sunsetboulevard16

Don't get me wrong, I love classic cinema. Hawks, Ford, Wilder, Hitchcock, you name it.

But the fact that a film is old, in black and white and with good photography doesn't mean that it's good. The way this film is put together is representative of a very naive and simple-minded way of storytelling.

The main culprit (though not the only one), is the script. Characters are not believably defined, it's all broad strokes. The main concern is the plot, instead of the humans that make it move. And the structure, while risky, has its problems too.

I can offer some examples of this:

1) When the hero woos Linda, there is nothing playful about the way he does it. Instead, he merely overflatters her. He makes himself look silly, in no way charming. This man is supposed to be intelligent.

2) Later in the film, when Rattery mistreats Linda, who is supposed to be the hero's girlfirend, he witnesses it and does nothing about it. And Linda basically accepts it.

3) At the beggining of the movie, we have a scene between a lawyer, called Nigel, and his girlfriend. It's a very long scene whose only purpose is to give us plot information. The girlfriend is never seen again, and the Nigel character is almost irrelevant to the plot.

There's good cinematography here and there, but the technique at times is also quite clumsy. There is a scene where a woman is shaking up a child, and the way it's shot and edited, it feels completely awkward. In some shots the child doesn't move but shouts off-camera, and the scene feels unreal.

Most of the performances are very broad, a lot of the times the plot moves via uninteresting and unsubtle dialogue, and the characters are simply not clearly defined. Rattery is simply a very bad person, there's very little that we can say about him, aside from that. And the hero is, well, a perfect guy: smart, elegant, well-natured... There are no nuances, no moral ambiguites, nothing. So it all plays like an old fashioned mystery stage play, where everything is naive, dumb and phony.

Ibáñez Menta, of course, was a great actor, but he didn't have a clear charater to play here, and as a leading man he's terribly unattractive.

Harry D'Abbadie D'Arrast always complained that this movie, which he considered his best, was undeservedly forgotten, for it created many concepts which would reappear in comedies of later years.

This time he was right. It is surprising to find in such an early film the conflict between economical safeness and spiritual freedom that would later be typical of such wonderful films as Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You, and very especially, George Cukor's Holiday (not a surprising coincidence, since it was written by the same screenwriter as Laughter).

It is an answer to the existentialism dilemma, where the only choices to make are living for the future (marrying a millionaire) or for the present (enjoying the moment you're currently living). Laughter goes even further than the later films, for it incorporates a third answer: suicide, which takes the story for the path of melodrama with a surprising respect of its unity.

In fact, what is most curious about Laughter is that it is much more mature that one would suspect. The structure of the story, the performances and even the humor feels fresher than those of other comedies of the period. A good example is the surprising scene in which Fredric March and Nancy Carroll do some role playing just for the sake of it: they pretend to be a marriage in which he is the woman and she is the man. They both imitate the conventions of each sex's supposedly proper behavior, making fun of predetermined attitudes and social obligations, clearly defending sponaneity and freedom as opposed to that which they parody/criticize (social roles conditioned by sexes).

Also the way the structure of the story is inventive enough, with a past time we never see but which is reflected in the present, and a triggering opening which serves as the conclusion of the movie as well. In fact, many other the elements of the movie (starting by the title itself) are developed in more than one level, like this one.

The biggest fault of the film is not in its final quarter (which, contrary to what I had read, seems to me fluid and coherent with the rest of the film): it is a number of technical limitations, which harm its rhythm for today's audience. These were common in the beginning of sound film (Lubitsch somehow avoided most of them in The Love Parade, made one year before this and quite a miracle).

The shortcoming I found most annoying was the impossibility for the camera to show the characters in a more frontal angle than the profiles during dialogs, which gives some important scenes a very old fashioned stagy feel.

(It had to do with the sound equipment: for what I know, they couldn't edit the sound they recorded, so they had to film each scene with several cameras so that they could use full takes of sound. So there could only be one light setup, and therefore, the characters had to be filmed from the only side where the light was better).

However, compared with most movies of that period, Laughter is a clear winner, and it is no wonder that March considered it one of his best films. His performance is relaxed, joyful and attractive still today, and so is Nancy Carroll's.

It is a pity that D'Arrast is not better known today, nor this movie properly restored/distributed. It is a interesting work on many levels, by a highly original and innovative filmmaker.

Don't misunderstand me, I moderately enjoyed the film. Good cast, good photography, no dull spots. The trouble is that, for one thing, the script is a not very original whodunit, like the one you may find in Agatha Christie's novels. In addition, as happens with other films by Gilliat, too much of the development is solved through dialog, the story is not told with images as much as it should.

If, in spite of all this, the screenplay was astonishing (the case of a film like Sleuth), it wouldn't really matter, but it is simply OK, no more no less. So it's the movie. Yet, had the director been one who gave the story a more cinematic feeling, punctuating its drama with visual touches, it could have been a wonderful film (Hitchcock did it with another talky script by Gilliat: The Lady Vanishes).

But the director was a writer. And it shows: stylish dialog (with a British feel to it), intelligent plotting and fine structure. All of which makes a small just-for-fun mystery film. Anyway, it may please you, if you don't expect anything more.