Raffles

Cracks Lyrical

Raffles
USA 1930 
Directed by George Fitzmaurice 
& Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
Sam Goldwyn Company
Warner Archives DVD Region 1

and

Raffles
USA 1939 
Directed by Sam Wood & William Wyler
Sam Goldwyn Company
Warner Archives DVD Region 1

A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief and renowned cricketer, was created by E. W. Hornung (brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) in 1899 in a series of four books, most of which were his collected short stories about the character. Then, in 1903, he wrote a self contained play about the character called Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman. And it’s this play which both the first English friendly talking version of the film, Raffles in 1930 and its remake, also called Raffles in 1939, were based. 

This DVD set from Warner Archives in the US is fascinating because, it gives some insight, as you watch it, into how things can be both the same and quite different simultaneously. The story is identical for both... Raffles decides to give up his life as a gentleman thief to marry Gwen, the gal of his dreams. However, his best friend Bunny Manders is in debt and so Raffles decides to do one last job at a party of a well to do friend. Then, another thief gets intertwined in his shenanigans and eventually the chief inspector on the case, sets a thief to catch a thief... and finally gets Raffles to confess to the crime, once Manders has received the reward money. However, Raffles then does a runner and escapes the long arm of the law. 

So a very simple story and the first version of it stars Ronald Coleman in the title role with Kay Francis as Gwen and, with not too much screen time, Bramwell Fletcher as Bunny (Fletcher’s role in The Mummy, two years later and reviewed by me here, would be even shorter, as he goes mad once Karloff takes his first steps from his sarcophagus). The direction is pretty interesting and it speeds along at a nice pace, it has to be said. Coleman is somewhat thoughtful as Raffles and David Torrence as Inspector McKenzie gives him a good run for his money. 

There are some things which don’t go down quite right. It’s an American movie purporting to be set in England but, the party guests all drink brandy instead of port after dinner. Not really the done thing at the time... although brandy was also drunk after dinner by some. However, there’s some nice ‘screwball comedy’ moments such as a wonderful exchange between Raffles and McKenzie when McKenzie states that someone is ‘a’ something or other instead of ‘the’. Raffles questions, “A?” Mckenzie answers, “Aye!” and Raffles concludes the exchange with “Oh!”... which I thought was particularly good. The same A-I-O dialogue is almost repeated in the remake but, it’s a bit off... I’ll get to that in a minute because it’s reflective of the whole production. But I liked this version of the story well enough and was pleasantly entertained by it.

The 1939 remake, from which the film’s leading actor was given special extension of leave to finish before going off to the Second World War as a new recruit, is kind of a much polished version of the same story. And it’s interesting because the running time is exactly the same, 1 hour and 12 minutes long, but this much more sparkly ‘do over’ seems somehow duller and less pacier in comparison. The great David Niven plays Raffles and Gwen is played in this version by Olivia de Havilland. Lots of the stage direction is the same but characters are excised and replaced while situations bearing the same ultimate results are arrived at in different ways, where a lot of the fat is trimmed away from the same script (used as an initial starting point). It’s curious, then, just as to why this version, with far better acting and production values, seems a trifle dull in comparison to the original. 

A nice thing that demonstrates this is the ‘A-I-O’ joke from the earlier version. It’s almost the same dialogue exchange between Raffles and McKenzie but, for some reason, an extra line of dialogue is added after the “Aye!” before you get to the “Oh!”. Thus ruining the joke of three lines of dialogue each representing a vowel. Did the new script writers (one of them rumoured to be an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald) just not get the expedient joke?

Anyway, the second version is still highly watchable but, for my money, it’s the first, rawer Ronald Coleman version which comes out as the superior film. The pre-code ending where Raffles gets away with it is somewhat downplayed in the remake, when it’s intimated that the gentleman in question will be going to give himself up to the Inspector once the credits have rolled. Which I think says it all about how pre-code movies spoiled everyone’s fun. The two Raffles are available in the US on one DVD from the Warner Archives label, should you be tempted. 

Ben Hur - A Tale Of The Christ (1925)

Ju-Dah Man!

Ben Hur - A Tale Of The Christ
USA 1925
Directed by Fred Niblo
MGM  Blu Ray Box Zone A/B

I’ve been meaning to watch the 1925 version of Ben Hur for a while now and this recent-ish Thames Television restoration, which includes the original two strip technicolour sequences which were rediscovered... not to mention topless slave girls (many of whom, I suspect, went on to become famous Hollywood actresses but this was when they were extras)... is included as a bonus feature in the 2009 50th Anniversary box set celebrating the 1959 remake by William Wyler, which starred Charlton Heston and is reviewed by me here. If you look carefully in the chariot race, you’ll see one of many assistant cameramen racing towards camera in one shot trying to warn another camera crew to get out of the way of an approaching chariot which was going too fast... that man was future remake director William Wyler.

