{"id":30838,"date":"2015-03-08T20:24:39","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T01:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=30838"},"modified":"2016-03-12T16:09:28","modified_gmt":"2016-03-12T22:09:28","slug":"1932-mgm-invents-the-future-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2015\/03\/08\/1932-mgm-invents-the-future-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"1932: MGM invents the future (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Seldom can we point to a moment when a movie convention is born. When, exactly, did crosscutting for suspense start? (Not, apparently, with Griffith.) What was the dissolve first used to convey the passage of time? What film first updated us on story developments by whipping newspaper headlines up to the camera?<\/p>\n

We\u2019re rightly discouraged from asking such questions. For one thing, we probably can\u2019t answer them; too many films are lost. And what may matter is not the first time a technique is used but the process by which it becomes normalized and widespread. That\u2019s when it achieves significance in the history of film forms.<\/p>\n

Still, occasionally we might be able to pinpoint a crystallizing moment, when the convention assumes a distinct identity. The problem then becomes tracing the uptake, the process that makes the convention standardized enough to be understood by audiences.<\/p>\n

In working on Hollywood narrative conventions of the 1940s, I\u2019m drawn to moments in earlier decades when certain storytelling devices seem to emerge, although maybe only in partial or bastardized or confused forms. Here’s an example.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t usually look to the MGM of this period as a hotbed of innovation. We think of it as the star-glutted studio that under Irving Thalberg turned out plump, well-upholstered productions of classics like David Copperfield<\/em> (1935) and Romeo and Juliet<\/em> (1937). Yet the search for prestigious productions led two releases of 1932 to become benchmarks of cinematic storytelling. Those two films launched conventions that are still with us.<\/p>\n

The one I\u2019ll consider today involves voice-over sound. I\u2019ll examine a second one in a later entry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The voice within<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Fallen Sparrow<\/strong> (1943).<\/em><\/p>\n

Like most terms of craft, voice-over<\/em> has several meanings.<\/p>\n

In one usage, voice-over is what we hear when a narrator recounts information during a flow of images. An external, voice-of-God commentary like that opening The Roaring Twenties <\/em>(1939) is one example.<\/p>\n

Or a character in the story may be recounting what happened in the past. As we see a flashback, we hear the voice of the character in the present. Perhaps the character is talking with another character, or writing a letter or diary entry.<\/p>\n

In each of these conventions, the voice-over sound isn\u2019t coming from the action onscreen. We don\u2019t see a source in the scene, and typically we don\u2019t see the external narrator speaking, or the character who is hosting the flashback. Moreover, the sound has a different timbre; it\u2019s miked more closely and without ambient effects. Another cue that the voice is \u201cover\u201d rather than \u201cin\u201d the images is the choice of verb tense. In a flashback, a character narrator will use the past tense to describe the action we\u2019re seeing, and usually an impersonal narrator will as well.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another type of voice-over, though. Here the voice is not sensed as \u201cover\u201d the action but \u201cin\u201d it. The voice is representing a character\u2019s thoughts at the moment. The cues for this are likewise pretty clear and redundant. Again the voice is closely miked. It accompanies a medium or close shot of a character, and the words are spoken by the character\u2019s own voice. But the character\u2019s lips aren\u2019t moving.<\/p>\n

We understand that the sound represents the thoughts in the character\u2019s mind. Using the literary term, we can call this convention interior monologue<\/em>. Unlike voice-over commentary, the interior monologue is marked by the present tense. The character will refer to himself or herself with the pronouns \u201cI\u201d or \u201cyou.\u201d In the sense I mean, the character isn\u2019t a narrator; the character\u2019s thoughts are what is narrated, by the convention I\u2019ve picked out.<\/p>\n

Both conventions of voice-over are strongly associated with Hollywood cinema of the 1940s. Call Northside 777<\/em> (1948) opens with the external narration of a detached, documentary-style voice.<\/p>\n

In the year 1871, the Great Fire nearly destroyed Chicago. But out of the ashes of that catastrophe rose a new Chicago. A city of brick and brawn, concrete and guts, with a short history of violence beating in its pulse.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The narrator goes on to describe a crime that took place in 1932.<\/p>\n

