Malpaso (2019): Chronicle of a death announced in black and white, from the Dominican Republic

Below are the program notes that I wrote for the feature debut of Héctor Velez, a filmmaker from the Dominican Republic, featured in the Cine Nepantla presentation of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles last September (*)

 

The Nueva Onda and Nepantla sections of the Latin American Cinemateca showcase the works of emerging and experimental directors, worth gaining critical attention beyond their countries and the specialized festival circuit. It may not be an easy task for programmer Guido Segal to find pearls for the Cinemateca screenings, but the quality of the films presented is a reward by itself.  Mexican filmmaker Andrés Kaiser's Feral (2018), was a self assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.  Como el cielo después de llover (2020), screened earlier this year, was the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, a remarkable first-person autobiographical documentary about the art and craft of filmmaking. 

 

It is now the turn of Malpaso, the first feature of Héctor Valdez, a director and producer from the Dominican Republic, a country well set up for location shooting of big budget productions requiring exotic locales. Valdez, who graduated from McGill University in Canada and returned to his country to work in film, has been active since the 2010s, directing and producing movies for television and documentaries. This training serves him well in Malpaso, the work of a filmmaker trusting his talents and gathering a top notch team of collaborators.

 

“Malpaso” is the name of a small town located in the Dominican Republic border with Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. In Spanish, it means “bad step”, physically and metaphorically, ominous denotations that the film subtly absorbs as the story develops. 

Based on a story by Valdez, with four writers listed in the credits and exquisitely shot in black and white by Juan Carlos Gómez, Malpaso follows twin brothers, Cándido (Ariel Díaz), who is albino, and Braulio (Luis Bryan Mesa), very black.  Their birth in a desolate rural shack, seen from the point of view of their black grandfather who brings them up, is s shocking yet restrained set up for the plot: the whiteness of Cándido is a disruptive factor – truly a bad omen - when, orphans at 15, the boys need to survive in near Malpaso, selling their only possession, a donkey. 

 

The first words of the film explain the whiteness / blackness purely in magical realist terms.  The black twin – from whose point of view the story is told in a flashback – says: “This is the story of how we were born. You are white as the moon, and I am black as the night. Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with the moon but he was also in love with the night”. So, at one level this dichotomy works by complementing, not opposing, the black and the white; but at a more pedestrian level, the albino’s whiteness and his strange facial features scare the black people of Malpaso, with the exception of an Haitian old healer who believes in curses and zombies. The “different”, “the other” will find no place in Malpaso.

 

In his portrait of a small rural town, overtaken by a petty crime lord, La Cherna (Pepe Sierra) dictating its social and business dynamics, Valdez imaginatively reworks the tropes of Cinema Novo – the Brazilian innovative response to Neorealism and New Wave in the 1960s: black and white cinematography, non-professional actors, a searing portrait of poverty and despair.  The film lands also in the brutal territory of urban violence and squalor later captured by Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1980) and City of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles), but it does so astutely observing the dynamics of exploitation and misery in a smaller scale. 

The creative voices of Valdez and collaborators, however, go beyond these Latin American models to locate the film in a place that is both poetic and realistic, drained of fast-paced action, and understated as well as moving in its emotional impact. Nothing is on your face in Malpaso, so the unimaginable future of the albino twin, when his brother is no longer there to protect him, is fully rendered by the cinematography and the evocative music of Pascal Gaigne. It’s a fantastic use of two film techniques approached with restraint. The film may keep the story cryptic and elusive, but the full extent of the horror, the horror, and the resilience of the fraternal bond are made explicit by a confident use of cinematographic language.

 

Malpaso may not target a large audience looking for thrills. But as an impressionistic and tender portrait of two barely literate brothers separated by social and economic circumstances outside of their control, understood by all but not explained or denounced, is worth a dedicated viewing.  This beautiful film may be short on action and dialogue but packs an emotional punch. The ending leads to a catharsis that Aristotle would have been pleased to recognize as the true function of tragedy.  

(*) https://www.lacla.org/lacla-latest-blog/2023/9/7/malpaso 

 

 

"Como el cielo después de llover" (2020): A first-person documentary with a Latin American twist

Below are the program notes I wrote about Como el cielo después de llover (2020, Colombia) directed Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo. The film was screened by the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles in June of 2023. 

The Nueva Onda selection of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles Como el cielo después de llover, the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, is a remarkable documentary. It is also an interesting complement to last year’s screening of the excellent Feral, the debut feature by Mexican director Andrés Kaiser, a self-assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.
 
Como el cielo después de llover, distributed internationally as The Calm after the Storm, falls in the category of the first-person documentary essay. This type of nonfiction work has gained recognition as a specific and very plastic mode of film practice.  It combines the documenting of a reality – in this case, the making of a fiction film in Medellín, Colombia - with an impulse to shape it also as an essay about the nature of cinema and the director’s approach to it.
 

