My column for the Spring 2017 issue of Cinema Scope. –– J.R.
Probably the most important DVD release of last year, inexplicably overlooked by me when I made out my lists for Sight and Sound and DVD Beaver, is Josef von Sternberg: The Salvation Hunters (1925) and The Case of Lena Smith (fragment, 1929), a single all-region disc from www.edition-filmmuseum.com for 19.95 Euros. It includes a wonderful new 32-minute audiovisual essay on The Salvation Hunters by Janet Bergstrom, and a new score to Sternberg’s first feature by Siegfried Friedrich, but the real pièce de résistance here is the dazzling four-minute fragment from the otherwise lost The Case of Lena Smith, discovered by Japanese film historian Komatsu Hiroshi in a Chinese junk shop in Dalian in 2003. (See the Filmmuseum’s exhaustive 2007 book about The Case of Lena Smith for more details.) In Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 1995 Citizen Langlois, Langlois’ companion Mary Meerson is quoted as saying, “TheCase of Lena Smith will reappear one day when mankind deserves it.” In the meantime, here is a fragrant glimpse of what undeserving mankind is missing.
Although most of the recent Blu-Ray releases of Olive Films have tended to steer clear of their previous auteurist commitments, Otto Preminger’s underrated if sometimes problematic 1969 Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is a very welcome exception.Read more
How we evaluate films obviously depends on how we watch them. Some viewers identify with one or more characters, and others identify with one or more artists who made the film. Recalling three recent Chicago moviegoing experiences — Erich von Stroheim’s silent Queen Kelly (1929) at the Siskel, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly at Webster Place, and The Enchanted Cottage (1945) on TCM — I realize that they all depended on my selected vantage points.
Stroheim, a Viennese middle-class Jew and army deserter, became a Jew in hiding once he entered the U.S., persuaded almost everybody that he had an aristocratic background, and became a devout Catholic. Because “Kelly” signifies “Irish”—another non-aristocratic outsider identity –the very title Queen Kelly points to Stroheim’s secret self as a writer-director and sometimes as a lead actor. In his Foolish Wives (1922), he hid in plain sight by playing a swindler pretending to be an aristocrat, and in Greed (1924), where he didn’t appear as an actor, he was again praised for his fanatically detailed Naturalism, this time related to working-class Americans. Yet by the time he wrote and directed Queen Kelly — a delirious fantasy set in a mythical kingdom about a convent student named Kitty Kelly (Gloria Swanson) abducted by a playboy prince (Walter Byron) the night before he’s been ordered to marry an insanely jealous queen (Seena Owen) — Stroheim has abandoned Naturalism for a kind of crazed Catholic pornography that seems to double as a nightmarish personal psychodrama in which he identifies obsessively with all his characters, victims and predators alike.Read more
Recently reseeing George Cukor’s scandalously neglected Travels with My Aunt (1972) helps to clarify how central self-images and sensual discoveries are to his best as well as his most personal films. Travels with My Aunt isn’t on the same level as Sylvia Scarlett (1935), A Star is Born (1954), and Bhowani Junction (1955), probably my favorites, but it often seems just as personal, and it does have some of the superbly intricate and dispersed ‘Scope compositions that one often finds in the latter two, as well as in Les Girls (1957) and Let’s Make Love (1960), with their own mottled lighting schemes.
(Too bad that Les Girls, also recently reseen, is so unpleasant apart from its choreography and compositions. All the characters are monstrous and the plot is absurd. Why does the Rashomon theme, both here and in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, depend mainly on odious people and motives — unlike Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, which uses a modified version of the same theme and is much kinder to its characters?)
Travels with My Aunt can also be read as a kind of response to the free-wheeling 60s and early 70s, much as Sylvia Scarlett celebrated certain aspects of the free-wheeling and footloose 30s. Read more
