The William Wyler Blogathon

Welcome to the William Wyler Blogathon headquarters. The blogathon, which occurred between September 21 and 23, was a rousing success. I want to thank everybody who participated, either in posts or in comments. Now that things have wrapped up, I have time to read everything, which is the best part of hosting.

In my announcement post (feel free to steal some of those images), I said "When I think of William Wyler, I think of the Oscars." So of course when it came to writing something for this event, I chose two early, non-Oscar films: 1929's part-talkie The Love Trap and 1932's wholesome Tom Brown of Culver.

The Participants (in order of appearance):

• operator_99 at Allure looks at actresses in Wyler's late-1920s and pre-Code films.
• Jacqueline at Another Old Movie Blog discusses Wyler's use of moments of silence.
• Emma at All About My Movies investigates The Children's Hour.
• Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee compares The Love Trap with another early talkie romantic comedy.
• Shane at Rocks That Move outs Wyler as an auteur.
• Shawn at Man With Towel drinks his way through How to Steal a Million.
• StinkyLulu makes a strong argument for Wyler's beatification.
• Bob at Forward to Yesterday finds it hard to ignore the anti-neocon stance of The Big Country.
• James at Rants of a Diva loves Babs in Funny Girl.
• Nick at Nick's Flick Picks was so inspired by The Good Fairy that he wrote his first full review since Wyler won his first Oscar.
• Odienator at Eddie's Blog-a-Thon Board takes on Bette Davis's three films with Wyler.
• Glenn at Stale Popcorn has four clips of Babs in Funny Girl
• Hedwig at As Cool as a Fruitstand admires The Best Years of Our Lives
• Self-Styled Siren thinks Jezebel needs a reappraisal.
• Brad at Criticlasm has loved Funny Girl at least since he was eight.
• Justine at Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles compares The Heiress with Roman Holiday.
• Mike at The Bargain Matinee takes a second look at The Children's Hour.
• John T. at The Many Rantings of John praises Wyler's use of quiet moments.
• Thom at Film of the Year flies in on the Memphis Belle.
• Lylee wants to know why The Big Country isn't hailed as a classic.
• And to wrap things up, Brian at Hell on Frisco Bay interviews Wyler's daughter, Judy Wyler Sheldon.
• And to wrap things up again, Noel at Critic After Dark brings us Filipino versions of The Heiress and The Collector.

The Love Trap (1929)

William Wyler's third feature after graduating from his apprenticeship in Universal's two- and five-reel Westerns starts out as a sparkling romantic comedy; had it stayed that way, it might deserve discussion as one of the better sophisticated comedies of the late silent period. But the sound juggernaut started with Al Jolson's boastful "You ain't heard nothin' yet," delivered two years earlier in The Jazz Singer, was forcing a dramatic shift in audience tastes, and studios added talking sequences to films already in production or recently released. Just over midway through the slim 72-minute running time, Universal's sound revolution dampens The Love Trap's sparkle by amping up the melodrama when it turns up the volume. What started out as a very good film ends up fair-to-middling because the actors aren't up to delivering dialogue that in turn doesn't measure up.

Star Laura La Plante and her husband, director William Seiter, had final approval on choice of director for this film, so they screened Wyler's previous film, the comedy The Shakedown; Wyler snuck into the projection booth and guffawed loudly during every joke, hoping that La Plante and Seiter would be convinced that everyday people like projectionists thought he was a comedic genius. It must have worked. La Plante plays Evelyn, a chorus girl whose dancing is so out of step that her stage director uses her as an example of what not to do before asking that she perform "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," adding that she shouldn't stop until she gets there. She dabbles innocently in the escort-for-hire racket at a swank party, but the devious and amorous attentions of one Guy Emory (Robert Ellis) have her running out wearing little more than a wrap.

The screenplay pokes fun at mawkish "You must pay the rent! I cannot pay the rent!" melodrama when she ends up evicted, sitting in her settee on the curbside as rain pours down. But every cloud carries a silver lining, and this time it's in the form of the wealthy and handsome Peter Harrington (Neil Hamilton), who takes pity on her, marshalling dozens of cabs to save her drenched furniture and manufacturing every excuse to remain in her company, even to the point of driving all night, ending up in the middle of nowhere, fighting off the furious cabdrivers, and eventually marrying her. Then comes trouble in the form of Peter's disapproving mother and sister (Clarissa Selwynne and Rita La Roy), who can't believe Peter would marry some tart from Squeedunk, Illinois. Things get worse when Judge Harrington (Norman Trevor) arrives; the Judge, Peter's uncle and head of the family, was at the aforementioned party and saw enough to get the wrong idea about Evelyn.