The Fallen Sparrow<\/em> (1943), by contrast, starts in a train compartment, with Kit McKitrick opening his suitcase, taking out his gun, and looking out the window. As the train goes into a tunnel, the windowpane becomes a mirror, as above.<\/p>\n

Over this image we hear Kit\u2019s inner monologue.<\/p>\n

All right. Go on. Let\u2019s have it. Can you go through with it? Have you got the guts for it? Or did they knock it out of you? Made you yellow?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The screenplay\u2019s indications are as follows: \u201cKit stares at the reflection of his own eyes. Softly, barely audible over this, though Kit\u2019s lips do not move:\u2026\u201d There follows a slightly longer version of the voice-over text.<\/p>\n

The inner monologue is a venerable literary technique, used in novels for decades, and plays for centuries as the soliloquy and the aside. So you\u2019d think that early American sound filmmakers would have adapted it quickly and without fuss. Actually, they don\u2019t seem to have done so.<\/p>\n

You can find auditory flashbacks (another device some would call voice-over). In City Streets<\/em> (1931) while Nan stands by the bars of her cell we hear a fragment of an earlier conversation. To venture outside Hollywood, there\u2019s the famous example from Hitchcock\u2019s Blackmail<\/em> (1929) in which the heroine seems to hear \u201cKnife!\u201d emerge from casual breakfast talk with increasing volume. Here, I\u2019d suggest, we\u2019re getting an impressionistic filtering and exaggeration of a word that\u2019s repeated in the action of the scene. Both passages are subjective, but neither is an interior monologue. And both are rare examples in early sound cinema.<\/p>\n

Hence the interest of Strange Interlude<\/em>, which MGM made in the spring of 1932.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thinking out loud (very)<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s based on a 1928 play that won Eugene O\u2019Neill his third Pulitzer Prize. Like many of O\u2019Neill\u2019s projects, the drama was massive and experimental. It consists of nine acts lasting five hours, with a dinner break after the fifth act. The production was surprisingly successful, running over a year on Broadway and touring to packed houses around the US.<\/p>\n

The action seems fairly skimpy for such a long play. At the start, Nina Leeds is grieving over the wartime death of her beloved Gordon. An older friend of the family, Charles Marsden, is secretly in love with her. Nina plunges into nursing work at a veterans\u2019 hospital, and a doctor there, Ned Darrell, is concerned about her careless promiscuity. Darrell himself is attracted to Nina but resists falling in love with her. Instead he suggests that she consider marrying Sam Evans, a bright but good-hearted college boy she\u2019s seeing.<\/p>\n

She does, but she learns from Sam\u2019s mother that there is a strain of madness in the family, and if they have a child, the lunacy is likely to be passed along. The mother brazenly suggests that Nina find a new partner and pretend the love child is Sam\u2019s. The target father becomes Dr. Ned, and of course he and Nina fall in love.<\/p>\n

The sexy situation surely drew notice; there were censorship rows in some cities. In addition, the play\u2019s undertones attracted an audience who was starting to hear about Freudian theory. The men are all displacements and substitutes for Gordon; Nina even names her son for her dead sweetheart. At the end, when Nina relaxes in Charlie\u2019s arms, she confusedly calls him \u201cFather,\u201d which is all an up-to-date 1920s intellectual needed to hear.<\/p>\n

The formal innovations of Strange Interlude<\/em> stem from what some critics considered O\u2019Neill\u2019s urge to create a \u201cnovelistic\u201d drama. This explains not only the play\u2019s extreme length, but its span of over two decades. Years pass between acts. O\u2019Neill sought, he claimed at the time, to trace the complete history of a woman\u2019s life, in a way that would show facets of the \u201cEternal Woman\u201d: innocence, passionate youth, early marriage, infidelity, motherhood, and eventual acceptance of old age.<\/p>\n

Another facet of O\u2019Neill\u2019s \u201cnovelistic\u201d ambitions was the expansion of the old-fashioned theatrical aside into a string of inner monologues. A character speaks his or her thoughts aloud, and while the other characters can\u2019t hear them, we can. All the major characters are given at least one passage of inner monologue. A great many of these run very long, over a page in the play script, and they were largely responsible for the vast length of the show.<\/p>\n

