Postcard of the Day No. 104, East is West (1922)

Constance Talmadge (1898-1973) was a star of the silent screen who made her mark in 1918 when she appeared in D W Griffith’s “Intolerance” but her days in front of the camera would be relatively brief.  With the advent of sound in 1928 she retired in favour of making money from real estate. A handful of crew plus an umbrella and some auxiliary lighting seems to be enough. The movie is identifiable as “East is West”, made in 1922 with Constance playing the part of Ming Toy. Ming escaped from the notorious Love Boat in Shanghai only to find herself pursued by Charlie Yong (“Fifty-fifty Chinaman”) in San Francisco's Chinatown where she was again threatened with white-slavery. Straight arrow Billy Benson saved her from a fate worse than death for the second time. History doesn’t record much about the audience response but the movie had been judiciously calculated to feed into contemporary fears of all things oriental as represented by the Yellow Peril and it would be a disappointment if all their worst efforts had been in vain. It turned out to be one of Hollywood’s more forgettable movies but the director, Sidney Franklin went on to enjoy a long and prolific career including directing “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” twice (1934 and 1957) employing the same script, word for word, on both films.  According to Imperial Tobacco (see below), Constance was noted in Hollywood for her inexhaustible supply of “pep”.

 

Les Demoiselles de Tiger Bay

Since last week’s post about the Newport Transporter Bridge in which I wrote about the theatrical potential of the bridge I’ve been reminded that the 1959 movie Tiger Bay opens with the mariner hero crossing on the gondola, passing through the gates, and by virtue of film-maker’s licence, finding himself in the streets of Cardiff. With his wages in his pocket after a long voyage, spirits are high as he looks forward to being reunited with his girlfriend but of course, tragedy awaits him. Tiger Bay shows us a seedy and decrepit Britain as yet untouched by the hedonism that would follow in the 1960s. The multi-racial character of Britain’s major ports is well captured. 

The credit sequence on Jacques Demy’s 1967 film, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort seems to have sprung from another universe with its colour, energy and optimism. We know that Don Draper watched the trailer for Demy’s 1969 movie Model Shop and it’s easy to imagine him watching the syncopated brilliance of the opening sequence of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and thinking how this cinematic energy could be put to more profitable use promoting cigarette sales. The Rochefort Pont Transbordeur is still in existence and operated principally as a visitor attraction. Unlike Newport it is restricted to pedestrian and cycle traffic. The Rochefort bridge, like the examples built in Nantes, Marseille and Rouen is recognisably of the Arnodin family, though it lacks the distinctive captain’s cabin on the gondola. It was opened in 1900, six years before Fernand Arnodin’s Newport design began operating. 

Meet the Middletons

They came from Indiana to New York in 1939 to gaze in innocent wonder at the glorious future foreshadowed by the multiple attractions of the World’s Fair. Their ecstatic expressions in this image suggest they may be witnessing the Assumption of the Virgin – well worth the long journey from Indiana. Muncie, Indiana was well known as America’s social barometer and led by Robert and Helen Lynd, social scientists had recorded an immense amount of detail about family life and employment in a city that became known as Middletown America. By selecting Indiana as the Middleton’s home state Westinghouse Electric Corporation intended to underline the association of their project with the aims and aspirations of the statistically average American. Studies of Munsonians and Middletown continue to the present day. 

Westinghouse’s origins were in railroad brake and signal technology but the business expanded to include all manner of electrical engineering and in designing the Westinghouse Pavilion they planned to reveal the full extent to which their products were part of a new world of labour-saving devices and consumer goods. In addition to a dazzling display of gadgetry and electronic wizardry there was a robot (Elektro the Moto-Man) in attendance to impress the visitors, all in the shadow of the Singing Tower of Light. The budget was stretched to include a 55 minute feature film (The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair) shot in Technicolor with a cast of professional actors. Generating publicity came first but a major objective was to address popular misconceptions about capitalism and new technologies. Six years of FDR and federal intervention in the economy had put big business on the defensive, inspiring the screenwriters to prepare a scenario in which the un-American critics of capitalism were comprehensively squashed by good-old all-American common sense and optimism. It may not be the most subtle example of corporate film-making but no opportunity is wasted to communicate the ideological message. 

