Parky at the Pictures (DVD 9/5/2013)

Dreyer supposedly chose this drama of a soul over biopics of Catherine de Medici and Marie Antoinette by drawing matchsticks. However, he soon became immersed in the material and spent months researching La Pucelle's life before basing his screenplay - which compressed 29 sessions spread over three months into five in a single day - on Pierre Champion's 1921 version of the trial records. Denied the opportunity to use sound, yet still armed with a budget of seven million francs, Dreyer commissioned art directors Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo to build a vast cement castle between Montrouge and Petit Clamart in the Parisian suburbs and hired an abandoned car plant at Billancourt to shoot his interiors. Ultimately, little of these imposing sets were seen, but Dreyer wanted his cast to experience an authentic medieval environment.

In the spring of 1431, 19 year-old Joan of Arc (Renée Falconetti) is captured while fighting for Charles VII against the Anglo-Burgundian alliance occupying France. She is brought to trial before Bishop of Beauvais Pierre Cauchon (Eugène Silvain), Canon Jean d'Estivet (André Berley), Vice-Inquisitor Jean Lemaître (Gilbert Dalleu), assessor Nicolas de Houppeville (Jean d'Yd), bailiff Jean Massieu (Antonin Artaud) and Maître Jean Beaupère (Louis Ravet). Intimidated by the dignitaries, Joan promises to tell the truth and admits that she thinks she has been born to save her homeland from its invaders. The bench taunts her about hating the English and follows a question about St Michael by asking why she insists on wearing male attire. She replies that she swore to remain in uniform until her mission is complete and when she hopes that her soul will be saved as a reward for her endeavours, she is accused of blasphemy.

Hoping to disorientate the Maid, the judges take a ring off her finger, read her a letter purporting to be from the king and order her to recite the Lord's Prayer. They ask her if she is in a state of grace and refuse to let her hear mass until she put on women's clothing. Having been humiliated by servants putting a crown on her head, Joan is taken to a dungeon, where she is asked if she fears God. As the spy Nicolas Loyseleur (Nicolas Loyseleur) looks on, she claims she has no reason to doubt His mercy and confidently proclaims she has nothing sinful to confess. Yet, on seeing the torture equipment, Joan passes out and is bled to ease her fever. She refuses communion, as she is convinced it is a temptation sent by Satan and her accusers decide she must acknowledge her crimes or be buried in unconsecrated ground and be sent to Hell.

Terrified by the prospect of losing eternal life, Joan agrees to sign a confession. Yet, while her life is spared, she is so distraught at being excommunicated that she recants almost as soon as her head is shorn. Lamenting the fact she allowed her fear of death to overcome her love of God, she receives the sacraments and prays before being taken to the Vieux-Marché in Rouen, where she is tied to a stake and martyred. She mouths the word `Jesus' before her clothing catches light and the witnesses can barely watch her agony. One old man mourns the passing of a saint and the soldiers retreat into the citadel after dispersing the hostile crowds.

Lillian Gish was briefly considered for the title role before Dreyer saw Renée Falconetti in a boulevard comedy and was convinced that she has the ability to `abstract from reality in order to reinforce its spiritual content'. He filmed her without make-up and reportedly treated her shabbily on set to elicit the right degree of persecuted suffering. But, whatever Dreyer's methods, her display of `realised mysticism' clearly came from within and her sole screen appearance remains one of cinema's greatest.

Filming in strict chronological order, after extensive rehearsal, Dreyer often demanded countless retakes to capture precise emotions. Digging trenches to achieve low-angle perspectives, he had cinematographer Rudolph Maté shoot his typage cast with high-contrast lighting and in tight close-up to emphasise the expressions that best conveyed the unrelenting intensity of Joan's interrogation. However, this is far from the exercise in still photography that some have claimed, as Dreyer made subtle use of pans, tilts, subjective angles, cross-cutting and montage to place the viewer at the heart of Joan's ordeal, which was made all the more disconcerting by the absence of spatial certainty.

