Catalogo Giornate del Cinema Muto 2012 - La Cineteca del Friuli
Catalogo Giornate del Cinema Muto 2012 - La Cineteca del Friuli
Catalogo Giornate del Cinema Muto 2012 - La Cineteca del Friuli
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iordina o aggiunge <strong>del</strong> suo al materiale originale. Molti personaggi<br />
dickensiani minori o di media importanza sono scomparsi, tra questi<br />
Miss Pross (e di conseguenza anche il suo assordante scontro finale<br />
con la Vendetta) e la famiglia Cruncher. Il Dr. Manette figura nel<br />
prologo come un giovane medico che cerca di salvare una ragazza<br />
rapita dai St. Evremonde, ma ha solo il piccolo ruolo di una stordita<br />
e amnesica vittima <strong>del</strong>l’ingiustizia reale. Del processo londinese a<br />
Charles Darnay si dà solo un resoconto, senza però metterlo in scena,<br />
favorendo strategicamente il Tribunale <strong>del</strong>la Conciergerie. Poi, dopo<br />
che ci vengono mostrato i vizi e la rapacità <strong>del</strong>la nobile famiglia dei St.<br />
Evremonde, l’attenzione si concentra su Sydney Carton: la sua vita e il<br />
suo talento sprecati, il suo amore senza speranza per Lucie e la tiepida<br />
rivalità con Darnay.<br />
Il film si prende un’ulteriore libertà rispetto al romanzo di Dickens. <strong>La</strong><br />
sartina senza nome che Carton incontra sulla carretta dei condannati<br />
e cui stringe la mano ai piedi <strong>del</strong>la ghigliottina acquista un ruolo di<br />
maggiore spessore e diventa “Mimi”. <strong>La</strong> parte fu creata per Miss De<br />
Silva: Mrs. Helena Martin-Harvey. Mimi, ancor più di Lucie Manette,<br />
diventa un’eroina praticamente onnipresente sia nel dramma teatrale<br />
sia nel film The Only Way. Ma, dopotutto, Lucie sembra ragionare con<br />
la propria testa e ha la temerarietà e il discutibile gusto di preferire<br />
un francese sobrio a un inglese ubriaco, mentre Mimi si accontenta di<br />
venerare Carton da lontano. Mimi fa da cameriera tuttofare per Lucie<br />
solo perché Carton ne è innamorato, e viene condotta a morte – sulla<br />
stessa carretta che porta alla ghigliottina Carton – per aver favorito la<br />
fuga da Parigi di Darnay e dei Manette. Indubbiamente, quello di Mimi<br />
era un ruolo coi fiocchi per la moglie di un attore-impresario.<br />
Come attore, John Martin-Harvey aveva un penchant per i personaggi<br />
manifestamente o nascostamente “nobili”. Come se fosse una risposta<br />
al luogo comune che ogni inglese è un cavaliere o un puritano, Harvey,<br />
sia per temperamento sia nella scelta dei ruoli, era un cavaliere, con<br />
un repertorio teatrale di realisti smargiassi o gentiluomini decaduti che<br />
lottano strenuamente per trovare e/o recuperare la loro innata bontà<br />
riscattandosi da una vita indegna.<br />
The Only Way acquista particolare vivacità nella sua descrizione<br />
<strong>del</strong>la Parigi <strong>del</strong> 1793, l’arena in cui Carton può affrontare impavido<br />
la marmaglia. In un tribunale francese, solo contro tutti, l’inglese<br />
sfida una folla di scalmanati e riesce quasi a vincere la sua causa. Il<br />
comportamento di Carton sul luogo <strong>del</strong> patibolo galvanizzava il<br />
pubblico di Harvey. L’episodio <strong>del</strong>l’inglese senza paura davanti alla<br />
plebaglia parigina che presto gli taglierà la testa era la scena madre<br />
<strong>del</strong> film, e la fama di Harvey era talmente persuasiva e così intenso<br />
il suo magnetismo personale che in alcune occasioni si interrompeva<br />
<strong>del</strong>iberatamente la proiezione nel momento in cui Carton scendeva<br />
dalla carretta per salire sulla ghigliottina. Lo schermo veniva sollevato<br />
all’istante, e Harvey, in abito da passeggio, si faceva incontro al<br />
pubblico plaudente declamando le battute finali <strong>del</strong> dramma nonché<br />
ultima didascalia <strong>del</strong> film: “Quel che faccio è il meglio, di gran lunga il<br />
meglio che io abbia mai fatto; e il riposo che m’attende il più dolce,<br />
di gran lunga il più dolce che io abbia mai conosciuto.” – DAVID MAYER<br />
56<br />
The Only Way is a double adaptation: a film adapted from a play<br />
adapted from a novel. We currently approach this film as the best<br />
silent version of Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, but at the<br />
film’s core is Freeman Wills and Frederick <strong>La</strong>ngbridge’s popular stage<br />
drama, commissioned in 1898 as a piece to commemorate France’s<br />
revolution, and the performance of actor-manager Sir John Martin-<br />
Harvey (1863-1944). The charismatic Harvey became identified with<br />
the role of Sydney Carton, which he purportedly performed over<br />
7,000 times between 1899 and 1939 in Britain and throughout North<br />
America. In the hands of film director Herbert Wilcox, who fretted<br />
that Harvey’s stage version lacked sufficient literary respectability,<br />
the theatrical narrative has undergone a partial reversal, restoring<br />
some excised characters but also slowing Harvey’s swift plotting and<br />
rapid sequence of dramatic scenes. Fortunately, it is Harvey’s stage<br />
version which mostly survives, and which has sufficient momentum to<br />
override Wilcox’s pedantic attempts at restoration.<br />
The Revolution and the subsequent “Terror” of 1794 have long<br />
provided fertile environments for British and French novelists and<br />
dramatists to explore the paroxysms of this popular uprising and for<br />
