Human Desire

Trenton Makes; The World Takes All Kinds

Human Desire by Fritz Lang, 1954:



An opening exerting a fully controlled suspense — laying the track for the events to unfold, in a first-time viewing of Human Desire we won't yet have any notion of the plot specifics (unless we've read Zola's novel or seen Renoir's film of La Bête humaine) but their nature is communicated with supreme clarity: inexorable / The rails rush by, "criss cross" — Human Desire provides a lesson on the dynamics of Lang's material in contrast to Hitchcock's; the obvious reference-point for the analysis, and Lang's creation of Human Desire itself, being Strangers on a Train / Masters, angles, (inserts), angles, (inserts), masters : Old-Master cinema / Head-on into the camera affixed to the side of a moving train-car, another train blasts by, just as in Renoir's film (the shot that almost killed cameraman Claude Renoir) / Fate-lines / Back from Korea after being away three years (offensives begun in June '50, ceasefire July '53): Jeff Warren, played by Glenn Ford / Within the first ten minutes Lang surreptitiously delivers a detail that's key to the understanding of Jeff's character: he was a habitué of the finest Tokyo whorehouses / The incessant calls from the depot's loudspeakers to check in with the yardmaster: the atmosphere of another military barracks / But are the domestic spaces battlefields any less? / Vicki (Gloria Grahame) married somehow to Carl (Broderick Crawford) who has fingers like a bloated cadaver's ("He looked big,— solid, — decent. That's what I wanted most, I guess."); Vera (Diane DeLaire), Jeff's landlord's daughter all-grown-up in the last three years, mewing like a civet / And Jeff's brought her back a kimono / Little memento / The figure that she cuts / Before concupiscent satins, those earrings of the madame, attendant memories of stains, you'd spill your medals too / Vicki's friend Jean tells Carl, as she dons her evening clothes, that most men can see better than they can think — that if Vicki's late (putting in the good word for Carl with the ominous CEO Mr. Owens), it's that 6:30 is late if you're married and early if you're single — Jean tells Carl she likes her new fella because he has lots of money — that "All women are alike — they've just got different faces so that the men can tell 'em apart." / Carl beats Vicki after she all but (all but) confesses ('confesses') she, maneater Vicki/Gloria-Grahame, has sucked and fucked Owens / Beats her while the oriental figures gaze down from the wall hangings / Yoshiwara / After the two board the train, and Carl murders Owens, he pimps Vicki out to attract Warren, who's also in their car, in order to get him away from the vestibule where he's smoking so that Carl can slip past unspotted / Vicki does so, gets Jeff to follow her for a drink; Carl, back in the dead man's compartment, checks the pocketwatch he's pilfered from the corpse: everything's on timetables, just like the day Lang escaped Germany / Ambiguity around Vicki's transgression, whether or not it occurred, the letter Carl has her write to lure Owens to his doom-room will stand as the blackmail, and the evidence of a guilt... just as Warren wastes no time in planting on Vicki the fatal kiss as soon as he gets his chance, the kiss that will bring her to the end of the line — the kiss ordained by her very husband / Fabricated (manufactured + fictional) guilt / Vicki bolts / Jeff smiles and shrugs / And back waiting in Owens's compartment, Carl's knife gleams as the door goes ajar, just like Peter Lorre's blade, near-identical, in M / The room for the inquest is built like a vise, with Warren fastened tight in its grip / "If a guy has to get himself murdered, why doesn't he pick one of the airlines?" / Vicki unbuttons her blouse to reveal to Warren the marks Carl's dealt to her shoulder, then snuggles in to be comforted / Vicki: "You killed him, that ought to satisfy you." Carl: "Yeah, it should, shouldn't it." / Jeff: In war, "Death comes as sort of an accident." Vicki: "Is it difficult to kill a man? — I mean, for a soldier." Jeff: "That's what they give you medals for." / Human Desire boasts one of the finest scores in a Lang film, by Daniele Amfitheatrof, who also composed for Ophuls's La signora di tutti / Long overshadowed by Renoir's film (admittedly, a masterpiece) and Lang's preceding picture, the other Ford-Grahame vehicle The Big Heat, Human Desire can now be accessed again, with the chance that the viewer will finally understand it as one of the richest of Lang's films, perfectly paced, super-precise, psychologically complex (even transgressive in its matter-of-fact, hardly simple presentation of the variety of outlets for human desire that cross 'societal norms', be they brothels or adultery or 'significant spans of age', Lang using Glenn Ford's smirk to coerce the viewer into accepting that 'it's all good' for getting someone off), full of touches that connect the picture backward toward Metropolis as proven earlier and forward into the geographies of Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse / "I can't tell anymore whether you're lying or not and I don't care — 'cause it's finished." / Two tickets to the dance