Costing a whopping 3.9 million dollars to make, this was the most expensive picture of the ‘silent’ era of cinema and I’m glad I finally caught up to it. It’s also the first ‘feature length film’ to be based on Lew Wallace’s best selling novel although, there was a short, 15 min version shot in 1907.

Now, I’ve read the book in a nice edition from Wordsworth Classics (you can see details of their latest imprint of this here) but it’s been a couple of decades now and I don’t remember it all that well. However, I do remember it’s quite different to the 1959 film which I was more familiar with and, although the 1959 version obviously harkens back to this version, I would say this 1925 go at the material is just a little closer to the book.

For instance, the books subtitle, A Tale Of The Christ is much more highlighted than on the 1959 version and the religious back drop which frames main protagonist Judah Ben Hur’s story, from Jesus’ birth at the start of the picture to his death at the end, is quite a bit more prominent in this version, I think. Also, the whole bit about Ben Hur building an army of warriors to fight for Jesus against the Romans, which was quite a dominant theme in the original story, also makes it into this version and is explored a little more after the outcome of the famous chariot race. In the 1959 version it doesn’t turn up as a sub-plot at all.

There’s much more made of the birth of Christ at the start with a big build up as Joseph and Mary look for somewhere to stay. This and pretty much all the main religious sequences are shot in two strip technicolour. At first, people’s reactions to Mary are hostile or indifferent but a casual look of her features touched by a holy spirit are all the swooning people need to be complicit to her wishes, it appears. It seems a bit much at first but that’s nothing compared to the first encounter between Judah (played by Ramon Novarro) and love interest Esther (played by May McAvoy). Here, he returns a lost pigeon to her after chasing it around Judea and, as they talk, their eyes and gestures are telling you a lot more about how sexified up they are as opposed to the words they are saying on the inter-titles.

There seems to be a lot of this style of acting in this one, where everything in the subtext is quite blatantly spelled out by the performers using eyes, hand gestures and expressions. It’s a little over the top and it’s what I always used to think silent movie acting was, as opposed to what I’ve actually seen of it in other movies of the era, which often have a more naturalistic approach to the performances. So this was kind of interesting to me. Indeed, during the galley sequence, where Judah is rowing with all the other slaves, Ramon Novarro looks like a complete maniac all the way through the scene... there’s no way I’d want to be pulling an oar anywhere near this guy, that’s for sure.

The film also stars leading screen actor Francis X. Bushman as the main antagonist Messala and Nigel De Brulier as Simonides, who would later go on to give Billy Batson his magical powers as the wizard SHAZAM in The Adventures Of Captain Marvel (reviewed by me here).

The film starts off with a very strong opening shot of a figure looking down into a valley at the town of Judea and, indeed, it does a lot of nice things along the same skeleton of the story differently than the 1959 version, although, I would have to say that the later version does improve a fair few of the scenes, especially in terms of what motivates various characters, than this 1925 version... for the most part. Although, here, it’s much more easy to see the accident which propels the story, where a loose tile comes crashing down when the new chief Roman is riding into Judea in a welcome procession, as something which could, actually, be seen as the assassination attempt Messala uses as an excuse to be rid of Judah at the start of the picture. In this version, the tile quite definitely bonks the head Roman in the head and causes him some serious damage.

The other main set pieces of the film such as the battle between the Roman galley and the pirate ships or that infamous chariot race which killed a lot of horses, apparently, is all pretty spectacular for the time. I didn’t expect to see pirates filling glass globes with poisonous snakes to throw at their enemy, for example. I also loved that, during the battle, for one shot inside the galley slaves deck, the camera operators were moving the camera very violently this way and that to give a sense of chaos and unease, much like you’d see when modern directors apply camera shake for the same reason. Bearing in mind how big, heavy and unwieldy those cameras were back then... this is no mean feat.

Another thing I enjoyed was Messala’s sexed up love spy Iras, played by Carmel Myers, who wasn’t in the 1959 version at all but here is played as some kind of Egyptian sex worker for hire and who wears this big, bejeweled lizard in her hair. She’s pretty cool.