The Middleton family (Mother, Father and bumptious youngster, Bud) have arrived in New York for the World’s Fair. They are reunited with elder daughter Babs at the Grandmother’s home in suburban New York. Babs has been studying art in the city and come under the malign influence of her teacher (Nicholas Makaroff) who has turned her head with anti-materialist rhetoric and talk of Abstract Art. At the Westinghouse pavilion the Middletons meet up with Babs’s high school sweetheart Jim Treadway who works there as a guide. Jim is an articulate ambassador for Westinghouse and explains the wonders of Westinghouse to his captive audience and genially bats away any hints of scepticism. Battle is joined when Jim meets Nick, with Babs as the prize. Nick is a notably grumpy dissident, sneering at the “Temple of Capitalism” and complaining about the impact of automation on employment. With arms folded defensively, Jim drops the mask of affability and gives Nick a serious lesson in the facts, quoting well-rehearsed statistics to undermine his every argument.

Despite all this Nick continues to press his affections on the ever-loyal but increasingly conflicted, Babs. Later, as they relax together in contemplation of some of Nick’s abstract art, Babs is moved to request a definition of abstract form. Nick explains, “Abstract form is the essential substructure, in short the fundamental rhythm underlying our conceptions of spatial limitations. Do I make myself clear?” Nick is emboldened to offer Babs what he claims is a priceless ring that has been in his family for generations – when she hesitates he accuses her of being provincial. Under duress she accepts, but Nick’s clumsy amorous advance is firmly repelled – the writing’s on the wall. See it for yourself at the Prelinger Archive.

In a tortuous conclusion, Nick’s dishonesty is exposed when the ring is shown to be a $2 piece of costume jewellery purchased in a novelty emporium. The Middletons celebrate Nick’s humiliation and the triumph of capitalism by returning to the Westinghouse pavilion, where Jim and Babs embrace and collectively direct their gaze toward the Singing Tower of Light, overawed by the scale of transformation promised by Westinghouse technology. Aside from the ideological conflict the best entertainment is provided by the dishwashing contest between Mrs Modern (with her Westinghouse Dish Washer) and Mrs Drudge (chained to her sink, exhausted and vanquished) and the performance of Elektro the automatom who can count to five and smoke a cigarette. Babs is unimpressed, “All he lacks is a heart.” Jim glowers in the direction of Nick, “He’s not the only one.” Unsurprisingly it all takes place in a universally white world with African-American characters confined to positions of service.

Charles Laughton, actor and drinker

In this ad for Pabst beer we see the great Charles Laughton squinting into the California sun, holding a glass of chilled Blue Ribbon. It’s 1949 and Laughton has just turned fifty – and recently played the part of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (released in 1950). Filmed on location in somewhat dishevelled post-war Paris in Ansco Color, the production had been fraught with difficulty. The original director had been replaced halfway through, after much internal conflict, by one of the cast (Burgess Meredith). Unsurprisingly the finished movie lacked coherence and consistency of tone – a curious combination of suspense and flippancy. The cinematographer was Stanley Cortez whose excellence was squandered on a meandering narrative and some mediocre acting. Laughton himself seemed uninspired and disinclined to take it at all seriously. But Cortez and Laughton would collaborate to infinitely greater effect five years later when Laughton directed his only film, the incomparable Night of the Hunter. Laughton had become a US citizen and at his first attempt made what would come to be regarded as “one of the masterpieces of American cinema” (David Thomson). When Laughton died in 1962 the critical standing of his film was basically unchanged from the initial indifference – the subsequent reassessment and rise to greatness would take place after his lifetime. Previous posts on Laughton here and here. 

