Category: 1932

I Was Born, But… (1932)

Yasujirō Ozu | 1hr 31min

The lingering cadence which brings the film title I Was Born, But… to an open-ended ellipsis seems to raise a question. The simple innocence that comes with infancy doesn’t hang around for particularly long after we venture beyond our family homes – so as children, what might we expect from a world that contains power dynamics far more complex than our immature minds can comprehend? Through Yasujirō Ozu’s patient eyes, this deliberation only deepens with age, not so much granting answers as it reveals the sheer commonality of imbalanced relationships through all stages of life. With gentle humour and formal acuity, I Was Born, But… contemplates such social patterns across two generations of a Japanese family, and delicately ponders the potential to break its pitiful cycles.

Brothers Keiji and Ryoichi are virtually copies of each other here, disorientated by their family’s sudden relocation to the Tokyo suburbs and sudden enrolment in a new school, yet still finding the time to get tangled up in mischief. Still working in the realm of silent cinema, Ozu borrows the light-hearted deadpan of Hollywood’s early comedians to pace their story, pitting the two boys against a local gang and their leader Taro who scares them away from attending school. With their father Chichi setting high academic expectations, they spend the day forging homework and grades to escape his ire – so it is unfortunate indeed that he remains well-informed through his boss Iwasaki, Taro’s father.

At least with the help of older delivery boy Kozou, Keiji and Ryoichi are able to gain some ground against their bully, even forming somewhat of a friendly rivalry with him and his cronies. “My dad’s got lots of suits,” one boy competitively proclaims. “My dad’s car is fancier” and “My dad’s the most important,” the others pile on, trying to raise their own status through association with their fathers. At Iwasaki and Taro’s home video night though, it quickly becomes clear whose is most definitively not at the top of the pecking order.

At this gathering, a whole new world of office politics is revealed to the brothers. As adults and children sit down to watch Iwasaki’s recordings, Chichi’s stern, authoritative image dissolves in their eyes, replaced by that of a clownish buffoon sucking up to his boss. “You tell us to become somebody, but you’re nobody!” they rebuke, and all of a sudden Ozu brings into focus the incredible similarities between their respective worlds.

After all, the social and economic barriers which afflict one generation is not so easily cast off by the younger, particularly given the recent relocation both parents and children have been equally affected by. As they walk through their relatively barren neighbourhood, Ozu frequently passes trains through the background, breaking up flat plains with these huge, industrial icons of modernity. Class and status are not merely defined by human relationships – they are right there in their humble surroundings, ever-present in transitory cutaways to telegraph poles and hanging laundry.

The foundations of Ozu’s pillow shots are evidently being laid in I Was Born, But…, though even more pervasive is his subtle yet purposeful positioning of the camera, taking the perspective of a child by setting it no more than just a few feet above the ground. Adults tower over us from this angle, and when Chichi’s disillusioned sons destroy his ego, he too sinks low in the frame to meet us where we sit. His humiliation is felt even further in the Ozu’s visual divisions, isolating him in windows and doorways, and once again affirming the extraordinary artistic mind which would eventually perfect the art of developing character through mise-en-scène.

Much more unusual for Ozu is the proliferation of tracking shots on display here, rolling past workers and students alike as they write at their desks. The formal parallels between generations continue to reveal themselves in this stylistic device, trapping both in rigid institutions which require submissive compliance from their subjects, though it is also there where Chichi and his sons diverge in their responses.

Disappointed that their father does not model the same upstanding behaviour he preaches, Keiji and Ryoichi attempt a hunger strike, sitting in the garden and turning their backs to the house. Ozu’s comedy is not patronising, but nevertheless finds levity in the brothers’ endearing synchronicity, eventually giving in to their mother’s rice balls and even opening up to their father once again. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” he tenderly asks, taking a seat next to them. “A lieutenant general,” Keiji responds, reasoning that he can’t be a full lieutenant since that will be Ryoichi’s job. Even if Chichi isn’t the perfect image of a respected family man, still there remains a childlike hope that their spirits will not be crushed in the same way.

