Between these poles of man and woman, however, there is Père Jules (Michel Simon), master of the boat. It is surely the mark of Vigos greatness as an artist that his imagination could project itself fully into both the heterosexual ideal and the fluid identity of this inspired madman. Jules is a multiple being, man and woman, child and adult, friend and lover, without boundariesat one point even visually doubled as he wrestles himself. He is a living text covered with extravagant tattoos; he is the cinematic apparatus itself, able to produce sound from records with his magically electrified finger. Jules is Vigos Surrealist sensibility incarnated by Simon, an astonishingly anarchic, instinctual performer.
Vigo develops and deepens the formal explorations of his previous film Zero for Conduct (1933). From silent, burlesque cinema and René Clair he borrows a parade gag for his prologue: stuffed shirts at the couples funeral filing past the camera, gradually becoming faster until they are an unruly, disheveled mob. Aboard the boat, Vigo finds his beloved aquarium spaces: enclosed rooms filled with cats, oddities, and wonders (as in Juless cabin devoted to exotic bric-a-brac). On deck, he uses ghostly, nocturnal lighting. Unifying the film is a superb rhythmic and expressive tone.
Vigos death at the age of twenty-nine was a tragic loss. But LAtalante crowns his legacyand is there any scene in cinema sexier than the magnificent, Eisensteinian montage of Jeans and Juliettes bodies, far apart, matched in postures of mutual arousal, an act of love made possible only through the soulful language of film? AM
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1930s
THE BLACK CAT (1934)
U.S. (Universal) 65m BW
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Producer: Carl Laemmle Jr.
Screenplay: Edgar G. Ulmer, from the story House of Doom by Edgar Allan Poe
Photography: John J. Mescall
Music: James Huntley, Heinz Roemheld
Music: Tchaikovsky, Liszt
Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Julie Bishop, Lucille Lund, Egon Brecher, Harry Cording, Henry Armetta, Albert Conti
The first screen teaming of the great monster stars of the 1930s, Boris Karloff (top-billed simply as KARLOFF) and Bela Lugosi, The Black Cat is at once the most perverse and the artiest of the original run of Universal horror pictures, informed by the strange sensibilities of director Edgar G. Ulmerbeginning to seesaw between high art and poverty rowand poetic pulp screenwriter Peter Ruric.
Based on Edgar Allan Poes story only in concept, The Black Cat feels like the last German Expressionist horror film, with a tale of diabolism, revenge, necrophilia, betrayal, and bad manners set in a modernist castle (a rare instance of up-to-date Gothic) built by widows-peaked Satanist-cum-architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) atop the mass grave of the soldiers he betrayed to the enemy during World War I. Horror-style honeymooners David Manners and Jacqueline Wells are almost comically out of their depth, the templates for Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), as unwilling houseguests
caught between Poelzig, who has his mistresses preserved like waxworks in cases in the cellar, and the vengeance-obsessed Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), who winds up the odd chessgame plot by skinning the villain alive before the castle is blown up. Deliberately outrageous but also a tease, Karloffs elegantly delivered rituals are all commonplace clichés (cum granulo salis) delivered in a lisping Latin. KN
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1930s
JUDGE PRIEST (1934)
U.S. (Fox) 80m BW
Director: John Ford
Producer: Sol M. Wurtzel
Screenplay: Irvin S. Cobb, Dudley Nichols
Photography: George Schneiderman
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge, Emil Gerstenberger, Samuel Kaylin
Cast: Will Rogers, Tom Brown, Anita Louise, Henry B. Walthall, David Landau, Rochelle Hudson, Roger Imhof, Frank Melton, Charley Grapewin, Berton Churchill, Brenda Fowler, Francis Ford, Hattie McDaniel, Stepin Fetchit
John Ford won his first Oscar for the prestigious and ponderous The Informer (1935), but this lesser-known work, released the previous year, has dated much better, despite its rambling structure, thick sentimentality, and flagrant lack of political correctness. Billy Priest (Will Rogers), magistrate of an 1890 Kentucky town, helps his nephew marry the right girl and foils an unjust legal action against a secretive blacksmith. The plot is secondary to a series of skits (many involving the discredited but brilliant black comedian Stepin Fetchit), songs, running gags, muttered asides, and incidental characters that evoke an idealized Old South community where pomposity is deflated, intolerance is kept in check, and blacks and whites coexist in sun-dappled harmony.
There are several inside references and general parallels that link Judge Priests director with its eponymous hero, who brings the audience to order in the precredits shot, allows digression rather than procedure to rule his courtroom, and shamelessly manipulates the spectators emotions by arranging for a band to play Dixie at a crucial point in the trial. Judge Priest is one of the loveliest visions of innocence ever put on the American screen, and Judge Ford judiciously reminds us just how much artifice is necessary to make legend prevail over fact. MR