Bird of Paradise (1932)

 

Director: King Vidor

Screenplay: Wells Root, Wanda Tuchock and Leonard Praskins

Based on a stage play by Richard Walton Tully

Cast: Dolores del Río as Luana; Joel McCrea as Johnny Baker; John Halliday as Mac; Richard "Skeets" Gallagher as Chester; Bert Roach as Hector; Lon Chaney Jr. as Thornton; Wade Boteler as Skipper Johnson; Reginald Simpson as O'Fallon

Ephemeral Waves

 

"What do they call this place?"

"Probably one of the Virgin Islands"

"Heaven forbid."

Immediately from the gate, pointing out that Bird of Paradise is offensive and politically incorrect - as a pre-Hollywood Code film where natives of a Pacific island are defamed superstitious and exotic, sacrificing maidens to volcanoes, compared to the white male protagonist - is obvious, but a waste of a review if that was the only thing to spend a review writing about. That should be something we should be already be aware of, and to have to repeat that as the basis of a review is in itself a sad state of affairs. Context should already support a viewer in realising this is from a different era be it the attitudes spoken of in terms of the "native" characters we see portrayed and that, with establishing shots taken in Hawaii, the lead female lead despite being a maiden from the Pacific Ocean islands is being played by an actress not from the region, Mexican actress Dolores del Río.

What Bird of Paradise is now is a cultural artefact, one which for many would be difficult to appreciate, or have to clench through its problems, but I came into with fascination as a text alien to the modern day. It is of the old Hollywood of pure fantasy, a construct depicting a Pacific island of the mind, the kind of haze dream which, camp nowadays, would have fed the brains of the likes of avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith, and perverted with overt phallic plants by Bertrand Mandico for The Wild Boys (2017). Its racism, and the complex web it ends up in for a tale of a white sailor Johnny Baker (Joel McCrea) falling in love with del Rio's native girl Luana, is a reminder that even a decade is a time ago, so the early ninety thirties is itself a time before with a lot of attitudes that have to be tackled head on. The film states it is set in the early thirties in dialogue, but you could swear it was turn of the century, the islanders the stereotype of the naive exotic "others", the white sailors teasing them with ice in the water which confuses them, and offering items from the first world like smoking pipes as trinkets as one would to children. It would be easy to just bury a film like this, probably not the worst film likely to exist from this era in terms of depictions, but that would be an unwillingness to look at ourselves and see our bias.

It also has a farcical edge, surrounding a notion in the plot of virgins being sacrificed to volcanoes. The entire volcano sacrifice concept is one that led me to wonder mid-viewing, as the film will eventually hinge around Luana, the tribal chief daughter, being there to sacrifice to appease the volcano God, whether it is something which is actually happened in one obscure tribe or likely a pure construct of colonially bias pulp. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pastiched in The Forbidden Room (2015) among countless influences, which is where this idea only exists for me, and this is likely one of the first (if any) sources for this fancy as a plot device then anything remotely practical as a practice.  

Again, I find myself with idea that merely saying that this film is merely offensive and not to watch is a worthless act to do for a review, even if I have to return to this over and over. I would hope you, the reader, if you are to feel uncomfortable with the content I will warn you about would just avoid the film - of white leads looking down on the natives, with some of the extras cast for authenticity, a romance with a native girl that eroticises her and shows her as a simple figure among figures backwards in their violent superstitions. If you were to still watch the film, my imagined reader, and be offended it would be obvious why. However, the film exists and, just from the volcano subplot, what Bird of Paradise is as content deserves to still be prodded with curiosity as much with these concerns in mind.