Then again, can we really judge a father based on the subjective opinions of their children? “Who’s got the best dad, you or us?” Ryoichi asks Taro, continuing their petty competition. “You do,” his new friend answers after some hesitation. “No, you do,” Ryoichi responds in confusion – but really, the different is negligible. These men and boys are simply doing their best navigating the pressures of families and peers, trying to find external validation while remaining true to themselves, and it is there where Ozu grants individuals of all ages equal understanding. Within the messy entanglement of power and status, the formal mirroring of I Was Born, But… reveals that conflict at the root of our common insecurities, as well as the sweet, liberating affirmation we never stop pursuing from infancy through adulthood.

I Was Born, But… is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Vampyr (1932)

Carl Theodor Dreyer | 1hr 15min

Caught in the transition from silent to sound film, Carl Theodor Dreyer constructs a peculiar aberration of a horror film in Vampyr, absorbing us into a waking nightmare that only occasionally disrupts its eerie quiet with isolated lines of dialogue. Though it is a work of primal, symbolic imagery, it still presents exposition to us through intertitles, lifting passages from the book that occult fanatic Allan Gray is given at the start of the film – “The Strange History of Vampires.” Accounts of these creatures’ enslaved victims and mortal weaknesses are divulged here, guiding Allan through a supernatural conspiracy located in the castles and villages of rural France, and weaving an astoundingly cryptic allegory of European fascism.

Still, Vampyr cannot be so easily reduced to its plot or politics, both being relatively minimal compared to Dreyer’s hallucinatory dreamscape of shadows and shapes. While directors like James Whale and Tod Browning were establishing genre conventions within 1930s Universal monster movies, Dreyer’s horror was holding his audience at an obscure distance, calling on existential fears of violated self-agency repressed deep in our subconscious. If any stylistic comparison is to be made, then Vampyr draws on a heavy influence from F.W. Murnau’s silent expressionism, referencing the Gothic iconography of Nosferatu and traversing intricate sets in steady, measured camera movements like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Conversely, the dark spirituality interrogated here would also prove foundational to Ingmar Bergman’s severe minimalism a couple of decades later, sinking the warped souls of humanity into a lifeless, misty greyscale.

Vampyr was caught in the transition from silent to sound film, and with such little dialogue Dreyer’s visual storytelling excels, following Allan Grey through his investigation of supernatural conspiracies.
There is an air of historic French nobility in the paintings and wallpapers of Vampyr’s interiors, using iconography as backdrops to the horror.

As for Dreyer himself, Vampyr marks an odd follow-up to The Passion of Joan of Arc, shifting from an aesthetic primarily consisting of close-ups to intricate wide shots composed with haunting precision. Interiors come alive with dancing shadows cast by invisible beings, while spoked wheels, curved scythes, and clawed angels imprint geometric shapes on giant canvases of negative space. Being shot on location in the pastoral commune of Courtempierre, much of the architecture here is authentically carved from stone and wood, and the sparsely patterned wallpaper of fleur-de-lis subtly infuses the setting with an air of historic French nobility too.

Shadows are like ghosts, moving independently of humans as if with lives of their own.
Dreyer’s stark, minimalist mise-en-scène is an enormous visual achievement, using simple shapes and lighting to compose his frames.
Expressionism in darkened silhouettes and angular shapes, setting in a psychological horror through haunting iconography.

Even Dreyer’s characters frequently appear ornamental to his mise-en-scène, striking vivid poses and expressions in true silent cinema fashion. Our two main villains, the vampire Marguerite Chopin and the ghostly Lord of the Manor, are both withered old crones preying on the vitality of youth, which Dreyer archetypally represents here in the innocent Léone and her virginal white robes. After she is found wandering the castle grounds in a daze with a pair of bite marks on her neck, she begins acting erratically, baring her teeth in a sinister grin as her gaze mysteriously drifts across the ceiling. For our leading man Allan, it is his wide, curious eyes that capture our attention, and which also become the filter through which Vampyr’s second half is distorted into surreal visions of skeletons and corpses.