This description may seem very abstract and removed from the experience of going to the movies for fun. Far from it. The film is fascinating at several levels, and it’s really entertaining. It is made of several pieces, that quickly begin to fit into a larger project that is fully laid out by the end of the film. First, Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo (she uses her father and mother’s last names) is the daughter of the famed Colombian writer and director Victor Gaviria, well known for his sociopolitical chronicles of the underprivileged: Rodrigo D. No Future (1990) and The Rose Seller (1998). Born in 1992, Mercedes studied filmmaking, with a specialty in sound design, at the prestigious Universidad del Cine, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While in film school, she directed shorts and collaborated in other projects, in tune with the small-scale, first-person hybrid projects of a generation of Argentine filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, Mariano Llinás and Rodrigo Moreno. In their works, less is more, silence and the unsaid have a symbolic dimension, and social and political issues emerge ambiguously.  In other words, the daughter’s cinema is in the antipodes of the “pornomiseria” cinema of her father, as some critics have described Gaviria’s work and that of another key representative, Héctor Babenco and his seminal Pixote (1980). They are blunt critiques of Latin American social problems.
 

The core of Gaviria Jaramillo’s documentary is herself participating in the shoot of her father’s latest film The Animal’s Wife (2016), based on a true story of gender violence, machismo and silence among the lumpen class in Medellín. Though we never see Mercedes on screen since she is the one operating the camera, the filmmaker is the voiceover documenting the experience. The shoot Mercedes records is, however, part of a larger project: making a diary of her personal and professional life, beginning and ending in Buenos Aires, where she now works, with Medellín as the long dramatic interlude.  
 
The record of Mercedes’ life interweaves two other key elements: the home movies her father made in the 1990s when she was growing up in Colombia (not edited chronologically) and the diary her mother wrote as an anxious young woman expecting her first child. What slowly emerges is the portrait of a family, including a younger brother, who may or may not be a rebel. It is a subtle domestic depiction, sightly unsettling. It combines her insights and memories while viewing the footage, with a selection of images and sound design, shaped by Mercedes “interrogating” the past. A short interview with her maternal grandmother provides an intriguing twist and a socioeconomic comment. 
 

This documentary essay functions as a Rorschach test, open to as many interpretations as there are viewers. For some, Como el cielo después de llover can be a feminist take on patriarchy, deploring machismo at the level of the story and the storyteller; for others, it is the record of a young filmmaker finding herself, as a woman and an artist. Other viewers may appreciate it as an open-ended meditation on the role and responsibility of cinema in a violent society.  
 
But what will come through in all the viewing experiences is the quiet, self-assured voice of a young woman observing the dynamics of a Hispanic family, the role of women with professional aspirations, and ultimately, the question of how she should live her life.  
 

In the final sequence – a long take of a long shot of Mercedes facing the open-ended pampas - her voiceover encapsulates the film’s topics.  “The family conversations set up the world we share, and give our future a meaning”, she begins. Like the great Colombian writer Guillermo García Márquez building his Macondo from family memories, it is with them, Mercedes notes, that “we can put together a story”.   And then she recites, in slow cadence, single words, phrases, complete sentences:
 

“I remember the crying in the fiction. A woman’s crying. Fear. An outraged body … as if it were a doll. The feminine. To have a brother. Medellín. Usefulness. To leave hours of the past as an inheritance to your children. To smoke some weed on a large stone. The images in the diary. Poetry. Colombian cinema. To confuse sensitivity with being gay. Desire. To be a prostitute. Men and women’s unequal time when raising a child. A little girl’s ideals. Buenos Aires. To record everything on a camera. To choose the right distance. To embrace the unspoken. The other. To think about the victim’s point of view. The hit men. The contradiction of filming a rape scene being the privileged gender. A set full of men. To take years to make a film. To be a sound mixer. Plants that fall asleep when you touch them. Cocaine. Evil’s presence. To write to your daughter before she is born. Uprooting. Testimony. Non actors. To choose silence. The beauty of ambiguity. Humaneness. The inevitable. To talk about gender violence in a country that is suffering war. A first-time mother.  Future “yes”. A family portrait. A stoical woman. To be and not being at the same time. Uncertainty. Conviction. To love contradiction. To wish to go back. To choose the South. To feel determined air”.

 

This litany contains the conundrums and certainties of life, “el oficio de vivir” (the business of living) if I may paraphrase the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías. Como el cielo después de llover is a beautifully accomplished first-person documentary. It feels as innovative a film today as was the New Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 70s.
 
