I am a published author of books about film - over a dozen to my name, the latest being "When Women Ruled Hollywood." As the title of the blog suggests, this is a site devoted to movies of the 1960s but since I go to the movies twice a week - an old-fashioned double-bill of my own choosing - I might occasionally slip in a review of a contemporary picture.
I have no idea why this masterpiece has not been acclaimed. For virtually half the picture, there is no dialogue, the entire focus on camerawork and reaction. Even Stanley Kubrick in The Shining (1980) gave in to grand guignol and The Exorcist (1973) was filled with over-the-top scenes but here the psychological impact of possession remains confined.
Initially, it appears we are in familiar Hammer territory, a grave-robber detaching a skull from a corpse only to meet an untimely end. There is another flashback to the gothic where the presence of the skull drives an order man to murder. But this is an Amicus production and set in contemporary times where Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are once again in opposition, but this time only in an auction house bidding for demonic artefacts.
Exposition is straightforward. Dealer Marco (Patrick Wymark) sells Maitland (Peter Cushing) a book about De Sade bound in human skin. Marco may be a con man. He claims to possess the skull of the Marquis de Sade but his attitude towards it, kissing its head, plucking its nose socket, and the fact that he willing to halve his asking price, suggest otherwise. Sir Matthew (Christopher Lee), who once owned the skull, warns Cushing against it.
The rest of the film covers Maitland’s possession of the skull and the skull’s possession of him. There is a notable Kafkaesque sequence where Maitland is arrested, taken before a judge and forced three times to play Russian roulette before ending up in the house of the dealer where he steals the skull. What is less often commented upon is that this nigh-on 15-minute sequence including a 90-second taxi ride is conducted in virtual silence, the camera mostly on Maitland’s face, that silence only broken by the feeding of bullets not the barrel of the gun and the barrel being rolled round. It is not long before Maitland commits his first murder.
There is a famous scene in the Last Tycoon (1976) in which Robert De Niro explains to a truculent word-obsessed British writer why dialogue is redundant in the movies. All you need is camera and reaction. That sets up The Skull’s greatest scene, a 17-minute dialogue-free climax, where Maitland is effectively preyed upon and consumed.
The skull itself appears to have a point-of-view, various shots of Maitland through the skull’s eyes. The actual special effects are limited to what is imminently achievable, the skulls glows, it moves through the air. The impact of its presence is shown on Maitland’s face and by his action. It is just hypnotic.
Various directors have been anointed for the way they move their camera – Antonioni’s 360-degree turn in The Passenger (1975) comes to mind, large chunks of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the long wait for sunrise in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the lengthy shots of James Stewart driving a car in Vertigo (1958). But I have never seen anything as innovative as the silent sequences in The Skull which would be a waste of innovation were the sequences not so effective, especially on the small screen. Freddie Francis (Nightmare, 1964) directed from a story by Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1960). Equally innovative is the jarring music by avant-garde composer Elizabeth Lutyens.
In the role of his career, Peter Cushing (Dr Who and the Daleks, 1965) turns on the style, his character virtually turning 360-degrees as he becomes enmeshed in diabolic terror.
Why settle for a measly Gatling Gun, as Mapache does in Sam Peckinpah’s gloriously violent The Wild Bunch (1969), when you can just as easily relieve government troops of serious artillery. It’s 1912 and the U.S. has sent General Pershing (John Russell) into Mexico with the titular weaponry in a bid to subdue Mexican rebels led by the titular Cordoba (Raf Vallone) raiding across the border and annoying powerful ranchers like Warner (John Larch).
Over-plotted to within an inch of its life and atmospherically indulgent – the natives are constantly whooping it up – and with star George Peppard trying out cigars for size for future enterprises like The A-Team (American television 1983-1987), this comes up short when compared to similar hard-nosed incursions into enemy territory like The Professionals (1966) and The Dirty Dozen (1967).
It’s a movie of many – too many – parts. First of all, we have rebellious U.S. soldier Capt Douglas (George Peppard), who gives superiors the finger, packed off with a small team to infiltrate the rebel army and find out what they’re up to. Not that that would require any infiltration. It’s pretty obvious with a prize plum like artillery suddenly arrived, the rebels are going to chance their arm and steal it.
Lo and behold that’s exactly what Douglas’s gang – which includes Jackson Harness (Don Gordon) quickly embittered because the good captain, in order to maintain his disguise, refuses to save one of his captured team being slowly roasted over a pit – does discover. But they don’t quite manage to get this information back to Pershing before those dashed clever Mexicans are blowing everything to hell and stealing the train containing the guns.
So now Douglas has to put together another team, the aforementioned Harkness augmented by Rice (Pete Duel) and Antonio (Gabriele Tinti), a Mexican who wants Cordoba brought to justice, and a few others, and infiltrate the Mexican stronghold. Along the way, they acquire the assistance of the beautiful Leonora (Giovanni Ralli) who is willing to use her body any which way (not going quite as far as Marianna Hill in El Condor out the same year) to gain revenge for Cordoba slaughtering her family and raping her. That last aspect seems a psychological stretch, but what the hell, how otherwise will the gang get close enough to the rebel leader.
Of course, just to sauce up the story, as if anything more is required, they are captured and need to bust out of jail and what with one thing and another it takes a goodly time before they can get close to achieving their objective. And that’s not to mention the betrayal that simmers in the background, Leonara having her own way of getting close to Cordoba, Warner not quite as right-minded as he appears, and the aforementioned Harkness waiting for the right moment to blow away his leader.
Not too well received, the movie went out in the supporting role in a double bill.
Plenty explosions, plenty action, and plenty living it up, scantily-glad women appearing at every turn, firecrackers going off, dancing in the streets, but somehow too much of this scrambles the focus while subsidiary characters take center stage too briefly too often, as with rebel women in the 100 Rifles (1969)-Raquel Welch mold. It gets there in the end of course but you just wish it would hurry up or expend more of its running time on developing the main personnel.
George Peppard (The Groundstar Conspiracy, 1972) is having a ball, but that’s only because every other character is so reined-in and there’s little else character-wise for him to hold onto. It wouldn’t have taken that much for him to command center stage, for competition in the acting stakes he’s only got Raf Vallone (The Cardinal, 1963), in worldly-wise form, and Don Gordon (Bullitt, 1968), stewing away. Giovanni Ralli (Deadfall, 1968) arrives too late in the proceedings to make much impact. Pete Duel (Alias Smith and Jones, 1971-1973) looks cute but has little to do.
Diligently put together by Paul Wendkos (Guns of The Magnificent Seven, 1969) but coming across as trying too hard, from a screenplay by Stephen Kandel (Chamber of Horrors, 1970).
Enjoyable if you enjoy shoot-em-ups, and even more if you’ve been charting the career of George Peppard who here makes the switch from all those uptight characters of the previous few years to letting a whole lot more hang out.
There was no greater divide between audiences and critics in Britain than the long-running comedy “Carry On” series (outside of an occasional satirical bulls-eye like Carry On Up the Khyber, 1968). And a similar gulf existed between the type of audiences the movies attracted in Britain and those in America. In Britain they were vastly popular general releases while in America their usual habitat was the arthouse as if they were seen as the natural successors to the Ealing comedies. And there was a third chasm – between the endearing risqué early comedies and the more lascivious later versions.
Carry On Nurse fell into the endearing camp. The humor was gentle rather than forced, the emphasis on misunderstanding and innuendo and smooth seducers like Leslie Phillips rather than exposed female flesh and the grasping likes of the ever-chortling Sid James. Perhaps you could define this earlier film as pre-nasal Kenneth Williams, his peculiar type of delivery not yet at full throttle. Here there is innocence rather than lust and the males quake in fear not just of the indomitable Hattie Jacques in brusque matron mode but of the other efficient nurses led by Shirley Eaton who have the measure of their rather hapless patients, although student nurse Joan Sims – making her series debut – is an accident-prone soul.
