The Grand Lama spouts the Christian doctrine through the mouth of a Jewish actor. The French, who were as divided as the rest of the world about the merits of this film, reduced the theme to a comfortable bourgeois ideal with a little foreword containing some such clap-trap as this—“who has not dreamed of retiring some day to his little home in the country!’’ What rubbish!
What a woeful depreciation of a grand theme! However . . . in the film based on that splendid human document, The Good Earth, the really important feature seems to have been the invasion of the locusts.
In San Francisco it is the earthquake, an episode which requires about three minutes to render, and the rest of the film is sheer drivel, absolutely insupportable, especially Jeanette MacDonald. (The same is true for The Charge of the Light Brigade and Gunga Din; only the destructive scenes have value—the rest is hogwash.) Even when the film is a restoration film the street scenes are unconvincing.
Whole corps of men and women are mobilized to study the history, costumes, architecture, furniture of a period—and yet the result is nil. The money spent on research, which is colossal, is sheer waste. The same for characters.
In a Chinese film, when America of all countries is full of available types, Paul Muni, a Viennese Jew, is made a Chinese, and Luise Rainer, after her adorable portrayal of Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld, is converted into a Chinese peasant woman who speaks English with an Austrian accent. A Frenchman or a Hindu is always a caricature of the type.
No country in the world has such a variety of racial types as America; no acting is required, because in the American film everybody is supposed “to be just himself.” Yet in their frantic attempts at realism, at producing a semblance of something life-like, something authentic, they will choose, as if blindfolded, the very man or woman most unlike the one they are attempting to portray. When it comes to reciting the Gettysburg address an Englishman is chosen, because he is undoubtedly the most expert in the use of the English language.
Charles Laughton’s recital of the Gettysburg address was a memorable moment in the history of the cinema, but what a travesty of the homely diction Lincoln must have employed! When they admire good acting in a foreign film they choose an innocuous museum piece like La Kermesse Héroique or such a sham as La Grande Illusion, with that linguistic, physiognomic monstrosity, Eric von Stroheim, who is neither fish nor fowl.
The French, in turn, are capable of applauding a fifth rate film such as Back Street, which was based upon the work of probably the worst writer in America, Fanny Hurst. They even fall so far, in their critical acumen, as to present it to the public through a little speech of pure asininity, by Henri Duvernois, one of their own bad writers.
Of the two films which seem to be most frequently revived here—Million Dollar Legs and The Whole Town’s Talking—the one is a burlesque-fantasy and the other a study of the “double.” Robinson is a capable actor, in the old style, histrionic through and through.
The film is excellent, and he is largely responsible for its excellence, but better films of this genre have been produced in Europe. As for Million Dollar Legs, with Jack Oakie, whom the French seem to adore, especially the intellectuals, it is hard to see what they so admire in this film which is put together in slapdash fashion and creaks with wheezy old gags that fill up the holes in a hollow scenario.
The element of fantasy* in it perhaps appeals to the French, because they have none themselves, but the burlesque is shoddy and emasculated. What is called “burlesque” by French film fans is only the weak dregs, the coffee grounds, as it were, of a once strong brew.
Real burlesque, as it was known in America before the Catholic Church intervened, would shock the French to death. The sexual element, which was its chief characteristic, has been eliminated; what remains is horse-play, wise-cracks, mountebank tricks of the carnival variety.
This bastardized version of burlesque, which the American films now present, the French intelligentsia accept as a sort of American Surrealism, the spice of life in the great cultural desert. But they are mistaken. What is truly surrealistic the Americans understand nothing of, nor do the French themselves for that matter, excepting the pontificators and mystagogues.
What is truly American usually misses fire here, as I have noticed time and again. The really excellent things which America offers— in weak pills usually, I must confess—make no appeal to the French spirit.
They fail to come within the scope of the Frenchman’s understanding of reality. (What is truly Irish is similarly misunderstood or ignored, I notice, despite the Celtic bond. Poetry, when it is lived, is simply another form of insanity to the French.) The films I have in mind, when I speak of representative American themes, have to do with a “message.”
And this message has to do with the common man, with the great hope which Whitman gives sublime expression to throughout his works. This hope the American is blindly trying to give body to.
It is something which the cultured European understands with his mind only; it never affects his behavior. But in America, despite the crass ignorance, despite the corruption in every walk of life, despite the seemingly permanent air of unreality in which everybody bathes, even when “up against it,” as the saying goes, this message is nevertheless understood by the lowest man, is in his blood, so to speak.
It marks the gulf between the New and the Old World, and all the blithe exchanges of fraternity and solidarity by the cunning politicians fail to hide it. The American is a different animal, and he is primarily a non-political, non-cultural animal.
In his most Utopian dreams he is most truly himself. He is, despite all outward signs of practicality, a dreamer, one, unfortunately, who is capable of committing the most heinous crimes in his sleep.
In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town we have the American par excellence in the person of Gary Cooper who, interpreting in his own original way a thin story by a hack writer, permits the French to visualize the common man whose homely, shrewd common sense is very close to the wisdom of the cultured man.
Between such a type as this and Raimu, who represents an ordinary man of the Midi, also a sound and solid type, though a “relapsed” one, there is a world of difference. Raimu symbolizes the tragedy of the common man of Europe who is forever being sacrificed to the political machinations of unscrupulous seekers after power. He is not a fool, but helpless, a pawn in a game which is beyond him.
In Gary Cooper, as pure type of American, one feels that perhaps one day the common man will win out over the undeserving leaders, over the despots in every guise who lure him to death. Americans, though denying it in practice, have always clung to the belief in such a possibility.
The European, on the other hand, does not believe, not deep down, even when he is a revolutionary. He is always thinking politically, strategically, ambitiously; he is animated more by envy and hatred than by any chimerical thought of real brotherhood.
The peasant always wins out over the city man, and the peasant is at heart selfish and uninspired. The American is a born anarchist; he has no genuine concern with the ideals of the European.
If, as an unwilling ally, he makes common cause with the European it is more out of a spirit of adventure, out of sheer love of fight, fight for its own sake. I speak of the man in the street, to be sure, and not those who “represent” America in official capacities by manipulating the passions of the mob.
When I see a character such as Raimu, I realize how solitary, how lonely, is the real man of Europe. In every gesture he makes Raimu enacts the tragedy of a life which has been imposed upon the common man of Europe and which, as an individual, he is powerless to alter because he cannot free himself from the mesh of national intrigues in which he is born and nurtured.
But if this man has little or no hope, and it is that which I read in the faces of Europeans everywhere, he at least has grandeur and dignity, sometimes the noblesse which is born of sheer desperation.
In all his roles, however, I have the feeling that it is not his own fight which I am witnessing; I feel that he has forfeited from birth the privilege of the pursuit of life and happiness which is theoretically, if not actually, supposed to be due every man. He lives on, as part of a group soul, a hero who is never recognized, except anonymously.
The American, while moving with the herd, is instinctively a traitor—to group, country, race, tradition. He does not know clearly what he is striving for, but he does know that he wants a chance, and he means to grab that chance, when he can, even if it involves the destruction of the world.
He is an unconscious Nihilist. Any real connection with the man of Europe is vague and tenuous, imagined rather than felt. He is far closer, in spirit, to the German and the Japanese than to the French. He is not democratic, not libertarian—he is a human bomb for the
