The Talkies Learn to Move: Pabst's Threepenny Opera

When Bertolt Brecht and G.W. Pabst decided to collaborate in bringing the former's Threepenny Opera to the screen, both men were at the peak of their careers. But the collaboration would be anything but smooth. Indeed it was fraught with conflict, as so many Brecht projects were.

The film has just been released on DVD by Criterion in a two-disc edition that features a beautiful transfer of the German film along with a host of features, including commentary by film scholars David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler, the French version of the film, and a documentary and essay on the adaptation from stage to screen.

Brecht drafted the original screenplay, but delivered something far different than he was asked for. Rather than simply bringing the original play to the screen, he drastically altered it, adding and removing scenes, rearranging the structure, and greatly altering the content and focus of the tale.

Brecht had already clashed with composer Kurt Weill over the play itself, each man claiming credit for the production's success. Now he clashed with Pabst, who took Brecht's script and bent it to his own aims. But as Bathrick and Rentschler point out in the disc's commentary track, the two men may not have been so far apart as they claimed. Each was perhaps reluctant to credit the other with the film's better qualities and reserved the right to scapegoat the other should the critics be unkind.

Shortchanged by the film, however, is Kurt Weill, for few of his compositions made it onto the screen.

The final product, though it may bear relatively little resemblance to the stage production, is an excellent film and a milestone of early sound cinema. Pabst often replaces scenes of dialogue with imagery, with long gazes, with near-silent shots in which the actors convey the plot without words. 

And at a time when the camera had been rendered almost stagnant by cumbersome sound equipment, Pabst's camera roams through the sets with fluidity and ease. If the camerawork at times seem similar to Fritz Lang's M, released that same year, there is good reason: Both films were shot by legendary cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner.

There are other similarities between the two films. Both examine the criminal underworld, and do so with a blend of humor, intrigue and distaste. And both feature wonderfully sustained sequences of cat-and-mouse amid the squalid streets. One image in Threepenny Opera is especially striking: One of Mack the Knife's henchmen has stolen an armchair and is running through the streets with police in pursuit. He crosses a courtyard, invisible beneath the chair, looking like an ant carrying its booty back to the nest. He scurries across the courtyard and out of view, only to appear again with the police right behind him, firing bullets into the upholstery.

In America, the reaction to synchronized sound technology had been extreme. The first couple of years worth of American sound films were filled with wall-to-wall talk; the audience was rarely given a break from the endless chatter of showgirls and dandy men about town. It seemed everyone was a wit, armed with a ready punchline for every situation. In Germany, by contrast, sound was being used more judiciously and with greater sophistication. Filmmakers like Pabst and Lang did not give up the virtues of the more image-focused cinema of silent pictures. Rather than treating sound as an end in itself, they used it as a means to an end, as another tool in the creation of compelling cinema. Sound was used as atmosphere, or fused into the story as a plot point, and often employed in one sequence merely to draw greater attention to the silence of another sequence.

The result is a film of richness and depth, with sound and image combining in the creation of a sharply rendered underworld. The words of Brecht, the music of Weill, the images of Pabst and Wagner — a fruitful collaboration of some of Germany's greatest talents.

Threepenny Opera. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

The Jazz Singer: The Movie Heard 'Round the World

The great thing about DVD is that it has given the major studios the opportunity to finally do right by the classics in their archives. For the first six or seven years of the format’s existence, the studios were, for the most part, content to simply reissue their back catalogues in cheap editions, often without any attempt to remaster the image.

But over the past few years, as box-office receipts have declined, studio bosses finally seem to be coming around to the reality that if these films are going to survive and be seen, they will be seen in the home, and thus it pays to provide definitive editions that will endure.

Thus Warner Bros. has just released a lavish boxed-set edition of the film that put the studio on the map back in 1927. The Jazz Singer almost single-handedly ended the silent era and launched Hollywood on whole new trajectory.

