“The day he was born, there was salt in the air.”
Blood and Sand (1941)
directed by Rouben Mamoulian
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Rouben Mamoulian was an Armenian from Imperial Russia who made it to Hollywood via London and New York. He was interested in technical experimentation and, like Josef von Sternberg, saw sets, cameras, and actors as means to a subconscious end. Unlike Joe Sternberg, Mamoulian is freer with motion and speed. Von Sternberg’s best movies drift like smoke. They linger and curl and get inside your head.
Any director who prioritizes atmosphere is in love with visions and the dream state, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fierce and full of life. Its impressions are sharp and cannot be dismissed as easily as a nightmare can. I saw the movie last fall and thought about it all winter. Mamoulian directed sixteen movies, and they are not widely available. Becky Sharp, the first three-strip Technicolor film, slogs unrestored through the public domain.
Anyone who watches a lot of movies makes his way to directors like Rouben Mamoulian eventually, so I hesitate to say that he should be better known. But one should avail oneself of Blood and Sand. Mamoulian was after the oils of Spanish masters: El Greco, Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez. But movies do not need paintings to justify their visions. Technicolor candlelight deserves a wall in any museum, as there is nothing that suggests the repose and potential of a settled imagination better. I mean that memory from childhood of reading a book like Treasure Island and picturing a pirate ship anchored out of the wind. Or the joy upon seeing a city that does not remind you of anyplace you came from.
It is easy to romanticize Spain, with its trajes de luces and bloody bulls. Mamoulian pursues death instead: at the inky alter where espadas “offer their devotions and seek protection of the saints;” in the low choral music behind the sad roll of a snare drum; through Rita Hayworth, hidden in a corner in a second shade of purple – bruise upon bruise. Death is the hero. He is powerful, silent. Statuary comes to life in death’s presence, in the place where a mother prays to hasten the mutilation of her son.
Hayworth is beautiful but seems oddly older than she was. Melodrama runs roughshod through the script. Juan himself bemoans his own illiteracy above more significant failings; his dying regret is not the wife he mistreated or the friends he threw aside, but the words - newspaper articles, mostly - he cannot read. To seduce Juan, Hayworth’s Doña Sol plays him a song on the guitar, but Juan is exhausted and falls asleep instead. When he wakes, the mansion is silent and nearly empty. He wanders about, looking for the exit, then stumbles on the room where the Doña sleeps. He watches her, unclear as to which of them is in the other’s dream.
directed by Rouben Mamoulian
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Rouben Mamoulian was an Armenian from Imperial Russia who made it to Hollywood via London and New York. He was interested in technical experimentation and, like Josef von Sternberg, saw sets, cameras, and actors as means to a subconscious end. Unlike Joe Sternberg, Mamoulian is freer with motion and speed. Von Sternberg’s best movies drift like smoke. They linger and curl and get inside your head.
Any director who prioritizes atmosphere is in love with visions and the dream state, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fierce and full of life. Its impressions are sharp and cannot be dismissed as easily as a nightmare can. I saw the movie last fall and thought about it all winter. Mamoulian directed sixteen movies, and they are not widely available. Becky Sharp, the first three-strip Technicolor film, slogs unrestored through the public domain.
Anyone who watches a lot of movies makes his way to directors like Rouben Mamoulian eventually, so I hesitate to say that he should be better known. But one should avail oneself of Blood and Sand. Mamoulian was after the oils of Spanish masters: El Greco, Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez. But movies do not need paintings to justify their visions. Technicolor candlelight deserves a wall in any museum, as there is nothing that suggests the repose and potential of a settled imagination better. I mean that memory from childhood of reading a book like Treasure Island and picturing a pirate ship anchored out of the wind. Or the joy upon seeing a city that does not remind you of anyplace you came from.
It is easy to romanticize Spain, with its trajes de luces and bloody bulls. Mamoulian pursues death instead: at the inky alter where espadas “offer their devotions and seek protection of the saints;” in the low choral music behind the sad roll of a snare drum; through Rita Hayworth, hidden in a corner in a second shade of purple – bruise upon bruise. Death is the hero. He is powerful, silent. Statuary comes to life in death’s presence, in the place where a mother prays to hasten the mutilation of her son.
Hayworth is beautiful but seems oddly older than she was. Melodrama runs roughshod through the script. Juan himself bemoans his own illiteracy above more significant failings; his dying regret is not the wife he mistreated or the friends he threw aside, but the words - newspaper articles, mostly - he cannot read. To seduce Juan, Hayworth’s Doña Sol plays him a song on the guitar, but Juan is exhausted and falls asleep instead. When he wakes, the mansion is silent and nearly empty. He wanders about, looking for the exit, then stumbles on the room where the Doña sleeps. He watches her, unclear as to which of them is in the other’s dream.
posted by NPK at 10:58 AM
<< Home