Henry King

When I first saw The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King 1952) a couple of years ago I was so bewitched, so enchanted, by a scene at a jazz club in Paris where Harry Street (played by Gregory Peck) and Cynthia Green (played by Ava Gardner) meet for the first time that I had to stop the film and watch the scene again, immediately. It is so wonderful; soft, tender, slow, musical, attentive to atmosphere and nuance, carefully staged and artistically lit; the room, the space is as vivid and as important as the characters in it. That is where King’s greatest strength as a filmmaker lied.

In an interview with King in Focus on Film (#26 - 1977) Scott Eyman complains that while "such obviously marginal talents as Douglas Sirk and Budd Boetticher" are being celebrated by the critics, Henry King is not. To call Sirk and Boetticher "obviously marginal" is perhaps petty rather than accurate, but Sirk and King do have something in common; the incredibly rich and meticulous mise en scène; where sets, props, scale, colours, actor movements, combined with sound, music and camera movements, are done with the out-most care and artistry. It is also something that is frequently mentioned in reviews of King's films (in her review of The Gunfighter (1950), in the Observer, C. A. Lejeune spent a lot of time describing the mise en scène - without using that word - because it has impressed her so much), and despite what Eyman may have felt, King seems to been treated rather well by the critics, and he does not seem to have had any enemies. In the 1920s he was even regarded by many as one of the best filmmakers overall, on the strength of, among others, Tol'able David (1921) and Stella Dallas (1925). They are both fine films, and Tol'able David in particular is interesting because it is close to King's own childhood. But a lot of King's silent films have been lost, and I have seen very few. Of the over 100 films King made I have about 20, and they are primarily from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and it is especially the period from 1943 to 1958 that is extraordinary. That is when he made, among others,  others, The Song of Bernadette (1943), Margie (1946), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), The Gunfighter, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Bravados (1958), all powerful, emotional and warm, made with total conviction. These are films that take their time, and the shots can go on for minutes and minutes, without very much, or even anything, happening on a surface level. King seems more interested in the inner lives of his characters, their spiritual lives, than what they do. And the mise en scène, as mentioned above, is there and the cinematography (frequently by Leon Shamroy) also glows; embedding the characters in both light and darkness, creating sophisticated depth and texture. King favoured medium shots; he wanted the whole space to be part of the images, that the background of a shot was as important as the characters. He once said that "a camera must talk", he wanted to convey the themes and the feelings visually and use everything within the frame for that purpose (so naturally he began using deep focus and low visible ceilings early in his career). This sentence from Bosley Crowther's review of The Snows of Kilimanjaro is also a rather apt summary of much of King's work "the overall production in wonderful color is full of brilliant detail and surprise and the mood of nostalgia and wistful sadness that is built up in the story has its spell". Even a completely unknown film such as Lloyd's of London (1936) has extraordinary richness, depth and tracking shots.

So the mise en scène is one central aspect of his films. Two other aspects are history and religion. All of the films mentioned so far, except Stella Dallas, are set in the past, and that is true for most of his sound films. He was perhaps a man most comfortable in the past, even though he was an aviator who flew his own plane well into his 70s. About religion he once said that "I have often explored religious themes in my pictures but I’ve never tried to be preachy or holier-than-thou." although the last part is debatable, especially in a film like I'd Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), about a priest in a countryside parish. It is a lovely and humane film but, well, preachy at times. Much better is The Song of Bernadette, a film of uncommon power and strength, with Jennifer Jones as the young French girl who believes she has seen the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is a sickly daughter in a poor family (there is a shocking scene in which her father has to dispose of contagious, bloody rags from the hospital as it is the only job he can find, the kind of job nobody else would take), and neither the authorities not the church approve of her stories and her visions. It is a sometimes cruel film. I am not religious but this film moved me, all 150 minutes of it, more than I would like to admit, and seeing it again did not diminish it. It has all of King's strengths discussed above.

Someone else who liked The Song of Bernadette was James Agee. After qualifying his appreciation by mentioning the limits on artistry he felt Hollywood provided, he had this to say in his review in The Nation:

I have seldom seen so tender and exact an attention to mood, to over-all tone, to cutting, to the edging of emotion, and to giving vitality, sometimes radiance, in terms of the image and the sound more than of the character, the story, the line, the music. Jennifer Jones especially, as Bernadette, whether through Henry King's direction or her own ability, impossibly combines the waxen circumspections of a convent school with abrupt salients of emotion of which Dostoevski himself need not have been ashamed.

