PRINCE POPPYCOCK

Does this sound familiar? You have stuff to do. Important Stuff. Then you turn on TCM. And a movie is playing that you have seen many times and you think, okay, I don't need to watch this one again. And then comes a scene you love. And then another. One hundred some-odd minutes later, you are sitting there realizing you haven't done a thing you were supposed to, but you don't care.


Body and Soul. The Siren didn't need to see it again, but then again, she did. The first time she saw it, she loved John Garfield. The second through third or fourth time, James Wong Howe's cinematography killed her. Has there ever been a fight sequence better than the finale? Raging Bull quotes its every aspect, ramps up the realism, sends the blood and sweat flying, but still can't touch it.

But this time the Siren watched, and Canada Lee tore her heart out of her chest. Lee's character, Ben, serves as the ethical anchor for Garfield's ambitious fighter. That wasn't a new role for African Americans in the movies; Mammy serves the same purpose in Gone with the Wind. The role of the black angel on the white character's shoulder persists to this day, as a matter of fact. But Lee reaches beyond the character, to meet Garfield as another man, equally yearning for success, equally bitter about his treatment. Ben's description of what it was like to win a fight, to walk down Lenox Avenue and bask in the admiration, becomes a window into the yearnings of all people for respect. What a shot of adrenaline it must have been in 1947, to see a black man form a genuine friendship with a white man on screen.

What the Siren wouldn't give to see Lee's stage performances as Bigger Thomas or Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi.

As a belated Martin Luther King Day post, or early for Black History Month, a bit about the great, tragic Canada Lee. Here is Otto Friedrich:

He became an actor, a passionate actor at a time when blacks were supposed to be amusing...nobody ever forgot seeing him as the punch-drunk fighter in Garfield's Body and Soul. Shortly after that, his name appeared in the mass of hearsay flushed out of the FBI files in the course of the spy trial of Judith Conlon. 'The drivel that has come from the so-called secret files of the FBI,' Lee called it at a press conference in 1949. 'I am not a Communist...I shall continue to help my people gain their rightful place in America.'

That's what they all said. The next time Canada Lee came up for a TV role, he was barred by the sponsor, the American Tobacco Company. Over the next three years, he was barred from about forty shows. 'How long, how long can a man take this kind of unfair treatment?' he asked the editors of Variety.

It was only a temporary reprieve, and the curtain came down again. 'I can't take it any more,' Lee told Walter White of the NAACP after a few more months of unemployment. 'I'm going to get a shoeshine box and sit outside the Astor Theater. My picture is playing to capacity audiences and, my God, I can't get one day's work.' White counseled caution and patience, and Lee, all full of rage and desperation, accepted that counsel. A few months later he was dead, of high blood pressure, at forty-five.

Mademoiselle Fifi doesn't get much love from various Internet critics, in French or in English, but the Siren enjoyed it. Perhaps that's because she saw it not as a Val Lewton mood piece, nor yet as a Resistance allegory, but as a woman's picture and a passable (albeit considerably cleaned-up) take on Guy de Maupassant, who happens to be one of the Siren's favorite French writers.*

The film combines the Maupassant short story "Mademoiselle Fifi" with his even more famous "Boule de Suif," which is generally thought to be the genesis of the tale that became Stagecoach. A coach filled with well-to-do passengers is making its way from Rouen to Dieppe just after the Franco-Prussian war. The one working-class passenger is Elizabeth de Rousset (Simone Simon), a "little laundress" as she is billed in the credits. That's one big divergence from Maupassant, as the original heroine is a large prostitute (hence Boule de Suif, literally ball of fat). During a stopover at an inn, the proudly patriotic Rousset is spotted by a Prussian officer, Lieutenant von Eyrick, nicknamed Mademoiselle Fifi. The officer asks her to "dine" with him. (As you can imagine, in the Frenchman's story he wants a wee bit more than that.) She refuses; he detains the coach. The passengers talk her into dining with him, then make it clear that they despise her for doing so. But the villainous Fifi hasn't done with our heroic laundress yet.

What's interesting in the film isn't the direction or the look of the thing. It's hard to believe Val Lewton and Robert Wise made the shimmering Curse of the Cat People that same year, and the pedestrian direction forms rather a good argument for Gunther von Fritsch's greater influence on Curse. Only a nighttime chase sequence near the end seems to have much of the visual sense of Lewton productions--darkness, echoing footsteps, the dread of what you are not seeing. That scene is also quite sexy in a suppressed, embrace-in-the-shadows way that the Siren identifies with Lewton. Otherwise the film has a rather standard period look, although that in itself is an accomplishment. In the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, Martin Scorsese notes dryly that Mademoiselle Fifi has the "dubious distinction" of being the cheapest period film ever made to that point. The Siren's sleuthing puts the budget at a minuscule $200,000. (The ever-great John McElwee has precise figures here at Greenbriar Picture Shows. Despite the low budget, poor Mademoiselle Fifi still didn't turn a profit.) But true to Lewton's ability to get visual bang for the buck, the movie doesn't look that cheap. The one "uh-oh" moment is a drive through snowy countryside that looks like exactly what it is--a California national park, about as French as a redwood forest.