Quite unusually, Dreyer’s primary vampire is not a man but an old woman – a decrepit being preying on the vitality of youth
It’s not quite The Passion of Joan of Arc, but the close-ups used here are powerful, lingering on the possessed Léone’s face as her eyes drift across the ceiling with a creepy, toothy grin.
A landmark of early surrealism, bringing the dead to life in Allan’s dreams.

It is here that the influence on Bergman becomes even more apparent, particularly in Allan’s nightmarish discovery of his own body in a coffin which mirrors a strikingly similar dream in Wild Strawberries. Dreyer’s avant-garde experimentations express a deep mortal terror, lifting our hero outside of his body through an eerie double exposure effect, and directly taking his point-of-view from inside a coffin as he is carried to a grave and buried.

A clever and fitting use of double exposure when Allan undergoes an out-of-body experience, encountering his own corpse as it is carried away in a coffin.
Heavily subjective camerawork as we peer out the top of Allan’s coffin from the point-of-view of his dead body.

If there is any hope to be found in this bleak scenery, then it is smothered by the dense, grey clouds observed in Dreyer’s formal cutaways, holding back the daylight from reaching the village. Only when Allan eventually drives a large, metal stake through Marguerite’s heart do sunrays begin to pour through, beckoning him across a foggy river with a rescued Léone to a bright clearing on the other side. At the end of a long, dubious path of existential horrors, Allan finds love, heroism, and salvation, and yet it is only by exploring his nightmares that any of this was made possible to begin with. Whether Dreyer’s horror is to be interpreted as a political allegory, a spiritual fable, or merely a hypnotic progression of expressionistic images, Vampyr is designed to lull us into the same impressionable state as its victims, eerily calling upon our own subconscious desire for complete, psychological submission to the darkness.

Excellent parallel editing in the climactic defeat of the villain, evoking the torture room scene from The Passion of Joan of Arc with the spinning wheels and cogs.
Formal cutaways to a cloudy sky, concealing the sunlight trying to break through.
Allan finally makes it to a bright, sunny clearing – a holy sanctuary within the natural world.

Vampyr is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the Blu-ray can be purchased on Amazon.

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Erle C. Kenton | 1hr 11min

Science-fiction was still a relatively young genre in the 1930s when Universal Pictures’ monster movies were flourishing, not quite distinct yet from the horror conventions it emerged from, but still carving out its own speculative concerns of man playing God. It makes sense then why the studio looked to H.G. Welles’ The Island of Dr. Moreau for inspiration in this field. The ‘father of science-fiction’ wrote novels that have now essentially become fables for an industrial, modern world, and in Erle C. Kenton’s despairingly grotesque Island of Lost Souls, his cautionary tale of interfering with nature is immortalised as one of the greatest film adaptations of his work. Dr. Moreau’s twisted biological experiments become a source of barbaric horror here, but perhaps even more terrifying than his creations is the egotistic scientist himself, played by an enormously pompous Charles Laughton whose crisp, white suit and stout figure projects an image of immense wealth, uninhibited by worldly human ethics.

A mere five years after working on F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, cinematographer Karl Struss carries visual cues from German expressionism over into his work on Island of Lost Souls, infusing Kenton’s jungle sets with an air of quiet dread. These are not like those which would feature in King Kong a year later, where the wilderness becomes a giant playground for apes and dinosaurs, but instead his dense foliage and imposing branches press in on his actors and obstruct gorgeously composed shots. Likewise, the interior of Moreau’s menacingly named “House of Pain” is designed like a Gothic nightmare, seeing Struss frequently shoot characters from behind the bars of the scientist’s steel cages.

Kenton returns to this frame a few times, shooting it almost like a portal between the outside world and Moreau’s island.
Bars all around Moreau’s compound, used to superbly expressionistic effect as visual obstructions and shadows.