King worked at 20th Century Fox for the last 30 years of his career, from the mid-1930s, under stuido boss Darryl F. Zanuck, and they seemed to have got along well. King was supposedly Zanuck’s favourite director at Fox, perhaps because they were so in sync, even though Zanuck was sometimes concerned about the slow pacing of the films and wanted to make them snappier, not least The Gunfighter. A Deleuzian might say that it was a battle between King's time-images and Zanuck's movement-images. But as a rule, King was pleased. "He'll watch the rushes every day and give you his opinion. If he respects you, that's all he'll give you. No dictatorial judgement. Generally he deferred to my judgement." One thing they argued about was the moustache Gregory Peck has in The Gunfighter. It was not good for box office according to Zanuck, but as you can see the moustache stayed. King wanted the film to be realistic, and he wanted it to be a low-key film about alienation and sorrow, and in that he succeeded. (King was less pleased with David O. Selznick, whose interferences destroyed King's last film Tender is the Night (1962), a film which he did not get to cut the way he wanted to.)

King would go off to a secluded location and work on the scripts, even when they had been assigned to him, and he worked on the film all the way through post-production. He was keen on the editing process to, and worked with the same editor, Barbara McLean, on some 30 films. He deeply cared for his films, and his characters, and this is of course partly why they are so good. But Zanuck was also sometimes deeply involved, not least on Wilson (1944), from the beginning to the end. Disentangling what was Zanuck and what was King is not always easy, even though it was King who was master on the set. But my research into King is still a work in progress, and there is much more to say. Suffice to say now that in 1968 Andrew Sarris put him in the category "Subject for further research" and I believe he probably deserves to be in "Far side of paradise".

I will end with a scene from King of the Khyber Rifles (1953). The film is not one of King's best but good enough and on occasion wonderful. It is a tale of adventures in British India, and as such rather colonial, but the main character, played by Tyrone Power, is an outcast among the British. Although his father was English, his mother was an Indian, and a Muslim, and so he does not have it easy. In this scene he is not welcome to participate in the celebrations with the other soldiers, and is sitting by himself, when a woman calls on him. The scene has all the quiet emotions and beauty that King excelled at, and notice the expressive sound of the wind; how there are people moving about in the background, and up in the watchtower, and how the camera keeps its distance from the couple on the porch. "[T]he meditative contemplation of humanity from the middle distance" is how Walter Coppedge described King's style and that is a nice way of putting it.



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The quotes from Henry King are from two sources:
Henry King Director From Silents to 'Scope, edited by Frank Thompson (1995)
Scott Eyman's interview in Focus on Film (#26 - 1977)
The quote from Walter Coppedge is from his book Henry King's America (1986)

The best book about King was published by the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2007, when they did a retrospective of King's films. Among those who contributed to it were Peter Von Bagh, Carlos Losilla and Miguel Marías.

Farran Nehme has a fine article about Margie in Film Comment here.

Both King and Henry Hathaway, whom I have written about earlier on several occasions, were at 20th Century Fox and Zanuck, but they are rather different. For one thing Hathaway frequently made films about violent men seeking revenge, and was often hard and cynical. King was the opposite of that, and disliked revenge. He was more interested in redemption. A character in a Hathaway film is much more likely to punch somebody out than in a film by King. Visually King was less showy, more subdued, whereas Hathaway was more striking and geometrical, using frames within frames for example, and sometimes flirting with surrealism. There was also a third Henry at Fox, Koster (they were known as the three Henry). I suppose I will have to write about him too some day.

Leo McCarey

There are two sides to Leo McCarey. The first one is him being one of the most important comic filmmaker of all time. He made shorts with Charley Chase. He put Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together and was the, to use a contemporary term, show runner for most of their silent films as Laurel & Hardy (he wrote and directed many of them as well). He directed Duck Soup (1933), the best of the Marx brothers' films, and it was he who devised some of their most memorable scenes such as the fake mirror sequence (a routine with a long history). In addition he directed Mae West in Belle of the Nineties (1934) and Harold Lloyd in the fine The Milky Way (1936). Some claim that with The Awful Truth (1937), which McCarey wrote, directed and produced, he "created" the persona of Cary Grant that is known today but although The Awful Truth was important Grant had been building himself up over time, and in Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937) the Cary Grant who combines wackiness and elegance was more or less in place. So The Awful Truth was important, and Grant is much better in it, but not groundbreaking. Besides his filmmaking McCarey also had an encyclopedic knowledge of humour (if you mentioned a joke he could say when it first was made and by whom) and a theoretical view on how humour works, ideas which he put forward in articles and essays.