And they say comedy doesn’t travel.
The action is mostly confined to a male ward. There are plenty of gags – alarms rung by mistake, boiling catheters burned to a turn, medication making a patient go wild, patients intoxicated by laughing gas and the famous replacement of a rectal thermometer by a daffodil. Wilfred Hyde-White as a constant complainer and obsessive radio listener Charles Hawtrey provide further ongoing amusement.
But the thrust of the story is romance. Journalist Terence Longdon fancies Shirley Eaton but his initial advances are spurned as she is in love with a doctor. In a role far removed from his later brazen characters, Williams plays a shy intellectual who finally comes round to the charms of Jill Ireland (later wife of Charles Bronson). Although Leslie Phillips is his usual suave self, he makes no designs on the female staff since he has a girlfriend elsewhere and his ailment – a bunion on the bum – makes him an unlikely candidate for a hospital liaison.
Hattie Jacques is in imperious form, Shirley Eaton shows what she is capable of, Kenneth Williams playing against type is a revelation.
British critics hated the “Carry On” films until late in the decade when Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) hit a satirical note. Critics felt the movies pandered to the lowest common denominator and were a poor substitute for the Ealing comedies which had given Britain an unexpected appreciation among American comedy fans.
It was a well-known fact the comedies did not always travel. Apart from Jacques Tati, the more vulgar French comedies featuring the likes of Fernandel were seen as arthouse fare. Unless they featured a sex angle or the promise of nudity, coarse Italians comedies struggled to find an international audience. The “Carry On” films were bawdy by inclination without being visually offensive
Carry On Sergeant (1958), the first in the series, had been a massive success in Britain. Distributor Anglo-Amalgamated was so convinced it would find a similar response in the U.S. that it was opened in New York at a first run arthouse. Although comedies were hardly standard arthouse fare, this was generally the route for low-budget British films. The picture lasted only three weeks and taking that as proof of its dismal prospects other exhibitors ignored it.
The follow-up Carry On Nurse (1959) took an entirely different route when launched in America in 1960. This time New York would be virtually the last leg of its exhibition tour. Instead it opened on March 10 at the 750-seat Crest in Los Angeles. Away from the New York spotlight, the little movie attracted not just good notices but decent audiences.
Instead of being whipped off screens after a few weeks, it developed legs. In Chicago it ran for 16 weeks in first run before transferring to a further 50 theaters. Within a few months of opening it had been released in 48 cities. In Minneapolis it was booked as a “filler” at the World arthouse, expected to run a week and no more. Instead, it remained for six weeks and when it shifted out to the nabes out-grossed Billy Wilder’s big-budget comedy The Apartment (1960) with a stellar cast of Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine.
In its fourth month at the 600-seat Fox Esquire in Denver where it opened in May, it set a new long-run record for a non-roadshow picture. It had been taking in a steady $4,000 a week since opening.
SOURCES: “How To Nurse a Foreign Pic That’s Neither Art nor Nudie: Skip N.Y.,” Variety, Aug 24, 1960, 3; “British Carry On Nurse A Sleeper in Mpls With Long Lopp Run, Nabe Biz,” Variety, Aug 24, 1960, 18;
Note: by and large this blog follows American release dates so although Carry On Nurse was shown in Britain in 1959 it did not reach America until 1960.
A post-WW2 operation to save a handful of Japanese adrift at sea in a storm is endangered when three members of the U.S. Air Force Air Rescue Service confront conflicts from their past. Despite tense rescue action, this is basically a three-hander about guilt and how men deal – or fail to deal – with emotions. Extended flashbacks illuminate the tangled relationships between Sgt Takashima (Yul Brynner), Lt Col Stevenson (Richard Widmark) and Second Lieut Gregg (George Chakiris). Unusually, for the period, tough guys actually emote.
So really it’s like one of those portmanteau films that are occasionally popular – like Trio (1950) made up of Somerset Maugham short stories or similar to something like the Oscar-winning Crash (2004) where characters interconnect after an accident. While each of the episodes stands up in its own right, the thrust of the narrative revolves around actions taken in the past having a direct bearing on the present situation.
Gregg is haunted by causing an avalanche after flying his helicopter too close to a mountain and, as a result, by having to leave behind many of the victims, due to restricted capacity on board, and now he is terrified of flying solo. As a consequence Stevenson has no faith in abilities as a pilot.
Stevenson also has an abiding hatred of Japanese – colleague Takashima of Japanese ancestry also bears his wrath – because his ill wife Caroline (Shirley Knight) and child died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp because medical supplies were reserved only for the Japanese. Faced with rescuing Japanese, he is enraged.
For his part, Takashima, a paratrooper during the war, inadvertently caused the death of his Algerian girlfriend Leila (Daniele Gaubert). It’s not so much an examination of tough guys under pressure as about their inability to deal with the consequences of action. There’s certainly a sense that the only way men like these have of dealing with trauma is to throw themselves into dangerous action.
Yul Brynner (The Double Man, 1967) gives a more thoughtful performance than you might expect while Richard Widmark (The Secret Ways, 1961), himself dabbling in production elsewhere, was good value. Goerge Chakiris (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) was a weaker link. The presence of Suzy Parker (Circle of Deception, 1960) and especially Daniele Gaubert (The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl, 1968) strengthen the film.
Unusually, at a time when product was in short supply and for a film boasting a strong cast, the picture was shelved for two years after completion. Presumably explained by the demise of Harold Hecht’s production company after he split with Burt Lancaster. Michael Anderson (The Shoes of the Fisherman, 1968) directed from a screenplay by Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy, 1969) based on the novel by Elliot Arnold (Kings of the Sun, 1963).
The title’s a bit of a misnomer, suggesting someone is trying to escape from Ashiya when, in fact, that is just the name of the air base where the rescue team are located.
Critics complained it was neither one thing nor the other, but in fact I found it a perfectly satisfactory combination of action and drama, especially as it dealt with rarely-recognized male emotions.
The selection process for my weekly Monday visit to the cinema has sorely let me down. I never refer to reviews in advance, not wishing to learn anything, however inadvertently, about the story. So, I went into this arthouse trio – all showing I hasten to add at my local multiplex – with high hopes.
May December
I find it impossible work out how anyone, least of all a brace of Oscar-winners like Natalie Portman (here listed as producer) and Julianne Moore, could seriously consider making a movie about someone convicted of child sex abuse. In this case, I guess, the excuse is that because it’s a woman it’s either a) understandable or b) excusable. But if the subject was a male sex abuser I doubt if he would be given the same latitude.
This is one of those films that would have been far better dealt with as a documentary where the facts can be treated more straightforwardly rather than deliberately clouded by fictional elements and sympathetic treatment. Supposedly, the audience is provided with perspective since the movie revolves around an actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) doing preparatory work 20 years after the event as a prelude to playing the character in a television movie.
The fact that Gracie (Julianne Moore), the married woman convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old boy, denies that she committed any crime, maintaining a) that it was true love and b) that she was the victim, that the boy was “in charge” and the seducer, seems a very deliberate attempt to muddy the waters. Especially, when it becomes clear that the boy, Joe (Charles Melton), now of course a man, has been forced to bury his true feelings about the subject.
With the usual showbiz entitlement, Elizabeth sees nothing wrong with disrupting what is, on the surface at least, a reasonably happy family, forcing the children of this relationship to come to terms with the fact that at least one of them was born from an illegal coupling.
