A Film Canon

Gentleman Jim stands in relation to Errol Flynn as Now, Voyager does to Bette Davis, hypothesising a narrative to account for his particular brand of charisma, and identifying him with a late nineteenth-century reconfiguration of masculinity from machismo to dandyism. As heavyweight champion James Corbett, Flynn reforms the game from a hand-sport to a foot-sport, such that it takes outgoing champion John L. Sullivan (Buck Ware) nineteen rounds to even lay a hand on him, and renders boxing continuous with dancing (the first fight is followed by a ball, the last preceded by a jig). At the same time, Corbett's contribution to "the scientific art of self-defence" involves the promulgation of a code of conduct that is both aesthetic and ethical, and ensures that those dimensions always supervene the more basic narrative, or voyeuristic, pleasures of the fight sequences, producing a character study, or even a period piece, rather than a sporting film per se. Hence the curiously redundant, predictable quality of those fights, as well as the attention paid to Corbett's theatrical career which, along with Flynn's markedly tongue-in- cheek performance, suggests that Walsh's real project is a study in good-natured, self- aware celebrity: "A swellhead is a guy who thinks he's good and isn't. Get the difference?"

This short Mass-Observation documentary presents wartime Britain as a nocturnal world, and its war effort as a hushed orchestra. To this end, Jennings artfully prevents any person or utterance becoming too individuated, integrating everything back into a murmur that encompasses speech, singing, humming, whistling, and a variety of inanimate noises, with the result that the only 'voice' is in fact this orchestra's performance, figured predominantly in terms of BBC radio, whose omniscience is only rivalled by that of the camera's movement from candid close-ups to vastnesses of land, sea and air. More poetically, Jennings construes this murmur as analogous in elasticity, durability and beauty to recurrent motifs of English pastoral life - wind blowing through crops and leaves, the surface of the sea - as if to drive home the point that, beyond ideological imperatives, the war is an issue of land, and the right to enjoy it in the light of day; that is, the right to sight.

Never Give A Sucker An Even Break robs W.C. Fields of his alcoholic cocoon, forcing him to take refuge in a diner, and a second, self-penned script; or, more accurately, to reduce his persona to the sum of its realistic and fantastic parts, respectively encapsulated in his passive-aggressive, semi-domestic banter with the diner waitress, and his imaginative extrapolation of a responsibility-free world from the trajectory of a falling whisky bottle. As a result, his nakedness is less tortuous than it would be elsewhere, just because this disassociation of his persona is exactly what the world's angularities so often threaten, as if his regular antagonists had finally realised that it were more destructive to market than to mother or menace him. This ensures that the film's self-referentiality - Fields plays himself, pitching his next script after the success of The Bank Dick - is deceptively conservative, a mere adjunct to a circumscription of his persona in the name of the very marketing machine that it ostensibly parodies. Hence the intensification of his most recognisable gags (odd words, faulty hats, incongruous violence) to a caricature of themselves - a problematic move for a comedian whose routine inheres less in specific behaviours than in the implication that there is some alternative, subversive nuance that could be placed upon them, and whose delivery is always a mere pretext for gesturing towards that elusive '...', here firmly reified as a physiological phenomenon: "I feel as though somebody stepped on my tongue with muddy feet." That said, this generalisation of the enemy means that, at a local level, Fields finds himself willing to play an unusual role - the devoted family man, albeit in an idiosyncratic way, as his conversation with his beloved niece suggests: "Don't you want to be smart?" "No, I want to be like you." "You don't think I'm smart?" "Not very."

Like The Birth Of A Nation or The Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane is a manifesto of film language, proposing a new aesthetic of disorientation that is narrativised in terms of the elusive life of media mogul John Foster Kane (Welles), and stylised in terms of a dazzling array of techniques. Most iconically, cinematographer Gregg Toland masters deep-focus  to an unprecedented extent, such that the prototypical shot consists of a face in extreme close-up, a figure in the middle distance, and a figure in the far distance, the latter tending to be emphasised by unrealistically - if subtly - large set pieces. Even when this shot doesn't occur, its logic pervades the organisation of the film, which frequently cuts between close-ups and long shots, as if to fuse internal and external montage, as well as relocating depth to both a diagonal and vertical register, through an exotic use of the mobile camera and low-angle shot respectively. Concomitantly, the entire space in which sound can echo is opened up to the viewer - most obviously in Kane's tympanal mansion, but more generally in a tendency to garble, overlap and distort speech, which finds its logical conclusion in the cacaphonous rehearsals for second wife Susan's (Dorothy Comingore) disastrous foray into opera. The result is a dislocation that extends to the fabric of cinema itself, whose basic syntactic unit - the cut - is either reduced to a non-sequitur, or choreographed around shadow and light in such a way as to make it unclear where one frame ends and the next begins. Even the distinction between cinema and other media is broken down, to the extent that it is questionable whether the work deserves the unqualified designation of 'film' at all. Not only are animation, still photography, painting and photomontage integrated into the cinematic image, but the entire distinction between cinema and newsreels - so crucial to the 1940s cinematic experience - is collapsed by the lack of credits, opening 'fictional' newsreel, and presentation of 'The End' ten minutes into what is, ostensibly, the narrative. Hence Welles' decision to refrain from showing anything other than the back of investigating journalist Thompson (William Alland), whose role as a potential object of identification is eclipsed by his usefulness in carrying the viewer from one proliferation of disorienting objects to another; an embodied, inquisitive tracking-shot.

