Skip to main content

The Scarlet Empress

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Year: 1934
Run-time: 1 hr 44 min

- This at first seemed like one of the lesser films from von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, but on reflection I like it a lot.  The set design is phenomenal - the insane chairs with grotesques hovering above the backs, the skeleton at the dinner table.  It's a fever dream, and the fact that it's shot in enough darkness to make the cameras of the time period strain to pick up these backgrounds makes it even more astonishing.

- This is from an era of period pieces when actors could just get away with American accents - I'm reminded of the excellent Youtube series on accents.  Surprisingly, I'm not entirely opposed to the old method - it allows the actors to be more naturally expressive.  It just sends a different directorial message, putting the emphasis more on commonalities between that time and place and now.  (It also inevitably comes off as insensitive to culture - I'm not saying we should go back to that mode.  There are necessary trade-offs to being inclusive, and they're worth it.)

- This is a landmark in that it's probably the last American film on our list that could be said to be "pre-Code" (or at least "Code-oblivious").  I was pretty shocked by the opening scene with its tortured nudes - to the point where I believed they must be wearing clothing - and the film's sense of eroticism is extraordinary.  Dietrich herself is sort of an icon of the pre-Code era, and while I think that's pretty reductive and ignorant of her extraordinary talent, I probably will be wistful of these early Dietrich films and what they represent.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot)

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Killers

  The Killers  uses up every noir cliche that had developed by this time - the detective story with flashbacks from Laura , the insurance investigator from Double Indemnity, the seductive femme fatale from Gilda - but somehow manages to feel wholly original. I thought that I'd grow weary of noirs by this point, but they are getting better, and there's no doubt that it's a fun genre, if there's not always much going under the pristine surface. There's some tremendous acting, and I unabashedly love the opening scene with the titular killers - the only part that seems to have been actually adapted from the Hemingway short story (Ernest himself was nevertheless a fan) - but the ending doesn't really work. It's a bit easier to follow than The Big Sleep, but it has a few too many twists for what is ultimately a pretty straightforward story without any real morals. Still, I have to recommend it, and it would definitely be up there in my list of best noirs.
Post a Comment
Read more

Suspense

Director: Lois Weber (with Phillips Smalley) Year: 1913 Runtime: 0:10 Source: Youtube Lois Weber is a fascinating, largely forgotten figure in the history of cinema.  Not only is she an early female filmmaker, with an unusual auteur-level control over her works, but for a short few years she held a surprising amount of sway in the burgeoning industry.  In 1916, she was Universal Studio's highest paid director, period.  During her heyday she made 10 movies a year, but the vast majority of her films are lost.  Unfortunately, this brief short is likely her only appearance on the list, but it highlights her technical innovations. Weber probably didn't invent the split screen, but she used it extremely effectively in this tight little domestic thriller.  The real highlight is a triangular three-way split, in which we see a distressed wife, played by Weber herself, calling her husband at work, while a burglar is about to cut the phone line with a knife.  A...
Post a Comment
Read more