It is from the thick, white fog surrounding Moreau’s island that a freighter ship emerges carrying our hero, Edward Parker, who has been reluctantly stranded with these men delivering animals to the secretive scientist. Silhouettes with unidentifiable features crowd the shot in the foreground, anxiously anticipating the arrival of outsiders, though it isn’t long before see them in full. What most people assume to be the strange-looking natives of this island, we recognise as Moreau’s mutated experiments, living under his cruel dominion which they call the “Law.” As they stare down the camera, Kenton reveals the fine detail of their makeup and prosthetics, covering bodies in coarse hair and squashing noses flat against faces. Bela Lugosi may not be instantly recognisable playing their leader, the Sayer of the Law, but his voice certainly is, heading their call-and-response mantra of “Are we not men?” as a sad reminder of their half-lives.

Kenton piles on the chilling terror with these daunting close-ups, revealing the fine details of the beasts’ make-up and prosthetics.

Edward’s arrival on the island is timely for Dr. Moreau, who is ready to progress his experiment to the next stage – testing the breeding capabilities of his hybrids with people. Lota’s mannerisms are primitive, but she is the most human-looking of the bunch, and as the only female, she is hand-picked to ingratiate herself with Edward. Like the rest of the scientist’s test subjects though, her existence is sad and pitiful, confused over her identity while longing to partner with this new, intriguing man.

Unfortunately for Moreau, the ability to complete the transformation of beast to human continues to elude him, and when his work is threatened by outsiders, he is eventually pushed to break his own Law – blood must be spilt for the good of his island’s future. It is ironically that malevolent act which exposes his hypocrisy to his creations, whose rebellion brings about the end of his judicious order. Once again, they crowd in on the camera, though this time in a frenzy which sees them revert to their primal, bestial selves, turning their master’s tools back on him in his House of Pain.

“You made us things! Not men! Not beasts! Part man! Part beast! Things!”

They aren’t close-ups, but Kenton still directs his actors to stare right down the camera in marvellously staged compositions like this.

Transcending the natural order is a dangerous game in H.G. Welles’ science-fiction, and Kenton extends this contemplative speculation to full-blown expressionistic horror with his translation of this powerful fable to screen. Mortal deities like Moreau may thrive on their artificial empires for a time, and yet within Island of Lost Souls, those who know what it’s like to be God are also doomed to crumble beneath the weight of their own selfish, conceited ambition.

Island of Lost Souls is not currently streaming in Australia.

Love Me Tonight (1932)

Rouben Mamoulian | 1hr 29min

In the romantic, fairy tale world of Love Me Tonight, it isn’t a stretch to believe that a poor tailor could disguise himself as a baron, infiltrate a wealthy Parisian family, and still marry the princess after his lie is exposed. This is a story based in age-old archetypes, written as broadly as any fable about aristocrats falling for commoners, and yet Rouben Mamoulian’s cinematic translation of these conventions carries a narrative dexterity and formal texture unlike so many other films of its ilk. Blowing in the wind, we find music passing through cities, country sides, and castles, and in its infectious lyrical motifs Mamoulian imbues it with a mystical power that transcends class barriers and unites distant characters under rousing expressions of love.

The first time we witness such a phenomenon in Love Me Tonight is during the musical number ‘Isn’t it Romantic’, a song so immortalised in hundreds of covers that its origins here are easily forgotten. The beauty of this soundtrack shouldn’t be a surprise though – this is one of the relatively few times that musical theatre composer Richard Rodgers wrote an original score for film rather than the stage, even though many of his later theatrical collaborations with Oscar Hammerstein II such as Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music would eventually find their own adaptations to the silver screen.

Grand set designs and shadows blowing these emotions up to wondrous heights.

Here, Rodgers relishes the flow of his verses as they are picked up by major and minor characters alike, starting with our strapping young protagonist, Maurice, in his humble tailor shop. There, he sits in front of a trifold mirror and cheerily sings to his reflections like a one-man quartet, while Mamoulian’s camera eagerly pans back and forth between each. As he finishes, the melody leaves the building with a customer, only to be passed on to a chauffeur, his passenger, a platoon of French soldiers, and a homeless camp not far from Princess Jeanette’s balcony, where she delicately brings the song to its final verse. Such elegant fluidity is present not just in the music, but Mamoulian equally instils it in his editing, camera movement, and staging as well, and further solidifies these agile ensemble pieces as part of the film’s form in several other numbers too.