D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation ushered the art form into its maturity in 1915, kicking off the first great era of motion picture innovation and achievement; The Jazz Singer brought the great cinematic decade of the 1920s to a close, halting the entire medium in its tracks for a couple of years as filmmakers struggled to harness and master the new sound technology.

One of the unfortunate aspects of these two cinematic milestones is that they are both marred by racism, a fact that greatly obscures their legacies. In 1999 the Directors Guild of America changed the name of its highest award, which since 1953 had been named for Griffith, in light of the stereotypes perpetuated in his most famous film. And The Jazz Singer, though widely known by name, is rarely seen today.

The fact is, The Jazz Singer isn’t that good a film anyway. Important, yes, and largely misunderstood, but not good. It’s really a silent film, with just a handful of sound sequences, most consisting of the ever-energetic Al Jolson singing and sweating and dancing, often in blackface. The combination of silence and sound proves an awkward hybrid at best.

The legend says that it was Jolson’s singing that drove a stake into the heart of silent film, but the truth is both more subtle and more interesting. Audiences had experienced sound pictures before, usually in the form of musical interludes, but these were of such crude quality that the innovation didn’t stick; the clumsiness of the available technologies only intruded on the dream-like quality of silent film. What startled audiences of The Jazz Singer and got them hooked on sound was a few improvised minutes of dialogue. Jolson, seated at the piano, finishes a song, turns to his mother and engages in some insignificant patter. The off-hand nature of the exchange gave the illusion that the audience was eavesdropping on a real-life moment, and it was that sense of intimacy and verisimilitude that truly launched the sound era.

Sound had been a huge gamble for Warner Bros. At the time, the studio was at the bottom of the heap and desperate to climb to the top. So they took a chance on sound and came up with the hit they so desperately needed. Their success sent them to the forefront of the industry, with all the other studios playing catch-up. The new medium brought with it a host of technical problems—satirized with great accuracy in Singin’ in the Rain (1950)—leading to a period of static, stage-bound films with little artistic merit. As stated in The Dawn of Sound: How Movies Learned to Talk, an excellent documentary included in the set, it seemed that audiences preferred mediocre sound films to great silent films.

The new three-disc set includes a wealth of material placing the film in its proper historical context, including commentary by film historians Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano; short films of Jolson from the era; The Dawn of Sound, which provides a great overview of the advent of synchronized sound, the impact of The Jazz Singer, and the demise of the silent film; and a full disc of Vitaphone sound shorts, films of Vaudeville acts of the 1920s. These films may be quaint, static and strange by modern standards, but they provide a valuable and rare historical record of the sort of entertainment that movies replaced, and to which The Jazz Singer pays tribute.

The Fantasies of Childhood: The Red Balloon, White Mane

There’s a magical time in childhood when the fiction of film is nearly indistinguishable from the reality of life, a time when a child still has a willingness and an ability to believe that magic is possible, and that maybe, just maybe, he can be its agent.

I was at that age when George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy was at its peak. It seemed to me entirely possible that such a cosmic drama indeed took place light years ago in a faraway galaxy, and that it might be still be in progress, maybe even somewhere in my neighborhood. Lucas’ attempt to construct a myth was successful, and I, and a gazillion other kids around the world, were his silent collaborators.

It doesn’t take a battery of special effects and widescreen melodrama to grab hold of a child’s imagination, however. Another film held sway over my young imagination, one that approached the world of youth and dreams from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Albert Lamorisse’s Academy Award-winning The Red Balloon (1959) was a major fixture in my childhood, a seemingly perennial treat bestowed on me and my fellow students throughout elementary school. And, judging by a casual survey of Internet posts on the topic, my school was hardly unique; it seems, when it comes to The Red Balloon, no American child was left behind. It seemed very real to me the first time I saw it, and though the reality of it faded as I grew older, successive viewings never failed to enthrall.