What Bird of Paradise definitely is camp melodrama, emphasised by the fact that even the sailors, despite Joel McCrea with his manly leading man appearance being the centre of attention, alongside beingcomedic foils are frankly flamboyant in a couple themselves. This is a film of exaggeration, not that dissimilar (but with more political issues) to the fifties tiki hut lounge music movement of exotica. With an uncredited Busby Berkeley choreographing the "native" dance sequence in the middle, this is Hollywood's extravagance in both its glory and bad taste too. It is emphasised knowing this film contextually has many importance sub currents to it in terms of American cinema's history. From RKO Studios, which would grow in stature over the thirties and forties just from King Kong in 1933, this is produced by David Selznick, in a brief period with RKO before a future including the legendary Gone with the Wind (1939) among his projects. King Vidor, a figure behind a fascinating film like The Crowd (1928), is here as is the fact that this is a sound production. Moving from the silent era Vidor worked in, to a period where actors were pushed aside when their voices now became a factor to consider, and the technology for sound having to be negotiated around practically just beforehand, Bird of Paradise from its exotic score to the dialogue stands out knowing just before sound was alien.

Then there is the fact this is a pre-Code film, a period sadly not easy to access still outside of the United States. Suffice to say, even if former post-master general Will Hays had already being brought into Hollywood at this point to clean up the cinema, there was a period in the early thirties where a lot of adult and edgy content for the time was still flagrantly around. Baring its problematic ethnographic content, Bird of Paradise is tame in the modern day, but it is still surprising for an underwater sequence where clearly, whilst blurred in the image, a female stand-in for Dolores del Río is very naked. Or that del Rio herself eventually wears above the waist only a strategically place garland which leaves nothing to the imagination. Or that, in contrast, McCrea's body is eroticised too, in a scene where coconut milk is seductively drank between them and spills on their figures whilst among of the native foliage.

It is a shame such a film is embedded to its historical context, the artificial reality of the dream factory felt fully here in its lack of subtlety or the exaggeration, where something like a shark randomly causing the natives to flee in their canoes is touched upon with a heightened shock for what is merely a fin gliding through the water and strategic use of pre-shot footage of a real one. Sadly, such an aesthetic is found, in its sincere form, in problematic material. del Rio, whose reputation includes her work back in her homeland of Mexico and the theatre for her full legacy, is frankly stuck with a character unable to grow as, with her childish grasp of English, the character of Luana is the eroticised innocent. Even Joel McCrea, who would make a career in the last half of his career mostly in westerns, is stuck with generic bland white male hero. These films appealed, and they influenced figures that could run with their best virtues even on lowest budgets into phantasmagorical content, but you are stuck with a film which has to cast a Hispanic actress, in a role which ultimately does not give her a lot to do, as an entirely different ethnicity. A film which has to dance a merry dance awkwardly around miscegenation, something Will Hays among his many do-and-don't would have as prohibited in Hollywood cinema but continues here beforehand to be uncomfortable for the ideas of the culture. [Spoilers] The volcano appears for a tragic ending but you can suspect as much of it is loaded even by accident in this mess of the time's attitudes. [Spoilers] I enjoyed this film when it was pure pulp, of whirlpools lovingly rendered in heightened style, or the extravagance of a flying fish swarm with many extras in boats and McCrea hitting them with a tennis racket, but you have to take these moments with the cultural baggage. The difference is I accept this and try to find these aspects to take of interest. That does mean rolling one's eyes a lot and having the kindness to warn others out of concern of their worst aspects.

Freaks (1932)

From http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/wp-content/
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Director: Tod Browning

Screenplay: Tod Robbins

Cast: Wallace Ford (as Phroso); Leila Hyams (as Venus); Olga Baclanova (as Cleopatra); Roscoe Ates (as Roscoe); Henry Victor (as Hercules); Harry Earles (as Hans)

Synopsis: Within a travelling carnival and its sideshow "freak" attractions, the owner Hans (Earles), a midget, falls in love with the Amazonian trapeze artist Cleopatra (Baclanova). Unfortunately Cleopatra is in cahoots with the strongman Hercules (Victor), and the pair as well as being cruel and abusive to those within the sideshow have a plan for Cleo to marry Hans and poison him to claim his financial inheritance. However, as a carnival barker who bookends the film states, the sideshow "freaks" including a living torso, a bearded woman and "Pinheads" live by a code. In a world where they are discriminated against, they have their own community where they protect each other and deal with their own foibles; those from the outside who befriend them, including animal trainer Venus (Hyams) and Phroso the Clown (Ford), will be treated as equals, while those who trespass against them will suffer horrible consequences.