Not to mention the damage this will do to the innocent children of the couple on whom the story was based, Mary Kay Letourneau (since dead) and Vili Fualaau. That Elizabeth turns out to be pretty creepy herself – explaining to a shocked teenage audience that she gets aroused during sex scenes and seducing Joe – seems to be an attempt at mitigation (oh, look, we all do crazy things once in a while!).
Saltburn
Brideshead Revisited Meets Carry On Downton Abbey. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the way it was actually pitched, it’s just so uneven, veering through several different styles without ever finding a target. The shock elements are, unfortunately, just risible. Via the trailer this appeared to be a moody, atmospheric picture about entitlement, the downside, if you like, of Downton.
Instead, it’s just plain barmy, which might well have worked if its take on the bizarre had been consistent, but, really it’s a contender for the coveted So-Bad-It’s-Good Award with Rosamund Pike odds-on to nab a gong for Best Maggie Smith Impression. .
Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is supposedly a scholarship student at Oxford, coming from a sinkhole estate in Liverpool, parents drug dealers etc etc. Out of his depth, by chance he latches on to sex god Felix (Jacob Elordi) and is invited to spend the summer at the latter’s stately home complete with sneering butlers and demonic family all graduates of the Over-Acting Academy.
Turns out we’ve not been watching Downton Abbey at all, but The Usual Suspects, Oliver not an innocent little bookworm but an extremely malevolent character who manages – in the absence (luckily) of post-mortems – to bump off the entire family in order to inherit (don’t ask!) Saltburn in order to, in a bizarre nod to Risky Business, dance naked through it.
The only reason it gets any points at all is Jacob Elordi, who exhibits tremendous screen charisma, and because the barmy extremely self-centred and out-of-it Rosamund Pike does elicit a few laughs and maybe, courtesy of Richard E. Grant, has a haircut to enter some kind of Hall of Fame.
Couldn’t find a poster for “A Forgotten Man” so thought I would temper proceedings with this old British poster for a seaside resort.
A Forgotten Man
This wants to say something important about the neutrality stance of Switzerland during the Second World War. But unless you live in Switzerland, you won’t have a clue what it’s trying to say. And if you thought The Crown was off-the-wall in summoning up the ghost of Princess Diana, wait till you start counting the number of ghostly apparitions here of young Swiss chap Maurice (Viktor Poltier), whom the protagonist Henrich (Michael Neuenschwander), while Swiss Ambassador to Berlin during the war, failed to prevent being executed.
I’ve no idea if this aspect is based on a true story. Either way, fictional or not, it’s a preposterous central conceit. Supposedly, Maurice had been arrested for trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Theoretically, we should all be applauding his actions. He should get a free pass for trying to rid the world of a monster. But, in reality, how would you expect an Ambassador to go about pleading clemency for one of his citizens who tried to murder the ruler of Germany?
There’s clearly some angst about the fact that Switzerland managed to emerge unscathed after a war which left the rest of Europe in turmoil. But it’s pretty hard to summon any sympathy for anybody, least of all the director because whatever point he’s trying to make is made so obliquely it fails to register. That it gets any points at all is due to its brevity and that, as the first movie in my self-selected triple bill, I came out of it in a far better mood than the other two.
If you ever wondered what kicked off the fad for having live orchestras playing at screenings of older films, you might be even more surprised to discover that Napoleon (1927) was the cause. And, for that matter, created the “event” movie, another contemporary buzzword that appears to indicate a limited-time-only showing. Abel Gance’s picture also set up another template, one that every director and critic ascribed to in their thousands, the restoration. For, in one fell swoop, the revival of this picture in 1981 after over half a century of neglect, turned restoration into an event, worthy of acres of newspaper articles, hi-hat premieres, and subsequent profitable release in both the theatrical and ancillary pipeline.
Equally, as luck would have it, Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), truly was an event, a silent epic, the last section projected across three screens (the famed triptych, precursor of Cinerama and 70mm), road-shown with a full orchestra and ticket prices as high as $20. It became the “must-see” cultural happening of the year. American journalists gave director Francis Coppola virtually all the credit and he was certainly due everything that went with the bold showmanship and the financial risk, underwritten by his Zoetrope company, of launching the film in America’s largest cinema, the Radio City Music Hall in New York, with a complete score (incorporating classical music) by his father Carmine and the aforementioned full orchestra.
But in fact, the actual restoration had been carried out in Britain by silent film expert Kevin Brownlow – author of The Parade’s Gone By and director of It Happened Here (1965), the documentary Abel Gance, The Charm of Dynamite (1969) and Winstanley (1976) – who had compiled his version from eleven different sources including the Cinematheque in Paris, an MGM print and a seventeen-reel version from a private collector.
Thanks to Brownlow, Napoleon became “The Greatest Reissue Story Ever Told.”
Why? Because it was the result of obsession and passion, emotions every artist shares with every cinephile. Brownlow first came across Napoleon as a fifteen-year-old, and although he only glimpsed a few fragments, it was enough to trigger a quest that was to last nearly thirty years. Ironically, it was thanks to a quirky French invention that Brownlow encountered the Gance masterpiece. Where other countries adapted the 8mm format for showing abridged features at home, the French projected these films on a 9.5mm gauge.
After being gifted such a projector for his eleventh birthday, Brownlow started hunting down and purchasing silent films. In 1954, at the age of fifteen, disappointed by Jean Epstein’s Lion des Mongols (1924) he asked for a replacement and was offered two reels of a movie of which he had never heard – Napoleon vu par Abel Gance. It proved a revelation. He was “converted as surely as Paul on the road to Damascus.” He found exhilarating the “rapid cutting and swirling camera movement…and the magic of the visuals were exceptional.” From scouring junk shops and advertising in magazines, he assembled other reels and began showing a 90-minute version to family, friends and other film lovers. Even when the British National Film Archive turned down the opportunity to view the picture Brownlow, undeterred, wrote to Gance and, by happy coincidence in 1955, was invited to meet the director at the British Film Institute.
The accepted version of the Gance story was that Napoleon was a neglected masterpiece, but that was not strictly true. If the parade had passed him by, it was not for want of trying. Napoleon was revived (although primarily in France) as Napoleon Bonaparte in 1935 and in 1953-1955 on the back of his original technological innovations and other films about the French Emperor. In directing the silent picture, Gance had anticipated the arrival of sound and made his actors speak actual dialogue which later facilitated dubbing. The 1935 sound reissue (140 minutes including new footage), partly piggybacked on a new film about Napoleon written by Mussolini.
The next revival owed everything to recognition of his part in creating the first wide screen. Another French inventor Henri Chretien, inspired by Gance’s triptych, had invented what Twentieth Century Fox marketed as CinemaScope. While delighting in Chretien’s process, French journalists recognized Gance’s contribution. In 1953, when Twentieth Century Fox toured Cinemascope throughout Europe one port of call was the Venice Film Festival where the organizers “planned to surprise those who think widescreen is a new thing” by showing Napoleon on the CinemaScope screen.
Gance timed public demonstrations of his process (called Polyvision) to coincide with the launch of The Robe. The arrival of Cinerama also sent journalists delving into the past. However, Gance’s film had to wait until 1955 for another commercial outing, when it rode in on the heels of Sacha Guitry’s phenomenally successful Napoleon (the most expensive French film ever made and a box office smash) and enjoyed a two-year run at the Studio 28 arthouse in Montmartre aided by the releases of Desiree (1954) starring Marlon Brando and King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956). Independent distributor Tomas J. Brand acquired the U.S. rights in 1954, hoping to interest Cinerama in showing the movie as a “spectacle.” Gance toured his process, renamed Magirama, through France in 1956 but his comeback venture Austerlitz (1960) with an all-star cast of Orson Welles, Claudia Cardinale, Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Caron and Vittorio de Sica flopped in the U.S.
