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Alistair Cooke at the Movies

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CRITIC

A cinema critic is very much in the position of Matthew Arnold, who having first written out for himself what he believed poetry was, and what he believed it wasn't, suddenly found himself confronted with Byron, who fitted none of his prescriptions. Arnold had the critical common sense, and enough healthy suspicion of his own motives, to accept Byron and remark simply, 'In poetry, we must take what we can get.' Now Myrna Loy has no place in my scheme of international cinema. But I'd accept her just the same. If she'd accept me.

The Cinema, BBC, 16 September 1935

'Too Utterly Utter': Reviews from The Granta

Cooke contributed to The Granta throughout his Cambridge years, 1927–32. He began with caricature drawings, progressed to parody articles, theatre and film criticism, and spent his last year as the university magazine's editor. Fellow critics included Michael Redgrave, the intellectual all-star Jacob Bronowski, future documentary maker Basil Wright and William Empson, the brilliant poet whose writings continued to percolate in Cooke's mind decades later, even when writing Marilyn Monroe's obituary. Period features in this brief selection from his reviews include the undergraduate writing style (facetious and strenuous), the knowing Eng. Lit. references; a fascination with Marlene Dietrich and a reverence for Adolphe Menjou's dapper performances in his silent films. More particular to AC was his marked aversion to the French director René Clair – then the intelligentsia's idol.

Love and Learn

6 November 1928

This film puts criticism to instant and agreeable rout. Is not the plot preposterous? Are not American judges revealed as incredible nincompoops? Is not the daughter's device to unite her unhappy parents an impossible artifice? But then, is not the whole picture a box where sweets compacted lie, and Miss Esther Ralston the most delicious of delicacies?

The answer to all these questions is the word – yes. And whether two people can undress and sleep in the same room without being aware of each other's presence, we hold, with Sir Thomas Browne, but a wavering conjecture. Enough that all the players act with just the necessary exaggeration and inconsequence to make questions of probability irrelevant. Superlatives are called for and you may take your choice from the language of the Girnhamite behind me who pronounced this film to be 'too utterly utter'; from that of her friend who declared it 'topping'; or from that of the undergraduate on my left who said it was '— marvellous'.

My own opinion is that this is a very delightful film, which demands a zest for fancy rather than fact. It has no concern with reason. If it had one would ask Miss Ralston to act – a churlish request in the face of her pretty termagant tricks.

Love and Learn. USA, 1928, Paramount; d. Frank Tuttle. Esther Ralston, Lane Chandler, Hedda Hopper.

'Girnhamite' was a slang relic of Josephine Elder's 1926 novel The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge, set at the lightly fictitious Girnham College.

Men Call It Love 16 October 1931

This is a worthy Menjou plot, but they must be 'directing' him more vulgarly than usual, he is being used as flavouring to a dish of infidelity. Fashions in Love showed him ageing but consummate, and helped to charm by what disappointingly appears now an assumed French accent. His close-ups were haggard and shocking, because you felt him trying to keep his job, the mask is cracking and we saw the sweat behind the tricks. Here poise is abandoned, he has gone horribly just back-porch poppa; he now appears in crisp tweeds and, apostasy, is disposed to genial acknowledgement, over drinks, of his conquests. So that you must be prepared for the loss of gallantry, of style, of a woman's man, a fastidious libertine, avuncular in an ambassadorial way to men, but condescendingly biding time till a woman was there to be charmed, supervised and, with the ultimate sigh, taken. From Menjou to disreputable commercial traveller is no joke. It so insults his heroines. Whereas formerly we wondered if these trusting, eager little wives would be worthy of his fine, scrupulous sophistication. But some things remain – he still wears his clothes (even a dinner-jacket), he is still too wise for this world, and he still bows.

Men Call It Love. USA, 1931, MGM; d. Edgar Selwyn. Adolphe Menjou, Leila Hyams, Norman Foster. Fashions in Love (1929) was Menjou's first talkie.

