The Seventh Art

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

The Affairs of Anatol (1921): the peephole that serves every use.

It is generally defined by three characteristics: implausibility, decorative overload and bad taste.

These are indeed the characteristics that can be found in the work of DeMille, the renowned king of film kitsch. They can be seen as negative. And yet, DeMille intrigues us, fascinates us and arouses our admiration.

Let’s first say that plausibility isn’t indispensable to a film’s success. The question isn’t even asked when it comes to animation films. Why should implausibility be necessarily included in the list of charges just because there are actors who are filmed?

Decorative overload is of two kinds:

Either we see edifices to the glory of a god built by the Babylonians, the Aztecs, the Pharaohs, the Philistines, the Romans of the Empire, cruel people who are against the Christians we are supposed to be, against the Buddhists of today. They are all inspired by a taste for extravagance. It’s a universe that is often shown as detestable, but which is striking in its unusual quality.

Or we see the modern world of the 1920s. With post-war wealth comes numerous eccentricities, probably corresponding to reality, but which are exaggerated through the talents of set designers such as Wilfred Buckland, Paul Iribe, and above all Mitchell Leisen (1898-1972), a mannerist who later directed remarkable comedies like Easy Living and Midnight.

And it’s a veritable festival of baroque or rococo ornaments, as noticeable in the costumes and the choice of props as in the sets. Let us randomly mention the safe that looks like a cigar box and which hides a telephone (Old Wives for New), the boots with curved tips in the shape of Viking ships or snakes ready to bite, or the pool that you enter in tailcoats (Don’t Change Your Husband), the skin of an entire beast, complete with the head, on the stairs, likely to make you slip (Saturday Night), the giant peephole in the middle of the door in The Affairs of Anatol, which defeats its own purpose because you can put your hand or head into it, the garden entirely made of sugar in The Golden Bed, the electric machine of the mechanical ballet in Madam Satan, which follows a fashion show with seven models in increasingly bewildering outfits, with feathers in the shape of tentacles, endless trains and furry hairstyles, the huge mansions of Arizona that look like expressionist sets (The Road to Yesterday), and I could go on for a long time… Americans have an adjective to describe this clutter: lavish. You can sense C.B.’s mocking humour in this extravagant display, but he is also making fun of himself since he offered these very things as a source of attraction for his guests during weekend parties at his luxurious second home. Of course, there might be a direct relationship between ancient architecture (allegedly faithful to reality) and the eccentricities of the 1920s (which one supposes are more imaginary), but it is not a given: in Male and Female, the ancient episode comes just after a scene set in the barren backdrop of a deserted island. It’s only C.B.’s unmotivated desire for a flashback that occasions this parenthesis.

Some of the humour is lost today, because we can no longer tell eccentric outfits from normal ones, which have also become very laughable.

Bad taste is obviously part of the game. The worse it is, the better it is. How does one draw the line? By going beyond. A little kitsch would be banal and mediocre. It’s the excess of kitsch that makes for the film’s strength, arouses laughter, mixed with an admiration for the set and costume designers’ inventiveness. After Madam Satan (1930), kitsch has a smaller part to play. From the period of colour films, the interest of costume work is no longer based on extravagance, but solely on the beauty of the outfits and their arrangement in the shot.

Kitsch certainly makes its appearance later too, in Moses’s entrance or in the schematized relationship between Samson and Dalilah, or Paulette Goddard’s lipstick after an aquatic and desert marathon (Unconquered), but it is less present. I miss it a little.

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

The Greatest Show on Earth (1951): a festival of colours.

DeMille takes a real, rather sadistic pleasure in showing disasters. It could be a sinking ship (The Little American, Male and Female, Cleopatra, Reap the Wild Wind), a zeppelin deflating in mid-air (Madam Satan), a train derailment or two trains colliding (The Road to Yesterday, The Greatest Show on Earth, Saturday Night and Union Pacific), a collapsing temple (Samson and Delilah, The Woman God Forgot), the Red Sea drowning the Pharaoh’s army (The Ten Commandments), and I’m certainly forgetting some others. This kind of scene is repeated over thirty-nine years of his career.