And there, pretty much, the matter lay, the parade now racing past Gance, until 1969 when, separately, Brownlow, using the facilities of the British Film Institute, began work on restoring the silent picture, while French film director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), who owned a cinema devoted to classics, purchased the rights and with funding from the French government released in 1971 (the 150th anniversary of Napoleon’s death) the 235-minute sound version Bonaparteand the Revolution, with some new scenes shot by Gance, who had reworked other scenes and added a color preface. Outside of France, it was destined for the rarified atmosphere of the film festival circuit, turning up in Rotterdam in 1972, Boulogne in 1972, the University of California in 1973, Paris again in 1973, not reaching New York till 1976.
Brownlow was aghast at this version, which had, in effect, been butchered by its maker, but after running out of money to complete his version turned in 1975 to the British National Film Archive which made a master print. The U.S. rights were purchased by Image Film Archive in 1975, which, with the New York Museum of Modern Art, purchased the rights to the MGM negative which contained several sections never seen before and working with Brownlow produced the five-and-a-half hour silent shown at the Telluride Film Festival in late summer 1979 in the presence of the director on a giant exterior screen erected by mountaineers for a screening beginning at nine o’clock at night. This edition, with music by Carl Davis, was the highlight of the London Film Festival in November 1980.
Interesting though all this was to the film buff, it was not going to make headlines across America. That was where Coppola’s marketing genius came in. He saw the necessity of creating an event that would match Gance’s ambitious scope and in one fell swoop remove restoration from the discreet chambers of museums and arthouses and push it out in the full public spotlight. For commercial reasons, Image Film Archive trimmed an hour, achieved by projecting the film at a faster speed and, at Brownlow’s suggestion, cutting scenes from the Toulon battle and a subplot concerning the secret passion of an innkeeper’s daughter for Napoleon.
Hiring Radio City Music Hall was an act of unsurpassed faith. The premiere on January 23, 1981, and two other performances cost $150,000, break-even set at ten thousand admissions (at $10-$15 a ticket) and the days when the Music Hall commonly did that were long gone. Bookings were sluggish until an article in the New York Times stimulated interest.
Napoleon at the Radio City Music Hall counted as three days that shook the reissue world. A gross of $297,000 spurred further showings. Image Film archive envisaged a 70mm version to avoid the necessity of projecting across three screens. If New York was a marketing coup, it was just the start. Coppola and Image Film Archive conceived an even bolder strategy. The movie would embark on an old-fashioned roadshow, harking back to the days of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, when print and orchestra traveled from city to city. The touring schedule took in Columbus, Chicago and Los Angeles (in time for Bastille Day). Tickets would cost $10-$20. The 3,890-seat Chicago theater racked up $195,000 for the first four performances, $199,000 for the second four and $173,000 for the third. The 2,750-seat Midland in Kansas City pulled in $150,000, in New Orleans at the 2,800-seat Saenger Performing Arts Center it was $232,000, in Syracuse $93,000 at the Area Landmark.
By July the gross from just forty-five performances was over $2.5 million and for cinemas that could not afford the expense of a live orchestra the score was married to the print. Two more weekends at the Radio City Music Hall in October added $834,000. By year end that had more than doubled, an unbelievable sum for a silent movie revival. The way the film was presented was seen as the reissue catalyst to fight the twin onslaught of video cassettes and cable, since it could not be mounted anywhere but a cinema.
In a move that would have far-reaching implications for the reissue business, Universal’s new classics division was emboldened to buy the worldwide rights from Image. “This will be the kind of event that will be the mainstay for exhibitors over the next five to ten years as we come to grips with home entertainment,” prophesied Ben Commack Jr., the unit’s boss. “If all we get are film buffs, we’ve failed,” he added, “There’s no reason why this film can’t be accessible to mainstream audiences.” A second release wave in 1982-1983, minus the orchestra, targeted smaller first run emporiums in eleven key cities, following a more traditional roadshow pattern of two performances a day and three on Saturdays, an intermission and sales of posters and records in the lobby.
The 70mm six-track stereo version, utilizing the Carmine Coppola score, was tested at the 915-seat Cinerama Dome ($7.50) in Los Angeles. Brochures were distributed to high schools, colleges, hospitals, corporations and museums. The concept almost fell at the first hurdle, first week only $18,400. The second week rose by $100, and fell, but not by much, over the next three weeks. When a final week was announced, takings soared to $19,900. Universal need not have worried. Seattle opened “big” on two small theaters, Philadelphia figures were excellent, Pittsburgh was “wow,” San Francisco “dandy,” Denver “impressive” and Cleveland took in a “sensational” $40,000 opener. Returning to New York, it scored $9,000 at the 549-seat Sutton (at $5 a ticket) arthouse. Although the French premiere of the revival had taken place in Le Havre in 1982, the film did not open commercially until July 1983. Running at five-and-a-quarter hours and with top tickets priced at $20, the three shows at the 3,700-seat Palais de Congress saw twelve thousand admissions.
All in all Napoleon was a triumph, grossing $7.5 million worldwide, certainly the most unexpected reissue of all time, and one that changed attitudes to revivals for the next three decades.
SOURCES: Brian Hannan, Coming Back to a Theater Near You, A History of Hollywood Reissues, 1914-2014 (McFarland, 2016) p275-279; Kevin Brownlow, Napoleon, Abel Gance’s Classic Film, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983); “Il Duce’s World Try on Napoleon Pic,” Variety, April 3, 1935, 19; “20th Fox Adaptation of Chretien System Stirs Paris Interest in 3D,” Variety, August 19, 1953, 13; “27 Pix from 16 Lands Incl Russia in Venice Festival Race This Week,” Variety, August 19, 1953, 3; “More 3D Systems Flooding Paris,” Variety, September 2, 1953, 10; “The New Always Has a Past,” Variety, November 3, 1954, 20; “Gance Preps Polyvision Prod. like Cinerama,” Variety, August 17, 1955, 14; “Gance Takes His Screen Process on Road Tour,” Variety, November 21, 1956, 14; “Abel Gance, at Age 90, Hit of Telluride; Napoleon on 3 Screens Runs Till 3am,” Variety, September 12, 1979, 28; “Gance’s Napoleon to be Shown at Nuart,” October 23, 1979, 17; “Zoetrope Mulls Symphonic Music for Gance’s Napoleon at Radio City,” Variety, March 19, 1980, 6; “British Slighted on Napoleon,” Variety, November 4, 1980, 1; “1926 Napoleon to Play Music Hall,” Variety, November 5, 1980, 1; Vincent Canby, “Gance’s Silent Napoleon is Reconstituted,” New York Times, January 24, 1981; “1927 Napoleon Makes Strong Showing,” Variety, January 27, 1981, 3; “Napoleon Sellout Prompts Added Screenings,” Variety, January 28, 1981, 2; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, 1981 – Chicago (April 29), Kansas City (May 27); “Napoleon Wow B.O. with 232G, 4 Shows; Syracuse is also Happy,” Variety, July 8, 1981, 5; “Napoleon Grosses $2.6-Mil to Date,” Variety, July 21, 1981, 4; Kevin Brownlow, “Napoleon a Triumph,” New York Times, October 11, 1981; “U’s new deal for Napoleon,” Variety, December 4, 1981, 2; “Big Rental Films of 1981,” Variety, January 13, 1982, 42; “Napoleon Retakes Paris,” Variety, July 27, 1983, 7.