A lot of cineastes will know of Freak's notoriety. Banned in the United Kingdom, causing outrage in its country of origins, sold to Dwain Esper to be churned out on the grindhouse tent circuit until it was critically revaluated, living with the reputation as a thirties horror film that still surprises. More so today with political correctness, the film from the title to some of the words in the synopsis will be even more uncomfortable without having seen the film, and even to the cast it was a film both championed but also damned for its depiction of those with physical differences. As someone who grew up with a learning disability, autism, whilst I cannot compare to someone like Prince Randian, the living torso, who had no limbs to speak of, viewing Freaks more and more since I saw it the first time in college film studies has a different perspective for me as someone not part of "normal" society even if it's not because of a physical handicap.

From http://breakfastwithplato.com/wp-content/uploads/
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In testament to the film, Freaks never mocks the titular individuals. While in broad brushes depicting the lives within a circus, the brief snippets of a community are rich as they stand. Tod Browning did run away with the circus when he was young and throughout there are many aspects to the film that couldn't be seen in anyway but heartening. A community where everyone helped each other, married and had kids as the human skeleton and the bearded lady do in one scene, and whilst the film is fictitious the normalisation of everyone's lives and letting actual sideshow attractions act is a huge virtue. The rawness of amateur performers is matched by the charisma of everyone, from Schlitzie the pinhead (actually a man playing a woman) to the already mentioned Prince Randian, who only gets one moment but shines just from showing how you don't need limbs to light a cigarette. That the film was cut down to only around an hour does mean a lot was probably lost that would've been exceptional to see, but what snippets remain are utterly inspiring and subversive in seeing these people be filmed having meals and merely gossiping between themselves. This is where even someone like myself with a mental disability can embrace this film more beyond a love of the movie, where not only is there solidarity between the sideshow, but also how it shows how ordinary they are even if their lives travelling could've been exciting and full of gossip. The film's in the same vein of the Universal horror movies of the thirties that it was meant to capitalise on, a lurid carnival drama also in the vein of the decade later Nightmare Alley (1947) where deceit and murder plots bubble up. Barring a finale where people crawl in the mud during a rainstorm with knifes ready, the horror movie moment, this exists in-between dramas as a pot-boiler which straddles the line between respectability and being offensive. The film for me is the former, but it still gladly provokes taboos. Just before the Hays Code, which was already created, finally clamped down on what it perceived to be morally offensive material, you had films in the early thirties which still stand out for how brazen and quite progressive they still are. Hans is openly wooing Cleopatra, hinting of an eroticism that is still not tackled in cinema a great deal, and more openly subversive is to be found the subplot with real life Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton playing sisters who are planning to marry their respective suitors, one of the funniest parts of the film for imagining how the arguments with the sister-in-law is going to turn out like but also hinting at more when both sisters can feel the sensations of the other.

From http://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/freaks1.png

You can easily connect Freaks, even though it was and always will have meant to be a horror movie to scare, to the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998) and Ulrich Seidl, all of which have prodded the taboos of either (or both) physical and mental disability, Freaks by possible coincidence being an ancestor of them in disregarding the safety bubble used around the subject. Whilst no way near as explicit as those films, and not in their cult/art cinema environment, this still does everything those examples do - showing the disabled as human beings, far from perfect, passionate and even having sexual desire. This doesn't detract from Freaks being a fun film, with a proto-Tales From The Crypt twist that's nasty, but the humanity is still worth relishing too.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Freaks-2.jpg

Technical Detail:

The one flaw with Freaks that I've finally overcome, but must be bared in mind, is that as an early thirties movie, it had to grapple with the introduction of sound and how films would now have to be made, visible in its basic cinematic structure. Browning was said never to be comfortable with sound - Dracula (1931) is an utterly sluggish and misshapen creation even with Bela Lugosi - and Freaks is a quietly put together work as a result of this. The content is what Freaks succeeds though, not elaborate technique you can find in another great film like Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). This was why it took a while for me to fully embrace Freaks over all these years, superficiality no longer a bias.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WeC8r2kZajo/maxresdefault.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

The term "grotesque" could've been used but for me that would be utterly offensive to the people in the film. There should be a distancing of that word away from connotations of physical deformity and disability by itself barring the extreme realms of body horror and its fictitious exaggerations. Grotesque for me should represent exaggeration and transgressive material like taboo sexuality or the worst in mankind's behaviour. I could use the word for if I cover an Ulrich Seidl film. Another work based around a carnival "freakshow", the notorious anime Midori (1992), could also qualify for the word as would Horrors of Malformed Men (1969), a film banned in its home country exactly for the concerns of it being offensive to the disabled but firmly entrenched in a truly strange reality instead.

Aside from this, Freaks isn't a weird film at all. Barring having real sideshow performers play themselves rather than using practical effects, nothing is unconventional from other movies. Nothing is abstract and there is no cinematic techniques which effect the content. Having the performers be real sideshow attractions is confrontational, causing people to react and if the legend is true it caused a violent reaction at its original premier. The rest of the film is a melodrama with lots of dialogue, mostly if not all shot statically without anything to baffle. Now if what I've heard is true about Tod Browning's silent films, where dialogue wasn't an issue, films like The Unknown (1927) which made his name with Lon Chaney could be awesome and utterly strange too.

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/
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Personal Opinion:

This was and still is a unique film, still utterly provocative to a modern audience, and despite its technical limitations, the boldness of the premise is still strong. It could be seen as sad, it would still be shocking, but firmly on the side of the titular characters, it champions them as much as it would offend others. This is also a film which doesn't fall into the annoying convention of the normal defeating the outsider evil. Here instead it's the outsiders who are the good people and the apparently normal people are evil, a simple idea far and away more relevant and more entertaining now in a fun film than most horror movies that do the opposite.

Halloween 31 For 31: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

From http://www.wildculture.com/sites/default/
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Dir. Rouben Mamoulian

From Dracula to Jekyll and Hyde, one literary creation to another. The humane doctor Jekyll (played here by Fredric March) creates of elixir that inexplicably backfires and brings out Mr. Hyde, all of his evil and base desires personified in a repulsive beast man (also played by March). It's less about duality than the notion of evil and/or animalistic tendencies existing in all people, even the good, the undesirable of one's self unavoidable. Explicit to this film is that, set in Victorian England, though the main actors speak in Hollywood American, the views of chastity and modesty are heavily restricting, Jekyll waiting in agony to marry his fiancée Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart) but prevented by her father's code, the result pushing him as well to becoming Hyde repeatedly until it cannot be controlled. From there, there's romance, pathos and horror, well acted with some levels of heightened melodrama, rare these days, later on when tragedy is closing in.

From http://monstergirl.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/
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What immediately caught me is how bold this film is cinematically, as the first few minutes or so of the film are entirely in first person from Jekyll's eyes, the camera seeing through the main character's perception. Drastically bold camera and editing tricks continue throughout the film. More first person shots, tracking along like the beginning one or single frames facing a character directly as they talk straight at the viewer. Dissolves to new scenes linger on so more of the original scene plays out on top of the next, two spaces existing in one time, and another form of transition, an angular screen wipe, does the same, almost always stopping in the middle so an unconventional form of split screen, between two different environments, takes place. It is exceptional filmmaking, and it's more significant in context of the use of sound at this point. This is only a few years after The Jazz Singer (1927), which famously included a few scenes of sound, though mostly a silent film, thus helping to push cinema into a sound medium as well as a visual one; it was still a problematic issue in the early thirties to have cinematic grammar as bold as the silent films because the sound technology could restrict what people could do. Here, there are so many elaborate stylistic moments in this adaptation of the Robert Lewis Stevenson's novel that it's amazing to see. And it's as much to the talent of the director Rouben Mamoulian as it would've been the film crew; while I need to rewatch it, an earlier film Applause (1929) by Mamoulian - which was a film that had to adapt to include sound while there were still silent films being made or having sound added afterwards - was immensely accomplished considering the situation with this new technology whilst being cinematic. It adds to the story, never becoming mere style but adding a grandeur. Just for the first transformation of Jekyll to Hyde, a lengthy build up, agonising knowing what'll happen, then the transformation itself in first person from Jekyll's eyes with a delirious spinning camera and silent film levels of superimposition of flashbacks, hazy greys and swirling light effects, this level of elaborate cinematic grammar is a godsend to the material. Even the more conventional grammar, a panning camera from one side of a location to the other side, has a sense of a whole toolkit being made available again when a film like Dracula (1931) was frozen into static scenes because of the technology.