The Red Balloon and White Mane (1953), another of Lamorisse’s children’s films, are getting a theatrical release from Janus Films. The two short films will screen as a double feature beginning today at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley.

The Red Balloon follows a few days in the life of Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son). In the opening scene he climbs a lamp post to untangle a red balloon, which he carries with him for the rest of the day. When he returns home in the afternoon, his mother discards the balloon by releasing it from their apartment window. But the balloon, grateful to the boy for having rescued it, hangs around, and in the morning it descends to street level again to join Pascal as he walks out the door and starts the long walk to school.

From that point on the two are inseparable. However, the pair draws the attention of a pack of bullies who chase Pascal and the balloon through the streets and empty lots of Paris. The chase culminates in a remarkable scene in which we see just how well Lamorisse has managed to anthropomorphize the balloon. In a single long shot, the balloon slowly deflates—an oddly painful moment that drew tears from many a rapt child in my classes. But what follows is an uplifting scene that perfectly embodies the fantasies of childhood.

The White Mane is also the story of childhood and friendship, this time between a boy and a seemingly untamable wild horse. Again Lamorisse produces an evocative tale, beautifully photographed, that examines the compassion and dreams of a young boy.

White Mane is a horse among horses, the leader of his herd, proud, defiant and elusive. Ranchers try to catch and tame him, but none can hold onto him for long. But the boy is able to prove his devotion and sincerity to the horse, and what develops is another magical friendship that concludes with another of Lamorisse’s fairy tale endings.

The Red Balloon (1959). 34 minutes. In French with English subtitles. 

Criterion Collection. $14.95. www.criterion.com.

The White Mane (1953). 39 minutes. In French with English subtitles. 

Criterion Collection. $14.95. www.criterion.com.

The Life of Reilly: A Career-Defining Performance

“Wow.” The word permeates The Life of Reilly, a new film of a one-man show by the late actor Charles Nelson Reilly. And with each utterance of the word, we get the sense that it’s the only time when this consummate entertainer is not totally in control of his performance. The word just seems to seep out, almost reflexively, at quiet moments during the show. It is as though Reilly himself is still marveling at his own past, reliving his memories, experiencing the formative events of his life all over again, but with the wisdom and awe of an older man keenly aware that he was too young to fully appreciate the depth, the pain, the humor and the madness of his life as he was living it.

Charles Nelson Reilly was first and foremost a stage actor, on Broadway and off, as well as a comedian, director and acting teacher. But he had always dreamed of being on television, and that’s how he is best remembered, as a familiar face in dozens of television sitcoms, commercials, and, in the 1970s, as a flamboyant wit on campy game shows. He died earlier this year from complications of pneumonia at the age of 76.

From 2000 to 2003, Reilly toured the country with a critically acclaimed one-man show entitled Save It for the Stage. Later, after Reilly had retired the show, directors Barry Poltermann and Frank Anderson persuaded the actor to revive it for just one night so that they could capture it on film. The three-hour show was re-fashioned in the editing room into a 90-minute film that opens this week at Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley.

It is easy to see how this compelling performer could carry a live show for three hours, yet it is also understandable that the film’s producers would consider that a bit too long for a movie version. But one thing is clear: 90 minutes is just not enough. Reilly is outstanding—his performance is by turns hilarious and tragic, sarcastic and solemn, incredulous and insightful. Hopefully the DVD version will contain the full show, or at least a plentiful sampling of what was cut.

Reilly took his original title, Save It for the Stage, from a repeated saying of his mother’s, an abrupt conversation-ending rebuke meant to discourage her son from discussing the family’s tragedies and secrets. And save it he did, for decades, until, in his golden years, he used it as the source material for this hilarious tour-de-force of confessional theater.

Reilly’s performance is full of surprising twists and turns. Laugh lines are followed by poignant moments of pain and doubt. Dramatic scenes are punctuated by sudden outbursts and comic asides. “That’s called a dramatic turn,” Reilly informs the crowd at one point, with mock self-congratulation. “Very few actors can do that.”