The greatest film about Hollywood since Show People, Sullivan's Travels poses the question of where film should stand in relation to mass poverty. At one level, this is a question of genre, as Sturges - and his cipher, director John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) - conclude that neither social realism, comedy, nor the simplistic hybrid characteristic of Capra is an acceptable solution. It is also an issue of representation, in which Sullivan's realisation of the complications of depicting the poor is itself only convincing against the backdrop of what is, ostensibly, a fairly representative sample. Finally, it is an engagement with narrative, as Sullivan's attempt to integrate himself into various impoverished narratives culminates with an example of the very trite predictability (a Disney short) that he was ostensibly escaping. The result is a tangential hybrid of comedy and social realism, representation and non-representation, in which every event or object possesses only the most oblique, contingent, relation to the next, and Sturges is forced to introduce overt meta-fictional devices simply - and barely - to keep the script within the realm of narrative, most conspicuously in the form of the generic 'girl' (Veronica Lake) and final 'twist'. In this way, the cross-nuances of The Lady Eve are further generalised from conversation into a principle of Sturges' universe; a space in which the most minor local differences can produce vast, sudden discrepancies in tone, style, and even character, while, conversely, all such discrepances are only apparent, reducible to a look, a gesture, an inflection. Although this undoubtedly contributes to the comic dimension of the film, it simultaneously generates a melancholy that is so pervasive as to be identified with the film, and is explicated in the central, extended montage sequence, in which Sullivan and the girl's sojourn among the impoverished takes them, momentarily, to a state that is beyond the ambit of the film, which accordingly reverts to a more primitive register, as if Sturges' final quest were for some compromise between directing and not directing, speech and silence.

The Lady Eve refines screwball miscommunication from cross-purposes to cross-nuances, conjuring up a universe in which every utterance possesses an irreducible openness, and conversation is anchored more in inflection than content; or, rather, only exhibits content insofar as it explicitly touches upon inflection. Hence the pervasive fascination with minor, pedantic differences (ale and beer), as well as the more surprising revelation that most differences are minor ("He isn't backwards, he's a scientist!" "Oh...I knew he was peculiar"), both of which ensure that Barbara Stanwyck's most enduring screen persona - the romantic strategist - seems less paradoxical than in any of its previous incarnations, reaching its (comic) apotheosis. In this way, Sturges transforms romance itself into something which requires only the most subtle inflection to become repellent, or ridiculous - most memorably in an impassioned declaration of love that is textured by an intrusive, quizzical horse, but more generally in his complete disassociation of the remarriage trope from marriage itself, as card shark Jean Harrington (Stanwyck) falls in love with millionaire herpetologist Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), is found out and discarded before being given the opportunity to declare her true feelings, and so disguises herself as the 'Lady Eve' in order to exact a revenge-by-marriage that, once again, gives way to genuine feeling, which she satisfies by reverting to her original identity. Just as this collapses the critical distinction between first and second marriage, so it fuses romance and suckerdom, concluding with an ambiguity that could either be sublime or ridiculous, and is foreshadowed in one of Sturges' most remarkable long takes, in which Fonda and Stanwyck share a prolonged embrace that is both erotic and detached, natural and clumsy. The result is a condensation of Fonda's taxonomical gaze to Stanwyck's's body, whose grace is only ever one step away from violence, and whose genius lies in knowing how to disguise this, as Fonda inadvertently realises: "They look too much alike to be the same".

The strongest instance of American Gothic since The Wind, The Devil And Daniel Webster extrapolates a powerful Expressionist aesthetic from the clash of Daniel Webster's (Edward Arnold) "lightnings and denunciations" with the "glittering eyes" of the jury of the damned, before which he appears to dispute the Faustian contract drawn up between New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone (James Craig) and the devil (Walter Huston). This takes the form of a bright, unearthly light that fuses the infernal realm with the gold that it temporarily provides, most memorably in Stone's dream-house, filled with whitewashed walls and objects, crystal chandeliers, and a dream-mistress clad in sparkling clothes and jewels. Concomitantly, low ceilings and skies ensure that the space that light opens up is as uncanny as light itself, while a run of unseasonable weather (hailstorms in August, snowstorms in June) imbues regular sunshine with a similar strangeness. This produces a supernatural queasiness, epitomised by a cacaphony of hysterical farmyard animals that both vocalise the devil's infernal jig, and confirm the extent to which this dimension is atmospheric, abstracted from the three major figures to a much greater extent than occurs in Benet's short story, and so transforming them, in turn, from figures into characters. As a result, Webster's summative invocation of the American spirit ultimately feels tangential to his more specific criticism of corrupt business, and the devilish loan sharks that practice it. Hence the introduction of a subplot concerning (latent) unionism, against which this corruption is defined. Similarly, Huston ensures that the devil is very much a character, albeit in such a way as to make his presence all the more sinister, culminating with the last image, in which the seduction of his spritely, mischievous charisma is creepily undermined.

