by Mark Cousins
The forced optimism of the Soviet films contrasts with those made in France at this time. The decade there had started with the sonic wit of Clair and the disruptive magic of Cocteau and Vigo, but soon major directors such as Jean Renoir, began to explore other genres. Renoir was the son of the famous artist, Pierre Auguste Renoir, whose legacy funded his son’s first forays into cinema. As a young man Renoir began his career in the silent era after studying mathematics and philosophy and described his films as “half way between a certain realism – not exterior – and a certain poetry.”30 His first notable work was La Chienne/The Dog (1931), a realist story set in an artists’ district of Paris. Both this and Boudu Sauvé des eaux/Boudu saved from Drowning (1932) featured the extraordinary actor Michel Simon in leading roles. Simon was a big, working-class, untheatrical actor and Renoir understood how to capture his gruff personality. Renoir said, “the idea of arti-ficially attracting the audiences’ attention to certain elements, to a star, for example, is a purely romantic idea. Classicism contains an idea of evenness that no longer exists in romanticism.”31 He could have been talking about Ozu, but he was referring to his own, even, unshowy style in which stars are not given special emphasis.
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Jean Renoir’s Toni used non-professional actors, real locations and naturalistic lighting to challenge what the director saw as the romanticism of more mainstream filmmaking. France, 1935.
Toni (France, 1935) (116), a story about immigrant Italian quarry workers extended the realistic elements in Renoir’s work. It used non-professional actors and sets or make-up and was one of the most important films of fictional naturalism in cinema since Von Stroheim’s Greed (1923). It was not seen widely so didn’t exert a major influence on the realist Italian directors of the 1940s, but Renoir’s La Grande illusion/Grand Illusion (1937), by contrast, was an international success. It starred Von Stroheim – who had turned more to acting than directing by this period – as the First World War German commandant of a prison camp to which three French soldiers are sent. The screenplay was based on stories Renoir had heard from friends, it avoided grand gestures and weaved a fine tapestry from the men’s nuanced interactions. Each character’s humanity is explored and at one point the film appears to stop as the men discuss the meaning of Jewish generosity. Generosity was, indeed, at the core of Renoir’s approach to human beings on screen. His now-celebrated film, La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939), jeered at its première and a tremendous financial flop, will be discussed in greater detail when we come to that year (see pages 170–71).
Few other mid-1930s French films attempted such dramatic even-handedness and the best shared a pessimism attributable to their times. By the middle of the decade, stars like Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan were playing the leads in stories about forgotten people aimlessly encountering each other in the bleak morning or evening light, momentarily enlivened in each other’s company, but then retreating into themselves and their pessimism. There are several reasons for this prevalent mood. There was much fear of a resurgent Germany in a country still weak from the bloodletting of 1914–18. Unemployment stood at nearly half a million in 1935 in France, where the Depression began later but lasted longer than elsewhere, and there was political instability. The right wing was dominant in the first part of the century and then an uneasy alliance of left-wing parties – the Popular Front – held power for a short period. And the industry itself was unstable; the personae of Gabin and Morgan capturing the subtle hopelessness of the decade. Both actors had melancholic faces which were slow to register feeling, in the manner of Humphrey Bogart.
The image to the right (117) is from Quai des Brumes/Port of Shadows (1938), a key work of 1930s French poetic realism and one of the first pairings of Gabin and Morgan. He plays a Foreign Legion deserter and she an orphaned young woman with a violent guardian. Set mostly in a cafe in the Port of Le Havre in 1936, it reaches its climax when Gabin shoots the guardian, only to be killed by a local crook just as his ship is leaving the harbour. The film was written and directed by the poet–director team of Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné who almost single-handedly defined the romantic pessimism of their time. They would on to make Le Jour se lève/Daybreak (1939) and Les Enfants du paradis/The Children of Paradise (1945), a memorable epic set in the world of nineteenth-century Parisian theatre. Carné’s meticulous studio style became unfashionable in the late 1950s, but he lived well into his eighties, long enough to see Les Enfants du paradis revived as one of the most enjoyable of French films, and Quai des Brumes rediscovered as an outstanding mood piece. The latter’s misty visuals were photographed by Eugen Schüfftan who had been visual effects designer on Metropolis (Germany, 1927) and, having fled the Nazis, was now in France en route to America. The film’s significance to French culture of the period is best summed up by the words of a French Vichy government spokesman: “If we have lost the war it is because of Quai des Brumes.” Carné retorted that you can’t blame a storm on the barometer.
Quai des Brumes was not the first time that Gabin had played an isolated man, who is killed before he can escape on a boat with his lover. In Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, France, 1937), the town was Algiers and the girl was played by Mireille Balin. Director Duvivier derived many visual ideas from Hawks’ Scarface and in an example of film style crossing the Atlantic, Pépé le Moko was remade first as Algiers (John Cromwell, USA, 1938), then as Casbah (John Berry, USA, 1948).
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Jean Gabin as the deserter and Michèle Morgan as an orphaned young woman. This famous image captures the haunt-ing pessimism of Marcel Carné’s Quai des Brumes. France, 1938.
