East Lynne (1931)

I've been told that there is only one copy of Frank Lloyd's East Lynne and that it is housed at UCLA. I sort of despaired of ever seeing this movie, particularly since I don't live in Los Angeles anymore, but I found a bootleg DVD online and thought I'd see what that held for me. The actual movie is something like 104 minutes long, but the DVD doesn't include the last real of the film, and I was only able to watch about 92 minutes of East Lynne. But I feel pretty sure I got the gist.

I was pleased to find that this film starred Ann Harding, who was nominated for Best Actress this same year for her brilliant performance in Holiday. She is definitely charming in East Lynne, but they chose correctly by nominating her for Holiday.

East Lynne is yet another Oscar-bait, woman-sacrifices-her-child picture, though I will say that I think Lloyd's film is different in some ways from the usual tropes these movies employ. In the first place, literally everything that happens in this film is the fault of a man and absolutely never the fault of the main character, Isabelle. And the film makes no bones about this. The men in this movie are terrible, terrible people who throw this woman away and treat her like shit.

I'm gonna write a little synopsis because there aren't any accurate ones on the internet. Isabelle marries this suburban, neo-Puritan dude and leaves the gay life of London to go stay at this giant manse in the country called East Lynne. She's super excited about it and loves her husband. But as soon as she gets to East Lynne she finds that the place is run by her husband's dour sister in law, who actually hadn't even come to London for the wedding. She badmouths Isabelle immediately, and it's clear she's going to muck things up somehow. The film skips all of the microaggressions we can be sure this old bat perpetrated, and we advance quickly to three years later with a title card. Isabelle has changed visibly. She no longer wears any pretty dresses, she's stifled in this house, and she also has a little boy. Her husband is mean to her; the sister is mean to her. It sucks. Then one of her former suitors comes to visit.

The suitor declares his love for Isabelle. Then he kisses her. She runs up to her room and is like no, dude. Leave me alone. But the evil witch of a sister-in-law lies and tells Isabelle's husband that she and the guy are having an affair. Finally Isabelle loses it: tells the sister-in-law off, accuses her of lying. But the husband takes her sister's side. Isabelle says, OK, then, I'm out of here. I won't stay in this house another minute because you don't actually love me. Well, that's all good and well, but this man will not let her take her son. She says, I won't leave without my son, but he says, Actually yes. You are leaving anyway. There's a lot of crying at this point. I was surprised she didn't burn East Lynne to the ground or throw the old lady down the stairs. Those responses would have been appropriate.

New title card. Three months later. Miss thing is on the boat to Paris. She does have a rich father, at least, who loves her. The suitor who kissed and caused (some of) this trouble is on the boat with her and offers to give her all the things she's been missing: fun and food and dresses and champagne. This gay life lasts awhile, but then as it turns out he was swindling the English government, so he gets fired from the diplomatic service, and the two are reduced to penury and to hanging out with (gasp!) Bohemians.

Then the Franco-Prussian War begins. Apparently it's 1870 (which I hadn't actually realized) and Paris is under siege. Miss thing is like I just really miss my son, perhaps my asshole ex-husband has come around and is not being such an asshole anymore. (We see in a few scenes back at East Lynne that he has most definitely not stopped being an asshole, though he has remarried.) But Isabelle's current boyfriend, who was swindling the British government, is now a full on jerk. She says I'm getting out of Paris and I'm going back to London to see my baby. This is crazy. Paris is under siege. A building falls on both her and her man. The man is killed and she somehow has some illness where she's going to go blind unless she has complete rest and, like, sits in a dark quiet room or something. But Lady Isabelle will not listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene, and she refuses to trust the science. She says, Listen, if I'm going to go blind I need to see my babychild one last time. So she goes back to East Lynne in the dark of night.

Meanwhile, her child is sick with consumption and he needs complete rest and things are touch and go, and he cannot possibly be disturbed at all at least for this one night. But this is the night that Isabelle has sneaked in to see him. (She can still see.)

And then the film cuts out.

Unfortunately, this is a ridiculous melodrama. It's so divorced from any reality and takes itself so seriously, that I just couldn't come around to enjoying it, even with Ann Harding in the lead role. 

I actually don't know what happens at the end, and I think the film is so different from the original novel that there are no clues even to be found there. Every synopsis online gets things so wrong that I don't think they can be trusted here either. Does she shake the crib and he dies in her arms or something like that? That seems about the speed of this movie. Perhaps one day I will find my way to UCLA to see the final reel. Hopefully I can watch just the end by itself, though, without having to rewatch the rest of this mostly tepid melodrama.