‘Isn’t it Romantic’ is infectiously passed between characters, transitioning smoothly from Maurice to Jeanette, and foreshadowing their impending romance.

Perhaps making this musical achievement even more remarkable is that Love Me Tonight falls a mere five years after the first feature sound film, The Jazz Singer, another movie-musical that, despite being a technological landmark, possesses far less artistic ambition than Mamoulian’s work. Rather than contextualising Rodgers’ songs here as conventionally isolated performances, they are instead woven into the very form of the narrative itself, demonstrating an effortless navigation of film’s transition to sound that so many other films stumbled over. Even in the middle of scenes, rhymes will occasionally start flowing from the actors’ lips, expressing eloquent sentiments that can no longer be contained within ordinary prose.

“A needle is magnetic.”

“How true.”

“And how poetic.”

In this way, music and romance unite to become forces larger than any single character. Even before Maurice and Jeanette are introduced, Mamoulian composes his own ‘Song of Paris’ through the polyrhythmic pulse of the city waking up, like an instrumental precursor to ‘Little Town’ from Beauty and the Beast. The opening of shutters, the sweep of a broom, and the puff of a chimney join the multitude of other sounds in this percussive symphony, building in texture and pace along with the accelerating montage towards Maurice’s introduction. Played with insurmountable charm by Maurice Chevalier, who incidentally gave his own name to the character, this cheerful tailor strides down the street towards his shop with a spring in his step, and as he greets his neighbours, Mamoulian sweeps us up in long takes gliding by his side.

The ‘Song of Paris’ displaying an astounding coordination of editing and musical composition, building an entire city out of its percussive sounds.

It is only when Maurice meets Jeanette though that the romantic longing which has pervaded Love Me Tonight settles into something truly intimate, with the song ‘Mimi’ unfolding purely through close-ups of both actors staring right into the camera. The passionate visuals only heighten from there, with long dissolves romantically bridging a loving embrace to a cloudy moonlit sky, and diagonally splitting the frame between alternate shots of their sleeping, smiling faces. Such an alluring style does not come without a good dose of comedy either, as Maurice’s request for a band of men on horses to quietly depart on “tip-toe” sees them comically ride away in slow-motion.

‘Mimi’ shot predominantly through elegant close-ups in our first run-in between Maurice and Jeanette.
Inspired editing through long dissolves and split screens. Big choices for 1930s cinema, but still so artistically potent today.

It is also somewhat amusing to see what may very well be the origin of the rom-com trope that sends one lover climactically chasing after the other to confess their love, though as it plays here, it does not feel worn-out or tired. Instead, it fits in just as nicely with the rest of this folk tale as every other romance narrative convention, playing to the raw yearning that seeps through every scene, and Mamoulian even lifts it to another level with a skilful display of suspenseful, parallel editing most certainly influenced by D.W. Griffith. With a tale of “Once upon a time” and “they lived happily ever after” punctuating the ending, Love Me Tonight cements itself as one of cinema’s great fairy tales, blending musical and cinematic style to revel in the stirring universality of love.

Maurice’s departure wearing away at Jeanette’s psyche, and Mamoulian once again returns to these beautiful long dissolves to illustrate this distressed emotional state.
A D.W. Griffith influence in this display of parallel editing, driving Love Me Tonight towards a reconciliation between its lovers.

Love Me Tonight is not currently streaming in Australia.

Scarface (1932)

Howard Hawks | 1hr 33min

While Howard Hawks can’t take full responsibility for initiating the gangster film, we can at least give him credit for solidifying it as a genre before the Production Code cut its legs out from under it in the mid-1930s. It wouldn’t be until the emergence of New Hollywood directors like Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese in the 1970s that there was any serious revival in the United States, and another decade or so before Brian de Palma directed his remake of this film. But for a long time, it was Hawks’ Scarface which reigned supreme as the peak of the genre, setting an early standard for the sort of anti-hero we so often keep coming back to.