                       List of sources
 
Alter, Nora M. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
 
Ham, Ally. The Calm After the Storm. Video Librarian website, June 6, 2022.
https://videolibrarian.com/reviews/documentary/the-calm-after-the-storm/
 
Lukasievicz, Mauro, “Entrevista a Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, directora de Como el cielo después de llover”. Revista Caligari, n/d.
https://caligari.com.ar/entrevista-a-mercedes-gaviria-jaramillo-directora-de-como-el-cielo-despues-de-llover/
 
Program notes, Harvard Film Archive screening, September 25, 2022.
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/the-devil-never-sleeps-2022-09
 
Interview, “Mercedes Gaviria narra cómo es "convivir con el cine dentro de la casa" en su ópera prima. Télam, March 3, 2022”
https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/202203/585233-mercedes-gaviria-narra-como-es-convivir-con-el-cine-dentro-de-la-casa-en-su-opera-prima.html,
 
Wilson, Rebecca,“Fatherhood, Family and Filmmaking in The Calm After the Storm”. Sounds and Colors website, January 13, 2022.
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/colombia/fatherhood-family-and-filmmaking-in-the-calm-after-the-storm-64389/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Library of Congress Film and Sound Festival: "Carne de cabaret" (1931) dir. Christy Cabanne

The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023.  I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne).  Here is the last of the three introductions, presented on June 18.

Carne de cabaret (1931) 

Directed by William Cabana [Christy Cabanne]

With Lupita Tovar, Ramón Pereda and René Cardona

 

Ten cents a dance / That's what they pay me

Gosh, how they weigh me down / Ten cents a dance

Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown

Seven to midnight I hear drums / Loudly the saxophone blows

Trumpets are breaking my eardrums / Customers crush my toes

Sometime I think / I've found my hero

But it's a queer romance / All that you need is a ticket

Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance

 

“Ten Cents a Dance”, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart, music by Richard Rodgers

 

Like Drácula, the Spanish-speaking film made by Universal Studios in 1931, Carne de cabaret, released the same year by Columbia Pictures, also in Spanish and starring Lupita Tovar (1910-2016), makes for an illuminating case study of how the Hollywood studios implemented a strategy to keep the foreign-language markets supplied with films, once synched sound became a viable technology. A disruptive innovation, expensive to implement but quickly embraced by audiences worldwide, sound meant that keeping the flow of pictures south of the border required a novel strategy: making Spanish-language versions of English-language originals.  Before dubbing and subtitling became the standard practice by the end of the 1930s, the studios - including later in the decade some independent producers - opened Spanish-language divisions to provide such films. The story of foreign versions goes beyond Spanish, to comprise remakes of original English-language films in French, German and other languages. Paramount’s Joinville studios, in Paris, and Astoria, in New York, implemented this strategy, as did MGM, Fox and Columbia in Los Angeles. The English and German versions of Anna Christie (1930), starring Greta Garbo in both, serves as a perfect illustration of this early 1930s business stratagem.
 

Film historian Lisa Jarvinen has written the indispensable account of how the Hollywood studios developed, implemented, and ultimately discarded this practice, with an eye to securing the 30% of the international market represented by Latin America and Spain: The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood's Shadow, 1929-1939 (2012).  For a survey of these films aimed at the Hispanic market, the compilation provided by Juan B. Heinink and Robert G. Dixon, Cita en Hollywood, included in the compilation volume Hollywood Goes Latin (2019) is the point of departure.
 

A preferred practice of these remakes was to use the same sets of the English versions, adapting the original screenplay by Spanish writers as a “versión española” - Spanish version.  Since the directors spoke no Spanish, “dialogue directors” handled the performances. However, what was a cost savings strategy soon revealed that literal translations were no guarantee for making appealing Spanish-language films, and that the variety of Spanish accents was an issue for Hispanic audiences.
 
Even though some Spanish-versions of 1930-1931 and then original Spanish pictures showed that Hollywood could make popular films with stars such as singers Carlos Gardel (Paramount) and José Mojica (Fox), Argentine-born Spanish singer and actress Imperio Argentina and newcomer Lupita Tovar, “overall they were not profitable enough to justify their large-scale production once studios began to suffer the effects of the economic depression”, as Jarvinen writes.  Also, the film industries of Mexico and Argentina, patterned after the American studios, had taken off by the mid-1930s and began their golden age.
 

This is the context necessary to understand how Lupita Tovar, a 20-year-old Mexican actress, with no formal training, scouted by Robert Flaherty for Fox Studios, made Drácula and Carne de cabaret, for Universal and Columbia, in 1931 and starred in Santa  the following year. This melodrama was the first major Mexican success of the sound era; it was directed by Antonio Moreno, the Spanish-born Hollywood star of the 1920s, who had co-starred with Tovar in the Spanish-version of The Cat Creeps (1930), La voluntad del muerto, for Universal, a few months before the Dracula Spanish-version. 
 
