Adolphe Menjou – Movie Musings

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper romance in the heat of Morocco

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Cast: Gary Cooper (Legionnaire Tom Brown), Marlene Dietrich (Mademoiselle Amy Jolly), Adolphe Menjou (La Bessiere), Ulrich Haupt (Adjutant Caesar), Eve Southern (Madame Caesar), Francis McDonald (Sergeant), Paul Porcasi (Lo Tinto)

Josef von Sternberg was one of the greatest directors of early cinema – and Marlene Dietrich was his muse. Or was he her Svengali? Either way, they first worked together on German film The Blue Angel and such was the impression made by Dietrich, Hollywood was desperate to get her and von Sternberg together for a new picture that would channel her star power into ticket sales. Morocco is the picture they come up with, a romance tinged with heartbreak set in French occupied-Morocco around a Foreign Legion troop passing through town.

Dietrich was Amy Jolly, a woman of uncertain and shady past, new in town and making a living as a night club singer. There here routine encompasses everything from erotic singing in top hat and tails (complete with a bisexual vibe – you can tell this is pre-Code Hollywood?) to an apple selling singing routine. She’s loved by La Bessiere (a rather bland Adolphe Menjou), a stuffed shirt rich guy. But her heart belongs to man’s-man legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper), a toughened old soldier with a girl in every barracks town. Who will Amy end up with? Will she follow her heart or her head? Can she bear to live the life of a soldier’s mistress amongst the camp followers?

Writing it all down, there are probably few mysteries about the resolution you get from Morocco, which even at its 90 minute run time feels like an impossibly slim piece of fluff. But that hardly really matters when von Sternberg shoots the film with a romantic flourish and with Dietrich and Cooper as such compelling leads. It’s odd to think, looking at it now, that Morocco was acclaimed as one of the greatest films ever made on release (it’s not even the best or most lasting Dietrich/von Sternberg Hollywood collaboration of which there were five more to come).

But it lasts in history because it introduced Dietrich to the wider world. Von Sternberg took control over every aspect of her image to best present her to the world – including a torturous 45 takes of her first line (because after all the first line was the one that will make the first impression on an audience). Von Sternberg and cinematographer Lee Garmes choose lighting methods and angles that would enhance her features, and shot huge parts of the film to favour her (much to the annoyance of Gary Cooper, who resented von Sternberg’s shunting of him to the sidelines).

Von Sternberg was determined that Dietrich would make an impression: and she certainly did with her cabaret act, still probably the film’s highlight. Dressed in a striking male garb, her rendition of When Love Dies is sold on her confidence, sexual allure and tinge of bisexuality (viewers were scandalised and titalated that the routine ended with Dietrich playfully kissing a woman in the audience) to make a lasting impact. Von Sternberg lets the tension build as well by holding the camera calmly on Dietrich (in drag) while the audience at first boo before silencing and then being swept up in her performances. This is the approach taken for the rest of the film – and its rather weak plot – focusing on the a magnetic quality, the indefinable star quality some people have to just make you watch them.

It’s recognised by von Sternberg, who builds the film around her. It’s tempting to see Adolphe Menjou – the jilted would-be husband, in awe of the star – as a von Sternberg self-portrait, dressed as he is to resemble the director. But von Sternberg felt so confident over his control of Dietrich and her career, I suspect there is actually far more of him in lothario Tom Brown, the sort of man who may love a woman but also very much likes her to submit her will to his own. Brown may have his moments of decency – he wants Amy to have the best chance in life, which is clearly with La Bessiere rather than him – but he’s also an at times ruthless opportunist and adventurer, with a string of broken hearts behind him. Interestingly, considering their later films and her reputation, Dietrich’s Jolly is actually a fairly passive figure throughout the film, to whom events happen and who never feels in charge of her destiny. Perhaps more than a little of life drippling through to the screen?