Reilly is just far too whimsical and self-deprecating an actor to play it straight. Every time he lures us into the story with his dramatic talents, he jolts us out of it with his humor, stepping outside the show to comment on the performance, on the staging, on the audience’s responses to the material. Humor is the lifeblood of the man and of the show.

But when he speaks of the saving grace of laughter, Reilly doesn’t speak of it in philosophical terms; he doesn’t talk of recognizing the cosmic absurdity of life, though the implication is there, and lingers after the show’s conclusion. For a man with Reilly’s background and ambition, there was little time to sit back and marvel at God’s sense of humor. Instead he was developing his own, using it to battle against the precarious circumstances of a man of a particular upbringing, with a particular sexual orientation, chasing a particular dream in a particularly public arena.

His youth was spent in a world of bitterness, recrimination and tragedy. Reilly’s mother was harsh and unyielding, prone to smashing the dreams of others before they could even take shape. She made her husband refuse Walt Disney’s invitation to collaborate in the great animator’s transition to color films; she tried mightily to foil her son’s ambition to act, first in grade school, then as an adult. Reilly’s father, crushed by unemployment and the missed opportunity of partnering with Disney, slipped into despair and institutionalization along a slope lubricated with alcohol, forcing his wife and son to move in with an extended family that included a lobotomized chain-smoking aunt.

And when Reilly finally escaped from the madness and made his way to New York City, he was brought low at what he thought was the peak when the president of NBC extended the courtesy of bringing Reilly to the dizzying heights of his lofty Manhattan office only to tell the would-be star face to face that “they don’t allow queers on television.”

So surely the man can be forgiven for having been too preoccupied to appreciate the absurdity of the universe. He had rent to pay. Laughter wasn’t a form of existential consolation; it was a survival mechanism, a crutch, a tool with which to survive from minute to minute and from day to day. But he had the talent and good fortune to transform that survival mechanism into a career—a career that ends with The Life of Reilly—a rousing artistic peak.

My Friend, My Horse

When I was 11 years old I was sent from the cozy blandness of the suburbs of Santa Rosa to what I thought was the wild, unruly countryside, about 20 minutes outside town. Out there in the uncharted boonies was a horse camp for kids, a small ranch stocked with the gentlest, most patient horses you could hope to find. They had to be; their patience was tested every week of every summer by a new batch of 30 loud, rowdy, snot-nosed kids—a sort of equine purgatory. 

For just one week I picked hooves, combed manes, bridled, de-bridled, fed, groomed, rode and cleaned up after the only poor beast who managed to show any kindness to me, or at least a reasonably comforting brand of indifference. 

For that experience, I am just a bit more attuned than I otherwise might have been to the pleasures of John Korty's new film, My Friend, My Horse, showing this weekend at his Take 2 theater in Point Reyes Station. Korty, an Oscar and Emmy winner for an eclectic range of work spanning animation, documentary, feature films and television, has been working on the film intermittently between other project deadlines for about five years.

Before attending that camp, horses, for me, had been merely theoretical. In my mind they weren't so much animals as vehicles for cowboys, or engines for carriages and wagons; they were background objects in history and in movies. But in that brief period of just five or six days, I learned to see them much differently. I learned to gauge their emotions by observing the positions of their ears, the loll of their heads, the whites of their eyes. And I discovered their crafty side: I learned to sneak up on them after having saddled them, to quickly cinch the saddle tighter before they had a chance to bloat themselves up again to keep it loose. 

And I learned that, once out on the trail, I was no longer in charge. For not only did the horse know every twist and turn through the woods, he also knew the location of every minor obstacle—every fallen tree and small, winding stream. I remember the mix of panic and exhilaration the first time that horse took off without my asking, picking up the pace from trot to gallop for some unknown reason. I simply held on for dear life, hunched over the horse's back, white knuckles grasping the saddle horn as he rounded a bend and then, with a sudden rush, leapt into the air, stretching to his full length as he hurdled the trunk of a fallen oak. Afterward he seemed to slow down only reluctantly, twitching and stamping his feet with pleasure and possibly in anticipation of the next one, which I would soon find out was just half a mile away.