Morocco 6 November 1931

There was only one Blue Angel. We may pray that Mr Wallis has booked Dishonoured, and for no less than a fortnight. Certainly, we can only hope that we shall soon come to talk of this one not as a film but as inferior Dietrich. For it has no quality, not even qualities: no unity, except of obtuseness and a dismally reverential production, and no 'moments'. And the photography had one stultifying trick of tracing her carefully through distant objects with a moving foreground of palms, table-tops, chairs, bed-rails.

With such superior and undeniable queens as Dietrich and the Garbo, the story should seek simply to point their fascination. The denouement of this just debased her to what Menjou (not, regrettably, himself) called the rearguard, to one of the touchingly loyal but contemptible women who go off, with each move of the Legion, 'after their men'. We had to laugh at this fine-limbed, prouder Tallulah shaking off Fifth Avenue shoes into the sand and stumping off into heat and snow; we had to laugh to hide our baffled and unsheddable tears – we had not expected such suburban tricks. But it was thrilling to have her beginning raddled and slowly guess, through a gradual crescendo of better days, the next step towards the final, consummate Dietrich; so that, although she keeps her style in rags, we began to ache for the civilized, fastidious beauty that we might have been given had the film lasted another half-hour: were ready to stand on our seats and cheer the last, blinding shot.

Morocco. USA, 1930, Paramount; d. Josef von Sternberg. Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou.

In 1968, Cooke paid tribute to the idiosyncratic stage actress Tallulah Bankhead in his Guardian obituary: a frail and lovely hellcat with the eyes of a sleepy leopard and the tongue of an asp.

Le Million

20 November 1931

Having a general prejudice against French film technique, against angles as points of rest, against the artistic pretensions of half-lights, against 'character' shots, used sentimentally to make tedious melodramatic plots seem like 'slices of life', and against René Clair in particular, I have no right to say much about this film, except that it is generally admired by the intelligentsia, that it is supposed to be a witty brief chronicle of the French mind, that it is better than Sous les toits de Paris, which drove me last term to an unforgettably early dinner in one of our large sordid eating-houses.

Next week we are blessedly to receive City Lights.

Le Million. France, 1931, Films Sonores Tobis; d. René Clair. Annabella, Rene Lefebvre, Wanda Gréville.

Westfront 1918

4 March 1932

In the libraries of the American companies there must be a formula: home and beauty, dalliance, Came The Call, tinny uprights and black silk stockings behind the lines, poignant parcel from home, the attack, then noise, just noise, and stark piles of bodies, and intermediate enlightening captions ('Cut off!'). Pabst, on the contrary, is not out to tell you, with a gluck in the throat, about the universality of clean limbs and dirty minds. He is interested in a fairly common story and tells it with that peculiarly steady German watchfulness. The picture has every ingredient of the dimmest American glory-ride. He doesn't presume to differ with anyone about right occasions for sentiment. But, unlike DeMille, he happens also to believe in them, and reveals his intelligence at the moment he is revealing the sentiment. For your own self-respect, you'd be a fool to laugh. Instead, you are wiser to follow the camera belittling, from above, the soldier as he goes downstairs after leaving the faithful wife.

The actual sequences tell you everything. You can follow, and grow anxious about, the way they're cut off; the tone (photographic) of the first half-hour is like nothing before; there is no protesting how harrowing it all is – the three minutes of the dressing station suffice; there are two fine German performances, in their timeless inflexible way, from the husband and his mother, and a quick, lovely bit of acting from the French girl; and the psychology of 'Kiss her or I'll shoot', and of the singing Bavarian's slyly appraising his accompanist's alertness on the mouth organ, is inevitable and immediately moving.

Westfront 1918. Germany, 1930, Nero-Film; d. G. W. Pabst. Fritz Kampers, Gustav Diessl, Hans-Joachim Moebis.

Alistair Cooke broadcasted as the BBC's film critic from 8 October 1934 to 28 March 1937. He spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes, and gave around fifty-six talks, supplemented by one-off programmes and items in schools broadcasts. Initially he planned to alternate 'review' talks with 'topic' talks, but the distinction gradually blurred. He also planned to bounce ideas off various experts, some linked with film only in Cooke's mind – such as the adventurous literary academic I. A. Richards, or Charles Fox, author of Educational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods. Reviews of London's new films were balanced with reviews of general releases: in this way many films were covered several times. He also wrote about them in Sight and Sound and, during January 1937, in the Spectator.