The second side is as a profound humanist, a maker of some of the most moving films ever made, such as Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) and Love Affair (1939). The McCarey of whom Jean Renoir said that he "understands people - better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood." He was loved by most people, and Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, George Bernard Shaw, Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin were among those who praised him and his work. He was Irene Dunne's favourite director and even Maria Ouspenskaya spoke kindly of him.

McCarey lost his way somewhat after the Second World War. The causes were several, including suspected alcoholism, addiction to painkillers (after a car accident that nearly killed him), and a sense of writer's block after winning a remarkable number of awards and being the most highly paid man in the whole of the United States in 1944. After having made at least a film a year until 1945 he made only five more films after the war. Of those five films one succeeds, and very much so: An Affair to Remember (1957). But it is significant that it is a remake of his earlier Love Affair. The other four films are the decent but dull Good Sam (1948), an amiable comedy called Rally 'Round the Flag Boys (1958) and two films on which McCarey had severe problems. On the first one, My Son John (1952), the leading man Robert Walker died during the shooting and McCarey had to borrow scenes from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), in which Walker also starred, to fill out the gaps. Walker's character is killed in the film but only because the actor had died, not because that was McCarey's intention. On the second problematic film, Satan Never Sleeps (1962), he got into a fight with William Holden, who played the lead, and when the studio took Holden's side McCarey walked away. Somebody else finished the film and McCarey never directed another film. An ignoble end to a once brilliant career.

But those final years cannot undo what had gone before. When he was at his most inspired he had few equals. His style of filmmaking was rather unique. He would come up with a general idea for the film, often based on his personal life, and then during the making of the film he would improvise constantly and making it up as he went along, together with his cast and crew. He would always have a piano on set and he would play on it whilst thinking up ideas, and then when he had a good one he would get back to filming. Often he would just say to the actors how a scene would begin, and then let them do whatever came natural to them. He would film it all, often in one take, and being as curious as anybody else as to what would happen. He would also tell one actor or two to do something, but not tell the others, and so let them improvise a response. This means that when a character looks surprised in a film by McCarey in all likelihood the actor playing that character is just as surprised. This is one of the true wonders of his films, these unguarded moments of genuine emotions.

McCarey was not shy of having the actors look into the camera, at the audience. The example above might be the most devastating of them. The old couple in Make Way For Tomorrow, one of the saddest of films, are having a special evening on the town, a few precious moments alone. Or almost alone. Just as he is about to kiss her she turns and looks at us, as if to say "Kindly go away and let us have this moment for ourselves." I do not know if it was her idea, or McCarey's, but it does not matter. The weird feeling of shame, for intruding upon them, is there.

McCarey's way of filmmaking also affected the structure and pacing of his films, in that they are often a progression of what I call emotional set-pieces rather than a more conventional narrative. The films do have a forward motion but it is not the story that is the main concern but the emotions of the characters. The sequences in which these emotions are expressed are often so rich and nuanced they become like short movies in themselves of either hilarious comedy or heartbreaking sadness and/or tenderness. Examples of this are plenty but perhaps the best is the visit to the old grandmother in Love Affair or the scene in Going My Way (1944) when Father Fitzgibbon, the old priest, tells the new priest Father O'Malley that he has understood that O'Malley has been sent to replace him. Or rather, he does not tell him, he let it be understood in a roundabout way, because he cannot bring himself to say out loud the truth; that he is too old to remain in his post and is not wanted anymore. Then he starts to cry and walks away, out of the room and out of his beloved church.

This way of making the films led James Agee to make the observation, when writing about The Bells of St Mary's (1945), that a film by McCarey is "distinguished for leisure and spaciousness, for delight in character and atmosphere, for it use of scenes which are inserted not to advance the story but for their own intrinsic charm." This scene for example, from Bells of St Mary's, where McCarey just told them to try and box.