Tramcars Ascendant

The cultural history of the tram is as yet unwritten but the tram was an early agent in the growth of suburbia as extended tram routes enabled developers to offer new homes for the out of town commuter. In North America (where trams were streetcars), Hollywood silent comedies made much use of the streetcars of Los Angeles as comic accessories. The most sublime cinematic tram-ride is in Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) where a remorseful George Brent desperately attempts to convince his terrified young wife that he has renounced all thoughts of murdering her while the tram proceeds from rural arcadia, via industrial suburbs to the frenzied heart of the metropolis. Murnau’s tram-ride was entirely filmed on the Fox lot and the city centre set he constructed was the largest ever in Hollywood, before or since. For Frida Kahlo the terrible injuries sustained as a teenager in a tram accident would overshadow her entire adult life and artistic output. In 1926 Antonio Gaudi had a fatal encounter with a tram outside his unfinished Sagrada Familia in the streets of Barcelona. Silent, empty and inscrutable trams share pictorial space with the skeletons, nudes and classical temples in the paintings of Paul Delvaux while blunt-nosed and hard-edged trams chisel their way at terminal velocity through high-rise canyons in Frans Masereel’s woodcut urban visions. In literature the most poignant evocation of the tram is in Victor Klemperer’s wartime diaries (I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End) in which he bleakly and dispassionately recorded the incremental exclusion of Jews from the trams of Dresden, by degrees confined to the open-air rear platform before total prohibition was imposed.

The days when the tram reigned supreme in the streets of the world’s major cities (the first two decades of the last century) coincided with the heyday of the picture postcard leaving a rich legacy of images of trams ruling the streets. These images come from postcards accumulated over many years without much regard to the traditional preoccupations of collectors such as condition, completeness or specialisation. Indeed, the surface stains and blemishes, the scuff marks and edge wear, the postmarks and postage stamps and fragmentary inscriptions all enrich the mysterious lustre of postcards and their ability to burrow deep into our visual imagination. A combination of traditional coach-building skills and the very latest in electric traction motors placed the tram at the forefront of early engineering technology and its continued survival across the world is evidence of its value for mass transit. Even in countries where private interests tend to take priority over the public interest, the tram is making something of a comeback, having been largely eliminated in Britain (where it was seen as an impediment to the free movement of private cars) and USA (where powerful automotive and oil business interests conspired to take control of tram systems and convert them to bus operation).

Tintin in Hollywood

Tintin’s first trip to America took him to Chicago in 1931. In recognition of his heroic efforts in vanquishing the city’s criminal gangs, the boy reporter was offered a starring role in a billion dollar movie production by Paranoid Pictures. Eighty years on and the juvenile newshound has finally appeared on the Hollywood screen courtesy of Steven Spielberg. Despite the expensive motion capture technology, Tintinologists have not been impressed and many have denounced the film as a travesty and an annihilation of the authentic spirit of Tintin. Hergé’s wonderfully economic and expressive ligne claire was the first casualty of motion capture, discarded in favour of photorealism. Instead of being contained within the comfort of Hergé’s hand-drawn contours Tintin has been ejected into a supremely uncomfortable three-dimensional universe. To add to his troubles, his adventures, always improbable, have been launched into a new zone of special effects and percussive explosions. The problem seems to lie in the US where Tintin has never been more than a minority taste. To overcome this lack of enthusiasm the film-makers have employed the full and formulaic arsenal of shock and awe implausibility to drive the narrative at neutrino-like velocity – it remains to be seen whether the enormous sacrifice of subtlety was worthwhile when the film opens in the US in December.


Whatever the critical reception the Tintin industry will continue to expand and fortunes will be made from the sale of mountains of memorabilia and merchandise. European collectors seem happy to pay premium prices for Tintin products – if Americans can be persuaded to do likewise, the Hergé Foundation and its commercial arm, Moulinsart, will soon be adding millions of dollars to their vast stash of euros.

