August 2006

Talking About the Movies: Summer Movies

By Frank Beaver

My summer “beach reads” have included two novels with interesting connections to the art and culture of movies: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002) and Trevanian's The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street (2005). While as different as black and white, they have one thing in common: their movie references are to American film's “golden age” of the 1920s and 1930s.

The Book of Illusions is a first-person story told by a New England literature professor, David Zimmer, who nearly gives up on life after a family tragedy.Then, late one evening, anchored to his sofa by grief and alcohol, Zimmer sees on television a clip of a fictional silent screen comic, Hector Mann, and the clip makes him laugh for the first time in months. On leave from his university, Zimmer decides to study Mann's films, most of which had been thought to be lost but which late in 1981 mysteriously began to be delivered to various film archives in the U.S. and abroad—twelve works altogether. Mann himself hasn't been heard of since he made his last film in 1929. It's presumed he's deceased.

Zimmer's archival journeys to analyze Mann's movies result in a scholarly book titled The Silent World of Hector Mann. The book shies away from biography, remaining entirely committed to a "reading" of the films themselves.

Chapter 2 of The Book of Illusions presents Zimmer's analysis of Mann's silent screen artistry, comedy conveyed entirely through physique and the magic of the camera lens. In a manner reminiscent of the attention that has been paid Charlie Chaplin's “little tramp” character—body, face, movement, gesture, costume—Zimmer conveys a perfect picture of Hector Mann's “repertoire” of comic imagery. He writes of Mann's face and costume: “The mustache is the link to his inner self, a metonym of urges, cogitations and mental storms. The suit itself embodies his relation to the social world…; (it) is his proudest possession, and he wears it with the dapper, cosmopolitan air of a man out to impress the world.” 

Every minute detail of Mann's screen persona is dissected in the analyses of the twelve films. And in the process Zimmer sets Mann apart from his contemporaries: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon.  Each of these silent comics, Zimmer argues, was in one way or another a “misfit.”  For him Mann never was.

Chapter 2's twenty-six pages of screen observation—the observations of a fictional writer analyzing a fictional actor—are, ironically, as brilliant as any I've ever come across. Auster makes us “see” what we cannot actually see, not only the overt imagery but also its psychological implications for a fully evolved, consummate silent film character.

The first part of The Book of Illusions is an overture to a larger dark and enigmatic story. After the publication of The Silent World of Hector Mann, Zimmer learns that Mann is still alive, and he is summoned to New Mexico to meet him.

What follows is the unraveling of mysteries about a public figure—an illusionist—and his hidden personal life. The biography which Zimmer had earlier avoided emerges in brilliant narrative storytelling, imaginative writing that matches Paul Auster's gift for critical analysis. It's a story replete with surprise, drama, romance, sadness, and philosophical insight.

Trevanian's The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street, also told in the first person, is an acutely observant story that begins with a six-year old boy's memory of starting a new life in Albany, NY, after his father abandons him, his sister, and their mother. They are left to eke out an existence in a tenement neighborhood that is populated by others as off-beat as the storyteller's eccentric but very determined mother.

The boy, Jean-Luc LaPointe, remembers their eight years of life on Pearl Street (1936-1944) with uncanny precision—the street, the city, the squalid apartment, the people, schooling at PS 5 and Our Lady of Angels, odd jobs for pennies, and most of all  memories of a mother who is alternately fragile and strong, often down but never out. It is her spirit that imbues Jean-Luc's own sense of determination.

Trevanian's writing is as culturally rich as it is moving. Sections of the novel incorporate memory of the Depression-era songs that spoke to the times; others recall the important place of the family radio and the local movie houses in providing escape as well as news and propaganda about the war abroad. The description of the LaPointes' semi-monthly visits to the Paramount and Grand theaters (excursions which they couldn't really afford) presents a lovely time-capsule essay on movie culture of the era—from the cartoons to the triple-feature kids' matinees to the lure of free dishes on Dish Night.

As for appraisal of the films themselves, Trevanian is incisively humorous. To wit:  The “drama” films, favored by the mother, were movies “in which broad-shouldered heroines wearing thick lipstick drew cigarette smoke far down into their lungs and exhaled it through mouth and nose simultaneously as they slogged their way through an hour and a half of histrionic athletics, standing with their hands on their hips and snapping sassy lines to bland, baffled men. Pencil-thin eyebrows arched, nostrils flaring, lips compressed, eyes flashing, they indulged in towering rages, or wept torrents, or bravely fought back their tears…and sometimes all three within ten minutes.”

Such commentary is one of the many pleasures of a book from a writer with a remarkable gift of recall that embodies time, place, and people. The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street and The Book of Illusions offer wonderful literary excursions with some unforgettable movie criticism to boot. Great reading for any time of the year.

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.