Picking favourites that year for his Garbo and the Night Watchmen collection, AC snipped most of his choices from much longer, discursive scripts. I have followed his lead, though the first BBC talk is reproduced complete. The selection's most serious omission is the sound of AC's voice. 'I have that first recording, by the way,' he wrote to the writer and journalist Tony Aspler in 1975, 'and the few times I've heard it I've alternately squirmed and laughed out loud at not only the Oxbridge accent, but at the fatal Oxbridge vocabulary.' The particular sound of Cambridge men, he told students in America in 1939, resembled 'hysterical daffodils'.

A Critic's Testament

The Cinema, BBC, 8 October 1934

This day last week I stood for the last time on Broadway, very forlornly watching, in the middle of a blaze of gyrating lights, one particular sign flashing out R ... O ... B ... E ... R ... T ... – black-out – D ... O ... N ... A ... T ... I recalled Mr Donat as a hard-working young actor at a provincial repertory company theatre playing weekly leads opposite a hard-working young actress, Miss Flora Robson. I should probably have gone on to muse with much pathos about the uncertainty of human fate, and so on. Luckily for you I did not. Instead I longed to see The Count of Monte Cristo, about which I had heard fine things.

But I had made a firm resolve across the continent – after mad little dashes to see the newest films – to resist any further indulgence in New York. I had resolved rather proudly that instead I would spend a last evening taking a walk through cool, lovely Central Park; that I would spend the last afternoon in taking once more the ferry to Staten Island and again looking across the magnificent fairyland that is New York; and that when dusk came I would go to the top of the Empire State Building and feel for the last time the healthy superiority of being higher in a building than anyone else in the world. Naturally, I stayed in bed late, had to spend the afternoon checking my luggage, and spent tea-time desperately wondering how I could find a good excuse for rushing away to a movie. But in Times Square I said, 'I will resist this one.'

Two years in America had not extinguished in me, you see, the well-known English principle that what is uncomfortable is good for the character. I looked to my right and noticed Of Human Bondage, which thankfully I had seen. By this time I was a glutton for piety and I decided also to resist The Merry Widow, which I had also seen. In the end I began to look for ways of sneaking into a movie house. I was being temperate for two reasons – I had lately seen too many Big Pictures; secondly, I was hard up. After a little burst of sympathy with myself on this account, the devil didn't desert me. Two minutes later I was paying 25 cents – half the usual charge – at a newsreel theatre. It was cheap and it wasn't a big picture. I now believe that newsreel theatres exist for no other purpose than to ease the conscience of people who are trying to reform. So I went in, with that very temporary, hopeless virtue that Mr and Mrs Mark Twain must have felt after an expensive first year of marriage when they agreed violently to cut their expenses and Mark Twain wrote to a friend, 'We find we can economize on two things – our subscription to Harper's magazine, and monograms on guest towels.'

I tell you this anecdote because I think you should know what sort of failings you are going to have to prepare yourselves for. A film critic should be a man who can't stay away from films or a man who never goes at all. I leave you to guess to which class I belong.

And I think before we settle down for the winter you should know some of the oddities and difficulties of my position. To those of you who know and are charitable I must offer my apologies. But many more of us, I think, are not aware just how feverishly some people hang on these harmless words ready with a pen, paper and the blank form of a libel action. Such devoted listeners, I am told, are usually interested parties – say a producer, a director, a casting manager, the officials of theatre circuits. To these I must recite my little declaration of independence. Which goes like this:

I declare that I am a critic trying to interest a lot of people into seeing, a few ambitious people into making, interesting films. I have no personal interest in any company. As a critic I am without politics and without class. I swear I am committed to no country, no director, no star, no theme, no style. For a film hero I am prepared to take John Barrymore, George Robey, a battleship, Mickey Mouse or an Italian straw hat. I hope that everyone who wants to make a lot of money in films will make it, that every girl who aches to become a star overnight will become one. I hope a little more fervently that any man or woman who can make an interesting film will somehow, somewhere, be allowed to make it.

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Excerpted from Alistair Cooke at the Movies by Alistair Cooke. Copyright © 2009 Alistair Cooke. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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