Then the talking starts.

As is often the case, the stereotypical image of early-talkie actors crowded around the microphone hidden in a flower pot and delivering their lines to a motionless camera (as parodied in Singin' in the Rain) proves to be inaccurate. There isn't a marked difference in cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton's camera's fluidity, and some of the most dramatic shot setups come during the talking sequences. No, the real problem (which Singin' in the Rain did get right) is that the actors, who were fine, even wonderful in the silent half of the film, aren't up to the challenges of sound. At the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it) of this list is Laura La Plante, whose line readings are cackle-inducingly awful at times. She talks so slowly, and emphasizes so carefully, that it's as if she's reading from cue cards—and maybe she is, since she's not used to having to memorize dialogue. It doesn't help that she seems to dramatically increase the amount of mad gesturing and arm-waving that people tend to associate with silent acting (but which is notably absent from the first, silent half of this film). At one point, Judge Harrington tells her, "You're quite an actress," but he's responding to the wrong scenes; her best scenes are long gone by this point. More correct is her husband, who tells her just before the final fadeout that she's a terrible actress, and sadly he's not far off. The other actors, who are more or less adequate once they have to start talking, are strangled by the increasing melodrama of the screenplay, which abandons for too long the lighthearted tone of the first half. It recovers somewhat by the end, but La Plante's obvious performance and the sorry dialogue have damaged the film too much by this point to save it.

The last scene of the film looks good on paper: Evelyn tries to change the Judge's mind, and when that fails, decides to take him down with her. Had it stuck to silence (a misnomer, of course: there's a rich and witty score by Joseph Cherniavsky that all but disappears when the talking starts, a victim of early sound recording limitations), it might well have been hilarious; La Plante's increasingly fervent gesticulations would have argued against the self-seriousness of the dialogue, and La Plante, from all appearances a fine comedienne, would have been free to sell the comedy without having to worry about her lines. I think her performance has a lot to do with Wyler's lack of experience with directing dialogue: I haven't seen all of his films, but I can't remember any really bad performances in them—"90-Take Willy" wouldn't allow such a thing.

[A note of caution on using biographies for research: Jan Herman, author of A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, thinks Peter is a taxi driver, and that Judge Harrington "finally realizes she's not so bad after all" (p. 87). Apparently he didn't see the film.]

Tom Brown of Culver (1932)

In film after film of the pre-Code era, the generation who lived through the War to End All Wars looked backward in horror and forward with prescient fear. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is the best-known and most powerful antiwar film of this era, but it wasn't alone. The following year saw The Last Flight, about a group of aviators drifting through Paris on a cloud of alcohol, trying desperately to forget their experiences. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Paul Muni is unable to sell his Croix de Guerre to buy a meal because the pawnbroker's case is already full of medals; and in Heroes for Sale (1933), Richard Barthelmess returns from Europe a morphine-addicted wreck. The twin aviation films The Eagle and the Hawk and Ace of Aces (both 1933) featured protagonists destroyed emotionally by their newfound ability to kill.

So I was surprised to find in William Wyler's filmography a pre-Code film that can't exactly be called pro-war, but lacks the antipathy of many other pre-Code films. The circumstances behind Tom Brown of Culver decreed that it be more rah-rah than the films I discussed above. Universal's intention was to make "a wholesome, virile picture to counteract the sensational gin-and-jazz pictures that were so sadly misrepresenting American youth" (quoted in Jan Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, New York: Putnam, p. 107). Instead of the dissolution and misery that other screen soldiers experienced in the early 1930s, Tom Brown finds self-respect and a direction for his life in the Culver Military Academy.

The titular Tom Brown (played, oddly, by an actor named Tom Brown), attempting to earn some money in an open boxing event, is spotted by an Army major (Sidney Toler) who takes pity on him, especially after he discovers that his father, an army surgeon, earned a posthumous Medal of Honor. Tom isn't particularly proud of the medal—echoing Paul Muni, he says "What good is it? Try buying grub with one."—and he'd rather have had a father around to raise him. The colonel gets him a job at a lunch counter run by one of Brown Sr.'s army buddies (Slim Summerville, playing someone named Slim), and later arranges for him to receive a scholarship to the Culver Military Academy, where Tom becomes the archetype of the surly, rebellious student. He won't march in formation, he won't shine his shoes, and he belittles the other cadets for their patriotic fervor. But after a fight with a fellow cadet, Randolph (Ben Alexander), Tom gets his act together and starts to respect the military, finally showing some pride in his father's actions. The film's best scene occurs in Memorial Hall when Ralph reverently shows Tom a picture of his own dead father, and Tom shyly pulls Brown Sr.'s Medal of Honor out of his pocket.