Surprisingly for an era where mangled adaptations were even more common than today, Mademoiselle Fifi adheres quite closely to Maupassant in many regards, even to keeping some dialogue almost word-for-word. Lewton was, by all accounts, a cultivated man with a high regard for literature and the screenwriters Josef Mischel and Peter Ruric treated the stories with respect. Aside from the changes mentioned above, the character of the bogus revolutionary Cordunet (John Emery) is made sympathetic, turned into a love interest capable of being inspired by Elizabeth's heroism. But many Maupassant moments fit nicely into a World War II anti-Nazi allegory. There's the scene, for example, where the Germans fill a teapot with gunpowder for the childish, barbaric enjoyment of blowing a beautiful room's interior to smithereens. That's straight out of the original "Mademoiselle Fifi," with a Hollywood line to whack us all with the symbolism: put enough powder in "to destroy the furnishings, and leave us the room," orders Fifi. Despite his character's ludicrous nickname Kurt Kreuger, the chiseled blond who pops up in many a 1940s Nazi movie, poses more of a real threat than Maupassant's short, effeminate officer, and the movie gives him a psychopathic sidekick for good measure.

The movie retains the anti-bourgeois bite of the short stories, in part by adding lines to make sure no one could possibly miss the point. "Rich people don't seem to like little laundresses, or liberals," observes Cordunet early on, when he and Elizabeth are being snubbed by the other passsengers. Elizabeth understands: "At the laundry they always said it was much harder for the rich to be patriotic." One wonders how this screenplay escaped HUAC's notice later on, since the dialogue's at least as revolutionary as Tender Comrade. One Maupassant touch, however, didn't survive: his anti-clericalism. The hypocritical nuns of "Boule de Suif" are jettisoned, their place in the coach taken by the sympathetic priest from "Mademoiselle Fifi." And in the latter story, the heroic prostitute is a Jew, something the screenwriters also eliminated. Given what the world was beginning to find out in 1944, the Siren wonders why that aspect was scrubbed.

So, we have comparatively unexciting visuals and a Resistance melodrama plot. What, other than her delight at finding favorite bits of Maupassant still in the film, made the Siren like this movie? It's the same thing that makes her like Lewton's movies in general--not just the atmosphere of dread and suspense, but the complex, dynamic treatment of women. A Lewton film fleshes out its heroine in distress. She doesn't just simper in one scene, scream in the next. She is an active agent of her own fate, for good or ill, whether trying to bring back the wife of the man she loves, clean up an insane asylum, escape an ancient curse, or even, as in The Seventh Victim, avidly pursuing evil itself.

Simone Simon as Elizabeth embodies this active quality quite well. She is by far the most principled character in the movie, and she comes into peril only when she allows weaker people to gain influence. In movies, as unfortunately across cultures and centuries, a woman's chastity is drafted into maintaining the purity of all sorts of things that really should take care of themselves--country, race, family. In Mademoiselle Fifi, yes, the heroine stands in for France. She's her own woman for all that, resisting the movie's onrushing allegory even as she resists the leering von Eyrick. She's dealt one blow after another, but picks herself up each time, principles intact. "I don't eat with Prussians," she says proudly, and instead of seeming ridiculous or petty that seems like a declaration of human rights.

Witness Simon's two main scenes with Kreuger. The first time she dines with him, his object isn't so much to seduce her as to humble her. He forces her to kiss him, then blows a plume of cigar smoke into her mouth. Simon's expression--mingled humiliation, pain and fury--renders the moment as close to a sexual assault as 1944 ever got. "What I think of you matters very little. What I want you to think of yourself matters a great deal," he tells her. This rather moustache-twirling line, which isn't in the stories, still sums up the tenor of the movie. Of course we're supposed to think of the pride of the French people, but it's the pride of the laundress the Siren was caring about, at that moment and later. Toward the end, at another dinner, Fifi forces another kiss and bites Elizabeth so hard she gets a streak of blood on her mouth. The camera stays where it is, in a standard two-shot on her and Kreuger, but this underlines the moment's brutality--no way to read it except as the rape of a virgin. But Simon's expression this time is different, there is a cold deadly fury to it. What follows a few moments later comes as little surprise.

