Some comedies: then and now, here and there

Artheme Swallows his Clarinet

France, 1912
D. Ernest Servaès

This starts as a nice, plain piece of Onésime-like whimsy (as in Jean Durand's Onésime, Clockmaker [also France, also 1912 {find here: http://www.kinolorber.com/video.php?film_id=1206]}).  Artheme plays his instrument a little faster, and the film speeds up to show/enhance the effect of the music on the people.  Then this accident happens, and we leap from the conventionally comic into the shocking and the amazing.  This guy has been impaled by his wind instrument!  Through his mouth and out the back of his head!  The situation is preposterous—very nicely varied and developed, too—which is why it’s finally a comedy, and a really good one.  But the key special effect, or the prop-work or whatever you might call it is really stupendous, and it makes you think about other, more horrible things.  What if this really happened to someone?  What about the fact that it really looks like it really has?  It’s hilarious and horrific at the same time, and quite powerfully visceral.  And everyone laughs at him!  Look how director/star Servaès combines a sense of trauma with amusing comic bluster, or pique.  This can’t have been very calculated, but by happenstance they’ve done something really complex, and true.  You can be grievously injured and extremely annoyed at the same time.  People and situations are complex. 

There’s a climactic shot/scene where that guy doesn’t try to help, but instead just starts playing the clarinet, the other guy’s head notwithstanding.  Artheme is outraged, and then starts to respond to the music and the possibility of new and better musical opportunity.  Even better, the waves are whipping all the way across the back of this vivid, dynamic, panoramic frame.  Our puny sorrows, and then the elements.  The solution/conclusion is wonderfully symmetrical, equal in violence and outlandishness to the inciting injury or incident.  Someone grabs a sledgehammer and drives the offending instrument out the other way.  You can’t just dismiss or dispense with crassness, combining as it so often does humanity’s vulgar nerve and joyful genius.

Purchase: http://www.flickeralley.biz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=39&Itemid=39

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb3Rurdahk8

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend

US, 1949
Written and directed by Preston Sturges

This film is always pegged as being a near-last gasp from a once great filmmaker.  Well the scale is small, and everyone strains overly to shoot Porter Hall in the rear end for that third time at the film’s conclusion.  But mostly, where’s the decline?  If this isn’t prime Sturges, then it’s still clearly, satisfyingly, brilliantly Sturges.  Listen to that dialogue!  Look at that lovely cast of eccentrics—as usual, if you look closely, it’s actually a cast of diverse Americans that are accepted and valued for their variety and particularity.  (In other words, actual Jews.  Also, note the critique contained in this Conchita/San Juan character, or the fact that Cesar Romero is left to speak for his own intelligent and charismatic self, regardless of his actual ethnic roots).  Consider how Sturges' conspicuous intelligence is grounded by his joyful physical comedy.  Sturges might be forbiddingly quick, if it weren’t for the fact that pratfalls get everyone in the end.  Also, here’s some more, way more of his own unique form of superbly staged and genial chaos.  (We’re moving into real provocation here, as in the guy who gets shot off of that roof in exactly the same way four straight times, or the combatant having all that trouble at the horse trough.)  At the end of these remarkable cultural runs—Renoir, or Capra in the 1930s, Godard, or J. Lewis in the 1960s—we get all petty and complaint-prone.  And then what happens?  No one funds an able-bodied Orson Welles, and he doesn’t get a single thing done for the last fifteen years of his life.  Serves us right.

The prologue, in which Russell Simpson teaches his little granddaughter how to shoot things, is equal parts funny and tender.  It’s not just the casting that summons John Ford-like associations.  These too are legitimate pioneer roots.  Grable is lots of fun, a bit Betty Hutton (cf. Sturges, 1944).  I should mention the Basserman twins, as essayed by Sterling Holloway and Danny Jackson.  They are quite shockingly unhinged.  It might even be a directorial lapse, an inconsistency or overreach that should have been tempered a bit.  Good thing that it wasn’t, though; they’re quite amazing, a two/red-headed explosion of comic id that almost seems to threaten the entire institution.  These sections, as well as the contributions of their slightly comical/really malevolent father, actually prefigure what Sam Peckinpah would end up doing to the Western.  Look out!

Sturges: clearly literate, and a smoker to boot

A Town Called Panic 

Belgium, 2009

Written and directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar

This is a completely delightful, almost totally unhinged film.  It’s also a lovely demonstration of how powerful suspended disbelief can be, particularly when the tale-spinner does his part.  It never occurred to us to question or object, despite the patent preposterousness of the erstwhile story, or the ridiculous figure animation.  One of the reasons, of course, is that realism is overrated, or just one strategy among many.  This was doubtless a commercial vehicle, but it also doubles nicely as an example of how and why modernism works.  They completely pulverize the fourth wall, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any conceptual or relational plausibilities.   

We were also happy to go along because this is so very imaginative, and so imaginatively executed.  What a great world!  What wonderful defiance of familiar physical and narrative laws.  What terrific design.  The repeated robberies are ridiculous, but they are also beautifully distributed, varied, advanced and resolved.  The centre of the earth section is fabulous.  Where on earth did those malicious mute scientists come from, with their juggernaut mechanized giant penguin?  (See what I mean?)  What about this music school?  One could go on and enumerate a ton of quirky delights. 

The thing that makes this really great, though, is that the madness has firm roots.  There’s profligate imagination, but every flight of fancy is scrupulously and artfully rendered.  The inciting incident is hilarious—coffee and computers, and the tens column—but what follows has an admirable internal logic, or inevitability.  (This brick thing is actually a really nice analogy for the cheerful, well-meaning destructiveness of decent capitalism.)  Notice also that we’ve got a loving parent figure (horse) and his well-meaning, mess-making young charges (cowboy and Indian).  The details of their domesticity are funny for their unexpectedness or absurdity, but they’re also sweet for the way they suggest mutually developed patterns of affection, interaction and domestic management. 

Bricks

Similarly, notice the underplayed, palpable warmth of this little community.  Neighbours Jean-Paul and Janine are funny, but they’re also a slightly exaggerated and very wise example of an affectionate, mutually tolerant middle-aged couple.  Look at that great birthday party, the hint of savagery as alcohol threatens, and then the kindly resolution.  Horse and Madame Longrée’s ridiculous romance also has a pretty plausibility about it.  The conclusion is world-destroyingly violent, and it leads easily to reconciliation and restitution.  This might be because, in the end, every object and character here is a toy.  It’s Winnie the Pooh, or Hobbes, or H.C. Andersen’s animated objects.  This is imaginative play, superb scaffolding by gifted adults.  Follow it with baths and prayers and being tucked in, sweetly and safely.

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