This comic take on Snow White replaces the dwarves with a group of professors working on an encyclopedia, transforms the maiden into Katherine 'Sugarpuss' O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a burlesque dancer on the run from the law, and, most memorably, translates her wisdom from domestics to linguistics, as she provides head professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) with a repository of American slang, as well as an unsolicited lesson in body language; or, rather, the nexus between the two, exuding that cerebral sexuality of which Stanwyck is peculiarly capable, and explaining her ability to penetrate the mind of a man who, before encountering her, thought that "the only thing I could care for deeply...was a well-constructed sentence." As this might suggest, a great deal of the humour arises from the incongruity between the fairy-tale and everyday worlds, and, more specifically, between caricaturisation and characterisation, clearest in the standoff between a pair of realistically drawn gangsters and the seven professors, each of whom has been defined in terms of a single accent or interest, which are now brought to bear upon their escape. From this perspective, Cooper's relatively one-dimensional screen persona means that he never really experiences the conversion from caricature to character that Stanwyck's presence is supposed to catalyse, his final rejection of a boxing manual in favour of impulsive fighting feeling like a mere afterthought, rather than a critical moment in the narrative. That said, screenwriters Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder arguably anticipate this in their organisation of the central academic session around the word 'corny', which Sugarpuss aims at Potts, then elaborates: loose-toothed, old-fashioned, over-sentimental.

The Wolf Man elaborates most of the hallmarks of the werewolf subgenre, albeit at the expense of a compelling script. Despite occasional moments of respite, it feels as if screenwriter Curt Siodmak is simply providing a primer on werewolfdom, as the same comments, speculations and interpretations are circulated from one mouthpiece to another, as monotonous as the gypsy chant with which the monster is laid to rest. As with earlier Universal horror films, this counter-productive discursion serves to invoke psychoanalysis as a possibility, or atmosphere, while neglecting its specific conclusions, such that the clear resonances with Freud's casebook are reduced to a series of banal attempts to metaphorise the werewolf; or, more accurately, to metaphorise the schizophrenia which which it is laboriously identified: "It's a technical expression for something very simple - the good and evil in every man's soul." That said, Oedipal conflict is inevitably evoked at a basic narrative level, as well as in the inspired casting of Lon Chaney Jr., whose uncanny resemblance to his father ("There's something very tragic about that man") is deflected into the muted presence of his older (but identical) brother, who died in mysterious, unexplained circumstances. Similarly, although Jack P. Pierce's werewolf costume is impressive, the moments of transition are fairly anticlimactic, while the fog laden forest and graveyard sets quickly become repetitive, if less conspicuously stagy than their precursors.

Suspicion continues Foreign Correspondent's project of documenting the moment at which an uncannily enlivened object forces a protagonist to completely reconfigure their conception of the world. In this case, that object takes the form of playboy Johnny Aysgarth (Cary Grant) - or, more accurately, the reification of Grant's screen persona that he provides, reducing himself to a mere receptacle for the female gaze; a hyperbolic, one-dimensional purveyor of charm. This is enhanced by Hitchcock's unusual editing style, which minimises Grant's entries and exits in such a way as to construe him as something that merely appears, akin to the portrait and photograph that haunt the narrative, rather than the source of any immediately explicable agency. As a result, the burden of acting falls squarely upon Joan Fontaine, who, as Johnny's wife, gradually suspects him of planning to murder her. To this end, Hitchcock mines her face for all the expressions of surprise, suspicion and disorientation that it can produce, while attempting to construe everything else as so much connective tissue between her and Johnny, akin to the web-like window that casts its shadow over their house, or even the wind that so often blows them together, such that a combination of scrabble letters to read 'murder' takes on a meaning beyond sheer randomness. This strategy doesn't always work, partly due to a slightly contrived script, but does find spectacular expression in the penultimate scene, during which Johnny brings his wife a glass of milk that may or may not be poisoned, and that is lit from the inside, suffusing the entire house with the import of this crucial gesture. From this perspective, the rejection of Hitchcock's original ending was fatal, since it robs Grant's one-dimensionality of its thematic resonance, and the film of its delicate tone, retrospectively reducing it to an awkward fusion of screwball comedy, thriller and romance.