It’s like this: a destructive machine (train or any other) moves towards the viewer, breaking through obstacles (scrap metal and wood work, stone walls). It’s direct, unabashed penetration (which doesn’t surprise us in C.B. DeMille’s highly sexual cinema), often in the direction of the viewer, sometimes seen from a distance in a frontal and artificial manner.  The camera sways and the framing goes askew, as masses, beans and iron bars fall in the foreground, momentarily hiding the actors behind. Everything moves, changes places. A fundamental principle with DeMille is to always show falling masses or passing extras in the foreground. In Madam Satan, the effect is further accentuated by the sinking airship’s exasperating squeaking and creaking. Dust rises. Water invades the living room, its furniture and its books (Male and Female). A beautiful disorder is an artistic effect. In a colour film like The Greatest Show on Earth or Reap the Wild Wind, this chaos of iron and steel is enhanced by the intrusion of beautiful clothes or pretty spots of bright colours.

This technique is different from traditional cinematic disaster based on the bluff of numerous brief insert shots (which is obviously less expensive). DeMille works with frontal wide shots, while his colleagues express dramatic shock through aggressive syncopated editing.

Disorder is underlined by very different positions of extras within the shot. It’s almost a catalogue of all possible attitudes, conveyed with the most divergent broken lines of weapons or destructive objects.

The same disorder is found in scenes without disasters, such as the Roman orgy of Manslaughter or the magnificent golden calf sequence of The Ten Commandments of 1956, where extras occupy the entire image, following the tradition of academic painting. On closer inspection, these scenes make reference to famous pictorial models.

These scenes of chaos often conjure one of the four elements, namely fire, which is quite visible in The Woman God Forgot, Joan the Woman (with a very impressive single shot in colour), The Road to Yesterday, Triumph, The Godless Girl, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The Ten Commandments. The fire at the Parisian hotel in Triumph derives directly from an experience C.B. had at the Ritz on the Place Vendôme.

Along with fire, there is also electricity, natural (the lightning of The Ten Commandments) or more artificial (Madam Satan, The Godless Girl).

There’s also water: we have seen the frequency of shipwrecks and there is even a flood during the Siege of Orléans in Joan the Woman.

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

Joan the Woman (1916)

With mistakes come trials. And C.B.’s work accumulates trial scenes, either reconstructions of trials that actually took place (The King of Kings, Joan the Woman) or invented from scratch (The Cheat, The Whispering Chorus, Manslaughter, Reap the Wild Wind, Unconquered).

The treatment is realistic most of the time—like the depiction of the place where suspects and convicts remain before or after judgment, I mean prison. Screenwriter Jeanie MacPherson had even spent several days in jail to perfect her documentation for Manslaughter.

DeMille has done a lot of work in the casting of jurors, who should, in principle, for contemporary films, belong to different strata of the society. It’s incidentally in the choice of extras that American cinema has always excelled: a bit typical, but not too much either. And in The Whispering Chorus, we also find those little sketches that journalists make during a trial, since cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.

DeMille doesn’t neglect any of the various stages of the trial and tries to push the suspense to its peak: acquittal or conviction, with multiple variants since he films not only contemporary trials but also those from all places and times, beginning with that of Christ.

When it had the means, American cinema never failed to take advantage from this dramatic setting inaugurated by DeMille. It is an extremely good setting because of its official, almost frozen quality, with the basic elements remaining the same from film to film: defence attorneys, prosecutors, judges, jurors, crowds, defendants, all easily identifiable by the viewer. One actor, Gary Cooper, was even a regular of courtroom dramas, almost always as a defendant. Capra, Preminger and Stanley Kramer would become regulars of courtroom dramas.

