Some Came Running

Nabokov/von Sternberg/Appel, Jr.

"...carried away by his re-creation of the past..." From von Sternberg's The Last Command 

Surrender (1927) represents the only American appearance of the famous Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine (né Mozzhukin, 1989-1939) whose romantic swashbuckler roles were much admired by adolescent Nabokov (1912016). Mosjoukine made his own miraged appearance in the first stage of young Nabokov's life as exile. After the Revolution his family moved to the Crimea, where Nabokov senior became Minister of Justice in the hopeful Regional Government. One morning in the summer of 1918, with real battles raging in thenorth (the Civil War), Nabokov suddenly met on a mountain trail

a strange cavalier, clad in a Circassian costume, with a tense, perspiring face painted a fantasitc yellow. He kept ferociously tugging at his horse, which, without heeding him, proceeded down the steep path at a curiously purposeful walk, like that of an offended person leaving a party. I had seen runaway horses, but I had never seen a walkaway one before, and my astonishment was given a still more pleasurable edge when I recognized the unfortunate rider as Mozzhuhin, whom Tamara [his first love, the model for Mary—A.A.] and I had so often admired on screen. The film Haji Murad (after Tolstoy's tale of that gallant, rough-riding mountain chief0 was being rehearsed on the mountain pastures of that range. "Stop that brute [Derzhite proklyatoe zhivotnoe]" he said through his teeth as he saw me, but at the same moment, with a mighty sound of crunching and crashing stones, two authentic Tatars came running down to the rescue, and I trudged on, with my butterfly net, toward the upper crags where the Euxine race of the Hippolyte Grayling was expecting me (Speak Memory, p. 247).

All rehearsals concluded, both actor and carefree lepidopterist would soon become permanent emigrés; Surrender starred Mosjoukine as a White Army officer who losed everything in the CIvil War that had provided a backdrop for the actor's unreal meeting with Nabokov. A publicity photograph poses Mosjoukine with Edward Sloman, Surrender's director, and some of those dazed Russian emigré extras "whose only hope and profession was their past." The theme is memorably orchestrated in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command, (1928), in which Emil Jannings plays an ex-tsarist general who, now a poor old man in Hollywood, applies for work as and extra and is cast to replay his former self in the film-within-the-film. The cruel, dizzying commission and that film's Communist director (William Powell) combine to drive Jannings insane. (Sternberg's scenario was inspired by a "true story" rather than, say, Pirandello's play Henry IV, 1922.) Still photos often fail to communicate the essence of a tragic performance or, even worse, freeze what seems to be an overblown expression (always a possibility in the context of the more stylized "theatrical" action of the silent cinema). 

The haunting quality of The Last Command, however, is preserved in several stills: Jannings about to don his "costume" in the extras' common dressing room; Jannings being inspected like a young recruit by the assistant director and prop man, ready with a box of authentic medals; or the spectacle of Grand Duke Jannings, imprisoned by mirrors and carried away by his re-creation of the past as he bravely confronts a mob of revolutionaries or arrogantly reviews the troops of his last command, many of them played by actual Russian emigrés. "I had fortified my image of the Russian Revolution by including in my cast of extra players an assortment of Russian ex-admirals and generals, a dozen Cossacks, and two former members of the Duma, all victims of the Bolsheviks, and, in particular, an expert on borscht by the name of Koblianski. These men, especially one Cossack general who insisted on keeping my car spotless, viewed Jannings' effort to be Russian with such disdain that I had to order them to conceal it," writes Field Marshal von Sternberg in his autobiography, Fun In A Chinese Laundry (1965).

—Alfred Appel, Jr., from Nabokov's Dark Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1974 

The DVD event of the week, or rather the month, or quite probably the whole year, is Criterion's Three Silent Classics By Josef von Sternberg, which collects the seminal films Underworld, The Docks of New York, and the above-discussed Last Command. (Incidentally, while I could not find the publicity still from Surrender described in the above passage, on the left here is a shot of the actor Mosjoukine.) Mr. Dave Kehr, in his superb assessment of the set and the movies therein for The New York Times, gets down to cases and nails them right away: "In a sense, Sternberg was an avant-garde filmmaker who found himself, by fluke and only for a short while, at the controls of the Hollywood machine, then operating at the peak of its otherworldly artificiality." I should hope to perhaps elaborate on this idea on this blog some time soon. In the meantime, I am hoping that the hereafter, where some believe the good Professor Appel (whose work moved and inspired me in so many ways) travelled to in May of last year, has a very good home theater system.

Tales From the Warner Archives #6: Preminger's "Saint Joan" and the bedeviling aspect ratio issue

Ah, Preminger. The obstreperous Otto. Is that an apt description of the man? Probably not entirely, but some sort of alliterative description sometimes seems de rigueur when contemplating such figures. Almost a quarter-century after his death, and thirty years after he made his final film (and almost eighty years since he made his first!) he's still a hugely contentious figure among cinephiles. As a recent sort-of-contra-Otto piece by the divine Siren attests. 