Purportedly, Frenchman Abel Gance got the idea for his film while walking down Broadway in New York in 1921. At that point he envisaged what we would these days term a “Napoleon Universe,” a series of six interlinked films (although early U.S. reports promised eight films) tracking the Emperor from his student days to exile in St Helena. Gance was a successful director, from La Droit a la Vie in 1917 to J’Accuse two years later each successive film had out-grossed the last. His La Roue / The Wheel (1923) was so lauded that French critics put it on a par with the later Citizen Kane.
He conceived each film to run about 5,500 feet for domestic release with a reduced version for the United States market. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending – he could not contain his ambition. The film, eventually restricted to just the early part of Napoleon’s career, took two years to make, beginning in 1925. But his innovations included dolly shots, handheld camera, overhead camera, footage shot from the back of a horse, tracking, rapid editing and split screen. It’s worth remembering just why cameras were so static during that period – moving them was extremely laborious and time-consuming, which meant it cost too much money to do. And when it did move, the unsteady camera attracted too much attention. Gance wanted movement to be discreet, not just for its own sake.
He also invented an extremely wide-angle lens and then the camera employed for the triptych. Anticipating the arrival of sound, and although they could not be heard, he made his actors speak dialog, which facilitated later dubbing. And if that wasn’t enough, he conducted tests in 3D – used in the battle scenes it was discarded for distracting the eye. Rock salt substituted for hail and filming proved so dangerous there were 220 insurance claims.
Gance took another swipe at the legend in 1960 with an all-star cast but no better results at the box office.
It cost $500,000 – equivalent to $8.7 million today – a hefty sum for those days but nothing compared to MGM’s Ben-Hur which cost eight times as much. However, Gance had anticipated box office returns of $4.4 million. As well as his technical skills, Gance was a whiz at salesmanship and eventually secured the bulk of his funding from Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Wengeroff who had previously invested in German films. Wengeroff had earmarked Gance as a potential director for a projected movie version of War and Peace.
But with little finance from the major French studios, Gance retained control. Initially, he promised the first part would be completed by the end of 1924 with the rest two years later. In the end, part one was as far as he got. Initially, he planned to use four actors to play the Emperor at different stages of his life. Oddly perhaps from the modern perspective, he placed more emphasis on physical resemblance to Napoleon than acting ability and screen-tested over a dozen actors. In fact, the actor who won the part of the adult Napoleon was a “rank outsider,” considered too old and too fat. When tested Albert Dieudonne “looked rather like an old woman.” But when Gance’s original choice rejected the role, he returned to Dieudonne who had transformed himself into a slimmer person after undertaking an extreme diet.
The first of the innovative multi-screen images – nine in total – occurs early in the picture, in the snowball fight. Later, as many as 16 images would be superimposed. All this was achieved through technical drudgery, repeating shots endlessly until they fitted into a pattern, and Gance likened the effect to listening to an orchestra, not necessarily taking in each instrument but enjoying the accumulated effect. The snowballs were actually made from cotton wool so didn’t fly far. To achieve authenticity, the sequence took place in winter, parents outraged that their children in the conditions risked flu or bronchitis.
The chase scene filmed in Corsica employed camera cars, with other shots from cameras placed in pits, while extreme long shots over the hills and the use of wide angle lens enhanced the experience. But there were three cameras on the one car, one facing back, one sideways and another fixed to the running board. He also filmed from the back of a horse devising his own means of working the camera.
Ambition cost money. And soon the movie was in financial trouble, filming put on hold while the director sought new backers. Eventually, funding came from a new source. Despite its name, the Societe Generale du Films, originally set up to develop film itself, was actually owned by a Russian. The SGF funding came with a proviso – that if necessary it was entitled to edit the film to bring it down to the contractual length.
Gance’s boldest innovation was without doubt the triptych (more easily explained as film projected on three screens simultaneously in the manner, a quarter of a century later, of Cinerama). “I felt in certain scenes I lacked space,” he said, “That the picture was too small for me. Even a big picture was too small…I had the idea of stretching the screen. I didn’t know how. I vaguely thought if I put one camera on the right, one in front and one on the left I would have an enormous panorama.” To achieve this effect – his name is on the patent – he intended to mount three cameras on top of each other, in a pyramid linked by a motor.
There was no time to test the new equipment, manufactured by Debrie. It was completed just in time for the filming of the battle scene on 11 August 1926. When shooting ended in October 26 (though editing and post-production would continue into the following year), the producers had cause for celebration, the signing of a distribution deal with MGM, which promoted it in Variety as a “celebrated world epic.”
The version that premiered in Paris ran for 210 minutes although the following month the trade press were treated to a longer version. But it proved a flop. Even in France where audiences had been reared on the myth of Napoleon, and revered him, it was too long. Though MGM purchased it for American consumption, and some critics enthused (Variety deemed it an “extremely impressive job”) they cut it down (Variety was in agreement – noting “it would have to be sliced” while conceding “no picture producer can picture Napoleon in 70 minutes”) and it was given a very restricted number of showings. It was expected to attract most attention from the “sure-seaters” (i.e. arthouses).
Response was poor. Although shown in New York, it didn’t warrant information on the box office, suggesting it had been such a disappointment the figures were not revealed. At the 600-seat Arcadia in Philadelphia box office was “very bad.” However, returns at the 3,200-seat Loews in Montreal the returns were “above average.” That could possibly explained by Canadian affinity with France except that in Toronto the 2,300-seat Loews “took one in the jaw” at the box office. In Baltimore audiences “let it alone.” In Havana, exhibitors complained of Napoleon overload, this being the third film on the subject in as many months.
Although most U.S. exhibitors contended that interest from “the horde” in Napoleon was extremely limited that didn’t stop studios from churning out rivals. Films that may have got in its way included Frank Lloyd’s The Eagle of the Sea (1926), Napoleon (1927) with Lionel Atwill, Glorious Betsy (1928) with Dolores Costello, the German Queen Louise and Napoleon (1928) and Napoleon’s Barber (1928), one of the first talkie shorts.
In Britain, while critics doubted the effect of the triple screen, it was shown to “great success” at the Tivoli in London’s West End. But the promised general release failed to materialize.
The cost of creating “a new alphabet for the cinema” proved excessive. That the film sank into the vaults, quickly forgotten, ensured that when critics came to assess foreign silent pictures inevitably they alighted instead on Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Metropolis (1927). To all intents and purposes, Abel Gance’s Napoleon was gone – but it turned out not to be quite so forgotten and its resurrection ushered in a new experience in cinema-going.
SOURCES: Kevin Brownlow, Napoleon, Abel Gance’s Classic Film (Threefold Music, 2009); “French Napoleon,” Billboard, March 21, 1925, p85; Review, Variety, April 27, 1927, p20; Advertisement, Variety, October 26, 1927, p14; “Napoleon,” Kinematograph Weekly, December 15, 1927, p59; “Napoleon,” Variety, March 7, 1928, p50; Review, Kinematograph Weekly, July 5, 1928, p41; “Scenes From,” Kinematograph Weekly, July 26, 1928, p4; “Theatre Atmosphere,” Kinematograph Weekly, August 2, 1928, p50; “Too Many Napoleons,” Variety, October 24, 1928, p2; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, November 14, 1928, p9; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, December 5, 1928, p10; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, January 9, 1929, p7; “The Empire 13,” Kinematograph Weekly, January 17, 1929, p34; “Advertising Cost Biz for Stanleys,” Variety, February 6, 1929, p9.
Behind the Scenes: Napoleon (1927)
Purportedly, Frenchman Abel Gance got the idea for his film while walking down Broadway in New York in 1921. At that point he envisaged what we would these days term a “Napoleon Universe,” a series of six interlinked films (although early U.S. reports promised eight films) tracking the Emperor from his student days to exile in St Helena. Gance was a successful director, from La Droit a la Vie in 1917 to J’Accuse two years later each successive film had out-grossed the last. His La Roue / The Wheel (1923) was so lauded that French critics put it on a par with the later Citizen Kane.