The Vagabond King (1930)

I had never heard of Dennis King before, but he's very good in this... as long as he's singing. Other than that, well, I've already seen the 1938 non-musical version If I Were King, so I guess I just thought it was old hat. And I know that the Frank Lloyd movie came out eight years later, and I realize that isn't really fair to the ol' Vagabond King. But either way, I wasn't into it.

If I Were King

If I Were King is not great or anything, but it is rather fun.
Basil Rathbone gives a festive performance, and Colman is, as always, both very good looking and quite entertaining. I've been sort of obsessed with Colman lately.

Berkeley Square

Well I wasn't expecting this! Berkeley Square (which is always pronounced Barkley Square) is a time-travel movie (!) and an exceedingly odd one at that. I was sort of impressed with this film's ambitions, even if I find Leslie Howard rather boring and found the plot itself rather bizarre. What a strange film.

Blood on the Sun!

This title is hilarious, and this movie is sort of hilarious too, except that it wants to be very serious.

Blood on the Sun is a James Cagney movie with the tagline "Cagney's Mightiest!". In it, he is an aikido-trained, hard-bitten reporter working for an English-language newspaper in Japan right before World War II.

Cagney plays the kind of character who doesn't do what he's told and likes to upset his superiors by telling them the truth when no one wants to hear it.

The film is a fascinating curiosity. It is a fictional retelling of the story of the Tanaka Memorial, which was a fake story about a document written by Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi for Emperor Hirohito that explained how Japan could take over the entire world. First Manchuria and Mongolia, then China, then all of Asia. A short version of this document was actually a published story in an English-language newspaper in 1931 in China, but the whole thing was an elaborate anti-Japanese hoax.

The plot of the film involves Cagney and a double agent in the employ of the Japanese (a beautiful woman played by Silvia Sidney with whom he falls in love – because of her principles) getting ahold of the original document, which they want to publish for the world to see, so we can all see that Japan is trying to take over the world just like Hitler.

To hear the story right now, it immediately sounds like propaganda. As I watched the movie, I instantly thought to myself, well this sounds like typical American wartime nonsense. Sure enough, it is (it was released in the Summer of 1945).

But the movie has its pleasures, particularly Cagney's martial arts fights, which are really delightful, and there are enough of them to make this movie worth watching. There's an entire sequence where Cagney fights three guys in his house in Japan and basically destroys the place. It's fun watching Cagney fight hand-to-hand instead of playing the gangster with the gun. And I have to confess that I love classic Hollywood versions of China and Japan. These old movies where white people play Asians, with "oriental-style" music in the score, that underline how mysterious the "East" is and how no one can be trusted over there. They fascinate me.

Also, this movie is in the public domain and so you can watch it on YouTube, which is what I did.

Cavalcade

I've been watching Oscar-nominated movies for a lot of years, and I had seen all of the Best Picture winners except one... until last night. (I've also seen nearly all of the films nominated for Best Picture – 482 of the total 515, or 93.6%.) But last night I finally saw my one holdout: Frank Lloyd's Cavalcade, which is based on Noël Coward's 1931 play of the same name.

And I sort of hated it. It is indeed a cavalcade – a Forrest Gump-like parade of historical events from 1899 to 1933 from the perspective of two families – and all of them tied very much to a sense of British nationalism and (considering the time period, of course:) war. The first event in this history is the Boer War, and this means that as soon as we started I was already calling bullshit on colonization and angry about what the film wanted me to lionize. Apparently this was supposed to be an anti-war film (I surmise this from the performances in it), but Frank Lloyd appears to have split his budget between parade sequences and huge, beautiful sendoffs, and sincerely scrimped when it came to paying for war sequences. The pro-war pageant sequences look gorgeous, in other words, and the wars itself are given short shrift. There is one (overly long) sequence covering the 1914-1918 World War, but the film seems to object only to that conflict's duration rather than understanding war, world war, and, oh let's say chemical warfare and the decimation of an entire generation, as essentially problematic. Even the bombing of London is portrayed as a romantic bit of fun.

