7/19/22
Newsletter46
The Ass Crack of Dawn
I raise my shade to darkness.
At the first Oscars for 1927-28, given in 1929 at the Roosevelt Hotel, for the one and only time they gave an Oscar for Best Title Writing. Of the five nominees, Joe Farnham was nominated three times, and oddly they gave him three Oscars.
Behind Paramount and next to Columbia was an area known as Poverty Row. This was where the really low-budget studios were located. The best of the bunch was PRC, Producer’s Releasing Corp. Two good filmmakers came out of there: Edgar G. Ulmer and Joseph Lewis. PRC shot their films in 5 days. Although this was nearly impossible for most directors, Ulmer and Lewis both prospered under the pressure. Edgar Ulmer was from Germany and had been Fritz Lang’s art director on films like, “Metropolis,” that had enormous sets. His best film, and most famous, is “Detour,” and it’s so weird and creepy it’s definitely worth a look. But Joseph Lewis loved having no money and using his imagination instead. He made a WWII film called, “The Burma Road,” mostly exteriors and all shot on a tiny soundstage. The whole set is a road running off into the distance behind some hills. What Lewis did was have the road get progressively smaller as it went away, and had progressively smaller miniature farmhouses on the hills. The last shot called for the little Burmese boy to watch the U.S. soldiers leave from a church where they left him, except they didn’t have a church. Lewis put the boy behind a four-foot-square piece of lattice work and got a shot of him watching and looking sad. He then got the reverse shot over the kid’s shoulder, through the lattice, of the jeep and soldiers leaving. In post he put in the sound of a church bell. In a crappy film, “The Invisible Ghost,” with Bela Lugosi, there is a courtroom scene and Lewis has no courtroom set at all. You see a big shadow on a wall of a gavel hitting a desk, close-ups of lawyers, and some close-ups of the jury – no set.
Raoul Walsh began his career in movies as an actor. He played John Wilkes Booth in “Birth of a Nation.” Performing a terrific stunt (not stunt men back then), Walsh shoots Lincoln, then jumps from the balcony onto the stage and gets his spur caught in the American flag, just Booth, then yells, “Sic semper tyrannus” and runs away. Walsh became a director the next year in 1916 and worked into the 1950s. He made a gigantic western in 1930 called “The Big Trail,” shot in 70mm, starring a new kid who had never played a lead named John Wayne. The film bombed and Duke spent the next decade making low-budget westerns before finally becoming a star in in John Ford’s “Stagecoach.” When Walsh and Ford would occasionally run into each other over the years, Walsh would say, “I discovered John Wayne, not you.”
The filmmaker with the shortest, most important, career was Jean Vigo. He made two films: “Zero for Conduct” in 1933 and “L’Atlante” in 1934, both very well-received, then he died. “Zero for Conduct” is a wonderfully weird movie that’s only 44-minutes long. It was remade in 1970 as “If . . .” starring Malcom McDowell, which is what got him “A Clockwork Orange” the next year.
And finally, the monster, Joseph Stalin, read over 20,000 books, and left notes in the margins of all of them. Stalin also had an operatic singing voice. At the meeting in Potsdam between Stalin, Churchill and Truman, Harry Truman played the piano and Stalin sang. Afterward, Truman said, “I disagree with all of Stalin’s political views, but he was great to party with.”
The sky grows light. Another day dawns.
ReplyForward