Tony Camonte’s arc is less of a character study than that of Tony Montana’s in de Palma’s version, but instead Hawks is far more interested in the world and legend that is built around such a threatening figure as this. The two films hit similar beats in their character journeys, playing on Freudian archetypes of the Madonna-whore complex in Tony’s relationship with his sister, as well as the murder of his boss to become the new drug kingpin in town. But Camonte is ultimately a more cowardly creature than Montana. Rather than madly going out all guns blazing in his final moments after his sister is shot, he completely breaks down. As a final gut punch, she calls him out for this weakness with her dying breath.

“I don’t want to stay. You’re afraid.”

Camonte collapsing under pressure in his final minutes, his true cowardice revealed.

Of course, this is a side of Camonte that only comes out behind closed doors under extreme pressure. The word on the street and in the newspapers paints him out as a larger-than-life figure – loathed by some, revered by others, but feared by all. So much of the gang warfare we see carried out is in short, sharp bursts of gunshots that are over within a few seconds, and target victims who are often dead before they even realise what’s happening.

Between these spurts of violence, Hawks is patient with his narrative. In the very first shot of the film, we slowly roll from the dark streets of 1920s Chicago into a nightclub after hours. Inside, crime boss Louis Costillo is wrapping up some private business with associates, and Hawks is sure to clutter every inch of his mise-en-scene with furniture, plants, and streamers. As Costillo makes a phone call, we suddenly detach from him. Our eye is caught by a shadow, moving slowly and quietly across a wall, which then turns into a silhouette behind a screen. All it takes is three gunshots from this mysterious intruder to kill Costillo, and to pay off on the masterful suspense of Hawks’ three-minute long take which introduced us to this dirty underworld.

A three-minute long take rolling from the street into a club, and ending with this terrifying assassination lit behind a screen.

To rewind a little, it is worth noting that at the start of this tracking shot, Hawks opens on the image of a street sign forming a cross shape at its intersection with the post. Though we don’t know it yet, X’s are harbingers of death in this film, marking characters who are destined to die. Scorsese surely would have had Scarface in mind when he used the exact same motif in The Departed, and Hawks is at least his equal here in the creative ways he works it into his mise-en-scène. Everything from lights, shadows, wooden roof beams, apartment numbers, and even a strike at a bowling alley seems to ominously brand each of Camonte’s targets, building tension each time by warning us of impending murders. But of course, the greatest use of this motif lies right in the film’s very title – the small, X-shaped scar on Camonte’s left cheek, marking him for dead right from the very start.

A brilliant dedication to a motif, as Hawks uses X’s all through his lighting and sets to mark characters for dead.

With that small wound, slicked back hair, and wild, angry eyes, Paul Muni strikes an intimidating figure that any newspaper would surely milk to fuel their own fear-mongering parade. But as the Chief of Detectives points out, even with that tone of dread that is attached to Camonte’s name, there is also an awe that surrounds him.

“That’s the attitude of too many morons in this country. They think these hoodlums are some sort of demigods. What do they know about a guy like Camonte? They sentimentalise him, romance. Make jokes about him. They had some excuse for glorifying our old western bad men. They met in the middle of the street at high noon, and wait for each other to draw. But these things sneak up and shoot a guy in the back, and then run away.”

One of the great performances of the 1930s – Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, leering and scowling all throughout.

In drawing this comparison to the “bad men” of the previous century, Hawks paints out an America in decline. Violence has always been a mainstay in world history, but in this new era where a coward like Camonte can reign supreme, it is conducted with secrecy and treachery, thereby repressing our most honest expressions of humanity. In wrapping up these ideas into a patient, brooding narrative, and then intermittently rupturing it with acts of brutality, Hawks effectively cuts right to the menacing heart of the gangster genre.

The real-life St. Valentine’s Day Massacre hauntingly captured in these shadows.

Scarface is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.