Saying that the film has some bite in it, with the dialogue from Jules Furthman often rich, rough and ready, creating characters who speak at times bluntly but with a sort of urban poetry. Sadly, the dialogue scenes are often frequently the dullest in the film. Von Sternberg was still at the time a natural director of silent film, not the talkies. Hollywood itself had still not really learned how to do record dialogue and do camera movements at the same time, so most of the dialogue scenes are visually flat and rather forced (not helped by the storyline itself being often less then enthralling).

Where Morocco really comes into its own is when it falls back on visuals. As a director of pictures, von Sternberg is outstanding. The camera perfectly captures the bustle of the Moroccan market town. There is a beautiful sequence where Amy raises through a seemingly never-ending row of soldiers to try and find Tom. The Morocco in this film may bear almost no resemblance to the real Morocco – it’s clearly a Hollywood fantasy land – but it also looks at no time like it was shot on a Hollywood backlot. Tom Brown’s slow and sad browse through Amy’s dressing room, before deciding he should leave for her own good is hauntingly well done in near total silence, matched with beautifully empathetic camera moves. The final imagery, as our heroes head out into the sands of Morocco, is marvellous, a perfect collection of shots and reactions leading to an image for the ages.

And Morocco is a film of images strung together with a rather dull plot and a very stilted scenes of dialogue. Marlene Dietrich is at the centre of many of these images. This was her only Oscar nomination – but it’s not her finest performance. She’s still learning her craft and – above all you feel – still very much an elaborate prop for von Sternberg. The more they became something like equals the stronger the pictures would become. Gary Cooper was unhappy on the film – but actually his performance is remarkably strong and assured, dripping sexuality (von Sternberg also works a lovely little scene that pokes fun at Cooper’s height).

Morocco seems like a landmark of cinema that is of greater academic interest at times than it is dramatic. But when the dialogue fades away and the film is able to relax into the series of arresting images that make up most of it, it’s still a marvellous and intriguing work.

Kirk Douglas leads men into pointless battle in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Colonel Dax), Ralph Meeker (Cpl Philippe Paris), Adolphe Menjou (Major General Georges Broulard), George Macready (Brigadier General Paul Mireau), Wayne Morris (Lt Roget), Richard Anderson (Major Saint-Auban), Joe Turkel (Pvt Pierre Arnaud), Timothy Carey (Pvt Maurice Ferol), Emile Meyer (Father Duprée), Bert Freed (Sgt Boulanger), Susanne Christian (German singer)

Kubrick’s fourth film is one that often gets overlooked when running over his CV – and it’s had less cultural impact than, say, A Clockwork Orange, 2001 or The Shining – but out of all of his films (except maybe The Shining) it’s the one I’ve come back to the most often, and is certainly his first stone-cold classic. This Word War One tragedy simmers with anti-war sentiment, and it’s so beautifully made and assembled you can see its influence in films right up to 1917.

In 1916 the war is bogged down into trench warfare. Command wants results, an action they can point to, so General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) is sent by the General Staff to instruct General Mireau (George Macready) to launch an attack on a well defended German position called “the Anthill”. Mireau says any attack would be suicide – until the prospect of his promotion being directly linked to it is mentioned, at which point he becomes the attack’s most passionate advocate. Mireau passes the order onto regiment commander Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who protests that the attack is pointless, but is ordered to lead it or be relieved of his command. The attack is a costly farce, and the humiliated Mireau (with Broulard’s tacit agreement) demands a blood sacrifice – one man from each company will be placed on trial for cowardice and shot as an example for the whole French army. Dax deplores this injustice – but with the administrative meat-grinder as deadly as the one on the front, what hope does he have?

Kubrick believed passionately in the project but also needed a commercial hit in order to bolster his career. So he recruited Kirk Douglas to get the funding – Douglas took a third of the film’s budget as his salary, so it wasn’t all charity – and he rewrote the ending of the book to allow Dax to come up with a last minute solution to get the soldiers off. Douglas, to his credit, was having none of that and demanded a rewrite that restored the book’s original bleak ending.