The old priest in Going My Way, Father Fitzgibbon, was based on a priest that McCarey had known well. In the next film, The Bells of St Mary's, the nun played by Ingrid Bergman is based on McCarey's own aunt, also a nun. The Awful Truth is based on McCarey's own marriage. Make Way For Tomorrow, a film about loneliness and generational conflict that was an inspiration for Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), McCarey made after the death of his father. These are some examples of how personal the films were, and how McCarey used his art to deal with his own life. Allegedly his wife used to asked him, when she saw the films, what the different scenes were meant to represent. ("When was that, darling?" she would ask.) If you want to know what McCarey was like you can look closely at Jerry Warriner, the character Cary Grant plays in The Awful Truth, because he based him on McCarey. What should also be mentioned is the sense of religiosity and spirituality that imbues several of his films.

McCarey was once one of the most honoured and celebrated of any filmmaker, and an internal auteur. The trio of films he made between 1937 and 1939, Make Way For Tomorrow, The Awful Truth and Love Affair, constitute the pinnacle of his achievements. Although he is not a household name anymore among cinephiles he is not forgotten and in the history of film his position is secure. Here, finally, is a scene from Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), where an English butler finds himself in the Wild West. There is no gunplay or fistfights here, but something much more spellbinding.



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I have never been able to watch My Son John, which is usually considered a disaster. But it has its defenders, for example Jonathan Rosenbaum who has called it "great but deranged". Some have suggested that it is the result of a conflict between McCarey's natural artistic sensibilities and the forced anti-communist theme. I have not mentioned Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), McCarey's anti-Nazi film, because it has been so long since I saw it but I think it might very well be classified as "great but deranged" as well. It certainly takes black humour to some surreal extremes. As for Satan Never Sleeps, while McCarey hated the finished film it has its moments. The three people it is about, played by Holden, Clifton Webb and France Nuyen, are treated with warmth and humour, and there are several fine scenes. But as a whole it is rather weak, muddled and obvious, especially the last 15 minutes or so.

For a deeper analysis of The Awful Truth see Stanley Cavell's book The Pursuit of Happiness. For a book about the life and career of McCarey see Wes D.Gehring's Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy (which is not as good as one would have wanted). The quote from Rosenbaum about My Son John is from his book Essential Cinema. The quote from Agee is to be found in Agee on Film Volume 1.

Maya Deren

Once in younger days me and a friend were making up mottos and one was "Even the avant-garde has its conventions!". That was in some kind of protest against the cult of the avant-garde we sometimes felt was running amok in the art world. This blog have been almost exclusively concerned with full-length narrative feature films, with the occasional post on music videos or TV. It just comes more natural for me. But it does not mean that I do not like avant-garde films, whatever that might be. For somebody like me, who in some ways are more interested in the style and the feel of the film than the story, avant-garde cinema is a natural ally. That might be why I could enjoy Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) so much. I saw it as a procession of short installations, or avant-garde films, instead of a functional narrative film, and thought that it was quite spectacular.

I was recently discussing avant-garde films with my friend Paul Taberham at University of Kent. He is doing research on avant-garde cinema, including the patience of spectators. I will be writing more on the subject later on but since I promised Paul a piece on Maya Deren, that is what I will post today. It is not an original piece, but a translated version of a post I wrote for my Swedish film blog back in 2008. It has been amended and updated:

Maya Deren

A woman is lying on a beach with the waves rolling back and forth. She looks at the sea gulls and then begins climbing a dead tree. Suddenly she is on a long dining table, around which well-dressed people sit, smoking, talking and laughing. She crawls along the table, but nobody takes any notice of her. At the other end of the table a man is playing chess, but when the woman reaches the chess board the pieces start moving around by themselves until one of them falls off the board and down through the dead tree and into the water. The woman follows it. Somewhat later she is in a house where the furniture is covered with white sheets. She walks around, opening one door after another, and suddenly she is no longer in the house but on a rock. She  slides down and walks around on a beach filled with stones. She picks up a stone and then another until she reaches the shoreline, where two women dressed in black are playing chess. At the end the woman runs away from everything, possibly terrified, while images we have already seen are shown again.

That, sort of, is the "plot" of Maya Deren's silent short At Land (1944), an important milestone in avant-garde cinema. Deren said that films functions on two levels, the horizontal, which is the narrative level, the story, the characters, and a vertical level, which is the poetic level, moods, tone, rhythm. She was much more interested in the vertical level, and she is, in many ways, one of the most important names within the art form she was working in.