Lupita Tovar made more than thirty films, playing mostly ingenues and “señoritas” in a career that spanned two decades on both sides of the border. Some of her films are East of Borneo (1931, Universal), Border Law (1931, Columbia), Vidas rotas (1934), Alas sobre el Chaco (1935, Spanish-language version of Storm over the Andes, Universal, El Capitán Tormenta (Grand National) (1935, Spanish-language version of Captain Calamity, Grand National) and María (1938, based on the 19^th century Colombian novel by Jorge Isaac, made in Mexico).
 

In 1932 she married Paul Kohner, a producer at Universal, who headed the foreign language department and who cast Lupita in Drácula. They moved to Berlin when Kohner headed Universal’s European productions but returned to Los Angeles as the political situation deteriorated in Germany with the rise of Nazism. In 1938, Kohner founded the Paul Kohner Talent Agency and managed the careers of many actors and directors, including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Río, Billy Wilder, Henry Fonda and Ingmar Bergman. The couple had two children, Pancho, a director and producer, and Susan, a film and television actress. Their grandchildren, Chris and Paul Weitz, have successful careers in Hollywood as writers and directors. Currently in the works is a project by the Weitz brothers about the courtship of their grandparents while filming the Spanish Dracula.
 

In The Sweetheart of Mexico. A Memoir. As Told to Her Son Pancho Kohner, published in 2011, Tovar gives us an engaging account of her life and times, spanning her Mexican childhood and adolescence, Hollywood and Berlin in the 1930s, and her career in Mexico until she retired in the mid-1940s. 
 
She writes about Carne de cabaret:  “Frank Fouce was an assistant director I had met at Columbia Studios. When they were casting the Spanish version of Lionel Barrymore’s Ten Cents a Dance, with Barbara Stanwyck, Frank suggested me for Barbara’s part. So I went to Columbia Studios to do Carne de cabaret, which was the title of the Spanish version. It was directed by Eduardo Arozamena and W. Christy Cabanne. Ramón Pereda and Rene Cardona starred opposite me. Our Spanish-language version took just two weeks. One “take” was all we were allowed, so we had to get it right the first time. This was one of the last films to get away with sexy innuendos before the studios started censoring their own movies to keep the government from interfering”.

Carnet de cabaret tells the story of Dorothy O’Neil, a dance hall girl in New York, trying to navigate in a man’s world, as the festival catalog aptly summarizes.  The original version is Ten Cents a Dance, inspired by the Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers song of the same title. This English-language original shows the difficulties of finding love in the working-class milieu of taxi dancers, starring 23-year-old Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990), as an innocent young woman called Barbara O’Neill.  Two years later, in Baby Face, Stanwyck is in full pre-Code mode, as a social climber who uses sex to advance in life. 
 

Carne de cabaret uses the same screenplay and dramatic structure. Both versions also utilize the same five or six sets – all interiors, except for one park scene; and mostly the same props. Viewing the films side by side, however, one can notice small variations in dresses, hats and even the order of the scenes. Many of the crowd shots in the dancing hall are the same in both films. There are a couple of short colorful additions in Carne de cabaret, including a sexy scene involving a young messenger watching a dancer undress, as reflected in a mirror.  
 
In another instance, an establishing shot of a busy public space simply lifts a shot from Ten Cents a Dance and shows Barbara Stanwyck instead of Lupita Tovar. One wonders what editor Logan Pearson must have thought looking for the Tovar shot he needed and could not find. He must have hoped no one would notice. 

The Hispanic community of Hollywood in the early 1930s was small but tight, and many of these writers, dialogue directors and actors later brought the American knowhow to the film industries of their home countries, most notably Mexico, Argentina and Spain. In his no-holds-barred memoir My Last Sigh (1984), Luis Buñuel gives a vivid description of the Spanish-language colony during his stay in Los Angeles for a few months in 1930-1931.
 

In Carne de cabaret, Tovar found herself surrounded by several of these interesting Hispanics. Eduardo Arozamena, a Mexican actor who had participated in Drácula, was the dialogue director, while René Borgia, a Venezuelan writer who later settled in New York, adapted the dialogue – colorful and sexy. Ramón Pereda, a Spanish-born Mexican actor, plays Bradley Carleton, the divorced rich man attracted by the innocent Dorothy, and René Cardona, in his first film credit, is Tovar’s husband, Eddie Miller, who turns out to be not what her good heart thought he was. Pereda and Cardona parlayed their stay in 1930s Hollywood into careers in the Mexican film industry.
 

Hispanic audiences in the 1930s – and also today – would have noticed a characteristic feature of the Spanish language (absent in English):  the difference between “tú”, an informal, familiar way of addressing someone, and the formal, respectful “usted”. This distinction plays an important role in presenting the relationship between Dorothy and Carlton, the older divorced man. The use of “usted” until the last line of the film gives a courteous and proper tone to the otherwise immoral proposition Carlton makes to Dorothy earlier in Carne de cabaret.  To the Spanish-speaking audience, their relationship is linguistically respectful but clearly has moved to a more intimate stage when they address each other as “tú” for the first time before “Fin” (The End) appears on the screen. 
 