A small but telling coincidence in film history now enters this story. In the same period that these French and American filmmakers were trying to recreate the densely constructed spaces of North African casbahs in Western studios, so the first studio opened in the Arab world. The founding of Misr in Cairo in 1935, which was also the first production facility on the African continent, helped establish Egypt as the filmmaking centre for the whole of the Middle East. The first films shown here had been by the Lumière brothers in 1897 but no features were made by Egyptian filmmakers until Misr was established. Thereafter, production numbered about twenty per year, increasing to fifty from the mid-1940s to the 1980s. El-azima/The Will (Kamil Selim, Egypt, 1939) is the most distinctive of the early Misr films. Its story of Mohamed, the son of a barber in a run down part of Cairo, was rooted more in the realities of North African life than in atmospheric exoticism, but its acting was more stagy than Pépé le Moko. Gabin lives above the city of Algiers in Pépé le Moko, but is oppressed by it visually, whereas Mohamed (Hussein Sidsky) battles against Cairo’s economic conditions. The Will’s director, Kamal Selim, died aged thirty-two, but his first steps towards North African cinematic realism influenced the great Egyptian director Salah Abu Seif.
The very different French and Egyptian approaches to realism were not mirrored elsewhere in the world. By the second half of the 1930s, the biggest box-office star in America and around the world was a doll-like Californian girl, Shirley Temple, who became a star at Fox in 1934, aged six, who danced and sang, most famously, “On the Good Ship Lollipop”. She was a licence to print money, but in 1937 the American company Disney made a film which would eclipse even Temple’s box-office appeal. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand – supervising director, USA, 1937) was so successful that it established the company’s reputation for generations. In the subsequent four decades, Disney was responsible for nine of the top grossing American films. Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), Peter Pan (1953), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and Mary Poppins (1964) outperformed others in their year of production and they often doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the takings of the top ranking films in adjacent years.
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A year before Quai des Brumes, Gabin starred in Pépé Le Moko, set in Algiers. Just before it was made Misr, the first film studio in the Arab world was opened in Cairo.
Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901 and died in 1966. He was not the first to make films by photographing drawings. These had been projected as early as 1896 but the technique remained undeveloped until J. Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur in 1909. The first animated feature, which no longer survives, is claimed to have been El Apostol (Frederico Valle, Argentina, 1917), which used over 58,000 individual drawings and took twelve months to make. As a teenager Disney read the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and watched the films of Charlie Chaplin. He then worked in New York, and at a commercial illustration stu-dio there he met a Dutch immigrant, Ubbe Iwerks, who would become his key collaborator for years to come. They set up together, with Disney conceiving the gags and Iwerks illustrating them, copying the pioneering animation work which was being done in New York. Disney was a driven man with similar characteristics to Edwin S. Porter. In 1923 Disney and Iwerks went to Los Angeles, and after making some costly business mistakes they decided to create a new likeable cartoon character to rival New York animators’ successful branding of cats and dogs. Disney decided on a big and plucky mouse and called him Mortimer, but his wife disliked the name and he became Mickey. Iwerks did seventy drawings of him each day to produce their first Mickey film, Plane Crazy (USA, 1928). With the advent of sound, Mickey took off. Pastiching Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jnr (USA, 1928), Disney and Iwerks dreamed up a Mickey film called Steamboat Willie (USA, 1928). By 1929 there were thousands of different pieces of Mickey merchandise available. The mouse was more famous than Greta Garbo and Disney became the single most important brand in US cinema. As a great refiner and expander rather than innovator, Disney played a similar role in drawn film as did D.W. Griffith is live action cinema.
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Plane Crazy, the first film in which Mickey Mouse appeared. Directors: Walt Disney and Ubbe Iwerks. USA, 1928.
After the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Mickey was a much-needed tonic and 470 million people saw him in cinemas that year across the world. A major New York department store, Macy’s, sold 11,000 Mickey-branded watches in one day. Eisenstein, psychologist Carl Jung and novelist E.M. Forster all discussed this half-human, half-animal, almost asexual movie icon. At the height of Mickey’s popularity, Iwerks left Disney in order, in part, to liberate himself from repeating this formulae.
This departure troubled Disney and he started to modify his daily production processes: he perceived the Disney company as more of an art school than a Model T Ford production line, sending his illustrators (all men) to drawing classes. In 1934, he launched Donald Duck, then embarked on his most ambitious project to date, a feature-length version of the Snow White fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. In preparation, he organized outdoor landscape study sessions for the 300 or so animators involved and he encouraged them to see every ballet and film performed and released in Hollywood. The film would be the first time an unstylized human character, Snow White, would be portrayed in a Disney animation. The production filmed a real actress in costume and transcribed individual images of her onto paper, a technique that remains in use to this day. A huge vertical racking system was constructed in order to give real depth to the image. Various layers of a scene were then slipped into it with the background at the bottom, foreground at the top and all the elements were filmed from above (120). Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (USA, 1937) cost six times its original budget. Its premiere was attended by movie stars Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich; it received a standing ovation and garnered some of the best reviews in movie history. Critics decided that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a glorious film, richly textured, colourful, vibrant and engaging. It appeared that Disney could do no wrong. Pinocchio, an Italian children’s story, was to repeat its box-office success and Bambi became his most sentimental feature to date.
