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Reviews
Les misérables (1934)
Most original adaptation, unlike anything Hollywood produced
I am a huge fan of those lavish Hollywood productions of the same period and genre and its strict codes of plot, camera angles and montage, where even the poor have to look glamorous. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Marie Antoinette (1938), A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and 20th Century Pictures' own version of Les Misérables (1935) come to mind. But this is something different. Starting with the fantastic soundtrack by Arthur Honneger and the expressionist camera and lighting, you enter another world. Of course it helps the authenticity by being a French film with French actors. Here you can see the real French working classes, the homeless and the criminals. By the way, the English subtitles of the Eclipse DVD are good and idiomatic. Also, this monumental and epic film (DVD version 281 min, and a 315 min version seems to exist) has none of the poor production values one is accustomed to with such films from Europe of the 30s. It makes you wonder what might have been possible at, say, MGM if Stroheim or Welles had been given free reign. Let's be glad to have both visions as created in very different studios on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Devil Is a Woman (1935)
Concha's music
After having watched The Devil is a Woman innumerable times, I still can't get over my excitement about certain scenes: If you haven't seen the film yet, go for it. If you know it well, re-live the pleasure of it reading these lines.
1. Above all: The scene introducing Concha in midst of the carnival crowds and carriages. Her entrance is carefully prepared: First we are we get a glimpse of a somewhat faded Senora flirting from a balcony. The music meanwhile is a cacophony of brash carnival tunes, the images likewise chaotic montage, the screen filled with crowds, balloons, streamers and confetti, the sound and images seem to be cropped and assembled at random.
The cacophonic music suddenly changes to trumpet fanfares which announce the arrival of Concha's carriage. The camera pans down from a balcony to the street, following downward hanging white streamers. Concha's white carriage enters from the left, drawn by a pair of white horses, two coachmen in white livery. She is sitting all alone in an ocean of white and presumably pink balloons, wearing her famous black pompom costume with matching head-dress, black lace mask and black lace gloves, underneath nails painted very red, as you can later see when she shakes her finger at Antonio. She's holding to her bosom a huge mass of white carnations which she throws to the admiring crowds. Meanwhile in the foreground, entering from the right, three black carriages drive by, drawn by dark horses, inside several young women who judging by their costumes and behavior obviously haven't Concha's class. The whole scene drowned streamers, balloons, confetti.
If this alone doesn't make you hair raise, there is the most erotic, flattering and slightly risqué "Spanish dance music" accompanying Concha's flirtations and close-ups. No harsh carnival tunes for her! The scene is so rich, it must be seen (and heard) many times.
2. Another scene which gains immensely by the music. It's not Rimski or Falla, Sternberg must have dug up a lot of traditional Spanish music which I can't identify being no expert, sorry. Concha has just seduced Antonio to accompany her to her box in a ballroom where they are supposed to have a sort of farewell over a cup of coffee. They arrive in the dark in front of the entrance. A servant opens the door which is really just a wooden latticed frame. Concha precedes and mounts a staircase. The camera stays outside in the dark. Her whole climb is visible from the outside, the stairs again being separated from the outside only by very sparse wooden frames painted white. Concha wears her white fringe dress and mantilla and mounts the stairs before Antonio, holding her fan in her right hand, parting the streamers with it while passing through, and spreading her left elbow extremely outwards. I suppose this is the way coquette Spanish women mount stairs. She looks behind exactly four times to make sure Antonio is following. She passes on her way a huge brightly lit painting (another painting, of a bull, hangs just outside Concha's box, but that comes later) and halfway meets another carnival crowd running downstairs. Inside her box she pops a few more balloons with a revolver.
Meanwhile the music, which had been Rimski during the scene in the "avenue of the Sycamores", changes again to a wonderful erotic rhythmic piece to the tune of which Concha climbs the stairs and shoots the balloons.
3. The whole film is full of such marvels, enjoy.
Force of Evil (1948)
strange soundtrack indeed
A lot of reviewers have remarked upon the uneven soundtrack, so I'll mention another astonishing sound track choice for such a gritty film noir, which is Beethoven's string quartet op. 131, adagio molto espressivo. It has been called the saddest music ever written and you hear it in a version for string orchestra, but it seems to be original Beethoven and not David Raksin using themes.
The music starts low in a night scene in a basement restaurant, where the frightened bookkeeper Bauer has agreed to lure Gomez into a meeting with some rival gangsters. Bauer sits at his table alone, one of the killers at another table, Bauer quarrels with the waiter, Bauer nervously drinks another glass of water, Gomez arrives, tries to talk sense to Bauer, then talks about dying himself, everything erupts in violence and over it all flows Beethoven's op. 131, giving the whole scene an unreal fatalistic atmosphere.
Classical music has been used later to similar effects by Pasolini in the 60s, but this must be a very early and strange example.