The Seventh Art

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

Florence Vidor and Elliott Dexter in Old Wives for New (1918): in DeMille, women are fished out.

Even as he nauseatingly made fun of markedly overweight women (Sophy Murdock of Old Wives for New, aunt Harriet in The Road to Yesterday), DeMille cast Gloria Swanson, a pretty but still plump woman, as his star in six films from 1918 to 1921. It was hard to close her bra (Why Change Your Wife). This corresponds well to the predominant feminine aesthetic of the time (we are reminded of the heroine of the recent Titanic, Kate Winslet), but not at all to the canons of our times. Gloria Swanson shot Don’t Change Your Husband at twenty-one, but she looks rather like twenty-eight. We could see this as one possible reason for the disaffection towards C.B.’s high-society films, to which our contemporaries prefer the frail Lillian Gish magnified by Griffith.

All this changed from 1919 onwards. In America, a new category of young girls, the flappers, began to appear. Flapper refers to young girls, but the term was extended, in a mocking way, to many girls between the ages of sixteen and thirty. The flapper is svelte, lean, naughty, does as she pleases, mocks conventions, often goes around without a hat, which was frowned upon at that time, goes neither to the temple nor to the church, and has a very liberated love life. A bit like Katharine Hepburn’s character in Bringing Up Baby. The flapper first appears in DeMille’s work (and I think in American cinema) in the form of Leatrice Joy (whose character kills a policeman while speeding in a car) in Manslaughter. She will appear again, played by Leatrice Joy or Vera Reynolds or Pauline Garon in Adam’s Rib, Feet of Clay, The Golden Bed, The Road to Yesterday and, in an oblique or offbeat form, The Godless Girl and Madam Satan, a film where she is nevertheless a bit silly and threatened by her curves (which ended the career of actress Lilian Roth, who was then sinking into alcoholism, according to her moving autobiography I’ll Cry Tomorrow, which was filmed by Daniel Mann in 1955).

The flapper then disappears, for the good reason that DeMille practically made no modern films anymore. We find an anachronistic echo of the character in the characters played by Paulette Goddard.

In DeMille’s work, eroticism often remains a little outdated and primitive. He shows nudity (Madam Satan, The Sign of the Cross, Cleopatra, Samson, Four Frightened People). That is far removed from suggestiveness, the master weapon of seduction in Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Gene Tierney or Jennifer Jones.

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

Wallace Reid in The Affairs of Anatol (1921).

If we look at DeMille’s whole body of work, we can see that the films often restart completely after two-fifths of their runtime. Oh, it isn’t necessarily at 40% of the film, it can be at 35% or at 45%, even at 30% or 50% (but it’s not as good then). It reminds me of the comment by Truffaut, who wanted his films to take a new direction around the seventh reel, that is, after an hour, a little later than in DeMille’s films.

In the first film, The Squaw Man (1914), there is a change of course when the hero goes from England to the USA. Then there is a new spell when he goes from the East to the West, from New York to the Rocky Mountains. There is also the escape of the protagonist of The Whispering Chorus (1918), who abandons his home and the office where he works as an accountant and, after committing a forgery, takes refuge on a deserted island in the Hudson river. In Male and Female (1919), this journey is unintentional: it is prompted by a shipwreck that forces a family of English nobles to land on a wild island in the Pacific, turning them into a new Family Robinson. And right in the middle of Why Change Your Wife, made a few weeks later, the spouses change partners, even homes, a situation that comes up again in 1921 in Saturday Night. The Affairs of Anatol (1921) branches off abruptly from the city to the countryside, with new protagonists, Abner, the miserly, puritanical peasant in conflict with his wife, Annie. We then leave them, without any real transition, to focus on the city temptress Satan Synne.

There is a complete change, in three seconds, in Fool’s Paradise (1921), where we leave modern Texas behind to go to a still archaic Siam. In its first third, The Ten Commandments of 1923 abandons the pharaohs to follow a rather ordinary American family of our time, in its simple dwelling. Anna Land, the central figure of Triumph (1924), abruptly leaves the can-making factory, where she is a simple worker, to become, overnight, a prima donna at famous operas, before losing her voice and returning to her old job.

The evolution is even more pronounced in The Road to Yesterday, and its passage from 1925 to 1625, from Arizona to England, with the alibi of the train accident that disrupts Beth’s consciousness.

In The Godless Girl (1928), it’s the transfer of the two protagonists from high school to the correctional facility.

Madam Satan (1930) unexpectedly jumps from vaudeville, unfolding in three rooms, to the hero’s arrival in the zeppelin where a massive party is taking place.

This construction scheme was later forgotten, with the exception of The Ten Commandments of 1956, with its departure of the Israeli people from Egypt for their homeland.

DeMille is certainly not the only one to practice this system: let us recall The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953), which is confined for an hour to the small brick-and-mortar city from which the trucks leave, before they begin their spectacular high-risk journey.

At the fifth reel of The Smugglers, I tried to give a new impetus to the film myself, with a long pan shot of the mountains, accompanied by Western-movie music.

But no other filmmaker persevered so much on these lines.

Other filmmakers generally introduce the median break softly. DeMille, in contrast, does it brutally. He tries to surprise the viewer, to shock him. You could almost think that it was another film, that the projectionist has loaded the wrong reel. It’s a shock that is usually an opening up: from the inside of a simple house or apartment, we open up to the vastness of the landscape or a luxurious set. DeMille never wrote about this practice. But it is so systematic that he was necessarily aware it.

Here is a practice dear to American cinema: when the interest of a film proved to be a little feeble, especially during public previews, it was boosted with a big storm scene (Griffith’s That Royle Girl) or the sinking of the Titanic at the end of Borzage’s minor comedy History Is Made at Night, or even the flights to get the miracle cure at the end of John Cromwell’s syrupy comedy Made for Each Other. Except that, in these cases, they were additions made after the shoot, while in DeMille, the doubling was done at the scriptwriting stage.

In my understanding, there were only two cases of late additions in C.B’s work: the montage sequence in Cleopatra and the introduction to The Sign of the Cross, imagined thirteen years after the shooting.

Critics didn’t like these irrational volte-faces. But it is precisely the force of the shock between the film’s different parts that produces the emotion. It’s a very modern force.

[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.