David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: Be
Natural and Echo in the Canyon)
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
Film archeology, which now firmly embraces the 30
years of silent movies, has found its Tut’s tomb in a little Frenchwoman who
lived from 1873 to 1968, won the Legion of Honor and is buried in New Jersey. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice
Guy-Blaché is like a reef of coral magic, loaded with treasure from a
silent Atlantis. Pamela B. Green’s
documentary uses explanatory graphics and zappy devices for a great purpose.
Guy-Blaché was a pioneer in tinted color, rapid cutting, sight gags, depth-of-field,
surrealism, pre-recorded sound, gender comedy and unforced acting (“Be Natural”
was posted in her studio). She rose not by acting (bourgeois father: “I’d
rather see you dead”) but, at first, by way of stenography. Attending a key
1895 demonstration of projected film in Paris with her boss, the emerging mogul
León Gaumont, petite Alice found her wonderland. A visionary in a new, still mongrel
medium, she would parlay her steno pad into a launch pad of imagination, a prodigious career of scripting, designing, directing,
producing and editing.
With similar passion Green and her team tracked down relatives, colleagues and terrific interviews of
old Alice and a surviving daughter. Though not obscure in her prime, Alice never
quite joined the primal pantheon of Lumière, Pathé, Porter, Mélies, Friese-Greene,
Edison and others (you know: the guys).
Gaumont was a good but patriarchal boss, and once the “flickers” became a world
industry Guy-Blaché’s energy and authority were largely siphoned into marriage
and motherhood. This movie is Alice Guy shedding her corsets to dance her
cancan. Losing her marital Blaché would be a topping reward, for Herbert Blaché
(English, not French) muscled into her art, took office control after they
moved to Fort Lee, N.J., to make longer films, ran their studio aground and killed
their marriage by philandering. Masterful Alice was nobody’s fool, yet still a
woman in her time, and she was sidelined. It would take Leni Riefenstahl to
make “woman auteur” an undeniable fact, although her mentor was Hitler.
Green has populated her devotional salute with a
hallelujah chorus (Geena Davis, Julie Delpy, Martin Scorsese, Kevin Brownlow, Diablo
Cody, Agnes Varda, Julie Taymor, Ben Kingsley etc.). Jodie Foster narrates. A
key backer was flesh-peddler Hugh Hefner, now making amends from his grave. Most
of the best talk is French, full of technical insights and suspenseful
discoveries. The academic hive buzzes, with an American prof declaring that Alice’s
bold improvs and meta-filmic tangents are the DNA of YouTube (would that make
her Playing Trumps a Gallic
premonition of Trumpism?). More of her prolific work is being saved from
nitrate oblivion, and yet we see only tauntingly delicious fragments. Alice mothered
more than she knew – in remaking her whimsical first hit The Cabbage Fairy, twice, she pointed the way to serial
franchising.
The film has a haunting figure, barely mentioned: D.W.
Griffith. Given too much credit in his time, the American master may now, by will
of fate and fad, get too little. He is seen briefly but mentioned only in a
Hitchcock quote praising him and Alice as early inspirations. Griffith’s impact
on acting, genre, narrative and the biz was massive, but today’s revisionism must
wonder if Guy-Blaché’s folksy, funny use of a black cast led by “cakewalk king”
William Russell, in A Fool and His Money,
is the forgotten antidote to Griffith’s patronizingly racist treatment of
blacks in The Birth of a Nation. Did
Alice ever contemplate the contrast between her short charmer and Griffith’s
seismic event? Now, in tandem, their dialectic cannot be silent.
Echo
in the Canyon
“It was just ’66 and early ’67,” music producer Terry
(Peter Fonda) said to an awed young lover in 1999’s The Limey. “That’s all (the hip, positive Sixties) really was.” Echo in the Canyon opens a slightly
wider window on that era, when a foaming
surf of California rock, cross-fed by folk and pop, flowed from musical wizards
sharing ideas and guitars in their homes in L.A.’s lotus-dreamy Laurel Canyon. Though
Jackson Browne calls it “the antithesis of the plastic straight world on
television,” bless the TV archives of Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark for period performances
of The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and
more. Andrew Slater’s documentary is hosted by singer and producer Jakob Dylan,
whose demurely attentive interviews often star his handsomeness (courtesy of
mama Sara, not papa Bob), his profile a camera beacon much like Fonda’s in The Limey.
This nostalgic package barely explores the famous
canyon, yet loves the songs and musicians, guitars and studios. We learn that
the Beatles’s Rubber Soul inspired
Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds, which in boomerang
return inspired the Beatles’s Sergeant
Pepper, and so forth. A less epochal echo is Jake Dylan’s whisper-glide
voice in tribute versions, boosted by songbirds Fiona Apple, Norah Jones, Cat
Power. The real gold is old clips and recent, dig-this memories from Eric
Clapton, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, John Sebastian and Wilson. The au-courant sex life of Michelle Phillips
helped end the heavenly harmonic Mamas and Papas. Post-sylph she still looks
good, impishly telling Dylan “I was a very busy girl.” Bonus for film buffs: slices
of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, a footloose
time capsule of hipster L.A. in 1968 that is beyond imitation. Remember star
Gary Lockwood? Here he is, like a hunky, tanned astronaut on planet Cool.
SALAD (A List)
Remarkable
Movies about Silent Filming
In order of arrival (with year, director):
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924), The Cameraman (Buster Keaton, Ed Sedgwick 1928), Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga-Vertov
1929), The Magic Box (John Boulting
1951), Nickelodeon (Peter
Bogdanovich, 1976 but see 2009 “director’s cut” DVD), A Slave of Love (Nikita Mikhalkov 1976), Unknown Chaplin (Kevin Brownlow, David Gil 1983), Lyrical Nitrate (Peter Delpeut 1991), The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011), Hugo (Martin Scorsese 2011) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison
2016).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
is busy this week devising a new magic show in Vegas.
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Born
upscale in 1899 to a Manhattan doctor and illustrator, Humphrey Bogart still
had a steep climb to fame. His first Hollywood campaign in the early 1930s
inflicted ten flops, but Broadway success in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest led him to Warner
Bros. to re-create his Duke Mantee. Mentored by friend and co-star Leslie
Howard, the triumph was his last for years. English movie critic Graham Greene
called Mantee ‘the sad simian killer, the best character in the play,’ without mentioning Bogart.” (From the
Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter
in my book Starlight Rising, available
from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Humphrey
Bogart’s gangster Duke Mantee looms over Leslie Howard and Bette Davis on a
rather stagey studio set of The Petrified
Forest (Warner Bros. 1936; director Archie Mayo, d.p. Sol Polito).
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