Two key Americans were involved above the line in Carne de cabaret. One was director Christy Cabanne, listed in the credits as William Cabana, a veteran of the silent era, who had apprenticed under D. W. Griffith, and had the reputation for working efficiently. The other one was Columbia screenwriter Jo Swerling, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant brought up in the Lower East side whose collaboration with Frank Capra included Platinum Blonde (1931) and Forbidden (1932). In Ten Cents a Dance and Carne de cabaret he captured with gritty realism the New York of the 1920s.  Swerling gave strong visuals to the song; he transformed into dramatic scenes the laments and grumbles of the dance hall girl who graphically describes her situation: 
Ten cents a dance / That's what they pay me/ Gosh, how they weigh me down / Ten cents a dance / Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown / Seven to midnight I hear drums / Loudly the saxophone blows / Trumpets are breaking my eardrums / Customers crush my toes.
 

What holds this film together is the performance of Lupita Tovar: her Dorothy is a charming mix of naiveté and resilience … and a Spanish accent that is studiously neutral, to travel well across the Hispanic world. Her dramatic intensity will look more persuasive to many viewers than that of Barbara Stanwyck’s, especially the well-handled bedroom scene that lays out, through facial gestures and body language, the high price she has to pay to keep her husband out of jail.
 
The Library of Congress premieres tonight a digital restoration of this film that has not been seen for decades.  Maybe Lupita Tovar’s performance will be rediscovered, like Drácula’s, by new a generation of cinephiles.
 
 

\

List of sources

 
AFI Catalog of Feature Films. The First 100 Years, 1893 - 1993 (2006). "Carne de 

    cabaret" (1931).

  https://catalog.afi.com/Film/1301-CARNE-DECABARET?sid=0384d2b1-26fc-4783-                bcbb-03519b6ad70c&sr=14.095596&cp=1&pos=0

Heinink, Juan B., and Robert G. Dickson, “Cita en Hollywood”, in Hollywood Goes 

    Latin. Spanish-language Cinema in Los Angeles, edited by María Elena de las  

    Carreras and Jan-Christopher Horak (2019).
 
Jarvinen, Lisa. The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood's 

    Shadow, 1929-1939 (2012).
 
Tovar, Lupita. The Sweetheart of Mexico. A Memoir. As Told to Her Son Pancho 

    Kohner (2011).
 
Tovar, Lupita. Obituary, New York Times, November 20, 2016.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Library of Congress Film and Sound Festival: "Craig's Wife" (1936), dir. Dorothy Arzner

The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023.  I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne).  Here is the second of the two introductions, presented on June 18.

Craig’s Wife (1936) dir. Dorothy Arzner

With Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Jane Darwell, Alma Kruger and Billie Burke

 

"People who live to themselves, are generally left to themselves."

 
I am pleased to introduce at this inaugural edition of the festival an interesting film from 1936, Craig’s Wife, directed by Dorothy Arzner, adapted from a 1925 play by George Kelly, with Rosalind Russell.
 

The thought occurred to me that even though most of you are familiar with Dorothy Arzner – the only woman director working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s – we can pretend to be the reporter in Citizen Kane tasked to figure out the puzzle of Charles Foster Kane.  Not that Dorothy Arzner proposes an unsolvable mystery, or that there is a Rosebud somewhere to unlock secrets. But the director and her films have been presented as unassailable evidence for critiques of Hollywood; made a cornerstone of feminist criticism; and used as case studies for issues of gender representation, so that these agendas tend to obscure Arzner’s place in commercial cinema and the context in which she produced her films – studio assignments, budget constraints, tight schedules, genre and censorship requirements. Arzner is credited with directing seventeen films from 1927 to 1943.
 

Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) had a directing career in Hollywood for 15 years, from the late silent era to World War II. She came to directing as an editor and writer with solid experience. Her studio tenure stopped due to ill health, and in her long post-Hollywood years she did training films and commercials, and taught at UCLA, mentoring Francis Coppola in the 1960s.
 
During Hollywood’s golden age, like contemporaries John Stahl, Mitchell Leisen and George Cukor, she directed movies that focused on women’s perspectives. She went further, in her best work, explicitly examining the place and role of women in American society. Christopher Strong (1933) and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) are excellent examples, as is Craig’s Wife, presented in a 35mm print from the Library of Congress.
 