I come here this morning not to praise Otto nor to bury him but merely to comment on a film reproduction matter of some concern, concerning a film bearing the man's name. That film is 1957's Saint Joan, adapted from the Shaw play of the same name, and long unavailable on domestic DVD, let alone any home video format. I wrote about a rather atrocious Spanish-edition disc of the film at my old blog back in 2008, saying the transfer rendered Georges Perinal's "silkily gorgeous" cinematography with "all the detail and contrast of a 16mm print that's been gnawed on by beavers after being washed through a mud bath." Hyperbolic, I know, but why should that surprise anyone. 

That being the case, I expected great, or at least good, things from the recently released Warner Archive version of the disc. And I largely got them. Got something else, too. 

Here's a screen cap, featuring the beguiling Seberg and the entirely impeccable Richard Widmark (in one of his most unusual portrayals), from the Spanish version: 

 

and here, the same shot from the new Warner Archive disc: 

 

Inceed, the Warner version has better contrast and detail and all that good stuff...and is also wider, out to a near 1.85 aspect ratio. And that widescreen wasn't achieved by cropping an "academy ratio" image—as you'll note, there's more picture detail in the wider version, e.g., the rest of Seberg's ear. All the sources I've seen say that this film is in fact a 1.33 one—Preminger is well known for his expertise with Cinemascope and other widescreen formats, but didn't hesitate to revert to a less rectangular picture shape when he so desired—so could the Spanish 1.33 image have derived from a further reduction of a wider 1.33 picture? Curiouser and curiouser.

Helen high water

I know, I know; it appears that SCR is devolving—some would call it evolving, actually—into a kind of tony cheesecake site, but I assure you, it's all just a coincidence and the next image to post on this blog is sure to be something with less potential prurient interest. But in case you were wondering (and I have to say I really think you were), yes, that is young Helen Mirren above, younger even than in Powell's Age of Consent, doing a bit of faux-burlesque in the extraordinary object known as Herostratus, the subject of today's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Auteurs'.

"Some Came Running," at leisure

Display case, "No Wave 1976-1980," KS Art

As I deal with the varied vicissitudes of being out (for the time being) of a day job, I've been trying to do a bunch of stuff that I might not have done were I still, you know, in a day job. Hence, last Thursday night, I met up with my similarly day-job-less pal Louise W. (who I met in geometry class at Jefferson Township High School in 1977; she was a freshman, while I was a mathematically-challenged senior), with blankets in tow, to get a sweet spot on the lawn by the Prospect Park Bandshell for the opening night of the Celebrate Brooklyn! series of concerts at said bandshell, featuring Mr. Isaac Hayes. We were soon joined by a host of day-job-possessing pals, including Kenny-Evans-wedding maid of honor Rubina H., wedding usher Patrick K., my buddy Mario of DVD Palace fame, and more. (My Lovely Wife, alas, was tied up in rehearsals for a play.)

It was a beyond-perfect night for such an event, which was hilariously prefaced by a bunch of goofy speeches from varied representatives of the municipality. Hayes was pretty awesome. He can't rock the gold-chain "Black Moses" vest like he used to—he instead wore a long black-and-gold robe—and he had three electronic keyboardists emulating the sounds of a 21-piece orchestra, but close your eyes and it was Hot Buttered Soul and Live at the Sahara Tahoe all the way, except without the stage patter. It was as if South Park had never even existed. "Lord, ain't nobody making music like this no more," one delighted old-schooler exclaimed a couple minutes into "I Stand Accused." Damn right, as Hayes says on one of his most famous hits. Speaking of which, the extended version of the theme from Shaft with which he closed the show had enough wacka-wacka for ten porno movie soundtracks...

Late afternoon Friday I hied down to Manhattan's Leonard Street, with a two-fold purpose. First, to attend a book party/gallery reception celebrating No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and longtime critical gadfly Byron Coley. An essential photo collection and text for anybody who looked in terrified wonder at the back cover of No New York, and subsequently listened in terrified wonder to its grooves.

Contemplating Coffin Joe

One of the most entertaining essays in the below-mentioned collection Exile Cinema is Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's ecstatic appreciation of Brazilian horror auteur Jose Mojica Marins and his cinematic alter-ego Ze de Caixao (Coffin Joe). (Maddin, incidentally, has the unique distinction of being both a contributor to the book and one of its subjects.) Good cinematic fetishist that he is, he gets himself into a right tizzy over Mojica's, or maybe Ze's, lower lip (before comparing it to a liver): "...resting easy as it does on those coarse black chin whiskers, fat and satisfied like a satiated cutworm or like the vulva of a woman who's been quite willingly stuffed into a hyper-realistic cow costume and rolled into a busy bullpen."

Yowsah.

And as you can see from the screen grab above, from 1964's seminal, and how, At Midnight I'll Take Your Corpse, that lip is a formidable sneer instrument.

So imagine my slight shock when, around 1994, on encountering Mojica/Ze in the flesh, I found him an almost ...avuncular figure.