Mademoiselle Fifi isn't available on Region 1 DVD, but there is a French edition of it. The Siren thinks it deserves another chance. While the film won't satiate a hunger for Lewton's particular brand of atmospheric menace, it offers a window into his careful regard for literature and for women.



(This post is a belated offering for Michael Guillen's Val Lewton blogathon over at The Evening Class. Please stop by there and check the links--the blogathon has brightened the Siren's week.)

*You can read her all-time favorite, "Useless Beauty," right here. The Siren finds that one quite cinematic and wonders why no one has filmed it. "Mademoiselle Fifi" and "Boule de Suif" are also available online.

The Siren may not have posted much over the last month, but she did manage to watch a fair number of movies, for a change. December was William Wellman month on TCM, a happy development. You can add William Wellman to the Siren's list of Favorite Directors With Shaky Auteur Status, along with Mitchell Leisen, Jean Negulesco and the award-laden but Cahiers-dissed William Wyler. The Siren saw Night Nurse ("You mother!") and rewatched a bunch of old favorites (no amount of Mr. C's pointing out what the Foreign Legion was really like can dim the Siren's love for Beau Geste). The revelation, however, was Wild Boys of the Road, an uneven but sporadically brilliant movie, sort of what might happen if you sliced out two scenes from an Andy Hardy film and used them to bookend They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

After watching a Depression-era movie the Siren often turns to one of her favorite works of social history, Since Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. Published in 1940, the book has the advantage of immediacy, and the Siren hasn't read anything that betters Allen's descriptions of daily life in the Terrible Thirties. Still, it must be admitted that Allen is not especially good on the movies, drawn as he is to prestige pictures. Here's his introduction to an aside on Hollywood's output:

As for the movies, so completely did they dodge the discussions and controversies of the day--with a few exceptions, such as the March of Time series, the brief newsreels, and an occaisonal picture like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and They Won't Forget--that if a dozen or two feature pictures, selected at random, were to be shown to an audience of 1960, that audience would probably derive from them not the faintest idea of the ordeal through which the United States went in the nineteen-thirties.

Wellman filmed the boy's wanderings on location, and the decision gives the long middle section of the film a depth and darkness the Siren has seldom seen in American movies of the era. The two main actors were quite petite, and Wellman plays this up when filming the dangerous task of getting on and off the trains. The sense of peril, of the speed and size and impossibility of stopping the moving train, makes you realize how something like Sullivan's Travels has glossed over the difficulties. (Wild Boys renders train-hopping several times more terrifying, for example, than watching Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones.) The cars themselves are dark, cold and offer no protection from predators.

Once on the train the boys meet fellow drifter Sally, who is hopping freight trains disguised as a boy. (Sally is played by young Dorothy Coonan, whose later marriage to Wellman lasted 42 years and produced seven children). There's a humorous bit where Sally, unjustly accused of stealing food, lands a hard blow on Eddie's face that sends him scampering to the other side of the boxcar, even as he realizes he's just been hit by a girl. But Wellman still films this in a way that conveys Sally's vulnerablity--she's horizontal, on one side of the frame, face out of sight, two boys looming over her. You sense the physical dangers for these kids at every second. Later, when the threesome join an expanding army of transient children, Sally's comparative luck is re-emphasized as another girl, left alone in a boxcar, is raped by a guard (Ward Bond, in one of his few turns as a rotten apple). When the crime is discovered the boys, already forming their own rough social code, surround and beat the guard (to death, it's implied).

Attempts to find help get nowhere. Sally, Eddie and Tommy descend upon her aunt. The aunt, it becomes clear, has a brothel to run, but at least she seems willing to help. But police raid the place and the kids must go on the run again.

The number of kids on the train grows until Wellman captures an army swarming off the boxcars in an unforgettable image of social breakdown--his camera never lets you forget that these are children. The fear you feel for them reaches a harrowing climax in a scene frequently excerpted in Wellman tributes. Tommy is jumping off the train with the others, but like a much younger kid he doesn't watch where he's going. The boy's head strikes a metal crossing sign with enough force to send him to the ground, dazed, as a train approaches. Tommy tries to crawl away, but he can't make it in time, and his leg is crushed.

When the police chase Eddie into a movie theater after he inadvertently gets involved in a holdup, the theater in question is showing another Warner Bros. release, the Lloyd Bacon–directed Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade. This goes far beyond cross-promotion and into a covert criticism of escapist entertainment (perhaps specifically answered by Preston Sturges with Sullivan's Travels). Footlight Parade is about Chester Kent (James Cagney), who creates live musical prologues for films; during the chase, Eddie ends up onstage where such a prologue might occur, James Cagney looming over him mid-tapdance. Eddie has become one of Kent's prologues, a bit of escapist entertainment for the audience members, who get an extra vicarious thrill out of Eddie's suffering.