All of this is, frankly, just conservative filmmaking, and it didn't bother me too much, because I spent most of Cavalcade complaining not about the film's politics but about the film's star Diana Wynyard. When her husband goes off to the Boer war in 1900, she totally loses it. She's mean to the children, she can't seem to enjoy anything, and she moons at the camera as though he's already dead. Spoiler alert – he's in the rest of the movie. I don't object to this in theory, but the rest of the film is set around the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic, and the first World War, so Wynyard really hems herself in. If you totally lose it in the film's first act, there's usually nowhere to go. And indeed there is not in Cavalcade. We've seen everything Wynyard has to offer by way of emotion in the movie's first thirty minutes. And then...? Well more of the same. I haven't seen anyone mope through a movie this much since that Katniss Everdeen girl could only make one face throughout the entire Hunger Games. A little variation, please!

Well, after that, people fall in love, the Titanic sinks, kids go off to war. And I was sort of fine, if a little bored, by the movie's perspective on the new century, on British modernism and the feelings of the film's young adults about the future. It's been eighty years (and a pretty rough century), so even I was sentimental about all of this.

But then the last fifteen minutes of the film happened. Now, in the original Noël Coward play, the main characters have become quite old and toast to the new year, hoping that Britain can come to regain the dignity it once held. And then the scene changes to one that gradually becomes (as Coward puts it) chaos. This chaos is mostly achieved through the image of six "incurables" (not my word, obviously) making baskets, a lot of people dancing but not enjoying themselves, an awful lot of news bulletins, a bunch of discordant music, and the noise of industry. The twentieth century is not quite what everyone has imagined: things move faster, but no one is actually happier. Fine.

In the film, we get the blind men making baskets and the discordant music (it's actually a really fun Coward song called "Twentieth-century Blues". And we also get a lot of people yelling at the camera: a generic atheist tells us there is no god and then an Anglican minister yells his sermon about the godlessness of the world – pan out to the six people who comprise the congregation sitting in a nearly empty cathedral. My red flags went up at this point. Is the message of this film that we all need to go back to church? 

And then the news items look like this:

Vice orgies? The age of "unfaith"? Husband and wife murder? It's news to me, but apparently there are much worse things out there than the sixteen million deaths and 20 million wounded who were casualties of World War I. Oh yes. Much worse than all that: degeneracy and vice orgies.

And if you are wondering what a vice orgy looks like (perhaps you'd like to attend one?), wonder no further. The camera finds a white man and a white woman on a chaise longue. She's drinking out of a martini glass and giggling; he's groping her. The camera moves to a sexy dark-haired white woman who, it appears to me, is adjusting a radio. 

Then the camera moves between some dancers to find this:

 

I wasn't totally sure that this woman to the right was one of the evil lesbians that are so common in this period (The Children's Hour would appear on Broadway one year later), but then we move a little closer:

Only one of them is having fun here. Look at how miserable the sweet young thing on the left is! She doesn't want to be here! If only she had listened to her mother and gone to church instead of this vice orgy. And the lesbian's grip now appears to be something more akin to coercion or assault. I will say, though, that I bless this actress who has been cast as the lesbian. Lesbianism in this period is almost always framed as predatory, frequently as vampiric. Further, the lesbian herself is often creepy, mysterious, mystical (mysticism is usually attendant to vampirism), and almost always older than her young, white, innocent prey. The dark cape is intended to convey this mysticism/darkness to us. She also has strange motley make-up around her left eye. But at least this lesbian is loving life, even as she physically assaults her unhappy victim.

And just so we don't leave out the gays – the camera moves to our next couple. You guessed it!

I'll just leave that there. It doesn't need any comment, and the film doesn't make one anyway, except to include this image in the "parade of horribles" that is supposed to represent the twentieth century's degeneracy. The film doesn't tell us who any of these queer people are, or where the party is, or anything like that. In fact, the people in this den of vice have no relationship with the other characters in the film. This sequence is supposed, instead, to be a brief portrait of the world in 1933 and of the overwhelming speed with which the twentieth century moves.

Honestly, it did move quickly. I get that. And technologies developed with increasing rapidity, and, well, it's all a little scary. I get, too, the kind of disaffection expressed by the song "Twentieth-century Blues": a feeling, perhaps, of emptiness or of soullessness. But to place the blame for that anomie with sex or dancing or jazz rather than with industrialization, the Great Depression, or the literal deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians in one of the deadliest conflicts the world has ever seen is a profoundly conservative gesture and one motivated by the ideology that blames sex for the world's problems instead of the collusion of militarism and industry. Cavalcade is, finally, a film that considers "good morality" the invasion of other countries in order to steal their natural resources and "bad morality" not going to church. Give me a break. We could make a long list of what was wrong with the twentieth century, but getting laid and going to parties won't be on there.