Feature Films: The Signal Tower | Possessed | Intruder in the Dust | Angels in the Outfield | When in Rome
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Clarence Brown learned his craft by working many years for director Maurice Tourneur.
Films:
The Signal Tower also shows men not taking these concerns seriously. The husband refuses to believe his wife's fears. He says women are worrying needlessly, about a man he trusts.
Possessed itself spoofs other members of the cycle, through dialogue mouthed by New York sophisticate Wally ("Skeets" Gallagher). In many films of the series, the woman treads the Street of Sin to help some pathetic relative. Here, Joan Crawford's heroine plainly declares, in answers to Wally's humorous questions, that she is doing it to help herself.
In today's film, the temptation would be for a director to make these three takes be one long sustained take. We are used to the long or even ten minute takes of Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph H. Lewis and Samuel Fuller, and to the elaborate sequences made possible by today's Steadicam technology. Brown, however, is plainly not thinking in such extreme terms. He seems content to stage the sequence in three medium length takes rather than one very long take. One can suggest some motives. First of all, his factory location and his street location were probably not contiguous. The fact that the factory shot and his street shot were at two different geographic locations probably made it impossible for him to join them into one long shot. However, had it been important to Brown, he probably could have found one suitable factory and street combination somewhere which would have enabled this. The choice of locations here is just a surface manifestation of a deeper underlying attitude.
One suspects that Brown saw little value in joining up his takes, and making them huge or sustained. He liked and wanted the staging of long takes, but felt it was perfectly OK if they were sometimes broken by cuts. For one thing, this must have made them much more practical for execution by his cast and crew. For another, cuts allow him to make a substantial change in location or camera angle, and this was also useful.
Brown prefers, both here, and throughout Possessed, to show the full figures of his characters wherever possible. He stages many of the scenes so that the characters are standing up. He prefers to show people from head to toe. The depth staging here is no exception. In the first shot, we see full figure, standing versions of Gable and Gallagher. Although they are in the foreground, they are standing far away enough from the camera that we can see their complete figures. In the background, Joan Crawford is close enough that we can see all of her too, and large enough to be a meaningful presence.
The bodies of Brown's characters are one of the main subjects of his film. This is a romantic melodrama. He is above all interested in showing us what his characters look like.
One of the main romantic scenes of the film show us Gable and Crawford all dressed up for a party, standing at her dressing table. Both stand throughout the entire scene. Both in fact stand ramrod straight. This is the most famous scene in the film, at least during its own time; a production still of it was widely reprinted. It shows his characters at their most alluring. I think that this was the film that made Clark Gable a star. He was a young contract player who had done supporting roles before this. But here, he played Crawford's successful, handsome, passionate, kind hearted and idealistic boyfriend, and audiences went wild for him.
There are other depth scenes in the film. The second shot of the movie, showing Crawford and Ford walking down a working class street, shows a woman coping with a drunken man in the background. This is quite an elaborate bit of pantomime. It establishes the squalor of the area, and makes a strong feminist point about what women have to put up with in men.
Another depth shot in the film is even more startling. This is the train sequence towards the beginning, when Joan Crawford peers into the train moving by, and sees all the inhabitants of the cars. The photography in this shot is so virtuosic, that it was included in Visions of Light (1992), a fascinating compilation film about American Cinematography. Seeing this clip in fact caused me to hunt up a videotape of Possessed, a film I had in fact never heard of. Like most early 1930's films, it is nearly completely forgotten today.
Brown also uses back and forth cutting to convey isolation, as well as confrontation. For example, when poor girl Joan Crawford is confronted by a French menu, she has to face this challenge all by herself. She is isolated by a close-up, followed by a matching close-up of Gable. The cutting here suggests that the two are functioning all of a sudden as individuals, not as a team.
