Category Archives: Movies

LADY OSCAR

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Here, Paul Zahl takes a look at an undervalued film by Jacques Demy, and finds much value in it, indeed:

HIS ODD BEAUTY

Very few

people seem able to say no to Jacques Demy's vision of life as reflected

in wonderful movies such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Lola (1960).  A phrase that seems to cover his vision is “optimistic romanticism”. Those are two good words for it.

Demy

made several more films, however, and three of them, A Slightly

Pregnant Man (1973), Lady Oscar (1979), and Parking (1985) are

considered bombs.  I've seen them all recently, though only segments of  Parking, and can well understand their bad reputations.

But I disagree about Lady Oscar!



Lady Oscar is a beautiful movie, an opulent, visionary movie, about a

cross-dressing aristocratic heroine, played by Catriona MacColl, in the

Court of Marie Antoinette, who sees and hears the great events of the 1780s in her role of Captain of the Guards, while all the while loving the faithful, kind, courageous stable boy 'André Grandier', played by Barry Stokes.



The movie was directed and also partly written by Jacques Demy; and its lush, sentimental musical score is by Michel Legrand.  Most of the actors were English but the film was filmed in France,

much of it at Versailles.  An alternate title for the movie was The

Rose of Versailles.



The big stunner, when you

sit down and watch Lady Oscar, is the opening credit revealing that it

was Toho Studios of Japan that produced the film.  At first glance, because of that familiar logo, you expect Mothra to come flying into the film.  But

no, or rather, “Non!”: it's the fashionable, swirling, and almost

feminine style of the man who directed Catherine Deneuve, Françoise

Dorléac, Anouk Aimée, and later, Dominique Sanda.



In other words, this is a mélange, an improbable

mix of commercial and historical elements, which, taken together,

produced an odd movie — at least, if you stop to consider the

ingredients.  Turns out Demy was not getting much work at the time; that the

Japanese had a popular commercial property on their hands, which was a

comic book entitled The Rose of Versailles; and that Lady

Oscar was made entirely and by design for domestic consumption in

Japan, even though it was filmed in France, with English actors, English

dialogue, and a French crew.  Lady Oscar's being owned by Toho of

Japan is the main reason it hasn't been seen very often in Europe and

America — until now, that is, with the release in 2008 of a “Jacques

Demy Integrale” boxed set in France.



Long story, isn't it?  Has all the makings of a colossal flop, right?  Too many cooks spoil the broth, “n'est-ce pas”?  You might think so.   And many do.  But I think Lady Oscar is a touching, lovely, sexy, beautiful movie.

Click here to continue reading and find out why:

The Odd Beauty of Lady Oscar

THE ODD BEAUTY OF LADY OSCAR

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Paul Zahl continues his look at Lady Oscar, an undervalued film by Jacques Demy:

HER ODD BEAUTY

First,

it is lovely to look at.  There is not a bad or ugly composition in it,

for a master is directing the camera.  As always with Demy, there is

the iris effect at the beginning and the end; the women's fashions are

gorgeous; the lens is fluid but not falsely fluid.  (I love the Vertigo

effect, half-way through, when Marie Antoinette finally succumbs to her

“youthful passion” in the garden pavilion.  It doesn't feel out of place

at all.)  The ball sequences are fairy tales of movement and pastels,

especially blues; the outdoor scenes at the Queen's Versailles hameau

or retreat are pure “70s pastoral”, soft-focus, but not like

advertisements; and the actors, who are mostly wooden,  fit when you

understand they are meant to be decoration for . . . “Lady Oscar”.


Now I come to the two chief goods of this film,

which leaves, with its many faults — such as the woodenness of the

plot, the script, and the actors, to name just a few! — a lasting impression.

The first great plus of Lady Oscar is the

“gender-bending” situation of the main story.  “Lady Oscar”, a daughter born

to a noble mother after five girls have preceded her in birth, has been raised a boy.  Oscar is a beautiful young woman in the

garb and robe of a young man.  But Oscar knows she is really a girl, and

understands herself to be a girl.  Nevertheless, she plays

the part of and dresses like a man, in order to please her father (who

had tired of having so many daughters, and longed for a son).

There

is no sub-text here, in other words, or at least none that I

can see.  When Oscar takes off her shirt, for example, to examine her

body after a duel, we see her female chest.  Demy dwells on Catriona

MacColl in this scene.  Later, she is able to confess her lifelong love

for 'André' to André, and they make love.  There is no ambiguity or

ambivalence.