Her work began to be championed by feminist film critics in the 1970s, as was Ida Lupino’s, the only major female Hollywood feature director of the 1950s. These books and articles saw both directors as Trojan horses in a male-dominated Hollywood. But Arzner’s view of her work in regard to the theory and practice of feminism was complicated. In Directed by Dorothy Arzner, the 1994 study of the filmmaker, Judith Mayne noted that Arzner’s intent was hard to define.
 
When viewing Arzner’s films, it is obvious that she is deeply interested in women, their roles, careers and the need to be respected by men – as the fiery speech of Maureen O’Hara to the leering male crowd in Dance, Girl, Dance makes explicit.
 

Craig’s Wife was a big-budget film for low-budget Columbia Pictures; producer Edward Chodorov assembled top talent for the prestige project. Screenwriter Mary C. McCall had established her reputation with Babbitt (1934), The Woman in Red (1934) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); she wrote eight of the ten "Maisie" movies made from 1939 to 1947. In 1942 McCall became the first woman president of the Writers Guild of America. Cinematographer Lucien Ballard had a five-decade career, working under Josef von Sternberg, Budd Boetticher, Raoul Walsh and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969).  Editor Viola Lawrence began at Vitagraph in silents, then became head editor at Columbia. Uncredited, actor and interior designer William Haines shaped the interior of Harriet Craig’s house, giving it a stiffly formal, sterile feeling.
 

Twenty-eight-year-old Rosalind Russell, in her first solo starring role, plays Craig’s wife, with a solid supporting cast of women character actors, including Billie Burke, Jane Darwell, Alma Kruger, Nydia Westman and Dorothy Wilson. The key male figures are John Boles and Thomas Mitchell.
 

Arzner’s version is the second of three adaptations of the 1925 Pulitzer-prize winning play by George Kelly (uncle of Grace Kelly). The first one, with the same title, was released in 1928, with Irene Rich as the protagonist and Warner Baxter as her husband. It was directed by William C. de Mille, the older brother of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. The play was adapted a third time, as Harriet Craig, in 1950, with Joan Crawford and Wendell Corey, directed by Vincent Sherman.
 

Except for toning down the original play’s social critique of a woman’s obsession for material possessions, McCall’s adaptation is faithful to the play: over less than 48 hours and through conversations, we view the downfall of a well-bred shrewish wife, who sacrifices husband, family and loyal servants to hold on the mausoleum house she sees as the ultimate form of social stability. Through unity of time, place and action, this “drama of domestic infelicity”- as Frank Nugent wrote in his review for the New York Times - is more connected to Eugene O’Neill than the conventions of the woman’s film.  

The message of the work is telegraphed twice, first through one of the characters noting that “people who live to themselves, are generally left to themselves”, and then repeated in writing at the end of the picture – unnecessarily didactic.
 

Rosalind Russell does not yet inhabit her vibrant, sharp-tongued signature persona, in place three years later in The Women (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940). Here she is a cold, fussy, calculating narcissist.  But it’s Russell’s acting that holds the film together, as each of the characters – different backgrounds and personalities, a great collection of women - interact with her, providing in some cases, welcome comic relief.  Frank Nugent – as did other reviewers at the time - wrote that “the entire weight of the drama depends upon the malign effectiveness of its central character and Miss Russell, here enjoying her first opportunity in Hollywood, gives a viciously eloquent performance”.
 
In a 1974 interview, Arzner told Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary that “I did not want an actress the audience loved. They would hate me for making her Mrs. Craig. Rosalind Russell was a bit player at M-G-M, brilliant, clipped, and unknown to movie audiences. She was what I wanted”.
 

It is up to the audience to assess Harriet Craig, as shown in Arzner’s version.  What does she stand for?  Is Harriet a twisted version of Hedda Gabler, suffocated by her dollhouse?  Does she suffer false consciousness, as Gramsci described those who could not see the circumstances of their oppression?  Is she the vehicle for critiquing a society – 1920s America - in which there are few choices for women like Harriet?  Is it a horror story about a monstrous woman, all surface politeness, destroying those who love her?  Is she a tragic heroine brought down by a fatal flaw? Or, after all, does she embody Freud’s puzzled question: Was will das Weib? What does the woman want?
 
This is the conundrum that makes the film resonant today.
 
 

List of sources

 
AFI Catalog of Feature Films (2006): “Craig’s Wife" (1936).

 https://catalog.afi.com/Film/3878-CRAIGS-WIFE?sid=b8ffc16a-f4dd-42d7-a141-        faf913bb273c&sr=9.71347&cp=1&pos=1

Fuller, Graham, “The Caring, and Ambiguous, Arzner Touch”. New York Times, 

   February 6, 2000.
 
Ferrari, “Dorothy Arzner”, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000.
 
Levy, Emanuel, “Craig’s Wife (1936): Arzner’s Favorite Film, Starring Rosalind 

   Russell”.

    https://emanuellevy.com/review/craigs-wife-1936-6/
 
Mayne, Judith, Directed by Dorothy Arzner, 1994.
 