From here on out, the film is defined by radical and often unprompted changes in characters' behavior, especially after Tom discovers that his father (H.B. Warner) was a deserter and is still alive. This causes him to doubt his newfound love for military school—but why? And Ralph, after going AWOL to see a pinup starlet, experiences a dramatic shift, turning in the space of one scene into the surly, rebellious kid he'd railed against when that kid was Tom—but why? But the biggest "but why?" comes when the Army brass find out about Brown Sr.'s desertion and pooh-pooh it away—he witnessed such carnage that he fled, a victim of shell shock, which isn't necessarily so crazy, but it's dropped into the film as almost an afterthought.

Despite the explanation for Dr. Brown's behavior, there's no effort to project from his experiences to any general statement on war. He had a rough time, sure, but these things happen, and the script manages to tie everything into a neat little bow with a rousingly patriotic message. This message, along with the screen image of the Culver Academy, was guaranteed: the studio shot much of its footage at the real Culver Academy, and the superintendent of the school had final approval of the film, making such demands as the elimination of hazing scenes from the final cut. I realize that I haven't seen every film made in the early 1930s, and there are likely fewer films that take a strong antiwar stance than there are films that don't register an opinion on the subject, but it's interesting that the antiwar films are the ones that are remembered.

Wyler wasn't excited about the project; he wrote to his brother that "it will make a lot of money.... It's not artistic in any way but purely commercial in subject and treatment, maybe a little too much so" (quoted in Herman, p. 107). He had already earned his reputation as a director who shoots entirely too many takes, so when filming ran behind schedule because of bad weather, the studio brass naturally assumed that "Ninety-Take Willy" had violated their direct orders limiting the number of takes a director could request. But the film was completed almost on schedule, and it was a critical and financial success.

(I can't believe I didn't mention that this film features near-cameos by such famous and should-be-famous Hollywood players as Eugene Pallette, Andy Devine, Tyrone Power, and Alan Ladd.)

Slapstick at the Altar

In honor of four months of wedded bliss, and as part of the spectacular Slapstick Blog-a-Thon hosted by Thom at Film of the Year, I thought I'd profile a handful of slapstick weddings and near-weddings: one from an unlikely director and one with an unlikely straight man, one featuring my favorite unheralded comedian and one featuring perhaps the best-known comedy pair in slapstick, and one unfunny, derivative snooze.

Balked at the Altar (1908)

When one thinks of slapstick, D.W. Griffith might be toward the bottom of the list of people who spring to mind, somewhere between Chester A. Arthur and Laurence Olivier. But Griffith, in his early days at Biograph, directed at least one film that fits the slapstick mold, and perhaps helped establish some of the film genre's conventions: 1908's Balked at the Altar. The scenario involves a young woman's attempts to snag a husband—any husband. She makes eyes at every man who passes by her doorstep (except the "elderly fat black man"; more on that later), and when that fails, her pappy journeys to town to recruit a likely suitor. When he brings the lucky guy home and then produces a shotgun to seal the deal, the new groom goes along with it until the crucial moment when he apparently yells "I don't" and leaps out the nearest stained-glass window. Thus commences a fall-down, drag-out chase in which the wedding party attempts to recapture the groom and finish the ceremony.

There's little here that screams "Griffith" or "first genius of American film"; there aren't any directorial flourishes, aside from one instance when a woman offscreen seems to wave her hand in front of the camera, which was the closest any of the actors get to the camera. There are no closeups (indeed, no shots that show less than the actors' full lengths), and the film is badly deteriorated, so it's nearly impossible to tell what anyone looks like, but most people of consequence have comical identifying traits that survive the ravages of age: the bride-to-be wears her hair in a summer-squash-shaped formation atop her head; the reluctant groom minces around, elbows cocked, and has a pointy beard; and the "elderly fat black man" is clearly a white guy in blackface wearing a pillow strapped around his stomach. This racist caricature seems to exist only to provide a running gag in which an older white lady beats him up at every opportunity.