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1917 as Elenora Derenkowsky. Partly due to the anti-Semitism in her home country the family moved to the US in 1922. There they changed their family name to (the less overtly Jewish) Deren. Her first name she herself changed from Elenora to Maya in the 1940s. (Maya is a Buddhist term meaning that reality is an illusion. It also means mother in Sanskrit.) Between 1930 and 1933 she studied in Geneva, Switzerland, and when she came back to the US she studied, among other things, English literature. By this stage she had been interested in dancing and joined forces with Catherine Dunham, choreographer and dancer. Together they toured America. Deren also met her next husband, Alexander Hammid (born Hackenschmied), and they married in 1942. This is when Deren began making films, perhaps because her husband was a filmmaker, and they worked together.

Their first film was Meshes in the Afternoon (1943). A woman returns home on a sunny day and sits down in an armchair by the window. She falls asleep and soon is dreaming strange dreams. She pulls keys out of her mouth, she runs on staircases that swings from side to side, knives appears out of nowhere and a mysterious creature dressed in black appears, with a mirror instead of a face. Everything is happening several times, although we small changes each time, and she is confronted by her own double. The film, as Deren's own later work such as At Land, problematized the self, and concepts of time and space. Hammid and Deren moved beyond conventional logic and continuity and they criticised bourgeois conventions and the "invisiblicing" of women. This was done with stylish and ambitious camera work.

Deren was very prolific. She wrote, photographed, filmed, danced, sew and initiated the Creative Film Foundation. The aim of the foundation was to support and promote art films. In her circles moved Arthur Miller, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Dylan Thomas, Shirley Clarke, John Cage and Stan Brakhage. She also did screenings of her own films, at the home of critics like James Agee and Manny Farber, and at Provincetown Playhouse. This was a very successful endeavour and led to the creation of Cinema 16, a film society which showed experimental films, as well as documentaries, and which had about 7000 members at most. (Agee was not overwhelmed by the films, but he thought that there was no one that was "paying any more attention to that great universe of movie possibilities" than Deren.)

In the late 1940s Deren had become interested in Haiti, especially the Vodou culture and ritual dancing, and this occupied a large part of her final years before she died of a brain hemorrhage in 1961, only 44 years old. In an evocative gesture worthy of her life and career her then husband, composer Teiji Ito, spread her ashes over Mount Fuji in Japan.

Besides making art, Deren was also writing and thinking about it, and its rules and obligations. She was of the opinion that film was a medium of its own and that it should use its opportunities to break open time and space. In a film a person can open a door and move from one room to a completely different space or time, and this way of going against the restrictions of reality was central in Deren's work. In her unfinished dance film A Study in Choreography (1945) a man is dancing in the woods, then through a cut he is suddenly in a studio, only to be dancing at a museum next, among statues and busts, before he is back in the woods again. Another example is the very beautiful The Very Eye of Night (1958) where students from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School have been filmed and then the negative has been superimposed over the star-clad sky, making it look like they are dancing on the Milky Way.

It is natural enough to make the connection to surrealism, but Deren did not like that connection. Surrealism for her was something narcissistic and narrow-minded. She advocated an active and all-encompassing art, where the artist and each individual were part of a larger whole. She wrote: "He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning." Deren was an active socialist, a Trotskyist, and her thoughts on the individuals place in a larger collective ties in with her socialist ideas. But she was critical of the situation in the Soviet Union, which she called a "feudal industrialism". She felt that an artist had a responsibility to act ethically, and that aesthetics and ethics are intertwined. When you express yourself aesthetically  you are also making an ethical statement, or should do so at least. It is the artist's responsibility to be aware of the larger world, its problems and conflicts, and deal with this in their art. For Deren this was a moral imperative.

In 1960 Deren wrote an essay called Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality, which can been read as her cinematic manifesto. It ends with the following words:

"If cinema is to take its place beside the others as a full-fledged art form, it must cease merely to record realities that owe nothing of their actual existence to the film instrument. Instead, it must create a total experience so much out of the very nature of the instruments as to be inseparable from its means. It must relinquish the narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature and its timid imitation of the casual logic of narrative plots, a form which flowered as a celebration of the earthbound, step-by-step concept of time, space and relationship which was part of the primitive materialism of the nineteenth century. Instead, it must develop the vocabulary of the filmic images and evolve the syntax of filmic techniques which relate those. It must determine the disciplines inherent in the medium, discover its own structural modes, explore the new realms and dimensions accessible to it and so enrich our culture artistically as science has done in its own province."

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The quote from Deren about the "dynamic whole" is from her essay An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. The quote from Agee is from a review in The Nation in 1946 and is reprinted in Agee on Film.

The Maya Deren archives are at Boston University.

Here writings on cinema and art are collected in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film.