Poisonville

In 1917 Dashiell Hammett, then employed as a Pinkerton Detective was hired by the Anaconda Copper Company in Montana to break a strike. First-hand immersion in the violence, intimidation and murder directed at the strikers and unions was a radicalising experience for Hammett that, decades later, would result in his appearance in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer for his Communist affiliations. Writing detective fiction for Black Mask, Hammett drew on these experiences and recreated the Montana city of Butte as Personville (pronounced Poisonville), a cesspit of venality where civil society had ceased to exist leaving organised crime in charge with the assistance of a corrupt police force and judiciary.


These bleak postcard images seem to reflect Hammett’s vision of a small city with all the vices of a much larger one. The stark office blocks have a meanness and lack of grace consistent with a place where brute force had a habit of prevailing over the rule of law. The blurred and anonymous figures appear weighed down by the despotic power of their criminal overlords. Hammett’s short story published with the title Poisonville soon expanded into a full-length novel that appeared in 1929 under the title of Red Harvest. The world still waits for the definitive Red Harvest movie. For over a decade Bernardo Bertolucci incubated a Red Harvest project, a screenplay was written but it all came to naught in the late 1980s and there it rests.

Cleveland Noir

These images are greyscale versions of colour originals from a postcard folder celebrating the city of Cleveland, Ohio in the 1940’s. The Forties was the great decade of Film Noir and it’s intriguing to note just how much these adjusted images resemble storyboarding for some great unmade Film Noir. Pools of light enclosed by large wedges of dense black shadow. Deserted freeways, windswept, neon lit sidewalks, empty hotel lobbies, Art Deco cocktail lounges – all perfect locations in which to intimidate a witness, blackmail a friend, commit murder or dump a corpse. The smell of cigar smoke and cheap perfume lingers in the air. The city streets make a lethal breeding ground for alienation, paranoia and betrayal. The ghosts of Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang glide silently through the shadows. Somewhere off-screen, Gloria Grahame, John Garfield, Gene Tierney and Robert Mitchum are preparing themselves for a long night of emotional treachery, mutual deceit and sudden violence in front of the camera.

Mildred Pierce

A short tribute to a great film, a great book and a great book jacket design. 'Mildred Pierce' (directed in 1945 by Michael Curtiz, best known for ‘Casablanca’) features Joan Crawford at her most melodramatically intense as a doubly double-crossed victim of her poor taste in men and some elementary parenting errors that created a callous and malicious daughter, the splendidly named Veda. The sight of a domesticated Crawford in a modest suburban kitchen baking vast quantities of sublime pies is a memorable treat. Every step that Mildred takes towards securing her hard won economic independence is undermined by the fecklessness of her nearest and dearest. As the fates overwhelm her, she offers minimal and utterly ineffective opposition and her ultimate decline seems the result of self-destructive impulse more than the malice of those around her. There is a mixture of naturalism and classic “noir” in the tone of the film but the really special quality is its sense of absolute conviction that persuades us to suspend all critical standards and surrender to its absurd charms. A special word of praise for Jack Carson who unsuccessfully pursues Mildred throughout the film with a cheerful acceptance of all the knock-backs. Even as he engineers her downfall, he contrives to convey a sense of basic human decency alongside the contentment of a life lived without conscience.


It’s the pie that catches the eye in C W Bacon’s (1905-92) dust wrapper (for the UK edition) as a ghostly Mildred hovers over her Spanish colonial style restaurant and offers us a particularly luminous example of her culinary craft. The lush semi-tropical plant life is hinted at, as well as the open topped car with headlights probing the velvety depths of the Californian night. The stage is set for dark and sinister events. As for James M Cain, his writing was the epitome of the hard-boiled style and his terse and punchy fiction with its staccato rhythms lent itself perfectly to cinematic adaptation, the other highlights being ‘Double Indemnity’ (screenplay by Raymond Chandler) and ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. More about Cain and more about C W Bacon in future postings.