The Cabin in the Cotton

Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis           

Michael Curtiz's The Cabin in the Cotton is one of the more under rated American films of 1932. This Warners/First National flick is one of many pictures about rural Americana released after the salad days of Griffith and Ince, but before the fateful Variety headline Hix Nix Stix Pix. The Cabin in the Cotton is set amidst the cotton fields of the American South and is based on a 1931 novel by Harry Harrison Knoll. The adaptation was by Paul Green, a then noted, now forgotten playwright who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Abraham's Bosom. Green, who was leftist enough to collaborate with Kurt Weill and sleep with Lotte Lenya, amplifies the portrait of class warfare present in the novel. The film has a frankness about class issues that would be remarkable even if the film was released to today.

When the film commences, the main character, Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess), is the teenaged son of tenant farmers working the cotton fields owned by Lane Norwood (Berton Churchill). Marvin is trying to better himself by going to school when his plans are upended by his father's sudden death. Norwood agrees to pay for Marvin's continued schooling, if he will work for Norwood after he gets his degree. Marvin ends up running Norwood's general store and keeping the books for him. However, Norwood has an ulterior motive for his kindness to Marvin. His tenant farmers, who resent Norwood for the usurious loans he has saddled them with, have been pilfering cotton and other goods from Norwood and he wants Marvin to rat on them. In turn, the tenant farmers want Marvin to use his smarts to sell their ill-gotten cotton. Marvin's plight is mirrored by the love triangle he finds himself in. The other two points being Betty (Dorothy Jordan), the earnest daughter of a tenant farmer, and Madge (Bette Davis), the saucy daughter of Norwood. After the tumult of melodramatic events, including a lynching and a fire, a kindly district attorney and Marvin are able to negotiate a truce between the farmers and the landowners.

The Cabin in the Cotton is strictly a backlot film. Painted backdrops and rear projection documentary footage are utilized to give the illusion of the outdoors. That is just as well, because Curtiz has always struck me as a director who is not really interested in portraying nature for its own sake. He is more at home in portraying the tangle of human relationships (most successfully in Casablanca) and The Cabin in the Cotton's scenario gives him ample opportunity to etch ambiguous motivations. Berton Churchill's Norwood is your typical Churchill performance, that of a bloviating and selfish fat cat. Yet, not all of the landowners are portrayed in the same light. Likewise, not all of the tenant farmers in the film are paragons of virtue. Some are as venal as Norwood and the efforts of such legendary stock players as Russell Simpson and Henry B. Walthall make them come to life. Curtiz's signature motif in the film are close-ups of hands, pushing and pulling, grabbing and entreating as a symbol of emotional manipulation. Another of Curtiz's coups in the film is the memorable staging of two dance sequences. The farmers' dance is to old time fiddle music as they do the Virginia Reel to Turkey in the Straw and The Girl I Left Behind Me. Norwood, after prodding by Madge, hires a black (or "yella" as one hick describes them) band from Memphis who play that new fangled jazz music. At one point, the band is instructed to play a "peckerwood wiggle", which mocks the poor folks.

Barthelmess, who was a big silent star, was nearing the end of his career as a leading man. At 37, he is too old to play his character. He never had the greatest amount of range, but I think his closed in performance, an augury of his embittered take in Only Angels Have Wings, is appropriate for the role. His character is a study in vacillation and Barthelmess is able to convey this. Ms Jordan's character is so anodyne that she hardly registers at all. The opposite is true of Ms. Davis who gives an outstanding, indeed star making, performance. This is the film in which she delivered the immortal line, "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair."

Davis plays a fun loving minx without a trace of censoriousness. Her Madge is a gloriously natural creature, never ashamed to flirt, pet, or get turned on.

Comment ca va?

Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean_Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's Comment ça va? (How's It Going?) is one of several Marxist Structuralist film essays that emerged from the Godard multiverse in the mid 1970s to little acclaim and attention. It crudely intermixes film, video and text, has amateurish camera work, and indifferent acting. Nevertheless, I was engaged with the film's philosophical struggles throughout. There is more to chew on here than in twenty typical features. I am generally not thrilled with Godard's Marxist platitudes, but he proved to be prescient on the great technological change of our era. We now live in an age in which the image has gained primacy over text. This has had an incalculable effect on human psychology and it was the primary theme of the latter half of Godard's career up to his final feature, The Image Book.

The two main characters in the film work for an unnamed paper, presumably Libération, a Leftist daily founded by Serge July and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973. As the decade unfolded, the paper moved to the center-left and it in this context that the idealogical conflicts of the film should be viewed. The dueling editors are played by Michel Marot, in real life a distinguished architect, and Ms. Miéville, here dubbed intriguingly "Odette". Odette and the unnamed character played by Mr. Marot are collaborating on a documentary on the newspaper biz. The film is a meta comment on itself, bien sur. The pair squabble with Odette taking the high road, i.e. the doctrinaire Marxist way, as Marot prevaricates. "Objectivity is a crime," she barks at him and he eventually sees her that she is right to adhere to resistance as the only just response to the world. Odette is filmed from the back or with her face in shadow, all we see are Miéville's blonde tresses. You cannot gaze directly into the face of truth or, in this case, Godard's final muse.

The primary duo is contrasted with a young proletarian couple, in a movie filled with dialectics, played by Christian Fenovillat and Catherine Floriet. He works as a machinist while she tends to domestic chores. There is no idealogical discussion between the two, they seem perfectly happy to canoodle on their couch oblivious to the television behind them spewing Lies Writ Large. Here I have to advise readers that I think Wikipedia's page on this film misreads the plot. It conflates Odette's character with Ms. Floriet's character. Ms. Floriet is a brunette, as you can see below, while Ms. Miéville is a blonde. It is a murky and tangled movie, but I think the fact that Wikimedia misreads a film about media disinformation is perfect irony. Now more than ever, one cannot believe what one reads and sees.

Catherine Floriet

Comme ça va? is structured like a B noir, opening and closing with Marot's deadpan narration. Now I am going to disclose the ending of the film because if you've read this far about Structuralism, French politricks, and whatnot, you can take it. Odette and Marot's film is rejected by the "Central Committee" of the paper in a fashion that, like much of the film, resembles Struggle sessions during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After this rejection, Odette leaves the paper and disappears from Marot's life. Now if this was a true noir Odette would have been shown getting iced by the party, but I'm not sure Godard was that prescient about the Party or had enough of a budget. Comment ça va is even more relevant in an era in which my country is befuddled by the fog of war. The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam: no more reporters on the ground with combat troops and we are seeing or not seeing the results.

Dark Water

       

Hideo Nakata's Dark Water is an effective horror film with a palpable sense of unease. This 2002 flick is slow paced, all the better to encase the audience in its gunky atmosphere. The film centers around a woman going through a contentious divorce named Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki). She is battling over the custody of her six year old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno) with a husband who is willing to fight dirty, including bringing up Yoshimi's past mental health issues. Under enormous stress, she must find a job and a new place to live. She finds a promising job in publishing, but her new digs are another matter. She and her daughter find themselves in a dilapidated and putrid apartment building in a flat that has water seeping from the ceiling. If that is not enough, mother and daughter soon both glimpse what seems to be a supernatural presence who may be leading them astray.

Dark Water conveys its atmospheric dread with a dour look. Even when the characters are outside their creepy domicile, the weather is overcast or raining. The film has a stomach churning palette, primarily grays and sickly greens. The few uses of primary colors, a yellow slicker and a red child's purse, are linked with the supernatural. Mr. Nakata, primarily known in this country for Ringu, elicits chillingly effective performances from his two leads. If Dark Water has a flaw it is that its scenario is overly reliant on tropes from its antecedents, namely Don't Look Now and The Shining.