So it’s largely thanks to Douglas we get the shape of the film that we end up with – but it’s clear that it’s Kubrick’s genius that makes it the film it is. Actor and director were a perfect combination here, so much so that Douglas got Kubrick on board to direct Spartacus (an unhappy experience for them both). But Paths of Glory was where both actor and director were working in perfect partnership, both pushing the other to give of their very best. Dax is the perfect Douglas role – decent, intelligent, well-spoken, passionate, a natural leader, but the film undermines all this with his ineffectiveness. Each of his crusades goes wrong, and he fails at every goal he sets himself. Douglas brilliantly captures both sides of this in his generously low-key but committed performance.

He has a great framework of a film around him from Kubrick. The director uses several longs shots, extended takes and tracking shots to throw us into the world. The opening sequences at the military HQ, taking in the palatial setting of Mireau’s campaign office, have a stately construction and technical formality which then contrasts superbly with the lower angle, tracking shot-laden, POV sequences set in the trenches. Kubrick’s camera glides through these trenches, low angles seeming to make them tower over the viewer, the mud and filth only worse in the body-strewn no-man’s land that stands between the French and the Germans.

It culminates in the attack sequence, one of the greatest battle sequences ever placed on film. Following the doomed advance at a methodical pace, matching the speed of the soldiers, the camera tracks over no man’s land as explosions rend the ground and bodies are thrown to the mud under a hail of bullets. At the front is Dax, vainly blowing on his whistle and encouraging the men forward, while all around him devastation and slaughter win out. Any thought that this wasn’t a pointless enterprise from start to finish is completely dispelled, and our sympathies are completely with Dax and the soldiers, whose lives are superfluous to the ambitions of the generals.

Both generals cut appalling figures for different reasons. Mireau, played with a trumpeting, vain bombast by Macready, is a “blood and guts” soldier who never places his own blood and guts anywhere near the line. Proudly bragging about the skills of his soldiers, then furiously denouncing their cowardice, one telling shot has him in the trenches staring through binoculars at the German positions, oblivious to the wounded men filing past him. Later he orders the shelling of these very trenches in fury at their failure to advance far enough. Broulard is hardly better, Menjou’s “hail well met” bluster hiding a chilling lack of empathy.

The Germans are never seen, because the real enemies here are war itself (and we are kidding ourselves if the same thing wasn’t happening on the other side) and the authorities who push us into it. The film is almost like some sort of black satire, with the generals confidently telling their soldiers they are right behind them, before retreating several miles to the rear to watch the battle unfold. Dax is middle-management, caught between trying his best to deliver orders he knows are impossible, and protecting men he knows are doomed, and failing at both tasks.

The system demands blood sacrifices from the lowest possible rungs, so the hierarchy can reassure themselves they are not blamed (Dax’s offer to take all the blame is promptly rejected by Broulard – no question of any of the officers being at fault!), so the men are chosen by their company commanders. One is chosen by lottery (he of course is a decorated war hero, but that cuts no ice), one because he’s an “undesirable” and the third because he has witnessed his own commanding officer’s cowardice. None of them deserve it, but their guilt is “proved” in a kangaroo court that lasts less than 15 minutes, and in which Dax is barely allowed to put a defence case.

Kubrick’s film becomes a surprisingly fast (it’s less than 90 minutes) but inexorable march towards those three stakes in the ground and the firing squad. Questions of justice and courage are completely pointless – any brave acts in the film are pointless, two of the victims are cited for their courage and the most cowardly character in the film, Wayne Morris’ snivelling Lt Rouget, ends up commanding the firing squad – and the message we are left with is that the institution of war and man are the real villains here.

War has no heroes, only survivors. Victories are important to the generals only in the sense of being tools to jockey for position, and the common soldier is an expendable puppet who can be killed on a whim to fill any political reason. It’s a harsh and chilling view of the military – and leaves very little hope – but it’s superbly made and controlled by Kubrick, in a film surprisingly with more heart in it than any film he ever made before or since. It’s a film that leaks with sorrow and disgust at the victims of the military machine, a film with emotion as well as a technical marvel. It might be Kubrick’s most complete film.