Furious that a Danish Protestant had been allowed to make a film about France's Catholic heroine, the Archbishop of Paris colluded with the censors to make numerous cuts to Dreyer's original version. But a few weeks after the premiere, a fire at the UFA studios in Berlin destroyed the original negative and Dreyer was forced to piece together a new edition from takes he had already discarded. Within a year, this edit had also perished in a fire at the G.M. de Boulogne-Billancourt processing laboratory and it wasn't until 1933 that an hour-long variation narrated by radio star David Ross was salvaged from extant prints. However, Dreyer had little time for this or a 1951 restoration by Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, which added classical music to a copy of the 1929 cut found in the Gaumont vault in Paris.

Arnie Krogh of the Danish Film Institute tried to duplicate Dreyer's intentions by patching together scenes from all existing copies. But, in 1981, a workman clearing out a cupboard at the Kikemark Sykehus asylum in Oslo found three cans of film, which proved to contain the original version that Dreyer had first shown to the public at the Cinema Palads in Copenhagen on 21 April 1928. Now, after 85 years, viewers can finally see this remarkable silent picture in all its austerely pristine glory.

Although it was made just two years later, Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) feels as though it belongs to an entirely different age. The most immediate difference is the visual style, with Dreyer's compositions looking even more starkly simple against Von Sternberg's densely detailed mise-en-scène, which uses smoke, shadows and a variety of draped materials to fill what he deemed the dead space between the camera and the subject. Obviously, Von Sternberg also had sound at his disposal in adapting Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat with co-scenarists Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller and Robert Liebmann, and he released the picture in both German and English versions. But the most striking contrast lies in the performances of Falconetti and a slightly chubby actress with 17 largely forgotten credits to her name, who would not only become Von Sternberg's muse during a seven-film partnership, but also one of the biggest stars in the world: Marlene Dietrich.

The irony, of course, is that this was supposed to be a vehicle for Emil Jannings, the winner of the first Academy Award for Best Actor, who had returned to Germany from a Hollywood sojourn that had ended when it was decided that his voice was too heavily accented to make the transition to talkies. Determined to prove he was more than a silent mummer, Jannings lobbied for the role of Immanual Rath, a highly respectable schoolmaster who is first seen discovering that his caged songbird has died and he sadly concludes that there will be no more singing as his maid, Ilse Furstenberg, tosses the stiff little creature into the fire.

Arriving in his classroom, Jannings is dismayed to find students Rolf Müller, Roland Varno, Carl Balhaus and Robert Klein-Lörk salivating over photographs of a chanteuse at a local nightclub. So, as much to save the boys by catching them in a den of iniquity as to see for himself what all the fuss is about, Jannings goes to The Blue Angel that night. However, on being shown to a place of honour and introduced to the audience, he immediately becomes smitten with Marlene Dietrich, as she sits on a barrel to perform `Falling in Love Again' in a top hat, stockings and a provocative costume.

Bashfully, Jannings visits Dietrich in her dressing-room and she teases him gently, as one of his pupils slips a pair of her panties into his jacket pocket. He returns them at the club the next night. But he also gets tipsy as he watches the show and stands up for Dietrich when she is heckled. In gratitude, she seduces him and he staggers into school the following morning to receive a dressing down from headmaster Eduard von Winterstein.. Yet, rather than coming to his senses, Jannings announces his intention to marry Dietrich and he quits his post to start selling the very photographs he had once denounced.

As the years pass, however, Dietrich tires of his devotion and, when his savings run out, Jannings is forced to become a figure of fun by stooging for clown Reinhold Bernt and assisting magician Kurt Gerron. Eventually, the touring troupe return to Jannings's home town and he is humiliated to discover several of his erstwhile colleagues and students in the audience at The Blue Angel when he takes to the stage. As he seethes with indignation, Jannings looks into the wings and sees Dietrich flirting with strongman Hans Albers and later attempts to throttle her backstage. He is bundled away in a straitjacket, only to be released when he calms down. A broken man, Jannings creeps into his old gymnasium and clings to his desk, as he dies of shame.