I also got a kick out of the way that, like the 1959 version, we never see the face of the actor playing Jesus Christ but, since he has a more prominent role here... not too mention mostly being shot in two strip technicolour for his scenes... it’s quite enthralling to see what distances the director goes to placing objects or people in front of his face to keep him hidden. There’s one scene where he is on trial before Pontius Pilate where he’s the centre of the shot and the light from outside the building is creating a big shining, holy spirited beam to light him with... only to have the silhouette of a watching Roman centurion standing in front of him. Honestly, it all gets quite strange as the picture goes on.

At the end of the chariot race, the director focuses in on the victor, Judah Ben Hur, by placing him in a circle in the centre of the screen, just in case the audience were in any doubt that this is the big hero moment of the picture. Also, towards the end of the film, where his mother and sister are cured of leprosy by Christ, in a much more direct and ‘hands on’ way than in the Golgotha sequence at the end of the 1959 version, the director has obviously applied the same colour filter trick to change their appearance that Rouben Mamoulian used in his 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A trick that Mario Bava would later use in his ‘official’ directorial debut Black Sunday (which I reviewed here).

This presentation of the film has a contemporary score written by modern ‘silents’ composer Carl Davis which is not bad and quite appropriate to the on screen shenanigans, although I was surprised by the amount of ‘Mickey Mousing’ in some of it and especially disliked the way he uses the non-diegetic score to suddenly jump and fill in for diegetic moments on screen such as the sound of a horn, trumpet, whip cracks or the drum beats on the galley. Indeed, although Miklos Rozsa’s glorious score for the 1959 version of the galley slave sequence can hardly be called subtle, it seems a lot more sophisticated in comparison to what Davis does here. Still, an interesting piece of scoring and I think I’ll try and pick up the CD at some point so I can hear it through a set of decent speakers and get to know it a little better.

So, yeah, I finally got to see the 1925 version of Ben Hur - A Tale Of The Christ and it was never once dull and, regarding some of the shots the various cameramen managed to get away with (and mostly live to tell the tale), often quite spectacular. Definitely something film lovers should probably take the time to check out but, I have to say, the 1959 version of Ben Hur is still my favourite of the ones I’ve seen, although that one’s a little further from the content of the book compared with this one. Pleased I finally got around to this and a good film to see Easter in with this year, I believe.


Ben Hur At NUTS4R2

Ben Hur - A Tale Of The Christ

Ben Hur (1959)

Ben Hur (2016)

Ben Hur

Are Judah One?

Ben Hur 
USA 1959 MGM
Directed by William Wyler
50th Anniversary Blu Ray Box 
Region A/B

You know, I actually bought this super duper, “everything and the kitchen sink” new Blu Ray remaster of Ben Hur to watch and review for last Easter. However, rather than taking their customary small amount of time to get it to me, Amazon actually took many weeks to deliver this one so, by the time it had arrived, the Easter period was long gone. So I saved it for watching this year instead.

I’m not really a religious person and Ben Hur is a film I discovered fairly late in life (I’ve only been properly watching it the last 20 years* or so) and, like lots of other movies I seek out, it was all due to the musical score that I got interested in it. Miklos Rosza’s monumental score for this epic picture is an absolute masterpiece and, because it was always included in the top 5 polls of greatest soundtracks ever written, I figured I should definitely have a listen. And, of course, once I’d heard the score to this I really wanted to see how it supported the film itself... like many of my later filmic discoveries (see my upcoming review of The Car for a similar musical entry point).

The film is the second of only two movies shot on a special camera used by MGM called Camera 65 (the first being the 1957 movie Raintree Country) and, depending on how the print is being projected, it gives you one of three, extremely wide aspect ratios: 2.66:1 when processed on Super 8 film, 2.76:1 on 70mm and 2.55:1 on 35mm. I’m never quite sure which version is being put onto the various home video versions of the film I’m seeing (I have this movie on VHS, DVD and now Blu Ray) but it’s certainly a lot of a longer frame than the standard 2.35:1 Cinemascope ratio most people are familiar with these days (not to mention the standard 1.85:1 ratio most movies post mid-1950s are made to be projected at). This, of course, contributes to the epic feel of the film and matches the emotional splendour of something which is often touted as being, to quote its sometimes used subtitle and borrowing from the 1925 version of the film, A Tale Of The Christ.

Well, I have to say that, although it certainly hypes itself as being a tale of Christ, and it certainly owes the deus ex machina style ending to the crucifixion, it’s actually more a revenge story and it uses the little dips into the periphery of Christ as impetus for fulfilling it’s own story needs, more than anything else. It’s also a very slow and rambly film in some ways and I imagine a lot of younger audiences wouldn’t really want to put up with a stealthily paced, sprawling Biblical epic like this, these days, but... you know... there’s definitely gold in “them thar hills”.