Human Desire by Fritz Lang, 1954:











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Previous pieces on Lang at Cinemasparagus:

Der müde Tod [1921]

Die Nibelungen: Siegfrieds Tod [1924]

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache [1924]

Spies [1928]

Woman in the Moon [1929]

M [1931]

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Passing Fancy

Conservative Anarchy

Dekigokoro [Passing Fancy] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1933:



Tomio Aoki, the child who never ages / It's an unbelievable world: Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) plunges his fingers into a strewn wad of soap? toothpaste? to finger-brush his teeth then dips into a pail of water to gargle and rinse and wash his face / It's common and easy to underestimate Ozu, proclaiming him simply to be one of the world's finest directors, as he's even better than that — Sakamoto brushes his head almost unnoticeably against a ceiling ornament, there's a cut here — reverse-angle: precisely picked up from that action, ornament sway / Tomio's head brushes under the hem of the tapestry moments later / Cut not just on action, but on a smile / The legend of Choemon and Ohan as recounted in Obi-ya — Choemon's 14-year-old-girl-transgression, and Ohan's river suicide after he abandons her, and Choemon's reinstatement with his wife / Too early too late / Intertitle: "BUT THE WORLD WE LIVE IN IS A CAPRICIOUS PLACE — " / Aoki and Hideo Sugawara, the two brothers of A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But... now face off as teaser and target, another of the constant confrontations in silent Ozu to take place in daylight under the open sky / A day that passes into night: the brilliant transition shot of Tomio chewing the leaves — the light dimming against the jacket hooks (which contain two gloves, echoing Tomio's joke about: why does a hand have five fingers? — because if it only had four there'd be an extra finger on a glove) before the bulb in the background snaps on — close-up of bulb — cut to shot of Tomio passed out among the leaves — Kihachi returned home drunk / Child's sickness, axiom of early Ozu — sickness from sweets gives onto a full-blown ailment (Tomio who began the film eye-patch sick) / The father worries he may have to hold a funeral, fingering his purse — learning something of his son's school life from the small invalid's chat with a visiting schoolfriend / The doctor says it's "acute enteritis" (or, an inflamed small intestine) / A father oblivious to and ashamed of his lack of education, rudiments of social intelligence / Harue (Nobuko Fushimi) who offers to pay the 50-ryô doctor's bill is the one Sakamoto wants but who will not reciprocate, who loves his best friend Jirô (Den Obinata) who in turn will not reciprocate, calls Harue "homely" in front of Kihachi out of deference to his feelings — the girl whose quasi-madame Kihachi promises to convince Jirô to marry her / Jirô understands Harue's hinting at "raising" the money through prostitution / He rebukes her / Suggests he loves her after all / He borrows money from a barber / Will make it up with labor in Hokkaido / Kihachi knocks Jirô out — says he'll go to Hokkaido and work to repay it — abandoning Tomio in the process / The barber says don't worry about it / Kihachi replies the same way he did to Harue's initial offer — remarking the barber "says such amazing things!" / He heads off / Five, ten, fifteen seconds of screen-time for Chishû Ryû (tramp on the ship departing to Hokkaido) / Kihachi jumps ship at the end, second thoughts / This man bobbing in the water recalling to mind at the moment one of his child's silly jokes / Not the most elegant of Ozu's films, but a crazy enough ending for the pace of caprices, for the film built out of passing fancies, not-quite-dictated by some Boudu-man

Dekigokoro [Passing Fancy] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1933:










Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style

Tokyo Chorus

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But...

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone?