Like a novel, the play gives us omniscience, gaining access to several characters\u2019 minds. The thematic thrust of the device was that we often think things that are the opposite of what we say. We wear \u201cverbal masks.\u201d The inner monologues tell us about the characters\u2019 real thoughts, and these tumble together in contradictions and associations. Here\u2019s a short example from the first scene, when Nina\u2019s father complains to Charlie that Nina has become a brittle young thing.<\/p>\n

PROFESSOR LEEDS (absent-mindedly). Yes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Arguing with himself.) Shall I tell him? \u2026no\u2026it might sound silly\u2026but it\u2019s terrible to be so alone in this\u2026if Nina\u2019s mother had lived\u2026my wife\u2026dead!…and for a time I actually felt released!…wife!…helpmate\u2026now I need help!…no use!…she\u2019s gone!…<\/strong><\/p>\n

This passage is tame compared to the fleeting feelings and contradictory attitudes that scamper through Nina\u2019s monologues. The effect is to suggest characters whose surface politeness conceals both shameful secrets and volcanic feelings.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019d imagine, there were problem making these interludes work onstage. The solution hit upon was to have the silent characters freeze in place while the \u201cthinking\u201d character delivered the monologue and moved freely around the set. The difficulties were compounded when O\u2019Neill packed a series of monologues close together; at some moments, characters\u2019 monologues seem to reply to each other. The choreography of the first productions must have been something quite dazzling and may account for the play\u2019s success with audiences.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the track of monologue<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Strange Interlude<\/em> was one of several Broadway properties bought by Irving Thalberg and his story editor Samuel Marx. There were censorship constraints, so that Nina is no longer promiscuous and doesn’t abort her and Sam’s child. Still, in the film she does bear Ned\u2019s child, and they mislead Sam into believing he\u2019s the father. The plot is propelled by the lovers\u2019 reunions at long intervals and their hesitation about revealing their secret to Sam, to Charlie, and to the grown-up Gordon. They rekindle their passion but decide not to run off or tell Sam the truth. If Nina is punished at the end, it\u2019s because she\u2019s never able to join Ned as his life partner.<\/p>\n

The script cuts the action down to fit a 112-minute running time, largely by dropping or condensing monologues. Very long speeches in the play become two or three lines in the film. There remained the question of how to present the monologues on film. In the early talkie days, people weren\u2019t certain what to do.<\/p>\n

MGM publicized the menu of options being considered. Director Robert Z. Leonard largely rejected the play\u2019s tactic, that of having the thinking character turn slightly to the audience and speak in a different tone of voice. For a time, the production team thought of using superimpositions. A ghostly double of one character would appear at the proper moment and utter the thoughts while the tangible character stayed silent. Alternatively, Leonard considered having the ghostly doubles entirely replace the actors during the monologues. Given the pace at which the monologues bounce around the scene, the superimpositions would have been throbbing in and out pretty often.<\/p>\n

The solution was the one that\u2019s obvious to us. We simply see the thinking character and hear his or her thoughts, more closely miked, while the actor\u2019s lips don\u2019t move. Why did Leonard and his colleagues even consider other options? Partly because rerecording was not yet established as reliable enough to allow inserting lines, some mere interjections, into the flow of the recorded dialogue.<\/p>\n

In production, the problem was solved in a mind-boggling way. The film was shot twice. The first go-round recorded the entire text, dialogue and monologue, for each scene. The dialogue was timed to fractions of a second. Then the monologue portions were transferred to phonograph discs. Then the film was rehearsed and re-shot, with the discs used as playback guides for the actors\u2019 pauses. And the playback was recorded on the set, with the dialogue.<\/p>\n

When the film was finally cut, the cleanly recorded monologues from the first go-round were cut into the shots of the actors thinking. They were amplified and, I think, spruced up a little in mixing to yield a more intimate sound field. Often they\u2019re whispered, or at least delivered in a subdued tone.<\/p>\n