From http://kinomusorka.ru/views/data/images/bd9f346ad762cb4d31ab28acd33568e8.jpg

Also with this adaptation, it's a Pre-Hays Code film. The Hays Code, which would severely restrict the content of Hollywood films unless the creators found ways to hide material in their films skilfully, had been created around this time but there were a few years, before the rules were fully enforced, where the films got away with harsher content. The film is pretty chaste, despite some bold sexuality, and "tame" by modern standards, but its frankness is surprising. It's major subplot, which connects to the main and lines it with a dark message, with the character Ivy Pearson (Miriam Hopkins) being trapped by Hyde as his pet, is still shocking now in theme, dealing with domestic abuse in a blunt way without being explicit. Against the pantomime hysterics of Hyde or the horror of the rest of the film, this still a brutal and nasty story arch to have, especially as a viewer will have it in the back of their mind when it gets to Jekyll having this in the back of his mind too. In general, whilst the film tries to get moralistic at points, Jekyll proclaiming to God and planning to sacrifice his love Miriam for punishment for his sins, the film doesn't try to cover up the dark material even if it doesn't repeat on about it through the narrative. The bluntness is refreshing, without being childishly nihilistic, and for being in a Hollywood film this old when, after the Hays Code, you do find some films kneecapped and prevented from being this thorough in the morality at play. The film itself shows its hand in a poignant way, halfway through, to Jekyll and to the viewer, as the doctor had intended, through his compound drink, to remove the evil and leave a good demigod in himself and others - a bird singing beautifully in a tree, with Jekyll admires, repeating an affirmative mantra, only for a black cat to appear in the tree and, off-screen, kill and probably eat the bird. As a horror film, first and foremost, it can still have some thoughts of interest as a morality play that, thankfully, didn't cop out and try to soften this message.

From http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/images/directors/07/42/jekyll.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

It doesn't qualify for the list, but it does contain cinematic grammar that, by itself, is abstract and worth briefly talking about. The first person sequences are inherently abstract in context of the camera usually being a third person onlooker to scenes, the position within a person's head, through their eyes, disorientating space for what viewers seeing through another's perceptions, (Lady In The Lake (1947), the film noir almost all in first person, will inevitably crop up for this reason if covered on the site). The use of dissolves, screen wipes and the entirety of the first Hyde transformation manipulates the form of this narrative in fascinating ways. The whole film is not abstract, too normal altogether to qualify, but it's as entertaining, especially in the context of a horror film, to see such unconventional tricks being used for added impact. That it won and was nominated for Oscars proves that once the Academy also had a sense of taste to appreciate good filmmaking like this.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wlLYu4oRY3w/TrbWPie_6EI/
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A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

Probably not, but as the previous paragraph, and the film itself, can attest to, a mainstream horror adaptation can be aesthetically bold, have the ability to explore serious content and still be a good film to just enjoy. With countless, countless adaptations of this story in existence in cinema, there's more than enough interpretations to dissect and compare to this one, which will be a difficult film to top in terms of an adaptation. That is enough to make something like this particular one appropriate for the blog.