Clarence Brown undermines many film conventions that typically call for back and forth cutting:
When I first saw Intruder in the Dust in 1971, its world seemed a familiar one to me. The racist Old South it depicted had been shown on network television news virtually every night during the 1960's, as part of the news' coverage of the Civil Rights movement. And I had encountered plenty of bigots in my native Michigan who shared the world view of most of the whites in this film. As a strongly pro-Civil Rights person, both then and now, the world shown in the film seemed deplorable, but not surprising. Seen today, however, Intruder in the Dust seems like a shocking time capsule of another time and place. The attitudes shown in the film look like part of a world of nightmarish horror. This world has now mercifully disintegrated, but its harmful after effects still remain.
At first they accept the idea of the accused being guilty. Everyone in town believes that this is true. It is considered an obvious truth. It is a major conceptual breakthrough, when one of the heroes suggests the opposite. The film shows that thinking originally and unconventionally is itself an act of social defiance. It is a place where social change starts.
Intruder in the Dust is a detective story. Detective stories in general are rich in metaphors about thinking. Detective tales often show the difficulties but also the value of ideas that defy conventional thinking.
Next, the film shows how the characters have to move to open social defiance. The elderly woman is startlingly brave. She has to stand up to ferocious personal criticism and attack.
The scenes where the woman defies the crowds, anticipate the scene in Angels in the Outfield where the aging ballplayer has to defy jeering fans to do his job. Both characters display remarkable grit, in standing up to social pressure.
Coincidentally or not, both characters are older. Perhaps there is a lesson here about older people being required to use grit to achieve positive social goals.
Unlike other semi-docs, there is no large scale police organization in the film; the police are not the central characters; and the finale does not take place in an industrial area.
Intruder in the Dust was made the same year as another semi-doc, Anthony Mann's Border Incident (1949). Both films share a fierce look at the injustices done a minority group: Mann's film deals with criminals who exploit Mexican immigrant laborers. Both films are shot on location in authentic rural and small town areas, in contrast to the urban sites of most semi-docs, and film noir as a whole. Both films seem deeply tragic, and explore major issues affecting American society.
The coach (Paul Douglas) is analogous to the director of a motion picture: Clarence Brown's job. When the film opens, the coach operates by yelling at and demeaning his players. Heaven intervenes, and urges the coach to start treating his players with respect. When he does, the players start functioning as a team, and start winning games. This is like Brown's own well-known respectful treatment of actors, where he listens to them and encourages their input.
The advice to treat workers well and with respect, also seems like advice designed for the world of work in general, not only Hollywood films.
The finale shows an aging ballplayer (Bruce Bennett) screamed at by the fans, who think he is no good, and want him removed from the game. The virulence of the scene is frightening. It anticipates an MGM film made a few years later, Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), with the terrifying scene of Van Gogh being jeered at by the townspeople. Both films show a vulnerable but sincere and hard-working person being denounced by the public. One wonders if the scene in Angels in the Outfield also has autobiographical elements: Clarence Brown was an aging veteran director, and perhaps he felt that older directors and workers weren't prized in Hollywood.
Once again, autobiographical elements are not the only interpretation. The episode is a powerful denunciation of agism and age-related discrimination in general.
The garbled sound is completely non-naturalistic. It is an intervention in and transformation of reality. Unlike most post-1930 Hollywood films, it does not claim to show the audience what is happening in a literal fashion. Instead, it shows reality transformed. This is quite unusual.
The non-literal sound is "justified" a bit, because Angels in the Outfield is a comedy. Hollywood comedy films sometimes have bits of fantasy or whimsy, which violate strict realism. However, the sound in Angels in the Outfield is not just non-realistic. It violates basic filmmaking conventions, about depicting events in a literal manner on screen.
In When in Rome, Brown will present a character's mental imagery on screen. This is not realistic. But it is not such a radical violation of filmmaking norms and conventions, as the sound in Angels in the Outfield.
Common features include:
Brown dealt with religious subjects as far back as his early silent films: The Great Redeemer (1920), The Light in the Dark (1922).