The chase scene is something Mack Sennett would have been proud of producing in his Keystone days (and in fact, Sennett appears in this film, although I'm not sure in what role; Griffith appears too, but again, all the faces are washed out). The wedding party tumbles out of the church like clowns from a fire engine, and each phase of the chase is defined by some obstacle they must overcome: a wooden fence and the two boys lolling against it, a steep incline and the drunk trying to sleep it off at the bottom, and finally the tree where they bring their quarry to bay.

That Little Band of Gold (1915)

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle starred alongside Mabel Normand in dozens of Keystone comedies in the teens. In many of them they were married, but in this one, they get married, thus qualifying the film for my completely arbitrary category. Within the first three minutes, Fatty proposes in the back of a cab, she accepts joyfully, they get hitched at the courthouse, and then she's waiting in front of her mirror, tearfully, for her wastrel husband to come home. Which he does, drunk and falling down. Fatty Arbuckle has one of the best "drunk" walks in film history: the top of his body stays mostly still, as if he were sober, but his legs twitch fitfully, making it look like he has to take multiple steps to cover the same ground as one sober step.

Mabel and her disapproving mother (and she has a lot to disapprove of—she catches Fatty fondling the help, and he continues to do so as she lectures him) force the big guy to take them to the opera, but as soon as they're in their seats Fatty is causing trouble: sneezing loudly, laughing at the funny-looking singers, unbuttoning his pants to get comfortable, and making pantomime plans with Ford Sterling, who occupies a box across the auditorium, to sneak off with the two buxom beauties Ford has in tow. The four end up at a restaurant where the furious Ford has to watch Fatty woo the woman they both want (Ethel Madison).

I was surprised to see Fatty as essentially the straight man. He cedes the screen to Ford Sterling, whose pointy beard, wagging eyebrows, and grimaces make him look like the kind of guy who'd tie a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. There's not a lot of physical comedy involved; I was expecting repeated scenes of a drunken Arbuckle falling down, but he apparently wanted to go in a different direction here. The most interesting thing about the film (which is stellar throughout) is the almost self-referential nature of some of the jokes. Early on, when Arbuckle is about to get dressed for his night out, his butler points at the camera and Arbuckle slams a door in our faces. And I think the opera scenes were shot at a real opera, with an audience of civilians instead of extras. When Fatty and Mabel sit down in their box, people in nearby seats point at them in surprise; you can see at least one person mouthing "Fatty Arbuckle." Similarly, when Ford Sterling sits down, people point and stare at him. Later in the restaurant, many of the other patrons are staring at the foursome and the camera, but the line between civilian and actor blurs when some of them get involved in the escalating conflict over Ethel Madison's affections. I suppose these were "plants" of film folks among the patrons.

The only moment of "traditional" slapstick violence is a tad shocking, given the generally tame feel of the rest of the film. At the end of their sojourn at the restaurant, before Mabel and mom can drag Fatty away, he grabs a champagne bottle and smashes it over Sterling's head. Because of the muted comedy to this point, it almost feels out of place, like a real person was smashing a real champagne bottle over a real head, and maybe real blood would follow. Of course Sterling short-circuits any such thought with some patented grimacing and gesticulating, but for just a second, it felt like the goodwill was gone.

His Wooden Wedding (1925)

I chose this topic mainly because I wanted a chance to write about my favorite slapstick short, which is this Leo McCarey-directed Charley Chase two-reeler. A well-to-do man (Chase) is about to get married when his best man (Fred DeSilva) slips him a note warning him that his bride-to-be (Katherine Grant) has a wooden leg. Charley is horrified, and who wouldn't be? At least, in this film, that is. Of course, right at that moment (it is Friday the 13th, after all), she sprains her ankle, causing a distinct limp that seems like proof of woodenness to Charley. When he gets a splinter from a cane while attempting to verify empirically the presence of lumber under her dress, he's convinced, and runs off in a fright, consoling himself with a large bottle of brandy. Of course, all his best man wants is the famous Dhulip Diamond, an heirloom that's been in Charley's family for years and is now perched on Grant's finger. I won't go into how it ends up stashed in Charley's top hat aboard a steamer bound for the South Seas as Grant and her frantic father chase them down in a yacht.

The comedic sequences, much like Buster Keaton's "trajectories," work as self-contained gags but also feed into the next routine in logical ways (well, in the film's logic, at least). Thus DeSilva's attempt to knock Charley's top hat off to retrieve the diamond runs into Charley's experiment with tossing hats into the wind aboard the steamer, which in turn segues smoothly into Charley's effort to free the diamond from inside the dress of a homely woman, which culminates in an uproarious dance sequence where Charley teaches her energetic, wiggly dances, hoping to force the diamond to fall out of her dress, with unintended consequences.