The film deals with the fall from grace of Judah Ben Hur, played by a fairly young and slightly spindly version of Charlton Heston, at the hands of his once boyhood chum but adult antagonist Messala, played by Stephen Boyd. Messala ruins Judah over an unfortunate accident by sending him to be a slave on a Roman Galley while his mother and sister are left to rot in a dungeon. The two ladies are eventually released back into the world when it is discovered they have both caught leprosy. The film certainly sounds like a standard revenge flick in this way... and it truly is, actually... but once you factor in Rosza’s six minutes plus of Overture before the movie opens and a short sequence detailing the birth of Christ, it’s actually around about an hour into the film before Heston is even sent to the galleys, encountering Christ as a man, who kindly defies the Romans to give Judah water when he is being trekked across the desert to his shipboard destination.

After this, we follow Judah, and pretty much only Judah, on his course for revenge as he escapes the galley and, through a strange twist of fate, becomes a citizen of Rome to finally return to his home town to ride against Messala in the film’s fateful and infamous chariot race (although the stories about fatalities in the filming of this sequence in various versions of the film seem to be an exaggerated myth, it turns out). And then, once all these boxes have been ticked, there’s a lengthy end game to the film where everything ties back in to Jesus, leading up to the film’s final solution in the crucifixion scene... but I’m not going to tell you what happens here. I’m not even going to tell you who wins the chariot race either... if you want to know you can find out by watching the movie for yourself.

Although it’s based on the book by Lew Wallace, it’s actually quite a bit different from the novel, as far as I can remember (been a while), which I seem to recall was as much about Judah Ben Hur raising an army to fight the Romans in the name of Christ than the tale as it is presented here but, whether it’s a good adaptation of the original novel or not, it’s certainly a spectacular looking movie. The action scenes are few and far between but the dialogue is quite interesting in places and it’s definitely a movie about the broad strokes in terms of story... jumping a year or three at certain points until it brings itself back to the bits it needs to get to, in order to fulfil its own end game.

It’s nicely and clearly shot, which is just as well because it consists of very long takes for a lot of it and, while there are certainly a lot of shots which incorporate a fluid camera movement, there’s a lot of the film which is purely static shots so, the fact that they are composed and lit well certainly helps. There are some nice transitional shots too... such as going from a shot of the open mouth of a cave to the open shape of an archway. Stuff like this is all good but, like I said, if you’re not that into the music, then you might find certain pasages of this film to be fairly slow.

There are some nice roles, some of them very small, for great character actors like Andre Morrel, Jack Hawkins, Finlay Currie, Sam Jaffe, Hugh Griffith... even a role for Dad’s Army’s Sergeant Wilson, John Le Mesurier, in a scene showing the direct aftermath of the chariot race. Fans of spaghetti westerns, Italian giallo and other films of that ilk should also note that a pre-famous Giuliano Gemma also makes an appearance as a Roman officer in the scene where Judah escapes from Messala’s dungeons and confronts him in his office... once you know he’s there, he’s really not hard to spot. Italian movie fans might also like to know that one of the Assistant Directors on this movie was the legendary, director to be, Sergio Leone... although there is some doubt as to whether he actually had as much to do with the chariot race, as he claimed.

And what about that chariot race? It’s quite spectacular, even now. Fast and dangerous and you can tell that Heston and Boyd were really driving those things at speed around the circuit. There was no way to fake the medium close ups and long shots in those days like you can now and Heston used to get up every morning of the shoot to practice with the horses for a few hours. It really shows in the final product and the stunt men in certain scenes, headed up by stunting legend Yakima Canut, who was second unit director on this, all do stellar work. Canut’s son doubles for Heston in the race, including that really dangerous tumble that Judah takes when he gets thrown over the front of the chariot and into the horses and clambers back in while it’s still speeding along... that was pretty much unplanned and could have been the end of Canut’s son right there but, since he manages to quite impressively come out of it and back into a controlling position... it’s left in the film and Heston is only seen in close up to finish off the final climb back into the chariot. It’s truly jaw dropping stuff.

The chariot scene itself took five weeks to film (it shows... it’s amazing) and, since it was filmed at Cinecitta, which is notoriously next to an airport, it was filmed silently and the sound was all dubbed in later. Itself quite an achievement, when you think about the noise and fury of the arena in this sequence. Interestingly, the decision was made to leave the film without music during the entire chariot race and it really gives the sound effects a raw power of their own. This is an idea composer John Williams later used for George Lucas’ own version of the chariot race in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (reviewed here), only bringing in music towards the end of that particular sequence to heighten the effect of a specific incident (for more about the way Williams’ cue works, read my review of the Liam Neeson thriller Run All Night here).