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Mabel's Strange Predicament

(Finding Herself 'Directing' Chaplin)

Mabel's Strange Predicament by Mabel Normand, 1914:



So apparently one scene of this film which features the Little Tramp was shot before Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal., though the whole wasn't finished till three days after Kid Auto Races — and it was released two days after Kid Auto Races — which means Kid Auto Races = the first completed Little Tramp film / The Tramp announces himself as a drunkard in the earlier film / Now he's pissed, and Mabel's Strange Predicament by the Mabel (Normand) of the title provides an early dry run for the opening of Chaplin's Limelight which contains the greatest drunk pantomime in all of cinema / This tiny picture conveys the fact that the shame of a woman being seen in ankle-to-collar pajamas was greater than that of being taken for a public drunk in 1914 America / The cuts are arbitrary at best at this point under Sennett, and with Mabel at the provisional helm / It's the Tramp before there's a full Charlie — and yet — because his gestures are so perfectly calibrated, especially with the physical stuff toward the end, one can see CHARLIE's emergence across 11 minutes 52 seconds like a duck cracking out of its egg in this one-reeler with a title like that of a hair-tonic / Quite a predicament though / If it's not weighing an abortion I'm still trying to figure out what

Mabel's Strange Predicament by Mabel Normand, 1914:





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The Phantom Light

Catalogue Raisonné: Powell (Cassingle B-Side)

The Phantom Light by Michael Powell, 1935:



1930s trains-cinema = suspense, because replete with sudden noises / A psychic society (Wales replete with folklore), which should have been a film named The Phantom Light's crux, except, as it turned out, in the case of a "quota quickie" / You see English producers then as now have 'taste' / So lots of business with planting a palm on Binnie Hale's ass to shove her up the lighthouse ladder / She dries her fanny behind a support pillar / Meat cute / The recurring conceit: a man who may be 'mad' (but who knows) restrained in an alcove — (keep cutting back to him as needed) / (Like a friend of mine once said, it was either his own line or he was quoting Larry Sanders: "Punch it up with a couple fucks") / A film that keeps frustrating the arrival of an actual phantom beyond the maddie... swapping it out for the "phantom light" (like when a UFO turns out to be a buggy front-room switch in a pasha's dacha)... and for music-hall repartée about "Sunday trousers" / A strange vertical geography that doesn't exactly mesh — we learn the piping running up and down the lighthouse heights ends at the base in weights for the clockwork, whilst other rooms have skinnier through-shafts because here there are only cables passing through — this is conveyed through dialogue / I imagine what Edgar Ulmer could have done with this scenario / The shadow of action — not a movie, but something containing the traits of movies / An amazing shot, amazing because it's documentary, of a man, bare-chested, jumping from crags, into nocturnal sea and swimming off / The whole's almost 'abstractly' incoherent / But '30s fetishism! — still have the filim stock and the light! — 500 setups lending the craft sheen / Though Powell would become a master, this picture's still very worth watching: example of a future-master working in the '30s 'nevertheless' being not as good a filmmaker as Johnnie To / Or Edgar Ulmer

The Phantom Light by Michael Powell, 1935:






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Red Ensign

Raise the Red Flag Then Have a Quiet Breakdown in the Drawing-Room the Little Ones Don't Talk About

Red Ensign by Michael Powell, 1934:



"Foreign lines are subsidized by their governments." — Seven words that make up the governing backstory for the 'action' that plays out over 66 minutes / — "...there's to be a quota law for British shipping before the month's up — that means a government guarantee for shipbuilding." — And there's the plot / A lot of "I understand it's part of the government's plan to..." etc. / What film historians refer to as "the quota quickie," this film, a British-cinema equivalent of the just-nascent '30s H'wood B-picture, but whose mandate didn't quite grasp the popular, or cinematographic, register / "In times of depression you must prepare for prosperity!" / Remember the Irish Free State? which dissolved in '37? / A propaganda film of the documentary-within-fiction sort; here, a dash of English pride strewn under cover of educating the Empire's public how ships are built and shipyards operate / Not far from what Microsoft did for Dublin / Industry between scenes of conversation relaying logistical and commercial developments of GREAT IMPORT / Of course the matter is that of British cinema itself in 1934 / A commissioned albeit near-expressionless cinema / But who am I to say what forces drove Michael Powell in '34 / Having my own druthers there would be less talk and more Carol Goodner, more scenes where she smiles on Janus-faced Leslie Bank, his right-side always turned to camera, the easiest trick, special effect, in the world / 'Cause his face was deranged in the Great War / And he's a wonderful actor and a presence and this sidestep of the lens I find very moving / There should be more malformed for the cinema; #flagaspriority / But the grandeur and the scale of the task, the shipbuilding, is what drives Powell on / Kate Bush should have written the song instead of Elvis Costello / This valuable film, a documentary-within-fiction, of sad English glory