Yet,

and I think it is an important “yet”, “Lady Oscar's”

role-playing, her male clothing over a woman's body, gives her insight and involvement in

the life of both the sexes at Court.  We therefore see the highest world of female fashion,

through the eye of the Queen's Body Guard, “Oscar”, who is a woman.  Maybe

this reflects Jacques Demy's own persona.  I don't know.  He certainly

shows, in the stunning visuals and moving camera, a secure comfort with

the material.

Whatever is going on under the surface, or

psycho-dynamically, on

which we might have more light to shed today, what you actually see in

the movie is the tale of a yearning female adult who is doing her duty

(and performing it well) as a cross-dresser, yet never stops loving . . . André.

Now to the second and final point, the core of “Lady Oscar for Today”.  A

theme I see again and again in the films of Jacques Demy is the

contrast between private domestic intimate drama, between individuals;

and the bigger social and political struggles that surround people at

points of history.  Thus, in The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), the

romantic longings of the twins, played by Catherine Deneuve and Françoise

Dorléac, are lightly contrasted with readings

from the newspaper, by their mother, concerning threats to world peace.  In A Room in Town (1988) the fated

romance of Dominique Sanda and Richard Berry is played out against the

background of a shipbuilders' strike in a French port.  The

focus is on the intimate drama, not on the social conflict; and that is

reflected concretely and bitterly at the end.  


In Lady Oscar, which portrays, through big crowd

scenes, such historic events as the first meeting of the Estates General

and the fall of the Bastille, the director's focus, almost

against the screenplay, is on “André” and “Oscar”.  That relationship is

where your emotional attention is, from the beginning to the end.  And

the ending of the movie reflects this personal focus most

acutely, and painfully, and memorably.  No wonder almost everyone

deplores the ending.  I can well understand why.  Nevertheless, I love

the ending.  Mainly because I can't shake it.  I wake up sometimes

thinking about it, crying out “André!” and waking our neighbor's dog,

not to mention Mary.

The ending of Lady Oscar says something

important about life.  The “devil is in the details”, or rather, the

heart of life is in the personal — the intimate, the one-to-one, the

“hopes and dreams of all the years” .  . . in a gently crying child, in

a

mourned romantic love, in a blue-and-red uniform of the Queen's Guards,

with a lovely actress secure within it, looking not for “Liberté!

Fraternité! Égalité!” (which are wonderful ends,

we know), but rather for the stable boy of her heart, the man whose heart

never left her and whose heart she never left.

A NEW KIND OF SEXUALITY

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Characters in popular art who make fun of sex, of their own sexuality, while still being deeply and powerfully sexy strike me as peculiarly American — I can't think of any examples that originated in other countries.

The English music hall created a kind of ditzy sexpot, best exemplified by Beatrice Lillie (above), but the ditzy sexpot had a very restricted erotic appeal — she tried to appear accidentally sexy, and was never sexually threatening in any way.  That was her charm.  The “naughty schoolgirl” figure crosses cultures, too, but her mask of good-natured innocence is just that — a mask, behind which to deliver erotic innuendo.



But America came up with something new — and as far as I can tell, Clara Bow was its first example.  She was frankly, unabashedly sexual, often in a way that threatened buttoned-up men, but she had a way of laughing it all off as a lark — as something not to be taken too seriously.

You can see traces of this attitude  in the great female blues singers of the early 20th Century, like Bessie Smith, but Smith knew that she was being bad — her tossed-off double-entendres had a leering quality, suggesting a down and dirty smirk.



Bow had none of this — to her there was nothing down and dirty about sex at all.  It was just about having fun, and if it was the most important thing in life, that was only because having fun was the most important thing in life.  Her overt but always skillful and imaginative flirtatiousness honored the game of flirtation, accepted it for what it was — if men didn't understand it, or know how to play it well, that was their problem.  It gave her an advantage which she cheerfully exploited.



Bow was different from the wise-cracking females in screwball comedies, who played the game with an edge of cynicism, somewhat resenting men for their dull-wittedness, even if they ultimately forgave them for it.  Stanwyck's character in The Lady Eve (above) is the paradigm for this type.

Bow's true successors in American culture were Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, who were sexy, knew they were sexy, laughed at their own sexiness while flaunting it without shame, in a state of paradoxically pure innocence about it.

They could be ironic but never, ever cynical.