The score, of course, it truly magnificent and, in addition to the background cues, which are left full on in the mix and loud on the soundtrack like they should be, we have Dr. Rosza’s opening titles (which only start up around a quarter of an hour into the film after a load of other cues), his overture and also his Entre Act music for the lead in after the intermission... all lovingly preserved on the Blu Ray and I’m thankful that MGM had enough sense to leave this stuff on the home video versions. Considering you can now even get a beautiful five disc version of the score, courtesy of Film Score Monthly, which is an improvement on even the old two disc book version from Rhino (in terms of content, not necessarily packaging design), I was surprised by how many passages in the film were actually left unscored. Even so, there’s a lot of score to get through (I think Rosza might have taken a year to write it all... if memory serves) and it’s all pretty amazing stuff... just the kind of film Rosza was born to compose. I say that particularly because I find some of the films Rosza has leant his incredible talents to, especially in later years when the stylistic trends in film making were a lot different to what they were in the 40s and 50s, seem almost overscored and old fashioned in ways that don’t always serve the best purposes of the films... but movies like Ben Hur are made all the more magnificent for his astonishing, in your face compositions.

There’s a couple of things I noticed this time around that I’d not noticed before... so I think I’ll finish up this little review by sharing those with you.

The first thing is specifically down to the new Blu Ray transfer, I think. When Judah’s boat is rammed by the enemy of his captors and he throttles the overseer to get the keys and release the slaves drowning in the deck below, one of those coming up through the hatch is missing his left hand. It’s all gory on the stump, like it’s been lost as a consequence of the other ship crashing through the hull. I’d never noticed this before and I then realised that the only way to achieve this effect was to actually have a man without a hand playing that role. Sure enough, when I was looking up a few facts of the film, it turns out that Wyler spotted that one of his extras was without a hand and another without a foot... so he made good use of these two by doctoring their stumps to make them look like ghastly injuries for their scenes. Still haven’t spotted the guy with the missing foot yet but... I’ll maybe catch up with him next time around.

The other thing I noticed on this viewing was, although the story is quite rambling and sprawls four years (three decades if you include the post-overture, pre-credits sequence), it's quite economical with the use of characters. That is to say, once a character has served his purpose - Andre Morrel briefing Messala on the situation in his new posting, Jack Hawkins making Judah a citizen of Rome and a son to his family, Hugh Griffith providing the means to take on Messala and progress Judah’s vengeance on Messala - the characters simply drop out of the narrative asides from, if they’re lucky, a mention or two later on by other characters. There’s no lingering around with them once their story purpose has been achieved... which I find kinda interesting, actually, considering the size and scope of this movie. It may be a little long winded in some sequences but it does make use of everything on screen to push forward a little more in the narrative stakes, it seems to me. Not necessarily my favourite attitude towards crafting a film but certainly a time honoured Hollywood one used more and more these days and an attitude which, obviously, has a long legacy.

And that’s about all I can say about this film except... maybe this one last little nugget, since it doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the IMDB section on the film and it’s one of my favourite little facts about the movie...

My understanding is that Wyler had been filming the classic western The Big Country the year before, with Gregory Peck playing the dashing lead and with Charlton Heston in a more villainous role. In the movie the two have a fist fight in some rocky terrain and, well, by the time Ben Hur was filming, Wyler realised he didn’t have all the footage required to make the fight scene work in The Big Country. So he had Gregory Peck fly out and he and Heston donned their costumes for that film and took some extra swings and tumbles for the fight scene in a rocky terrain (presumably some closer/tighter shots so they matched somewhat) in between takes on Ben Hur, so Heston was technically filming two films while he was out doing this one... which I always find an amusing item and makes me look at the fight scene in The Big Country in a different light every time I see it.

So there you have it. Ben Hur. Religious epic and instant Easter classic. Brilliant acting (although Heston gets a little ropey in a couple of scenes in this, I fear), magnificent sets, wonderful costumes and a drop dead gorgeous musical score. Not much not to like here, to be honest. Definitely a big solid recommendation from me and one that no lover of cinema should not have seen. Ben Hur... Judah man!

*Don’t worry, the movie is not actually 20 years long, 
although I’m sure it might seem that way to the less 
appreciative part of the audience. 


Ben Hur At NUTS4R2

Ben Hur - A Tale Of The Christ

Ben Hur (1959)

Ben Hur (2016)