Despite having vowed never to work with each other again after their feuds on the Paramount set of The Last Command (1928), Von Sternberg and Jannings had been reunited by UFA producer Erich Pommer to make a biopic of Rasputin. However, Von Sternberg quickly lost interest in the project and similarly started to neglect Jannings after he became intrigued by Dietrich, who had landed the role of Lola-Lola after it had been offered to bigger stars like Brigitte Helm, Lucie Mannheim and Kathe Haack. Consequently, life began to imitate art, as Jannings became increasingly jealous of Dietrich and even threatened to strangle her. His fury was scarcely assuaged when the critics concentrated more on her performance than his own and, while he remained a star throughout the Nazi era, his international reputation soon started to fade. As for Dietrich, she moved to Hollywood with Von Sternberg and long continued to sing Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann's haunting torch song in her cabaret act.

There is no question that The Blue Angel has dated, with Jannings's acting being overly reliant on the grandiloquent gestures and expressions he was accustomed to making in silent pictures. But it retains a fascination, particularly in its allegorical insights into Weimar Germany. Produced just 12 years after defeat in the Great War, many saw the story as a reflection of the decline of Prussian militarism, with Jannings's authority being undermined by the trappings of decadent modernity. Although it has not been blamed like Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) for priming the German populace for National Socialism, it certainly presents a society in a moral vacuum and it is perhaps no accident that Lola-Lola found solace in the arms of Mazeppa, as the nation itself needed a strong man to deliver it from the self-pitying weakness and defeatism epitomised by `Professor Garbage'.

Von Sternberg had done much to elevate the Hollywood crime picture with the little-seen silents Underworld (1927) and Thunderbolt (1929) and the yakuza was fast becoming an increasingly common character in Japanese movies of the same period. It may surprise some to learn that Yasujiro Ozu was one of the leading exponents of this new genre and the BFI has released three choice examples in The Gangster Films, a two-disc set in its ongoing Ozu Collection.

Von Sternberg had done much to elevate the Hollywood crime picture with the little-seen silents Underworld (1927), The Docks of New York (1928) and Thunderbolt (1929) and the yakuza was fast becoming an increasingly common character in Japanese movies of the same period, as Shinseinen magazine started publishing translations of American pulp crime stories and local writers like Yasunari Kawabata and Yoichi Nakagawa began exploring the seedier side of city life. It may surprise some to learn that Yasujiro Ozu was one of the leading exponents of this new genre and the BFI has released three choice examples in The Gangster Films, a two-disc set in its ongoing Ozu Collection.

There are actually four titles included here, but only a fragment remains of A Straightforward Boy (1929), which was based on the same O. Henry story (`The Ransom of Red Chief') that Howard Hawks would select for his contribution to the anthology Full House (1952). Although it has a crime element, this is essentially a comedy that sees yakuza Saito Tatsuo kidnap young Aoki Tornio for a ransom. However, the spoilt brat proves to be quite a handful and Tatsuo has to keep dancing attendance and buying him toys until he pleads with his boss to be given permission to get shut of him. But this proves easier said than done.

A similar jauntiness also informs Walk Cheerfully (1930), which is one of the busiest films Ozu ever produced. Inspired by a story by fellow film-maker Hiroshi Shimizu, the action owes much to Ozu's love of Hollywood and all things American. Yet, while several of his silent outings exhibited the influence of Ernst Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd, Ozu was not alone in incorporating `foreign' tropes in his pictures, as the Nikkatsu-based Yutaka Abe had been labelled Japan's most westernised director following the likes of The Woman Who Touched the Legs (1926) and The Five Women Around Him (1927). But the prominent positioning of posters for Frank R. Strayer's Rough House Rosie (1927) and Harry Beaumont's Our Dancing Daughters (1929) - which respectively starred those epitomes of Jazz Age working girls, Clara Bow and Joan Crawford - suggests the tone that Ozu was striving to emulate and his eagerness to explore the increasing modernity of Japanese urban living.