He conceived each film to run about 5,500 feet for domestic release with a reduced version for the United States market. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending – he could not contain his ambition. The film, eventually restricted to just the early part of Napoleon’s career, took two years to make, beginning in 1925. But his innovations included dolly shots, handheld camera, overhead camera, footage shot from the back of a horse, tracking, rapid editing and split screen. It’s worth remembering just why cameras were so static during that period – moving them was extremely laborious and time-consuming, which meant it cost too much money to do. And when it did move, the unsteady camera attracted too much attention. Gance wanted movement to be discreet, not just for its own sake.
He also invented an extremely wide-angle lens and then the camera employed for the triptych. Anticipating the arrival of sound, and although they could not be heard, he made his actors speak dialog, which facilitated later dubbing. And if that wasn’t enough, he conducted tests in 3D – used in the battle scenes it was discarded for distracting the eye. Rock salt substituted for hail and filming proved so dangerous there were 220 insurance claims.
It cost $500,000 – equivalent to $8.7 million today – a hefty sum for those days but nothing compared to MGM’s Ben-Hur which cost eight times as much. However, Gance had anticipated box office returns of $4.4 million. As well as his technical skills, Gance was a whiz at salesmanship and eventually secured the bulk of his funding from Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Wengeroff who had previously invested in German films. Wengeroff had earmarked Gance as a potential director for a projected movie version of War and Peace.
But with little finance from the major French studios, Gance retained control. Initially, he promised the first part would be completed by the end of 1924 with the rest two years later. In the end, part one was as far as he got. Initially, he planned to use four actors to play the Emperor at different stages of his life. Oddly perhaps from the modern perspective, he placed more emphasis on physical resemblance to Napoleon than acting ability and screen-tested over a dozen actors. In fact, the actor who won the part of the adult Napoleon was a “rank outsider,” considered too old and too fat. When tested Albert Dieudonne “looked rather like an old woman.” But when Gance’s original choice rejected the role, he returned to Dieudonne who had transformed himself into a slimmer person after undertaking an extreme diet.
The first of the innovative multi-screen images – nine in total – occurs early in the picture, in the snowball fight. Later, as many as 16 images would be superimposed. All this was achieved through technical drudgery, repeating shots endlessly until they fitted into a pattern, and Gance likened the effect to listening to an orchestra, not necessarily taking in each instrument but enjoying the accumulated effect. The snowballs were actually made from cotton wool so didn’t fly far. To achieve authenticity, the sequence took place in winter, parents outraged that their children in the conditions risked flu or bronchitis.
The chase scene filmed in Corsica employed camera cars, with other shots from cameras placed in pits, while extreme long shots over the hills and the use of wide angle lens enhanced the experience. But there were three cameras on the one car, one facing back, one sideways and another fixed to the running board. He also filmed from the back of a horse devising his own means of working the camera.
Ambition cost money. And soon the movie was in financial trouble, filming put on hold while the director sought new backers. Eventually, funding came from a new source. Despite its name, the Societe Generale du Films, originally set up to develop film itself, was actually owned by a Russian. The SGF funding came with a proviso – that if necessary it was entitled to edit the film to bring it down to the contractual length.
Gance’s boldest innovation was without doubt the triptych (more easily explained as film projected on three screens simultaneously in the manner, a quarter of a century later, of Cinerama). “I felt in certain scenes I lacked space,” he said, “That the picture was too small for me. Even a big picture was too small…I had the idea of stretching the screen. I didn’t know how. I vaguely thought if I put one camera on the right, one in front and one on the left I would have an enormous panorama.” To achieve this effect – his name is on the patent – he intended to mount three cameras on top of each other, in a pyramid linked by a motor.
There was no time to test the new equipment, manufactured by Debrie. It was completed just in time for the filming of the battle scene on 11 August 1926. When shooting ended in October 26 (though editing and post-production would continue into the following year), the producers had cause for celebration, the signing of a distribution deal with MGM, which promoted it in Variety as a “celebrated world epic.”
The version that premiered in Paris ran for 210 minutes although the following month the trade press were treated to a longer version. But it proved a flop. Even in France where audiences had been reared on the myth of Napoleon, and revered him, it was too long. Though MGM purchased it for American consumption, and some critics enthused (Variety deemed it an “extremely impressive job”) they cut it down (Variety was in agreement – noting “it would have to be sliced” while conceding “no picture producer can picture Napoleon in 70 minutes”) and it was given a very restricted number of showings. It was expected to attract most attention from the “sure-seaters” (i.e. arthouses).
Response was poor. Although shown in New York, it didn’t warrant information on the box office, suggesting it had been such a disappointment the figures were not revealed. At the 600-seat Arcadia in Philadelphia box office was “very bad.” However, returns at the 3,200-seat Loews in Montreal the returns were “above average.” That could possibly explained by Canadian affinity with France except that in Toronto the 2,300-seat Loews “took one in the jaw” at the box office. In Baltimore audiences “let it alone.” In Havana, exhibitors complained of Napoleon overload, this being the third film on the subject in as many months.
Although most U.S. exhibitors contended that interest from “the horde” in Napoleon was extremely limited that didn’t stop studios from churning out rivals. Films that may have got in its way included Frank Lloyd’s The Eagle of the Sea (1926), Napoleon (1927) with Lionel Atwill, Glorious Betsy (1928) with Dolores Costello, the German Queen Louise and Napoleon (1928) and Napoleon’s Barber (1928), one of the first talkie shorts.
In Britain, while critics doubted the effect of the triple screen, it was shown to “great success” at the Tivoli in London’s West End. But the promised general release failed to materialize.
The cost of creating “a new alphabet for the cinema” proved excessive. That the film sank into the vaults, quickly forgotten, ensured that when critics came to assess foreign silent pictures inevitably they alighted instead on Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Metropolis (1927). To all intents and purposes, Abel Gance’s Napoleon was gone – but it turned out not to be quite so forgotten and its resurrection ushered in a new experience in cinema-going.
SOURCES: Kevin Brownlow, Napoleon, Abel Gance’s Classic Film (Threefold Music, 2009); “French Napoleon,” Billboard, March 21, 1925, p85; Review, Variety, April 27, 1927, p20; Advertisement, Variety, October 26, 1927, p14; “Napoleon,” Kinematograph Weekly, December 15, 1927, p59; “Napoleon,” Variety, March 7, 1928, p50; Review, Kinematograph Weekly, July 5, 1928, p41; “Scenes From,” Kinematograph Weekly, July 26, 1928, p4; “Theatre Atmosphere,” Kinematograph Weekly, August 2, 1928, p50; “Too Many Napoleons,” Variety, October 24, 1928, p2; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, November 14, 1928, p9; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, December 5, 1928, p10; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, January 9, 1929, p7; “The Empire 13,” Kinematograph Weekly, January 17, 1929, p34; “Advertising Cost Biz for Stanleys,” Variety, February 6, 1929, p9.
Behind the Scenes: Napoleon (1927)
Purportedly, Frenchman Abel Gance got the idea for his film while walking down Broadway in New York in 1921. At that point he envisaged what we would these days term a “Napoleon Universe,” a series of six interlinked films (although early U.S. reports promised eight films) tracking the Emperor from his student days to exile in St Helena. Gance was a successful director, from La Droit a la Vie in 1917 to J’Accuse two years later each successive film had out-grossed the last. His La Roue / The Wheel (1923) was so lauded that French critics put it on a par with the later Citizen Kane.