Chase is my favorite silent comedian, partly because few have heard of him and I can sound like a serious film nerd, and partly because I really love him. Mostly the latter. His career in front of and behind the camera lasted from the early teens, when often supported bigger stars such as Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin (he appears in That Little Band of Gold as a ticket-taker), until his death in 1940 at the age of 47. He was a graceful acrobat who, like Chaplin and Keaton, translates his grace into elaborate physical comedy. Many of his shorts start with him making an embarrassing decision that he spends the rest of the film attempting to make up for, in increasingly absurd situations. I like that he isn't afraid of coming across as a jerk, like he is here and in one of my other favorites, 1931's The Pip from Pittsburgh, in which he agrees to go on a blind double date but decides to make the experience as bad as possible for everyone involved. I've seen only a small fraction of the over 200 films he appeared in and the over 100 films he directed, but my esteem for him grows with every new discovery.

Oliver the Eighth (1934)

In this odd little short, which is funny for much of its running time but then squanders its promise in an abrupt ending, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy play barbers who both answer a personal ad from a rich widow seeking a new husband. Ollie cheats his partner by promising to mail his letter and then hiding it, but Stan comes along for the ride when the widow (a divine Mae Busch, vamping it up like Gloria Swanson 16 years later in Sunset Blvd.) chooses Oliver as her husband-to-be. Too bad for both of them that she's a deranged murderess who was slighted by a guy named Oliver and has vowed to exact her revenge on anyone bearing that name.

There's not a lot of traditional slapstick to the humor: poor Ollie gets bonked on the head several times, but only once is it part of a sustained gag. Most of the humor comes from pantomime (something the former silent film stars, including Busch, knew pretty well): Busch has a similarly deranged butler named Jitters (Jack Barty) who plays solitaire with invisible cards, does card tricks with those same cards, and serves an invisible dinner that Ollie and Stan are obliged to pretend to eat to avoid setting Jitters off. Laurel and Hardy are masters at delivering punchlines: it's sort of funny to play solitaire with invisible cards, but it's hilarious to cheat; the pantomimed dinner scene is funny, but it's hilarious when Stan, having knocked the invisible salt over, tosses an invisible pinch over his shoulder for luck.

As the ending approaches, Stan and Ollie are locked in a guest room as Busch prepares to murder them both. I was looking forward to a series of gags as they attempt to elude her and Jitters and escape from the house, but I suppose the operative word in "comedy short" is "short": having spent their two reels on setup, the payoff is necessarily disappointing.

Caught in the Act (1936)

My celebration of slapstick weddings ends on a sour note, as this Andy Clyde short is the only one that I actively disliked. There's little to recommend this film or Clyde's skills as a comedian. His entire shtick is that he's a relatively young man (44 years old here) playing a doddering old man. Thus, his ability to execute a tumble or jump in the air is supposed to be amusing. But Clyde (who went on to achieve fame of sorts as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick in the 1940s) short-circuits everything by calling undue attention to himself, with far too many snorts, grunts, whimpers, and laughs.

In this film, he gets engaged to the energetic Esmerelda (Anne O'Neal) and sets off home to prepare for the big event, which is to happen the next morning. Distracted from his bath by a door-to-door salesman, he gets caught outside, naked but for a sheet wrapped around him. This is decidedly inconvenient, because there's a maniac named Jack the Kisser on the loose, who runs around wrapped in a sheet, kissing unsuspecting women. Andy quickly winds up in jail, handcuffed to the real Jack the Kisser (John T. Murray), who escapes, dragging the bewildered Andy with him.

John Murray steals the entire film as Jack the Kisser. He looks and sounds like a villain from a Warner Brothers cartoon, with waggling eyebrows, insane stares, and that mwua-ha-ha-ha laugh. Clyde himself only provides one big laugh, when the police administer a sobriety test—say "rubber buggy bumper" ten times fast—and his ability to do it convinces them that he must be drunk. The centerpiece of the film is an extended "nobody's piloting the motorcycle" stolen from the superior Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr.. The comparison may not be fair (Keaton being one of the undeniable slapstick geniuses), but it's impossible to avoid judging this film against its predecessor and finding it lacking in style, timing, and outrageousness. Keaton's routine was marked by constant and seemingly real near-disaster, but Clyde's is shot mostly against a rear-projection screen, and without any whiff of danger, it just doesn't work.