Nugent, Frank, “The Music Hall Presents a Skillful Film Version of That Pulitzer Prize

    Play, Craig's Wife”. New York Times, October 2, 1936.
 
 
 
 

Library of Congress Film and Sound Festival: "Frenchman's Creek "(1944), dir. Mitchell Leisen

The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023.  I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne).  Here is the first of the three introductions, presented on June 15.

Frenchman’s Creek (1944) dir. Mitchell Leisen 

With Joan Fontaine and Arturo de Córdova and Basil Rathbone

 

“The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system." – André Bazin, Essay on “la politique des auteurs”, Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1957.

 

Frenchman’s Creek, an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1941 novel made by Paramount Pictures in 1944, directed by Mitchell Leisen, starring Joan Fontaine and Arturo de Córdova, winner of an Academy award for its production design, with technicolor cinematography by veteran George Barnes and a luscious score by the classically trained Victor Young, is an excellent example of André Bazin’s observation on the workings of Hollywood during the studio era.  And if the previous sentence should be forgiven for being weighty, it is because the “genius” of the system consisted precisely in shaping disparate esthetic, economic and technological elements into an extraordinary confection designed to appeal to a vast audience. Then and now.

 

Frenchman’s Creek is presented in a 4K digital restoration by Universal Pictures and the Film Foundation, using a three-strip Technicolor nitrate print from UCLA.

 

The point of departure for Frenchman’s Creek was the historical novel by du Maurier, an author whose fame was cemented by the huge success of Rebecca, published in 1938, and its 1940 film version by Alfred Hitchcock. Beginning with Frenchman’s Creek, du Maurier gives shape to a different kind of heroine, a bold and fiercely independent protagonist, whose longings for adventure clash with the realities of marriage and motherhood. In Frenchman’s Creek – a novel well worth revisiting – the writer gives us a fantasy of infidelity, a sort of “erotic daydream”, as noted by biographer Richard Kelly. “It is the dream and not the interpretation that has the power to enthrall people”, he wrote.

 

This was the challenge faced by Mitchell Leisen, the veteran Paramount director assigned to the project: how to give sight and sound to a work of imagination, rooted in thoughts and desires. The conventions of the historical romance helped shepherd this melodramatic fantasy, along the lines of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and other swashbuckling pictures. The casting lent a good hand: Joan Fontaine, on loan by David O. Selznick, anchored the film according to genre expectations – even though it reversed the actress’ timid Rebecca persona. Arturo de Córdova, a Mexican star with a supporting role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), played the romantic lead, with an eye to becoming a “Latin Lover” like Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Montalbán and Fernando Lamas. The supporting cast was top talent: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Cecil Kellaway.

 

The festival program provides the film’s plot: Noblewoman Dona St Columb (Joan Fontaine), escaping from a loveless marriage and on the run from her husband, leaves London for the coast in Cornwall. She encounters a romantic French pirate (Arturo de Córdova), but their brief idyllic romance is interrupted by slimy Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone).

 

The adaptation by Talbot Jennings, a graduate from Yale Drama school and seasoned screenwriter with a flair for action adventure and romance pictures (until 1944, Mutiny on the Bounty, Romeo and Juliet, The Good Earth; later Across the Wide Missouri, Escape to Burma, The Naked Maja and The Sons of Katie Elder) was faithful and kept the key lines of dialogue and settings, to foreground the protagonist’s romantic dilemma. 
 

But it is in the director’s eye for décor, costumes and the use of color – more than in the performances – that the film becomes a baroque romantic fantasy, that verges on “camp”.

 

Mitchell Leisen was a versatile director at Paramount, who brought an appreciation for sets, costume and mise-en-scène in depicting the dynamics of romance, in comedies and dramas such as Midnight (1939), Remember the Night (1940) and Hold Back the Dawn (1941). In the auteur evaluation of Hollywood directors – spurred by Bazin’s essay - he was considered a minor figure. Andrew Sarris included Leisen in the category “lightly likable” of his influential The American Cinema (1968). When the studio system began to collapse, Leisen did not make the transition to independent projects, lacking, one could argue, the strong artistic vision of Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks or Huston.

 

To modern gender critics, details in the film including cross-dressing (pirates pillage a trunk full of women clothing), the foregrounding of exaggerated wigs symbolic of male emasculation, and some outrageous beefcake shots of Arturo de Córdova in his scanty blouses add to the intriguing visual rendering of Dona St Columb’s conflict.
 

More directly, the filmmaker uses sound to highlight the protagonist’s situation; this is presented in the sweeping rendition of Debussy’s piano piece “Clair de lune” as a full orchestra leitmotiv for her longing for adventure and romance.