He conceived each film to run about 5,500 feet for domestic release with a reduced version for the United States market. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending – he could not contain his ambition. The film, eventually restricted to just the early part of Napoleon’s career, took two years to make, beginning in 1925. But his innovations included dolly shots, handheld camera, overhead camera, footage shot from the back of a horse, tracking, rapid editing and split screen. It’s worth remembering just why cameras were so static during that period – moving them was extremely laborious and time-consuming, which meant it cost too much money to do. And when it did move, the unsteady camera attracted too much attention. Gance wanted movement to be discreet, not just for its own sake.
He also invented an extremely wide-angle lens and then the camera employed for the triptych. Anticipating the arrival of sound, and although they could not be heard, he made his actors speak dialog, which facilitated later dubbing. And if that wasn’t enough, he conducted tests in 3D – used in the battle scenes it was discarded for distracting the eye. Rock salt substituted for hail and filming proved so dangerous there were 220 insurance claims.
It cost $500,000 – equivalent to $8.7 million today – a hefty sum for those days but nothing compared to MGM’s Ben-Hur which cost eight times as much. However, Gance had anticipated box office returns of $4.4 million. As well as his technical skills, Gance was a whiz at salesmanship and eventually secured the bulk of his funding from Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Wengeroff who had previously invested in German films. Wengeroff had earmarked Gance as a potential director for a projected movie version of War and Peace.
But with little finance from the major French studios, Gance retained control. Initially, he promised the first part would be completed by the end of 1924 with the rest two years later. In the end, part one was as far as he got. Initially, he planned to use four actors to play the Emperor at different stages of his life. Oddly perhaps from the modern perspective, he placed more emphasis on physical resemblance to Napoleon than acting ability and screen-tested over a dozen actors. In fact, the actor who won the part of the adult Napoleon was a “rank outsider,” considered too old and too fat. When tested Albert Dieudonne “looked rather like an old woman.” But when Gance’s original choice rejected the role, he returned to Dieudonne who had transformed himself into a slimmer person after undertaking an extreme diet.
The first of the innovative multi-screen images – nine in total – occurs early in the picture, in the snowball fight. Later, as many as 16 images would be superimposed. All this was achieved through technical drudgery, repeating shots endlessly until they fitted into a pattern, and Gance likened the effect to listening to an orchestra, not necessarily taking in each instrument but enjoying the accumulated effect. The snowballs were actually made from cotton wool so didn’t fly far. To achieve authenticity, the sequence took place in winter, parents outraged that their children in the conditions risked flu or bronchitis.
The chase scene filmed in Corsica employed camera cars, with other shots from cameras placed in pits, while extreme long shots over the hills and the use of wide angle lens enhanced the experience. But there were three cameras on the one car, one facing back, one sideways and another fixed to the running board. He also filmed from the back of a horse devising his own means of working the camera.
Ambition cost money. And soon the movie was in financial trouble, filming put on hold while the director sought new backers. Eventually, funding came from a new source. Despite its name, the Societe Generale du Films, originally set up to develop film itself, was actually owned by a Russian. The SGF funding came with a proviso – that if necessary it was entitled to edit the film to bring it down to the contractual length.
Gance’s boldest innovation was without doubt the triptych (more easily explained as film projected on three screens simultaneously in the manner, a quarter of a century later, of Cinerama). “I felt in certain scenes I lacked space,” he said, “That the picture was too small for me. Even a big picture was too small…I had the idea of stretching the screen. I didn’t know how. I vaguely thought if I put one camera on the right, one in front and one on the left I would have an enormous panorama.” To achieve this effect – his name is on the patent – he intended to mount three cameras on top of each other, in a pyramid linked by a motor.
There was no time to test the new equipment, manufactured by Debrie. It was completed just in time for the filming of the battle scene on 11 August 1926. When shooting ended in October 26 (though editing and post-production would continue into the following year), the producers had cause for celebration, the signing of a distribution deal with MGM, which promoted it in Variety as a “celebrated world epic.”
The version that premiered in Paris ran for 210 minutes although the following month the trade press were treated to a longer version. But it proved a flop. Even in France where audiences had been reared on the myth of Napoleon, and revered him, it was too long. Though MGM purchased it for American consumption, and some critics enthused (Variety deemed it an “extremely impressive job”) they cut it down (Variety was in agreement – noting “it would have to be sliced” while conceding “no picture producer can picture Napoleon in 70 minutes”) and it was given a very restricted number of showings. It was expected to attract most attention from the “sure-seaters” (i.e. arthouses).
Response was poor. Although shown in New York, it didn’t warrant information on the box office, suggesting it had been such a disappointment the figures were not revealed. At the 600-seat Arcadia in Philadelphia box office was “very bad.” However, returns at the 3,200-seat Loews in Montreal the returns were “above average.” That could possibly explained by Canadian affinity with France except that in Toronto the 2,300-seat Loews “took one in the jaw” at the box office. In Baltimore audiences “let it alone.” In Havana, exhibitors complained of Napoleon overload, this being the third film on the subject in as many months.
Although most U.S. exhibitors contended that interest from “the horde” in Napoleon was extremely limited that didn’t stop studios from churning out rivals. Films that may have got in its way included Frank Lloyd’s The Eagle of the Sea (1926), Napoleon (1927) with Lionel Atwill, Glorious Betsy (1928) with Dolores Costello, the German Queen Louise and Napoleon (1928) and Napoleon’s Barber (1928), one of the first talkie shorts.
In Britain, while critics doubted the effect of the triple screen, it was shown to “great success” at the Tivoli in London’s West End. But the promised general release failed to materialize.
The cost of creating “a new alphabet for the cinema” proved excessive. That the film sank into the vaults, quickly forgotten, ensured that when critics came to assess foreign silent pictures inevitably they alighted instead on Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Metropolis (1927). To all intents and purposes, Abel Gance’s Napoleon was gone – but it turned out not to be quite so forgotten and its resurrection ushered in a new experience in cinema-going.
SOURCES: Kevin Brownlow, Napoleon, Abel Gance’s Classic Film (Threefold Music, 2009); “French Napoleon,” Billboard, March 21, 1925, p85; Review, Variety, April 27, 1927, p20; Advertisement, Variety, October 26, 1927, p14; “Napoleon,” Kinematograph Weekly, December 15, 1927, p59; “Napoleon,” Variety, March 7, 1928, p50; Review, Kinematograph Weekly, July 5, 1928, p41; “Scenes From,” Kinematograph Weekly, July 26, 1928, p4; “Theatre Atmosphere,” Kinematograph Weekly, August 2, 1928, p50; “Too Many Napoleons,” Variety, October 24, 1928, p2; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, November 14, 1928, p9; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, December 5, 1928, p10; “Picture Grosses,” Variety, January 9, 1929, p7; “The Empire 13,” Kinematograph Weekly, January 17, 1929, p34; “Advertising Cost Biz for Stanleys,” Variety, February 6, 1929, p9.
That Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) dominated the foreign film scene in the silent era was only because Abel Gance’s majestic Napoleon the same year was butchered on release and rarely seen outside its native France. Audiences who might fancy waiting for streaming to view Ridley Scott’s new epic on the grander four-hour scale might prefer to test their stamina against this early masterpiece that broke incredible new cinematic ground.
You could easily get the impression from the vast amount of innovation on display here that one man – and a Frenchman at that – had single-handedly decided to revolutionize the entire medium. Of course, France had been instrumental in the birth of cinema. Alice Guy was key to the development of narrative cinema although the world being male-dominated that singular achievement was erroneously handed over to George Melies.
Here’s the list of Abel Gance’s innovations: split screen (in fact, triple images), underwater shots, tinting, fast cutting, hand-held shots, extensive close-ups, point-of-view shots, superimposition, use of multiple cameras, mosaic shots and multiple exposure. Perhaps even more astonishing was that at the time the bulk of movie cameras were static. Even if the result had been, dramatically speaking, as dull as ditch water, it would have been of historical cinematic importance, possibly on a par with This Is Cinerama (1952) or House of Wax (1953), the first 3D.