Minoru Takada is a small-time Tokyo hood. He dresses in sharp suits and hangs out in gyms and bars with his sidekicks, Hisao Yoshitani and Teruo Mori, and his moll, Satoko Date, who sports a Louise Brooks bob. When not driving fast cars, gambling or listening to jazz, he is pulling cons that bring the maximum reward for the least effort. But, then he spots the sandalled feet of Hiroki Kawasaki stepping out of a car and shuffling into a jeweller's and he is instantly smitten. Initially convinced she is a woman of means, Takada is uncertain how to approach her. But he discovers she is an office worker and he vows to go straight and become a window cleaner if it will help win her heart.

In order to help his pal, Yoshitani also quits the gang and finds work as a driver. But Date is unwilling to lose her man without a fight and tries to abduct Kawasaki and present her to her sleazy boss, Takeshi Sakamoto, who has a pencil moustache, a lapdog and a simpering manner that Ozu lampoons without compunction. Desperate to lure Takada back into her orbit, Date tries to implicate him in a crime. But his determination to go straight prompts her to turn him in to the police and he and Yoshitani stride off to prison with cheerful hearts because they know that Kawasaki will be waiting for them with her mother, Utako Suzuki, and her little sister, Nobuko Matsuzono.

In truth, the narrative is hardly remarkable. Indeed, there is something positively conventional about the romance, with Takada preferring the demure, kimono-wearing Kawasaki to the sassy, cigarette smoking Date, who not only hangs around with the bad boys, but usually gives as good as she gets. But the tone also shifts frequently between crime melodrama, love story, comedy and revenge saga and the excellent cast nimbly responds in each case. However, those familiar with the Zen-like stateliness of Ozu's mature style will be astonished by the pace and stylistic audacity of this treatise on the speed of progress in a Japan committed to industrialisation and no longer able to shut itself off from the wider world. In addition to making extensive use of fades between scenes, Ozu also has cinematographers Hideo Mohara and Yuharu Atsuta employ wide angles and tracking and panning shots to alight upon such telling items within Hiroshi Mizutani's sets as phonographs, trumpets, typewriters, golf clubs, boxing gloves and guns. So, while this may lack the abrasiveness or sensationalism of Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930), it remains a significant entry in the yotomono canon.

Ozu's sixteenth feature, That Night's Wife (1930), differs dramatically from any other in his career. Adapted by Kogo Noda from the Oscar Schisgall tale `Nine to Nine' that had appeared in Detective Story Magazine (and then in Shinseinen) this was rare among Ozu films in having a predominantly night-time setting and was one of only only two to feature a woman wielding a gun. But what is most striking here is the use of cross-cutting between parallel actions in the opening scenes, as this was a technique that Ozu almost totally eschewed, in spite of its centrality to American screen grammar. 

Events start with a red herring, as beat cop Chishu Ryu moves on a vagrant in the street, In fact, the focus is going to fall on Tokihiko Okada, an artist who has fallen on hard times and has had to commit a robbery in order to buy medicine for his ailing daughter, Mitsuko Ichimura. On his way home, Okada calls doctor Tatsuo Saito, who reassures him that if Ichimura survives the night she will make a full recovery. Realising he will be walking into a trap if he goes home, Okada hails a cab that just happens to be being driven by undercover detective Togo Yamamoto, who has been alerted to his crime. However, on hearing the reasons for his misdeed, he let Okada to go inside, where wife Emiko Yagumo is waiting for him.

Yamamoto knows he has to arrest Okada, however. But Yagumo grabs her husband's pistol and threatens to shoot unless he is allowed to keep vigil over his child during her fight for life. The detective accedes to her demand and they remain in the room for the remainder of the night. The fever breaks and Ichimura ceases tossing and turning. But, while Yagumo coerces Yamamoto into letting Okada escape, he decides to turn himself in, as his pursuer had been suitably honorable and he knows that the sooner he serves his punishment, the sooner he can return to being a dutiful spouse and father.