John Korty's film is full of stories like this, of the excitement and trepidation of first encounters and of the joys of long-term acquaintance with these animals. It's a local film, locally made and featuring local people. A parade of West Marin faces—Pam Carr, Bryn Byer, Warren Hellman, Sandy Duveen, Ann Grymes, Alessa Lopez, Steve Hadland, Alli Smith, Hilary Smith, Ellie Genazzi, Victor Miranda, Jette Jarl, Mira Brock, Alan Margolis, Pat Healy, Boyd Stewart, Ed Brennan, Sophie Dixon, Carlisle Rand, Anne Sands, Maddie Murphy, Susie Rowsell, Peter Meyer, Fielding Neale, Lily Neale, Meagan Neale, and Casey Cambell, Stewart Campbell and Amanda Wisby—regaling us with stories of their lives among the thousand-pound beasts. From billionaires to former jockeys, from old-timers to pre-teens, everyone's got a horse story, some of them simple and humorous, others surprisingly emotional. 

To the uninitiated, the whole thing may seem a bit odd. Isn't this just anthropomorphism? The horse seems like such a stoic creature, and one that requires restraining apparatuses, besides.

At times, while the virtues and spiritual qualities of horses are being noted, the film cuts to images that, to a horse lover, may serve as a perfect illustration of the point. But others, looking at shots of horses staring balefully at the camera, may wonder if it isn't all in the eye of the beholder, if we're not simply projecting our notions of horsiness onto an animal that knows nothing other than horsiness, that is biologically engineered for nothing else. Why do we attribute such nobility and wisdom to these animals?

As several of Korty's subjects point out, part of the answer is in the fact that we ride them, and that once we entrust our bodily safety to an animal we'd like to think the animal isn't taking the responsibility lightly. For when you spend time riding on the back of one of these giants, putting yourself at the mercy of the whims of a (nearly) wild animal, you can't help but feel there's some sort of understanding between the two of you. You have to. At that point, it's essentially a survival skill. 

To order My Friend, My Horse on DVD, see www.myfriendmyhorse.com.

This review was written for the West Marin Citizen.

Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934

We tend to think that once something is committed to film we have it forever. The act of recording seems by its very nature permanent, and often we forget that the very materials used to record are nearly as transient as the images they capture. For the reality is that film is a tenuous medium at best, given to disintegration and, in the case of nitrate films, spontaneous combustion. And this is compounded by the fact that cinema itself was for decades considered merely a novelty, an ephemeral entertainment of virtually no great cultural or historical value.

In fact, it is estimated that 90 percent of all films made during the silent era (1895-1929) and 50 percent of all films made before 1950 are lost, disintegrated over time, neglected or willfully destroyed to extract their nitrate content, or simply mislabeled and forgotten, awaiting discovery on some dusty shelf.

The National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization created by Congress in 1997, has helped save more than 1,000 films over the past decade. Most of these films are not commercially viable; the audiences they draw at film festivals are not nearly large enough to cover the costs of their preservation and distribution, and there’s little financial incentive for commercial companies to release them on DVD.

So the foundation, through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, stepped into the void and began releasing many of these rare cultural artifacts on DVD. The award-winning Treasures From American Film Archives series has consistently been one of the best reviewed discs every year in which a collection has been released. The first set featured a sampling of rare films spanning the history and range of the medium; the second focused on the silent era.

This year the foundation has released Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934, another beautifully produced collection of 48 educational films, commercial features, cartoons, newsreels and propaganda films. The four discs each have a theme: urban life, women and women’s suffrage, labor and capital, immigration and patriotism. The set includes four feature films, an illustrated book with notes for all the films, and commentaries and original musical accompaniment for each. And all proceeds support further film preservation.

