From The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., a book-length catalogue for a retrospective I put together for the Viennale in 2009, adapted and expanded from a catalogue entry for Il Cinema Ritrovato the same year. — J.R,.
LAUGHTER
Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast (1897-1968) – a French-Basque aristocrat who was born in Buenos Aires and died in Monte Carlo – made eight films, all between 1927 and 1935, and apparently many of these are lost. (He was fired from the early talkie Raffles –which seems to retain a few d’Arrastian qualities – and replaced by George Fitzmaurice, and reportedly he also did some uncredited work on Wings. It appears that he also had a lot to do with the preparation of one of my favorite musicals, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!(1933), according to the late Pierre Rissient, which wound up being directed by Lewis Milestone.)
I’ve seen only three of his films – A Gentleman of Paris(1927), Laughter (1930), and Topaze (1933) –and all of these are pretty remarkable. (The latter is a Pagnol adaptation with one of John Barrymore’s most touching performances.) As far as I know, the only one who ever wrote about this figure in any detail was Herman G.Weinberg Read more
One thing suggested by Sanford Schwartz’s editing of The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (Library of America) is that Kael’s editing of her own work is superior to his. I admire his discernment in including her thoughtful and uncharacteristically generous review of Marguerite Duras’ Le camion (The Truck) — even though I regret the suppression of its original context, in the September 26, 1977 issue of The New Yorker, where it was sandwiched between Kael’s eloquent two-paragraph dismissal of Star Wars and a longer mixed review of Short Eyes, in a column pointedly called “Contrasts”.
In her final collection For Keeps (1994), Kael omitted the other two reviews, but she also had the foresight to delete the final sentence of her review of The Truck, which referred to its original context: “At the opposite end from popcorn filmmaking, it’s a demonstration of creative force — which doesn’t always cut as clean as that laser sword in Alec Guinness’s hand.” Schwartz also leaves out the reviews of Star Wars and Short Eyes, yet he retains the final sentence in the review of The Truck, which now reads like a non sequitur coming from left field (or from outer space). Read more
Here is another one of my Paris Journals for Film Comment — the first one, I believe, after the magazine shifted from being a quarterly to a bimonthly publication. Once again, I think part of the reason for reproducing this now is its value as a period piece.
2019: A fascinating footnote about Solntseva: at a film festival in Spain a few years ago, Sergei Loznitsa told me that thanks to an opening of some of the KGB’s old files for public scrutiny, it was revealed that she had been a longtime member. Most of us know far too little about the Russian and Soviet past to begin to understand the reasons for this, but it seems possible that Solntseva may have actually joined the KGB in order to help protect her Ukrainian husband, who was reportedly under Soviet surveillance for most of his life. It does help to explain, in any case, how, after Dovzhenko failed to get so many of his own personal projects like Desna produced, Solntseva was able to direct three of them with lavish budgets and immense technical resources after his death.