This may not be the most tautly scripted Ozu picture ever (the meeting between Okada and Yamamoto is wildly coincidental and no attempt is made to purchase the supposedly vital medicine for which the office robbery was committed), but it is gripping throughout. Once again, Mohara Hideo and Atsuta Yuharu pick out telling items in Yoneichi Wakita's sets that suggest Okada and Yagumo are decent people who have strayed simply because of penury and parental anxiety. Comparisons have been made with contemporary American thrillers and postwar film noir. But this has more in common with the milieu of Fritz Lang and the bleak poetic realism that characterised the films of Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir, as Europe drifted towards war. Indeed, it would be fascinating to know if either Carné or screenwriter Jacques Prévert had seen Ozu's brooding psychological drama before they embarked upon Le Quai des brumes (1938) or Le Jour se lève (1939).

Ozu had little time for Koro Ikeda's 1952 remake, whose reliance on dialogue deprived it of the visual character that had made the original so distinctive. The use of shadow and the recurring close-ups of hands are particularly inspired. Moreover, the rhythmic mix of camera movements and subtle edit points feels as unOzu-like as the dissolve switching the perspective when Yamamoto first knocks on the apartment door. The wisp of sentimentality that somewhat understandably clouds the denouement is also unwonted. But it spoils nothing and this reaffirms how potent silent cinema could be in the hands of a true artist.

Concluding this selection is Dragnet Girl (1933), Ozu's 29th film (his prolificity during this period was quite phenomenal), which returns to the Americanised settings of Walk Cheerfully and follows along much the same lines, albeit with a twist in the tail. However, this is less indebted to the Warner gangster cycle that had by now come to include William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) and Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) than it was to such Von Sternberg melodramas as The Docks of New York or Underworld. Indeed, there is even something of the Austrian's habit of filling dead space to create an illusion of image depth and convey the ambience of the setting. But this would be Ozu's last venture into the gangster genre and his subsequent work would lose the transpacific iconography and adopt the audiovisual, dramatic and thematic traits that would lead to him being hailed the most Japanese of all directors.

Kinuyo Tanaka works in the typing pool for a large Yokohama company. She seems a highly respectable young woman and has attracted the attention of boss's son, Yasuo Nanjo. Away from work, however, Tanaka is the mistress of boxer-turned-yakuza Joji Oka, whose men adore him because he is a bit of a bruiser and thinks nothing of thumping those who annoy him, even in a swanky night club. The only trouble is, Oka is not much of a hoodlum and pickings are slim. Consequently, he feels like a kept man and over-compensates by treating Tanaka like one of the boys rather than his lover.

Student Hideo Mitsui has admired Oka from a distance and asks if he can join his gang. However, his sister, Sumiko Mizukubo, wants him to stay out of trouble and complete his education. She pleads with Oka to do the decent thing and dissuade Mitsui from going astray and he is taken by her demure demeanour and traditional raiment. He also discovers that she is a fine cook who knits and devotes herself to caring for her sibling. However, when he visits her at the record shop where she works, Oka frustrates Mizukubo by claiming that the classical music she prefers is too highbrow for him and she tells him to stop trying to put on a front for other people and be true to himself.

Her lecture hits home and Oka falls passionately in love with her. But nightclub hostess Yumeko Oushi sees them together and informs Tanaka. Distraught at the prospect of losing her man, Tanaka tries to reason with him and explain why he is better of with her. Yet, while she eventually makes Oka see sense (and even attempts to knit herself to show him that she can also be a homebody), he insists on doing one last job to ensure Mizukubo and Mitsui have enough to life on.

Crisply photographed by Hideo Mohara to pick out the chic and shiny trappings of a modern lifestyle, this is superbly designed by Yoneichi Wakita and his set decorator Takeshi Hoshino. The script, co-written by Ozu (using the pseudonym James Maki) and Tadao Ikeda, is equally perceptive in its discussion of style, class, propriety and a sense of belonging. But, while Mizukubo and Tanaka (who would go on to become a fixture in the films of Kenji Mizoguchi) both excel, the male leads are a little stiffer and few of the supporting characters register. Yet, as always, Ozu's direction is impeccable, right from the opening shot of the row of hats upon a peg and the white fedora we will soon come to associate with Oka is the one to fall. An item of clothing also dominates the closing image, as Ozu invites us to speculate whether Mizukubo or Tanaka has need of a baby booty. But it is the coffee pot in the apartment Tanaka shares with Oka and the Victriola with the RCA Victor dog logo that become more important than the typewriters, punchbags, billiard cues and guns, as Oka realises he is ready to settle down and just needs to decide with whom.