And it if had been as visually striking and cinematically interesting as The Robe (1953), Twentieth Century Fox’s first demonstration of Cinemascope, it would have more than passed muster as a cinematic footnote.
Instead, it is just stunning. You couldn’t ask for a bolder storyline, the biopic of one of the most fascinating characters who ever lived, Napoleon Bonaparte, who resurrected France after the Revolution of 1789, conquered most of Europe, and rose from defeat and captivity to rally his troops for one final battle at Waterloo in 1815. Wisely, Abel Gance doesn’t attempt to cover all that territory, only going as far as the invasion of Italy, which marked the Little General’s rise as a battle master.
Unlike other directors such as Orson Welles who scarcely made another movie after one of his first efforts was butchered on release, Gance kept plugging away despite the debacle of Napoleon. “Venus of Paris” was shown in 1941.
Which version you see – the most common one comes in at around the four-hour mark but if you have the stamina there’s enough in the longer version to keep you engrossed for another couple of hours – will inform your assessment of the authenticity of the narrative and attest to the compelling nature of the tale.
Beginning with a young Napoleon revealing his military skills just to engage in a snowball fight, it moves with narrative focus and cinematic flair through his difficult time at school to the invasion of Italy. Some of the imagery is haunting, a freed pet eagle returning out of choice to his side, the French flag used as a sail, lightning illuminates hand-to-hand combat (that battle taking place in the kind of driving rain Kurosawa would employ in Seven Samurai, 1954), scenes change color, and the final unfurling of the triptych (three connected screens a la Cinerama) is one of the most visual climaxes in cinema.
But even the shortest version contains the bulk of the innovation, perhaps proving that dialog was the most redundant of all the cinematic developments. The trailer, which you can catch on YouTube (see link below), is almost jukebox cinema, a compilation of many of the greatest scenes. Unless you are familiar with silent cinema style, you might recoil at some of the acting, but, once you get into the swing of it, that seems to jar less.
Much as I am a huge fan of Ridley Scott (the extended version of Kingdom of Heaven, 2005, a long-time fave), I doubt if his version (even the longer one promised for the Netflix screening) will come anywhere close to the almost cinematic perfection of Abel Gance.
Don’t take Stanley Kubrick and martin Scorsese’s word for it, this is a must watch.
Director Blake Edwards was so confident that he could repeat on the big screen the small screen success of Peter Gunn (1958-1961) that the movie was promoted as the first in a series. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Although the private eye genre had been given a fillip by Paul Newman’s shamus Harper (1966) the bulk of screen investigation has been subsumed wholesale by spies. And the amount of time that had passed between the demise of the original television series and the movie revival – only six years – was hardly enough for nostalgia to kick in. Nor did star Craig Stevens have any box office appeal – this was his first picture in nearly a decade.
A James-Bond-rip off credit sequence with girls dancing to a psychedelic background sets up a more contemporary picture than the one unveiled which is as old-fashioned as they come and, except for an increased budget, betrays its television origins. A few characters, Gunn’s girlfriend Edie (Helen Traubel), a nightclub singer, Mother (Laura Devon), the owner of the eponymous nightclub, and Lt Jacoby (Edward Asner) are reprised from the series although played by different actors.
The dialogue is sometimes slick (“Call me Samantha” – “Samantha” – “You called”) and sometimes corny as when prior to an explosion that knocks the hero sideways is the line “may God strike me down.”
Gunn is hired by a nightclub owner Mother to find out who killed a gangster who had once saved the detective’s life. Fingers point at another gangster, Nick (Alberto Paulsen), somewhat protected from the law by his corruption, but it soon becomes clear that the obvious may not be correct. Naturally, Gunn gets in the way of Lt Jacoby, while women fall at his feet.
Somewhat unusually, in this foreign poster the women are covered up.
Making the biggest impression is Sherry Jackson (The Mini-Skirt Mob, 1968) as the aforementioned Samantha who turns up unannounced in Gunn’s flat. You can catch Edward Asner (The Satan Bug, 1965) in an early role. Plus there’s the Henry Mancini (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) score, already a big hit. The only element that makes it contemporary is some gender-confusion but otherwise it’s a fairly flat story and relies far too much on its television origins.
Rather than go to the trouble of reinventing the character for more contemporary times, Blake Edwards (The Grip of Fear / Experiment in Terror, 1967), wearing two hats, simply rewrites the small screen’s first episode, adding some violence to attract a cinematic audience.
It might have been better had William Friedkin not turned it down, but given how poorly that director served The Night They Raided Minsky’s / The Night They Invented Striptease (1968) it could well have had the same outcome.
Strictly for fans of nostalgia.
You can catch the original TV series on DVD or check out the movie version for free on YouTube.
Even the biggest stars have to start somewhere. Julie Christie in embryo, however endearing, is a long way from the finished article in Doctor Zhivago (1965). And, to be honest, this is more of a reminder of the scale of the journey undertaken for here she’s really no more than an adornment. Though, possibly, as rich man’s daughter Claire, she’s acting her socks off given her main role is to fall in love with gormless civil servant Murdoch (Stanley Baxter) after imagining him dressed in a kilt spouting Burns.
And at this point in cinematic development, cars were viewed more as sources of comedy than thrills, anyone suggesting that vehicles could be pushed to their limits in the breakneck manner of Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1970) would have their heads examined.
This poster and the one below bear all the hallmarks of a quick reissue to take advantage of Christie’s post-Zhivago fame.
Cashing in on audience love of the antique auto as demonstrated in Genevieve (1953), and with a surprisingly contemporary nod to the ongoing battle between cyclists and drivers, this mainlines mostly on a long-lost innocent charm even as car salesman Freddie (Leslie “Ding Dong” Phillips) injects as much innuendo (though not on the Carry On level) as possible.
After coming off worst in a collision with aforesaid rich fellow Charles (James Robertson Justice), cyclist Murdoch decides to buy an old Bentley Red Label 3-liter (the titular “Fast Lady”) sports car as a means of wooing speed-mad Claire. As you might expect, the path to true love is littered with obstacles, not least the overbearing father’s objections and the small matter of Murdoch not being able to drive. Cue jokes about driving lessons and tests and a mistaken arrest for drunk driving. There’s endless opportunity for protagonists to end up in the mud or the water.
Legally, in the credits, her name had to be smaller than the top-billed stars. But there was nothing to prevent distributors from making her face the focus of attention.
Feels miscast somehow, the top-billed Leslie Phillips (Maroc 7, 1967) has misplaced his normal charm, coming across as little more than an upper-class spiv. And you can’t help feeling Norman Wisdom would have been better suited as Murdoch rather than snarky Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter (Father Came Too, 1964) while James Robertson Justice (Mayerling, 1968) never leaves his comfort zone.
On the plus side are too many treats to mention. Apart from Christie and a glimpse of Stanley Baxter before he dominated the British light entertainment television scene, in bits parts are such comedy legends as Dick Emery, Frankie Howerd and Clive Dunn (and singer Kenneth McKellar on television) plus a smattering of racing idols like Graham Hill and John Surtees and a cameo from BBC motoring correspondent Raymond Baxter.
Ken Annakin (Battle of the Bulge, 1965) isn’t much stretched though keeping the script by Jack Davies (Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, 1965) and Henry Blyth (A Stitch in Time, 1963), based on the book by Keble Howard, on the straight-and-narrow may well have been his most difficult task.
May be heresy but for some viewers Julie Christie will take second place to the array of vehicles.
The Magnificent 60s 