Toronto Star
February 13, 2003 Thursday Ontario Edition
SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. J14
Vintage glimpses of global exotica
The world became a smaller place during the 20th century, and the principal
culprit in this process was the cinema.
In a manner that - for good or ill - blazed the trail for the current
news-channel convention of instantly beaming pictures of distant disasters,
movies of a bygone era brought geographical and cultural exotica, often in
fabulously fabricated renderings, home to movie theatres.
Morocco, Algiers, Casablanca, Shanghai Express - such movie titles held
out the promise of exotic transport.
This week, as esteemed anchors from around the world gather in Bagdad
in
breathless anticipation of a big fat war, let us return to another era in
international spectacle. One when an escape abroad still really meant
something.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
In this intelligent, exquisitely crafted and completely funny 1932
comedy by
the legendary German emigre director Ernst Lubitsch - who was to the
American
screwball comedy what Busby Berkeley was to the American musical - Herbert
Marshall and Miriam Hopkins play a pair of urbane and amoral thieves
collaborating in a delicious scheme to relieve the glamorous and
thoughtless
heir to a perfume fortune (Kay Francis) of as many francs as their steamer
trunks can carry.
The miracle of the movie - beyond its whip-crack timing, diamond-sharp
writing, and smartly sexy hedonism - is how undated and unabashedly adult
it
remains even after 70 years.
The invitation to venture beyond good behaviour has always been one of
the
movies' more seductive come-ons, and it was one of Hollywood's more durable
strategies to see the entire world outside the American border as a kind of
frontier beyond propriety.
Welcome to Paris, a good place to plunder.
PEPE LE MOCO
As well as forging the template for the iconic, tender-tough persona of
Jean
Gabin - which in turn became the mould in which every subsequent French
male
movie star, from Montand to Belmondo to Depardieu, was forged - Jean
Duvivier's
1936 hard-boiled romantic thriller also set the standard for movie-made
visions
of North African existential escape.
Watching Gabin, as the master thief Pepe le Moko, elude the police in
the
silken, teeming labyrinth of a studio Casbah, it's impossible not to see
just
about every subsequent exercise in fabricated middle-eastern exotica - from
Morocco to Casablanca - reflected in its shadows.
Plus there's something eternally heartwrenching about Gabin's particular
personification of charismatic, nicotine-stained world-weariness. Where
Bogart's
cynicism often seemed a cover waiting for the right woman to come and yank
off,
Gabin's seemed to course more deeply. Which only made his redemption - and
subsequent betrayal - by love that much more devastating.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP
Shot in London during relentless bombardment by the Nazi Luftwaffe,
Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger's epic 1943 satire of impervious Britishness
- as
embodied by Roger Livesay's Clive Candy, a career British military man made
of
equal parts presumption, ignorance, prejudice and bluster - was itself
blasted
when first released. Even Churchill challenged its propriety.
Based on the walrus-mustached, hawkish magazine cartoon character
created by
David Low - whose "Colonel Blimp" became a symbol of ossified British
imperialism - Powell and Pressburger's splendidly Technicolored film
follows the
aging but otherwise utterly imperturbable Candy across several continents,
three
wars and several fraught relationships.
The point that got the movie in much trouble with the political and
military
establishment of the time was that Candy's lingering crusty Victorianism
refused
to acknowledge a changing world.
It was one thing to maintain a stiff upper lip while the bombs fell
around
you. Another to assume it might keep you from getting blown to blazes.
GRAPHIC: In his 1932 film, Trouble In Paradise, Ernst Lubitsch crafted
an
intelligent, exquisitely crafted and very funny take on plunder in Paris.
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