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

Robert Preston in North West Mounted Police (1940).

Many of C.B.’s films turn around the notion of fault: someone, usually quite nice, commits a fault. He redeems himself, either in a more or less heroic death or by confessing his mistake, or by benefitting from the indulgence of a superior.

It begins with The Squaw Man. The squaw kills a man, but it is to protect the one she loves. She confesses her fault and kills herself.

Maggie, the maid of Kindling, becomes an unwitting accomplice to a burglary. Her mistress eventually pardons her.

Edith, a woman of high-society, misappropriates money from a charity, whose treasurer she is, to buy a chic dress she likes, which sets the drama in motion (The Cheat).

The English soldier Eric Trent betrays Joan of Arc, his benefactor, who will be burnt alive because of him. And in 1916, his namesake, also played by Wallace Reid, sacrifices himself deliberately by destroying the German trench posing a danger for French soldiers. Joan, who then appears in a superimposition, is happy. The soldier of 1916 has rehabilitated, in some way, his supposed ancestor.

Marcia, the heroine of The Devil Stone (1917), accidentally kills her husband, who has seized, by dubious manoeuvres, an emerald that brings bad luck. This death and Marcia’s confession ensure that the ill fate no longer works. And the detective chooses to close the case.

The accountant of The Whispering Chorus (1918) commits a forgery. He is tracked down, arrested for a murder he hasn’t committed. But his return home would compromise the future of his wife, who has remarried. And he prefers to atone for his mistake on the electric chair—the “supreme redemption”, according to the film’s French title.

The odious Elizabethan count of The Road to Yesterday is absolved of his crimes when, on his way back to the America of today, he converts to Christianity and rescues his wife from a burning train.

The two protagonists of The Godless Girl inadvertently cause the death of a student, but redeem themselves at the end by saving many lives in a fire accident at the prison.

Ronnie Logan, Madeleine Carroll’s bad brother, deserts his combat outpost, resulting in the death of several other soldiers (North West Mounted Police); he too redeems himself in his death—just like the husband in Union Pacific, responsible for the death of a man during a holdup, and played by the same actor, Robert Preston.

John Wayne (Reap the Wild Wind) is responsible for the sinking of a ship. But in fighting the octopus which threatens the life of his rival, he redeems himself while losing his life.

A jealous Delilah delivers Samson to the Philistines. To make amends, she helps Samson destroy the temple and the power of the Philistines. She dies during this destruction.

The evil animal trainer of The Greatest Show on Earth organizes the holdup of a train, but he tries to prevent the convoy with his sweetheart from crashing, at the cost of his life.

Here we see Christian ideology come to the surface: crime and purifying repentance, or sacrifice. But this is more of a dramatic contrivance than a real ideological message.

The persistence of this motif across films becomes a bit tiresome.

Does it attest to a certain lack of imagination, or a desire to exploit a formula that works very well with the viewer? Filmmakers from the thirties were not afraid to steal from themselves, as films only had an ephemeral life then, exacerbated by technical progress (advent of talkies, of colour).

Other hobbyhorses: the distant sound of bagpipes or music announcing the arrival of rescue troops (The Plainsman, North West Mounted Police, Wassell, Unconquered), wedding through a go-between object (the sword of The Crusades, the necklace of The Road to Yesterday), the glove, a theatrical prop par excellence (The Crusades, The Godless Girl, Fool’s Paradise).

Also note the omnipresence of animals, dogs and cats in the comedies, monkey (Four Frightened People, The Godless Girl), donkey (The Road to Yesterday), wild animals (Male and Female, The Sign of the Cross, Samson), asp (Cleopatra), sharks (Feet of Clay), octopus (Reap the Wild Wind), zebras (The King of Kings), not to forget Noah’s Ark in the circus film. In contrast, children are almost completely absent. They are mischievous characters, confined to secondary roles (The Road to Yesterday, Male and Female, Why Change Your Wife).