The new DVD set Treasures From American Film Archives: The West has a stupendously good print of the silent film Mantrap (above) in which Bow definitively realized the new type of sexuality she pioneered.  It's one of the greatest and most electrifying performances in the history of cinema, a performance that led to her being cast in It — to be seen as “The 'It' Girl”.  They had to call it “It” in her case, because there was no existing word for what she had — no previous form of sex appeal applied.  It was a new kind of it.

[I have never seen a still photograph of Bow that really captures her screen persona.  The studio publicity photographers tried to fit her into familiar categories — glamor queen, vamp, flapper — none of which came close to evoking what she did on screen, which is hard to evoke in words, too.  You just have to watch her best movies — she herself thought that Mantrap was the best of them all — and marvel.]

SHOOTING COWBOYS AND INDANS

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Although the first truly important narrative film made in America, The Great Train Robbery from 1903, was a Western of sorts, it took about five years before the Western-themed film resolved itself into a recognizable genre. It was a wild and wooly ride, which the form almost didn't survive.  Like The Great Train Robbery, early Westerns focused on violent crimes.  They modeled themselves on sensational Western dime novels and appealed mostly to kids and male working-class moviegoers — and to foreign audiences.  When producers and distributors decided to court a higher class of clientele, including women, the Western came to seem unsavory, driving the better sort of folk away from the fancy new movie palaces that were gradually supplanting the storefront nickelodeon.



Gilbert “Bronco Billy” Anderson (above), who had played three bit parts in The Great Train Robbery, rode to the rescue by creating a Western hero who appealed to all classes and to women.  “Bronco Billy” might start off as a bad man but his heart was always in the right place and he always ended up tamed by and defending conservative social values, usually personified by a beautiful and virtuous woman.



When Anderson lost interest in Westerns, and movies in general — his dream was to become a theatrical impresario —  William S. Hart (above) was there to fill his boots.  Hart played a tougher and more taciturn Western hero but like Anderson always came around to the defense of traditional values, religion and social order.



In the 1920s, an era of industry consolidation, the studios generally gave up on Westerns that might appeal to everyone.  The B-Western was born, marketed once again to kids, to working-class males and to foreign audiences.  These constituted a reliable though limited base for Westerns, which had to be cheap and formulaic to make money — but they made a lot of money on that basis and were a major source of studio profits.  They produced big stars like Tom Mix, above, but stayed lean and mean where budgets were concerned.

The wonderful book by Andrew Brodie Smith pictured at the head of this post tells the tale of how the Western was born and how it evolved into a genre — restricted in form by the 1920s but still vital and immensely valuable to the industry.  Well-researched and written, it's essential to understanding the role and nature of Westerns in the earliest years of cinema.

PASSPORT

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You would have needed one of these to see The Great Train Robbery when it came out in 1903.  Actually, you might have needed two of them.  In 1903, the nickelodeon had not yet been established as a venue for motion picture exhibition.  If you lived in a town on one of the regular vaudeville circuits, you would have been more likely to see The Great Train Robbery on a vaudeville program.  The cheapest admission to that would normally have been ten cents, but of course you would have been treated to a full bill of live vaudeville acts, in addition to the one or two short movie attractions.  If you lived in a place off of a regular vaudeville circuit, you might have seen the film in a traveling tent show, as a sideshow attraction at a local fair or in a hall rented for the purpose by an itinerant exhibitor.



In any case, hundreds of thousands of people paid hundreds of thousands of nickels to see The Great Train Robbery in 1903 and in the years following.  It was the first sensationally successful American story film.  It help establish the story film as the primary form of movie entertainment and also helped establish the Western as a vital genre of that form.

IT'S A WRAP

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Toronto, 1987, wrap party for the movie Gotham, starring Tommy Lee Jones, on the right, and featuring Kevin Jarre, who died this year, on the left, in the Perfecto motorcycle jacket.  I'm in between them, with the cigarette.  Those were the days, eh?  I mean, the days when you could smoke a cigarette in a bar in some other city than Las Vegas, Nevada . . .

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

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. . . about the art of the 20th Century:

The art that doubts its task must make novelty into its highest value . . .
                                               — Walter Benjamin

Curiously, it was cinema, a supposedly new art form, that remained, along with jazz perhaps, the most self-confident of arts in the 20th Century, never for a moment doubting its task, which was traditional, conservative even, humane and popular, unlike the older “high art” forms which became the province of ever-dwindling cultural elites.



Hiding behind the mask of its purely technological novelty, it carried on the art projects of the 19th Century without shame — Victorian academic painting, Victorian theater (especially Victorian spectacle-theater), program music and the variety stage.

This has to be one of the most astonishing sleight-of-hand acts in the whole history of art.