The Seventh Art

[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Reap the Wild Wind (1941).

A film by Cecil DeMille is first of all a well-rounded story. We don’t necessarily notice it today because it has more or less become commonplace. But in the years 1915-1925, it wasn’t all that common. It could even be said that DeMille is a kind of forerunner in this respect.

Some of his films, especially those with an unusual runtime—from two to three hours—contain very complex, nested plots, such as those in The Whispering Chorus (1918), The Golden Bed (1924), The Road to Yesterday (1925) and Wassell (1943). And in the end, we manage to understand everything. The Road to Yesterday was perhaps a bit harder for viewers at the time, but today, with a little attention, we are easily able to. At the end of the film, we are proud of ourselves for having managed to get everything.  

The complexity often has to do with the multiplicity of characters, whose comings-and-goings are made less difficult by the casting of well-known actors or those with remarkable faces or costumes.

And also by their well-spaced entries in the plot. In Reap the Wild Wind (1941), Paulette Goddard appears at the fifth minute, John Wayne after eleven minutes and Ray Milland at the twenty-third minute. Information should always be spread out. Two divers get into a fight, and their harnesses make it difficult to identify who is who, but John Wayne has a big nose that is very different from Ray Milland’s, and that’s enough.

Another variation: different members of a family are individualized one by one (Male and Female), with a brief pause between each new approach, because we follow a wholly secondary character, an imp seemingly from Lubitsch’s films, who places shoes at the door of every bedroom: shots of each pair of obviously different shoes, and of each character with an emblematic attitude and costume.

A device that is typical of such complex construction is the use of a second flashback within a first flashback. It’s a very rare effect in cinema (I can think of Passage to Marseille, a Curtiz film from 1944, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, made by Buñuel in 1972, but that was a double dream). That is the case in The Road to Yesterday, when we return to 1625 to Malena the gypsy woman, who recounts an even more distant past.

The differences in place and time are made more evident with the help of different colour tints: red, green, yellowish, blueish. The problem is that one film reel runs for about thirteen minutes, which may not necessarily be the length of the sequence to be tinted. And we are also helped by intertitles introducing characters and actors, which takes advantage of the occasion to hypocritically move the plot forward.

It’s only in the silent version of The Ten Commandments that it derails a little. The allusion to the pretty girl who suddenly comes out of a jute bag is too (in)explicit, probably owing to the deletion of a sequence during editing.

[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Old Wives for New, with Sylvia Ashton: bodybuilding in the America of 1918.

We don’t think of DeMille as a maker of comic films. Yet, he often provokes laughter, as much as a Blake Edwards or a Preston Sturges.

Above all in comedies, of course: at one point in The Affairs of Anatol, a furious Elliott Dexter breaks everything in the apartment of his fiancée, Wanda Hawley, when he realizes that she hasn’t given up the easy life set up for her by Theodore Roberts, the rich man who has kept her. It’s a fine destruction scene—within the setting of a modern apartment—comparable to those in regular epic films. At one point, Theodore Roberts makes his job easier by handing him a piece of furniture to destroy, when he should be shocked by this fury directed at the girl he loves. The weight loss cure that Sylvia Ashton (Old Wives for New) undergoes remains an irresistible comic monument, as does the folding bed concealed by a fake piano (Saturday Night). There would be no end in sight if we wanted to draw up an inventory.

But the dramas arouse laughter too: in The Road to Yesterday, the character of Rady, a nerdy runt, is comical from start to finish. I’ll always remember his disgusted reaction, at a corner of the frame, when he sees the two leads kissing, although he is the one who is supposed to marry the pretty heroine.

Another very funny scene: Roland Young parachutes into a den of lions, just before their feeding time (Madam Satan).

North West Mounted Police is supposed to be a serious Western. But the best part of the film is the little game between two privates, the Scotsman McDuff and the Canadian Duroc, who belong to rival armies and play at shooting at each other all through the film, without ever touching each other of course, by aiming at the top of the hat [1] or knicker buttons (hence the shot of Akim Tamiroff… in underwear). And when another soldier notices McDuff’s latest miss and kills Duroc for good, there is a general consternation among the two fake enemies, who first believe that the other has betrayed the secret pact uniting them, before realizing, happy in the face of a death suffered or caused, that it was not so. It’s the duo Akim Tamiroff-Lynne Overman once again, already present in the previous film, Union Pacific. One takes the same and starts over.

Footnote:

[1] An idea inaugurated in The Road to Yesterday: the kid who shoots arrows.

[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Union Pacific (1939) with Barbara Stanwyck: reading out the love letter to the dying man.

Conflicts in DeMille’s work sometimes evoke Cornellian dilemmas and conjure all their power.

For instance, John Tremble, the hero of The Whispering Chorus must make a choice: either manage to prove that he didn’t commit the murder he is accused of—which now seems possible—and return to his wife, or accept going to the electric chair to avoid ruining the life of his wife, now remarried to the governor, on the eve of her delivery.

Jim Brett (Northwest Mounted Police) loves young April, but he must arrest her brother, guilty of desertion and threatened with a firing squad. And he knows well that if he arrests him, April will never forgive him…

There are several conflicts of this kind in The Greatest Show on Earth: Brad (Charlton Heston), the injured circus director, can only be saved if he agrees to receive the blood of Sebastian the acrobat, his rival in love who has almost compromised the survival of the circus with his misdemeanours. He begins by refusing this gift, but he has no choice. His friends tease him: if Brad marries the woman he loves, their children will have Sebastian’s blood.

The film’s credits mention that James Stewart plays the role of Buttons, the sad clown with his face permanently covered by a mask. The film’s viewers recognize James Stewart by his characteristic way of speaking. Stewart’s work is magnificent, playing solely on his voice and movements.

But Buttons was once a doctor who euthanized his wife. Pursued by the police, he found refuge in the circus with the help of this mask.

The policeman who tracks him down shows Brad a photo of the man he is looking for. And we see a photo of James Stewart. It’s the only time in the film that we see his face. The audience is thus one step ahead of the film’s protagonists, which it appreciates.

Brad needs a doctor for his blood transfusion. And his sweetheart is chasing Buttons, who smells trouble and prepares to leave the place. She convinces him to stay and perform the operation, under the supervision of the policeman, who even assists him and who realizes that Buttons is the doctor he is looking for. He arrests him after shaking his hand, congratulating him for his conduct and sacrifice. I could have just as well mentioned these sequences in the chapter on mistakes.

We are quite close to Corneille territory in Union Pacific: a dying, wounded man wants his fiancée’s letter, which he has just received, read out to him. Barbara Stanwyck has no time to look for the letter and takes out a piece of paper from a neighbour’s pocket. It’s an ordinary advertisement, and she begins to read it out as if it were a love letter, improvising with verve and lyricism. There are some variations of this principle in Wassell, with the love letter dictated to the nurse, but in fact inspired by her, while it is theoretically addressed to the fiancée, and with the blind man showing the photo of his younger sister. But we see that it is, in reality, that of his old grandfather.