit further. Bolin is fake. P.J. Byrne is an actor who was cast in the role of an asian-coded character by two white directors. These two directors take potshots at the idea of appropriation and anachronism that plays into the making of the Nuktuk serials, while themselves creating a story which loosely plays on folklore and various non-white cultures as viewed through a white western lens. I mean, even the voice acting, although including some notable names (including Jason Isaacs as Zhao) is largely absent of people of color, especially when compared to another animated property that came out half a decade earlier and featured a non-white cast of characters, Disney's Mulan.

What am I trying to get at here? I'm not exactly sure, I guess. I suppose that if I have a point it's that I'd be hesitant to go after Nanook of the North as an antiquated, harmful, and racist piece. I mean, certainly these things are in it, don't get me wrong, the fact that they use the word "e*****" is point enough, but I don't really think that it's fair for modern audiences to posture as though our own media properties have undergone some great leap forward with regard to how non-white actors are cast and live action people of color are presented on film.

I'd be perfectly willing to hear other perspectives with regard to this topic, but I'm hesitant of inviting some kind of flame war... I may very well be overlooking some crucial analyses that have been done on Nanook over the years that could shed some new light on the topic, this was just sort of where my mind went upon viewing it. A film which seems to say more about the filmmakers and what they consider uncivilized (albeit admirable in some way). Which, ironically, is set against films like Haxan and what 1920s culture considered civilization.

The Kid

The Kid
Directed by Charlie Chaplin

TW: Parental abandonment

Comedy is a hard thing to do. Over time I've become more and more reserved in my comedic senses and don't typically enjoy the genre. My favorite comedy movie is probably The Big Lebowski, which I enjoy primarily due to the very well-written dialogue-based comedy which builds over the course of the film. As far as other comedy goes, I enjoy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community and Tim and Eric but beyond these I tend to find a lot of comedy pretty hackneyed and reliant on a shared sense of humor. If the sense of humor isn't shared between writer and audience, the comedy can fall flat.

It's nice, then, that The Kid has held up so well over time. It's actually a pretty impressive movie in its own right, with lots of wonderful choreography and impressive shots, but I want to highlight that the movie is one of the few I've found funny in years. Chaplin and Coogan play well off of one another and so many of the scenes are brilliantly choreographed. In my opinion, slapstick is like a dance, and to do slapstick well requires a lot of precision in making things look like accidents.

The plot of the movie is okay for what it is. An unnamed woman gives birth to a child, and due to complications with the father, decides to abandon the child in the back seat of an expensive car, leaving a note asking whoever finds the child to take care of it. The car is stolen and the thieves, upon discovering the child, leave him on the street where he is found by Chaplin's 'tramp'. The tramp takes the child in and becomes a father to the child, who eventually becomes a player in the tramp's con-artist game.

The woman, now distraught over her child and wealthy, takes to charity work among the poor, where she comes across her child (now named 'John'), but the two do not recognize one another. When John becomes sick one day, the woman offers to call a doctor. The doctor, upon finding out that the child is not the tramp's biological son, calls an "orphan asylum" to take the child away. Hijinks ensue and the tramp and John are left wandering the streets, avoiding the authorities. Eventually, the child is given over to the police (kidnapped, actually) and the woman arrives to take him back.

The Tramp, now tired after having searched for John all night following his kidnapping, falls asleep on his doorstep and has a pretty bizarre dream sequence where various characters in the movie are now angels. The Tramp becomes an angel too and all seems good until three devils sneak into the gated neighborhood where the angels are living. Things go downhill from here until The Tramp is shot and wakes up to find that he's being hoisted up by a police officer. The officer takes him to see the woman and the child, who welcome him inside the woman's mansion gladly.

So I don't really want to talk about the plot to this one. I have some pretty conflicted feelings about how the child's custody is handled throughout the film. Maybe I'm being too harsh here, but it seems to me that the woman is thoroughly in the wrong for having abandoned her child. Not necessarily for the decision to not take care of a child herself (plenty of circumstances arise that make child raising by a particular parent a bad decision for all parties) but in her method of trying to find an adoptive parent by literally leaving the child in the backseat of a car with a note. I understand she was trying to put the child to a well-off family, but it's still reckless endangerment.

But like I said, I'm more interested in talking about the comedy; or the dramedy more accurately. I'm amazed at how much this film conveys through visuals alone. One of the things I think people oftentimes forget about silent films is that not all dialogue needs to be given an intertitle. So much of the dialogue can be inferred or left to the imagination of the viewer and, far from something being lost, I think a lot is added to a film as a result.

I'm actually really pleased that I found this film. I remember watching Modern Times back in undergraduate, and I thought it was okay. Now, having seen this, I'm really looking forward to checking out the Harold Lloyd and Chaplin films that are also on my list.