Viewing these films is like traveling back in time. It’s a uniquely compelling experience to see documentary footage of everyday life 100 years ago, to see everyday people going about their everyday lives—not posed in static photographs, but walking, talking and laughing. And the more formally staged films say just as much if not more about who these people were, about how they thought and behaved, and how they sought to influence and persuade one another. And though the differences between their time and ours are legion, at times the real surprise is how much has remained the same.

100% American (1918, 14 minutes) features the screen’s first genuine star, Mary Pickford, in a film designed to encourage citizens to buy war bonds. The idea of movie stardom and the harnessing of that influence for commercial and political means was new at the time, and there was no more popular figure in motion pictures than “America’s Sweetheart.”

In the opening scene Pickford is shamed by a man on the street selling bonds. “Our boys are sacrificing their life-blood,” he cries, “What sacrifice have you made?” An alien thought in our time, when the popularity of war is maintained only by keeping it at arms’ length. We then watch as our plucky heroine struggles to overcome the myriad temptations of daily life—fancy new dresses, ice cream sundaes, public transportation—in an effort to save her pennies and donate them to the cause. Nevermind that Pickford wasn’t actually a citizen; in her native country the film was retitled 100% Canadian.

In other films it’s apparent that some things haven’t changed over the years. Listen to Some Words of Wisdom (1930, 2 minutes) gives us Mr. Courage and Mr. Fear, chatting amiably over dinner at a restaurant. The Great Depression has Mr. Fear worried about his finances, even though he has just received a raise, and thus he orders a simple meal of crackers and milk. Mr. Courage intervenes, advising Mr. Fear that it is his patriotic duty to spend his money to help jump-start the economy.

While there are many films in the collection that represent progressive causes, then as now film production was an expensive enterprise, so it is no surprise that so many of these films represent moneyed interests. Two cartoons illustrate the point. The first, The United Snakes of America (1917, 80 seconds) is essentially a newspaper political cartoon, brought to life by stop-motion animation as the drawing is inked in, first the faces and bodies of Uncle Sam flanked by an army man and a navy man. The film essentially creates a punchline by presenting the most crucial elements last, as snakes with labels such as “pro-German press” and “peace activists” come into view, attacking Uncle Sam and revealing that the cartoon is in fact a swipe at all those perceived as undermining the war effort. As far as editorial cartooning goes, this is not the least bit unusual. But to whom does this statement of opinion belong? An independent cartoonist? A media corporation—Hearst, perhaps, or Pulitzer? In the final seconds a hand comes into view to proudly sketch in the credit line and reveal the source: the Ford Motor Company.

Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat (1919, 40 seconds) is another animated political cartoon in which Uncle Sam protects the gross domestic product from the evil claws of the International Workers of the World, represented by a rat that crawls out of the woodwork to feast on the harvest. The patriotic Uncle Sam, tellingly hiding behind a wall of sacks labeled “American Institutions,” takes a shovel to the head of the dreaded Bolshevik-loving rodent and crushes it. Again, praise be to the Ford Motor Company.

The status quo is again represented in a few films about the women’s suffrage movement. The Strong Arm Squad of the Future (1912, 60 seconds) is a short animated film that satirizes the movement by caricaturing women in roles of power as manly, brutish, and, most damningly, unappealing to men. More objective in its perspective is On to Washington (1913, 80 seconds), a news film that contains footage of the suffragette march on Capitol Hill. In a more commercial vein is The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13, one installment in a long-running serial in which the heroine battles not only villainous robbers, but the evils of workplace discrimination.

This is just a small sample; Treasures III is far too varied to adequately express here. Suffice it to say that this is not just a collection for history buffs or cinephiles; the films contained here offer both entertainment and enlightenment, and more than a little astonishment.

Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. $89.99. www.filmpreservation.org.