Red Ensign by Michael Powell, 1934:





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Paths of Glory

Marriage by Any Other Name

Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick, 1957:



Paths of Glory is the last work in the phase "early Kubrick" (Spartacus and Lolita are transitional works from the early to middle periods) and coming back to it after several years one acknowledges the opening scene in the château wouldn't be better in Lubitsch — curtains open upon history available for billeting, or something like it (and that "something like it" alone says something, never mind "billeting") — "I admire your taste. [...]" "I really haven't done very much — the place is much the same as it was when I moved in!" / Kubrick's satirical (but is that even the word?) turns of dialogue, even this "early," stab: "a fighting general" / "something pregnable" — rifles and trust, care for the penetrating weapon, carve the canal, direct link from Paths of Glory to Full Metal Jacket / "Yes it's a terrible price to pay, but we will have the Anthill!" / Try to patrol enemy lines, the moonlight is all-pervasive (cf. Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket — the ambiguous [d]evolution of the Starchild) / It's a different planet / Dead soldiers appear on the earth like the ghosts they are when flares cross the sky overhead / The beautiful discrete scene re: fear of pain v. fear of dying — no helmets on soldiers' asses / The "theater" of war / The tension between theater and documentary / I think there's no question that during the charge Kubrick understood he'd require a new way to convey this moment at a level equally cinematographic and moral in its validity, as galvanizing as the comparable stretch in Four Sons / And this too would have to be for the history of cinema / To convey war you must do something worthy of 'the history of cinema,' must rise to meet 'the history of cinema' / The formal (staging, framing, tracking) and the documentary / It's not verisimilitude he's after / A Bronx Irish Jewish priest / In moments, at this point in Kubrick's oeuvre, there are still vestiges of Elia Kazan — that is to say, Kubrick hijacks Elia Kazan-isms, Kazan's theatricalisms / And at the end: "And as my wife always says, what is life without a little diversion?" / And these were the very men Dax defended / And the shellshocked man the general has transferred out of the regiment is the one who will live / Kubrick's precision: the men moving past with bandaged gashes like any "extra" as General Mireau (George Macready) peers through the binoculars and says it won't be long now before they take the Anthill / "Extras" / "Taking," innuendo / Everything is "immaterial" in the face of protocol / Just as a saloon can double as a courthouse in Judge Priest, in Paths of Glory a palace can turn a court martial into a space for Greek theater, draw a line back to arguments in ("no stenographic record") ancient tribunal — filigree and ornamentation is a throwback, not to its once contemporary form (man's monumental folly across two centuries) but to that once contemporary form's adoption of what, seen from our/my vantage amounts to pastiche of 'antiquity' / Folly of all men across centuries / "That's really deep — that really is deep" — Joseph Turkel (Lloyd the bartender in SK's supreme masterpiece The Shining) at the priest's arrival takes the tone of Zooey Glass / When news holds great objective bearing for a superior officer the messenger is still putting himself in, has been molded into assuming, a complaisant-submissive position / The first film where the officers at a ball waltz with 'women of a certain age' / Dax is not invited because it's "a dress affair" (Douglas and Menjou in essentially the same dress — except Menjou's in slacks and the other isn't) / One can gauge Dax a moral champion but it's not as if he commits suicide after the executions — he walks through a door / This man with a wedding band, after hearing Christiane's song of 'release', might just as well be entering a brothel / Broulard/Menjou: "These executions will be a perfect tonic for the entire division. — There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die." / The depositions are a dead trail — they decompose as a force of agency, and all but dissolve as a viable plot mechanism, with Broulard's declaration that he must get back to the party lest he be "rude to the guests" / Or, rather, the consequences are outside of the consequences / "I'm sorry." — not even a capitulation, po-faced: rather, 'I'm sorry it has to be that I do not capitulate and this system makes it so the endurance of my own hide depends on my non-repentance or at least the stifling of my regret' / There is no correlation between Ophuls and Kubrick, that stupid old truism, except that from point A to B there develops a single idea; in Ophuls one witnesses it flower in real time but a Kubrick film demands Memory, same as in Flowers of Shanghai / Between one building and another, with trenches and the mutilated strewn in between, an uneasy peace is born / And what of that

Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick, 1957:








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Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.

Introducing the Little Tramp

Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. by Henry Lehrman, 1914:



Chaplin's second onscreen starring role, and the first appearance of the Little Tramp / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. is based on the premise that this character can control the frame completely — an auspicious bow / Already lighting the match with a kick off his shoe-sole / It was Chaplin, before Hitchcock, who first "controlled the universe" / The Tramp, this drunk, doesn't give a shit / This drunk's a narcissist / Because tramps are real people too / Bukowski could have written this picture / Charlie / The thinking-man's Democrat

Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. by Henry Lehrman, 1914:








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Making a Living

Introducing Charles Chaplin

Making a Living by Henry Lehrman, 1914:



Chaplin's vaudeville bandito moustache / A "sharper" in top-hat and monocle and spats beneath the Edendale sun / A monocle like the makeup around the eye of Petey the dog in Our Gang / And what if Dave Eggers had brio / That bit where the sharper turns his head back around and you see the monocle's fallen out of his eye, it doesn't look like a mistake so it's the most minor gag ever and one of the most pleasurable to see, I couldn't tell you why / Twitchy and frantic but the kid's got it / Every comedy till 1918 was surrealist / Back when drunk aristocrats discovered autos / Stabbing's just a blow, you stab or get stabbed you just keep on keeping on in the antic frenetic frame / Visual chaos / Don't ask sense of Making a Living / A real race to GET OUT THE NEWS / Henry Lerhman HAS AT IT / And for bystanders on the street it must have looked like some wildman getting possessed by one of those jumping Méliès devils

Making a Living by Henry Lehrman, 1914:






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Dé-si-ré!

The Will to 'Desired'

Dé-si-ré! by Sacha Guitry, 1937:



Madame to her boyfriend monsieur le ministre, while getting ready for bed: "To think one day you could be president of the Republic." "Why do you say that?" "Whenever I see you in your underwear, I can't help thinking about it." / One wants to quote every line from a Guitry film, and of course this 'theatrical' chamber comedy about domestics and their employers lends itself to that desire / A film naturally built on cross-cut scenes, in line with the great French tradition of framing a story of masters and servants not merely as an examination of the struggle between disproportionate power and ill-matched members of respective classes but more interestingly as a battle between the sexes / "Songes et mensonges!" / "You don't send a deaf woman to dinner alone!" / Violence in Dé-si-ré! is the angular suddenness and rapidity of the cross-cuts, shots only held long enough to contain un éclatement of sound / Désiré, feminine forename of Guitry's character (the valet who has seduced, seduces, inadvertently), with the masculine ending, character and name at one with the slippage back and forth between open and repressed longing which even itself is worn on the sleeve, and bringing to mind Guitry's phrase recounted by Luc Moullet in our discussion on JLG's Une femme mariée: "I'm against women — I'm right up against them" / The valet Désiré desired by Madame Odette (played by Jacqueline Delubac, ice-coy) / Delubac lived till 90 and died in the same year as Gummo / Guitry's magnificent hand-flapping chest-pounding soliloquies, especially that one at the end where the sculptural moonlight provides the spotlight, as though Désiré's mounted a stage for all to see and hear his most private confession, transformed, frieze-like, classical, into the stationary, though animated, voice — his posture assuming the same arch, the near-leer, it took in Madame's erotic dream... / As the movie says: "You'd think one only heard properly through closed doors."

Dé-si-ré! by Sacha Guitry, 1937:







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