Today the technique looks fairly conventional, at least at any given moment. At the time it seems to have struck observers as a novelty. \u201cIt is a technique admirably suited to the audible screen,\u201d remarked the New York Times<\/em> critic, musing, \u201cI wonder whether these spoken private thoughts will inspire another picture with them?\u201d Variety<\/em> mocked Strange Interlude<\/em> as a critic\u2019s picture, a natural for \u201cdiscourses on academic analyses of the contemporary \u2018art of the cinema.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Both opinions strike most of us as deeply wrong. Today Strange Interlude<\/em> looks a misbegotten monster, opposed to nearly everything we would celebrate about Hollywood sound cinema. Just when films were starting to pick up the pace, this movie goes lugubrious. Perhaps in the theatre O\u2019Neill\u2019s monologues wrap the action in a rhetorical micro-dramas, but in the film they expose the plot as a relentless tango of bourgeois self-absorption. The monologues drain the film of curiosity, suspense, surprise, and affect. There is no mystery in it. Everything is said, every question answered in advance. It must be one of the most absolutely explicit films ever made.<\/p>\n

Yet if we argue that poor works of art can have worthy historical influence, I\u2019d submit Strange Interlude<\/em> as Exhibit A. Its purpose was misguided, and it bungled achieving even that, but it threw up an important convention that would eventually enhance cinematic storytelling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Keep it to yourself, and to us<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a novelty, the filmic inner monologue ran risks. The Los Angeles Times<\/em> critic worried that the movie version could confuse people who hadn\u2019t seen the play. The ballyhoo for the release talked it up as \u201cthe first to pioneer in a new field of the talkie; namely, the presentation on the screen of hidden thoughts as well as the regular spoken dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n

To assist viewers with the convention, the film has a foreword implying that we won\u2019t see lip movements.<\/p>\n

In order for us fully to understand his characters, Eugene O\u2019Neill allows them to express their thoughts aloud. As in life, these thoughts are quite different from the words that pass their lips.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The opening scene immediately reinforces the point. Charlie walks down the street, greeting a one-legged soldier. This reassures us by displaying normal dialogue.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Charlie comes to the camera and pauses at the gate, musing aloud, \u201cThis pleasant old town, dozing. What memories it brings back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then we get the film\u2019s first inner monologue. His voice clear, his mouth closed, Charlie eyeballs the camera in a confiding way no one else will in the film. \u201cQueer things, thoughts. Our true selves! Spoken words are just a mask to disguise them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The device is bared. It has been sharply contrasted with external dialogue and spoken monologue, and the theme of hidden thoughts is blatantly announced. Soon enough, after embracing Nina, Charlie’s voice-over reminds us: “How she’d laugh if she could only read my thoughts.” In the film’s first moments, its unusual sound device is flagged with Hollywood’s customary redundancy.<\/p>\n

Throughout the film, Charlie is the only character who will occasionally play to the camera, in an echo of the stage production. The gesture reflects his role as an ineffectual observer of the Nina-Sam-Darrell triangle. In the film\u2019s first sequence, which corresponds to the play\u2019s first act, Charlie is also a crucial force for exposition, getting the lion\u2019s share of inner speeches. In earlier plans for the play, he was intended as a chorus or stage manager.<\/p>\n

So the film introduces its narrational device very explicitly. But as<\/em> a film it offers a chance to coordinate the dialogues more tightly than was possible on the stage. With one character speaking while the others freeze, there was an inevitable slackening of pace. The movie camera, however, can isolate the thinking character. We can\u2019t see what the offscreen characters are doing, so often they more or less cease to exist during the monologues. Concentrating on one character, we forget the others.<\/p>\n

Probably O\u2019Neill intended the fragmentary quality of some of the monologues as an equivalent of the stream-of-consciousness technique that Joyce had brought to literature with Ulysses in 1922. But by linking voices in a fairly linear way, Strange Interlude<\/em> achieves the effect of an older novel in the Balzac-Dickens-Tolstoy line. In these works the omniscient literary narration shifts among characters within a scene. The film firms up this sense of gliding from mind to mind by isolating characters in singles, cueing us to expect a monologue at any moment. Sometimes, however, the film dares to interweave its dialogues and monologues within a sustained shot. At one point an aside from Nina in a two-shot is echoed by one from Charlie; she passes the ball by lowering her eyes, while he lifts his head.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The interpolations become quite fast and precise, as you can see from this extract.<\/p>\n