Plague Times Diary (5) - On YouTube John Baxter finds much to enjoy in the colorised version of THE KENNEL MURDER CASE (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1933)

 

Michael Curtiz

GOOD DOGGY.

         In his memoir Owning Up, George Melly reminisced about his first encounters with jazz; the discovery in a junk shop of some legendary rarity, the cleaning of the 78 rpm disc; the search for scratches, the ritual sharpening of the fibre needle; then the first glorious blare of Armstrong or Beiderbeck.

         Melly wasn’t of my generation and I never liked early jazz, but film scholarship in the sixties wasn’t much different. Before DVDs or even VHS, films had a physical rather than an electronic existence. Reels in metal cans, sometimes incomplete or mislabeled (if labeled at all.) Films too obscure to be seen with audiences, but rather to be shared with a handful of fellow obsessives or perhaps seen alone, with just the clattering projecter for company and the ever unfolding mystery of that silver window on another and better reality.

         Back then, the homes of film people were part residence, part screening room. Bill Everson’s apartment in New York, furnished with rows of seats souvenired from some demolished cinema; Kevin Brownlow’s home in north London, with a vintage movie camera perched on a tripod by the window. That I recognised this gorgeous object as an Akeley persuaded him, more than any argument, of my worthiness to share his scholarship   

         In moving to England and becoming a programmer for the National Film Theatre, I expected a more streamlined world. But film hunting was just as hit and miss as in Australia. Finding rarities could mean secret meetings with the TV comedian who kept a stash under his floorboards, or shamelessly flattering the millionaire Los Angeles collector as he led you through his vault of treasures, each in its own bright pristine can. 

Or, more agreeably, visiting the urbane Jacques Ledoux, conservator of the Belgian national film archive in Brussels.

         “So you are doing a Michael Curtiz season?” he said amiably. “How can I help?”

No point is asking “What have you got?” I’d learned from experience that he played the game differently.

         “Well, do you have....”  A surreptitous glance at my list. “Noah’s Ark?”

         He slid out a drawer in his meticulously ordered desk.

         “Ah... yes!”

         “Excellent. And...” The list again. “Doctor X?”

         He smiled. “Does anyone?”

         Well, it was worth a try. The two-colour Technicolor horror films Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum were the holy grail of Curtiz studies. The closest I’d come was a silent subtitled 8mm reel of highlights, sold by a home movie service   

.“The Kennel Murder Case?”

         The drawer again. “Yes!”

         

How antique it all seems now, in a world of apparently infinite accessibility, where the rarest of rarities is likely to turn up on Turner Classic Movie as a filler between splatter flicks. But a little of that frisson returned recently when I found on YouTube a colourised copy of The Kennel Murder Case, the film that Bill Everson rated among the four or five greatest of all detective films.

Colourised? Yes, I know. We’re all aware of the horrors perpetrated in its name, But a tool is as good as its user. (Not that the technique is particularly expert in this case, with occasional shifts back into monochrome, and fabrics veering from beige to green.) But even so, the colourised The Kennel Murder Case is a rediscovery, reaffirming the mastery of Curtiz and of Warner Brothers in the early nineteen-thirties. 

I got to know those films intimately during the first days of television in Australia, Channels hungry for content bought the entire libraries of RKO, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Most nights, from 11pm to 2am, they filled slots called The Golden Years of Hollywood or Million Dollar Movieby whatever came next off the shelf. It was nothing to see an ad hoc retrospective of a single director in the course of a fortnight; fine when it was Billy Wilder, less so when it was George Waggner or H.Bruce Humberstone- although in some ways, the one was as illuminating as the other. 

Warner films of 1930 to 1934 were an education in themselves. With so many directors using the same technicians – cinematographer Tony Gaudio, designer Anton Grot, editor George Amy, costumier Orry-Kelly – their pesonal styles were thrown into relief. Thanks in part to some tutoring from Barrie Pattison, even then as much an enthusiast for Curtiz as today, the way Roy Del Ruth kept the camera low and included both the characters full-length and the decor in shot (like Yasujiro Ozu, dare I say?); the hustling boots-and-all direction of Archie Mayo, who seemed to shoulder into set-ups, no longer a spectator but part of the story. And of course Curtiz; forensic, strategic, a man who, instead of eyes, had a camera in his head.

Colorised Lobby Card

It’s this skill that colourising emphasises in The Kennel Murder Case.As the process brings out surfaces, one notices how he enlivens even the most banal images by shooting through a car door or over the bonnet, contrasting the texture of metal, stone and cloth; how this brings an almost preternatural elegance to William Powell’s Philo Vance; his kid gloves, his cane, his fedora, as distinctive a uniform in its way as that of Sherlock Holmes. Colour brings to life Orry-Kelly’s costumes. More emphatically cut and patterned than street wear so as to catch the eye in black and white, they leap out in colour. Helen Vinson’s clinging golden satin evening gown and Mary Astor’s zooming double-breasted lapels and snap-brimmed felt hat live in the eye long after the scenes end.

Curtiz starts with his foot to the floor and never lets up. Corpses topple from closets, a Doberman savages the villain amidst Chinoiserie fragile as eggshells. Powell, called on to explain a locked room with a corpse inside, uses twine and pins to expose the trick, Curtiz films this with no attempt at artifice, as flat as a demonstration of carpentry, “Yes, Yes,” one can almost hear him muttering. “Let’s get on!”

William Powell (l), Mary Astor (c) ? (r)

I tried to convey my fascination in the Curtiz season the NFT let me program in 1975. It was too early for some. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian called it “ridiculous”. Ingrid Bergman took exception to a program note suggesting that the supporting cast of Casablanca comprised“the sweepings of the studio, while of their performances, it’s kindest to say they never gave any others.” Nor did the resident silent movie pianist ever get on his wave length. For Pharaoh in Moon of Israel staring aghast at his dead first-born, she favoured us with Brahms’ Lullaby    

          These days, its rarer not to acknowledge Curtiz as, to use the title of the NFT season, The Ultimate Professional. He took pride in delivering the film in time and under budget. The craft is evident. The art is....well,...understood.

         Two postscripts. 1. We did manage to get a colour print of The Mystery of the Wax Museum. At the last minute, Jack Warner supposedly looked in his garage and found nitrate copies of both it and Doctor X.  2. Imdb notes that, because its copyright was never renewed, The Kennel Murder Case can boast “the longest, most continuous, most frequent, and most popular number of telecasts of any motion picture of its era.”  Nice one, Mike.