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In this complex multiframe system used for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the camera is mounted above a series of images representing foreground (top), middle distance and background (below) layers of a scene. The result was unparalleled visual depth.
The Second World War closed down many of Disney’s overseas markets, which had contributed nearly half the studio’s revenues. Mickey was sidelined and Disney made many government commissioned films for the war effort. He employed 1,000 people and, despite the art school ethos, many of these felt underpaid. A strike took place, with ambigu-ous results as neither workers nor management felt that the dispute, about working conditions, was resolved satisfactorily. As a result, Disney became more politically outspoken and even testified at a series of post-war American Congress hearings designed to end the careers of film industry figures who were rumoured to have communist sympathies. Meanwhile, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was dubbed into Japanese, Mandarin and other languages, thus expanding the Disney empire. But its creativity did not keep pace. The studio diversified into live-action films, television series and then theme parks. The production process became cheaper and simpler when the drawings started to be xeroxed rather than traced onto film. This meant that films like One Hundred and One Dalmatians now had each object in the frame bordered by black lines (121).
In the 1930s, the Walt Disney creative formula was a winning one – it selected stories which centred on the theme of innocence, illustrated them with surreal touches, invariably used supporting characters, emphasized technical innovation and applied what Disney called “audience values”. In later work the sur-realism decreased and the audience values mutated into a homespun patriotism which persuaded some 1960s parents that Disney’s films were too politically conservative for their children. As if to emphasize this point, the US Senate and House of Representatives passed a Bill commending Disney for using “the characters he created to promote family values and to teach civic and moral lessons.” The baton of creativity was passed from Disney to the Warner Bros. and MGM animation departments in the early 1940s, where the tone was irreverent and where there were no romances or magical forests. Speed and goofiness ruled the roost and the animations of Frank Tashlin, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery thrived on this freedom.
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A shift in style: One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ more linear style, in which dogs and objects were clearly bordered in black lines. USA, 1961.
Walt Disney died in 1966, but the eponymous studio continued. A new division, Touchstone Pictures, set up to make films for an adult audience, revived its fortunes in the 1990s with films like Pretty Woman (1990). Eventually it bought the US television network ABC, made some modest artistic advances with The Lion King (1994), acquired the successful independent production and distribution company Miramax in 1993, and the innovative computer animation outfit Pixar (which made the Toy Story films and Finding Nemo), before facing new financial problems at the end of the millennium.
The 1930s had been a golden age for American entertainment cinema. In 1939, as war was declared in Europe, three films about three women, debated the roles of pleasure and escape in life (122). These were the comedy Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch for MGM), based on an original screenplay, the musical fantasy The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming and others for MGM), based on a children’s classic, and the romantic epic Gone With the Wind adapted from a blockbuster book (produced by David O. Selznick, directed by Victor Fleming and others for MGM). Not one of these films varied the schema of filmmaking, but each attempted an evaluation of life’s priorities.
215 a, b, c, (216, 217)
Three outstanding women in the Golden Age of Hollywood:
a, Greta Garbo as Ninotchka; b, Judy Garland as Dorothy; c, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett o’Hara.
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The themes of home and escape were explored in three of Hollywood’s most distinctive characters in 1939: Ninotchka, played by Greta Garbo (top), Dorothy, played by Judy Garland (middle) and Scarlett O’Hara, played by Vivien Leigh (bottom).
Ninotchka’s brillant screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett parodied the dourness of communism. With several no
ds to Boris Barnet’s The Girl with a Hatbox (Soviet Union, 1927), it tells the story of a mirthless Soviet, Ninotchka (Greta Garbo, 122 top), who travels to Paris to check on three incompetent colleagues entrusted to sell jewels in order to buy equipment to further the revolutionary cause. She purchases a hat, falls in love and is seduced, on her own terms, by the shallow pleasures of the West. Having drunk too much champagne, the tipsy Garbo tells her lover that she is a traitor. By kissing him she has betrayed Russia. He stands her up against the hotel room wall, ties a napkin over her eyes, take one of the jewels, a crown, and places it on her head. She speaks, “Comrades, people of the world. The revolution is on the march. Wars will wash over us. Bombs will fall. All civilizations will crumble. But not yet please. Wait, wait. What’s the hurry. Let us be happy. Give us our moment.” As she says this, he pops a champagne cork, she hears it and, half-thinking that she’s been shot, slumps to the floor. This lovely moment shows 1930s Hollywood at its most sophisticated and humane. It does not pretend that the world is perfect, but it argues that moments of rapture are at least possible, and its playful anti-communism is differ-ent from the virulent strain which had been entrenched in the US since 1938 and which would be formalized in 1945.