 

But Leisen does not let the décor overwhelm the themes, which the film highlights from the original novel, by keeping a key exchange between the pirate and the aristocrat:

 “You forget that women are more primitive than men. For a time they will wander, yes, and play at love, and play at adventure. And then, like birds do, they must make their nest. Instinct is too strong for them. Birds build the home they crave, and settle down into it, warm and safe, and have their babies. You see, my Dona, there is no escape for a woman, only for a night and a day".

From inside the film fantasy emerges a biological counterargument - open to controversy, I’m well aware – that makes it nevertheless a remarkable case of self-reflexivity, a work commenting on itself.

The troubles with the Production Code Administration are not difficult to imagine, “adultery and illicit love without 

 compensating moral values”.  As noted by the AFI Catalog, a compromise was reached when, at the end of the film, the Frenchman tells Dona, “Of course, if you choose to stay in England, there is nothing that has happened between us that  would make your marriage a pretense."

 

A super production for Paramount in 1944, with a budget a little short of 4 million dollars, the film was shot on location in Mendocino County, California, with faithful reconstructions of English Restoration interiors in Los Angeles. Cinematographer George Barnes – a cinematographer from the silent era, who had mentored Gregg Toland, and photographed Rebecca, Meet John Doe and Jane Eyre - worked the lighting patterns to follow the protagonist’s increasing sense of liberation, a feature to be nicely observed in this restoration.  Academy awards went to Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegté and Samuel M. Comer for Production Design.  A good source for fascinating production details about Frenchman’s Creek is the oral history/biography of Mitchell Leisen by David Chierichetti, published in 1973.

A final note about the short-lived Hollywood career of Arturo de Córdova. The actor is an example of Hispanic masculinity in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.  In Spanish, he is described as a “galán de cine”, a leading actor in roles of romance and action.  A modern-day equivalent is Gael García Bernal, a star working in Mexico, Spain, Argentina and the U.S. in films like Bad Education (2004), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Amores perros (2000) and Mozart in the Jungle (2014-2018). De Córdova starred in memorable works in a variety of genres during the classic era. He is best remembered as the protagonist of iconic Mexican crime films like La diosa arrodillada / The Kneeling Goddess (1947) and En la palma de tu mano / In the Palm of Your Hand (1951), directed by noir master Roberto Gavaldón. In Él / This Strange Passion (1953), the ferocious satire on masculinity directed by the iconoclast Luis Buñuel, he plays the dark side of the “hidalgo español”, the Spanish gentleman, of which Don Quijote is also a caricature. 

 

De Córdova’s career spanned 1939 to 1959, with 73 films, including the 24 he made outside of Mexico.  Seven of those were productions by American studios. The actor may have seen Frenchman’s Creek as an opportunity to launch a Hollywood career as a leading man, with his good looks and fluent English. A move not unlike that of Pedro Armendáriz, who carved a small niche in westerns.  

 

The actor’s fine performance in Frenchman’s Creek, is perhaps too down to earth in contrast to the “fairy tale princess aura of Fontaine”, as Chierichetti observed. But the Mexican “galán” certainly is an attractive masculine counterpoint to both the bumbling libertine of a husband (Ralph Forbes) and the degenerate Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone).

 

The audience will have the opportunity to appreciate the many facets of Frenchman’s Creek, a fantasy weaving romance and adventure made to entertain in the midst of a world war, by talented individuals above and below the line, working in a true “dream factory”.

 

List of sources

 

AFI Catalog of Feature Films. The First 100 Years, 1893 - 1993 (2006). “Frenchman’s Creek" (1944).

   https://catalog.afi.com/Film/1617-FRENCHMANS-CREEK?sid=9eb98440-c7f8-                                  4615-9e59-c614886c3340&sr=10.508499&cp=1&pos=0 

Chiarichetti, David, Hollywood director: The career of Mitchell Leisen, 1973.

 

Cloarec, Nicole, Anne Hall et Xavier Lachazette, “The Enduring Appeal of Daphne Du 

    Maurier's Fiction. New Critical Perspectives”, Revue LISA, Vol. 19-n°52, 2021.  

    https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/13277

 

de la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo, “Homenaje a Arturo de Córdova”.  Catálogo del Festival 

    Internacional de Cine de Morelia, 2013.    

    https://catalogos.moreliafilmfest.com/pdf/catalogo_2013_1_3.pdf

 

Drabelle, Dennis, “Swing High, Swing Low: Mitchell Leisen in Perspective”. 

    Film Comment, September – October 1994.

 

Kelley, Richard Michael, Daphne Du Maurier, 1987.

 

Lippe, Richard, updated by John McCarty, “John Fontaine”. International Dictionary

     of Films and Filmmakers, 2000.

 

Sarris, Andrew, “Mitchell Leisen”. The American Cinema. Directors and Directions,

     1929 - 1968, 1968