Although surprisingly little crime is committed in Ozu's gangster films, debuting director Henri-Georges Clouzot more than atones in The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942), a whodunit adapted from a book by Stanislas-André Steeman that reunited Pierre Fresnay and Suzy Delair from their first outings as Inspector Wenceslas Vorobeitchik and his irrepressible girlfriend Mila Milou in Georges Lacombe's Le Dernier des six (1941), which Clouzot had scripted from the Belgian's novel, Six Hommes morts. Like its predecessor, this was produced by Continental Films during the Nazi occupation of France and, while it may not seethe with the self-loathing of Clouzot's wartime masterpiece, Le Corbeau (1943), its jokey style doesn't quite disguise the criticisms of the flaws in the national character that had led to such an ignominious defeat in the spring of 1940.

A serial killer is on the loose in Paris. Yet, while he leaves a card signing himself `Monsieur Durand' at the scene of each murder, no other clues have ever been found. When cat burglar Raymond Bussières is arrested with a stack of Durand cards in his possession, he protests that he found them in the Mimosas boarding house at 21 Avenue Junot while he was searching for valuables. Having consulted with Commissaire Louis Florencie and Interior Minister Antoine Balpêtré, Pierre Fresnay assumes the guise of a Protestant clergyman and takes a room in the premises run by Odette Talazac and her whistling assistant Marc Natol.

Eventually, Fresnay gets to know the other guests, including spinster and aspiring author Maximilienne, blind ex-boxer Jean Despeaux and his alluring nurse Huguette Vivier, fraudilent stage fakir Jean Tissier, seedy old colonial doctor Noël Roquevert (who thinks the world is a better place without the ineffectual victims) and artist Pierre Larquey, who delights in making sinister mechanical models of Durand. But the situation is complicated when Fresnay's girlfriend Suzy Delair also checks in because she has heard there is a 100,000 franc reward for the capture of the killer and thinks that the publicity would do her struggling singing career no harm at all.

Fresnay has several characters arrested at various points during the story, but the murders keep happening and he has to release them. Maximilienne seals her fate when she announces she is going to write a book based on events at the pension and the murderer decides she is getting too close to the truth. Ultimately, Fresnay cracks the case himself, but he requires Delair's eleventh hour intervention as a lethal triumvirate plot his demise.

Steeman was reportedly less than amused that Clouzot bowdlerised his storyline by inserting Wens and Mila from his previous tome. But Fresnay and Delair are the undoubted stars of the show, as they put a Gallic spin on the kind of wisecracking sleuthing that William Powell and Myrna Loy had perfected as Nick and Nora Charles in MGM's spin-off series from WS Van Dyke's 1936 take on Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. However, as credited co-scenarist Steeman has to shoulder some of the blame for the occasionally shoddy plotting and the failure to tie up so many loose ends. But the flashes of coarse and often gallows humour (such as Roquevert unintentionally giving a Nazi salute) are typical Clouzot, as are the digs at the pompous authority figures whose eagerness to take the credit and pass the blame would doubtless have been readily recognised by audiences living under the Vichy regime.

Apparently, Clouzot drove his cast hard to keep the action at screwball pitch. But they responded with fine performances that are made all the more disconcerting by cinematographer Armand Thirard bathing Andrej Andrejew's sets in Expressionist shadows that brought a touch of Série noire menace to the polar genre. Sadly, Fresnay and Delair (who became Clouzot's off-screen companion and is still alive at the grand old age of 96) didn't get to reprise their partnership. But one hopes Le Dernier des Six finds its way on to disc soon and that Eureka continues to release titles from the most neglected two decades in post-silent French cinema history between 1939 and 1959.