these same authors to develop what might be called the substitutionand-noble-self-sacrifice<br />
school of melodrama. Such melodramas<br />
feature a protagonist who successfully substitutes himself for a rival/<br />
near-rival/son imprisoned and awaiting execution in the Conciergerie<br />
and who then sacrifices his own less-worthy life to liberate the<br />
Revolution’s victim. Baroness Orczy and Montague Barstow’s The<br />
Scarlet Pimpernel, Watts Phillips’ The Dead Heart, and Victorien<br />
Sardou’s Robespierre are three such dramas. Our familiarity with A<br />
Tale of Two Cities might lead us to suppose that Dickens is being<br />
directly plagiarized, but the facts are otherwise.<br />
Dickens himself is the borrower from a theatrical cliché which is at<br />
least a decade older than his novel. Perhaps because the guillotine is<br />
the first attempt to industrialize death and to make the operation of<br />
the process more interesting than the individuals consumed in the<br />
process, dramatists have sensed that one frightened victim looks much<br />
like all the others and that errors might occur. Alexandre Dumas père<br />
was the first in a considerable lineage of dramatists to work the prisonsubstitution<br />
trick in his Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge in 1847. Dion<br />
Boucicault adapted this play in his 1853 melodrama Genevieve; or,<br />
The Reign of Terror, and, in turn, Boucicault’s play became the source<br />
for the same ruse in Wilkie Collins’ 1857 melodrama The Frozen<br />
Deep. Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities followed in 1859, and the<br />
first stage version of the novel appeared in 1860.<br />
The Only Way draws heavily on Dickens’ novel, and, like the novel, it<br />
pursues a similar strategy of first establishing, then reversing polarities<br />
– making the audience sympathetic to the Revolution, then appalled<br />
and antagonistic to the corruption and violence of the Terror. But it<br />
also suppresses and elides and rearranges and adds to the novel. Gone<br />
are many of Dickens’ lesser and mid-range characters: no Miss Pross<br />
and thus no terminally deafening encounter with “The Vengeance”,<br />
no Cruncher family. Dr. Manette appears in the prologue as a young<br />
physician attempting to save a girl abducted by the St. Evremondes but<br />
has only a small role as the dazed amnesiac victim of Royalist injustice.<br />
The trial of Charles Darnay in London is reported, not dramatized, but<br />
that is a strategy to make more of the Tribunal in the Conciergerie.<br />
Rather, once we have seen the vice and rapacity of the noble family of<br />
St. Evremonde, the emphasis is on Sydney Carton, his wasted life and<br />
talent, his hopeless love for Lucie, his half-hearted rivalry with Darnay.<br />
There is a further liberty taken with Dickens’ novel. The little<br />
nameless seamstress whom Carton meets in the tumbril and whose<br />
hand he holds at the foot of the guillotine has been enlarged into the<br />
role of “Mimi”. It was a part created for Miss De Silva: Mrs. Helena<br />
Martin-Harvey. Mimi appears throughout the stage play and film The<br />
Only Way as a heroine more ubiquitous than Lucie Manette. After<br />
all, Lucie has something of a mind of her own and has the temerity<br />
and questionable taste to prefer a sober Frenchman to a drunken<br />
Englishman, but Mimi worships Carton from afar. She cleans and acts<br />
as maid to Lucie because Carton loves her, and Mimi is taken to her<br />
death – to ride to the guillotine in the tumbril with Carton – because<br />
she abets Darnay’s and the Manettes’ escape from Paris. Undeniably,<br />
Mimi is a plum role for an actor-manager’s wife.<br />
As an actor, John Martin-Harvey’s choice was for roles which<br />
displayed actual or inner nobility. As if in response to the cliché that<br />
every Englishman is either a Cavalier or a Roundhead, Harvey was by<br />
temper and self-casting a Cavalier, his stage roles featuring swaggering<br />
royalists and decayed gentlemen struggling to find or recover inner<br />
goodness and to redeem worthless lives.<br />
Where The Only Way comes to life is in its depiction of the Paris of<br />
1793, the arena where Carton can stand up to the rabble. It’s where,<br />
in a French tribunal, the lone Englishman takes on a mob of Frenchmen<br />
and nearly wins his case. The Tribunal episode lasts for a full 17<br />
minutes, and it is from this point that the film gathers momentum.<br />
This sequence shows Harvey at his best: intelligent, thinking quickly,<br />
sardonic, melancholic humour willingly turned against himself, all in<br />
an easy quiet inner style which can enlarge to full stage tirades. Note<br />
how, frequently changing hands, he uses his hat both to disguise and<br />
emphasize large gestures. That blunt, battered, shabby hat, introduced<br />
to gull the court into thinking him a harmless English eccentric, leads<br />
his sweeping arms and assists the force of his rhetoric, but nevertheless<br />
is so commonplace and unobtrusive as to hide Carton’s guile and<br />
court-craft. Carton’s behaviour on the scaffold endeared Harvey to<br />
his audiences. So appealing was this moment of an Englishman fearless<br />
before the Paris mob who will soon take his head, and so persuasive<br />
was Harvey’s reputation and so intense his personal magnetism that<br />
at some screenings the film was <strong>del</strong>iberately stopped at the moment<br />
Carton stepped from the tumbril and ascended the steps to the<br />
guillotine. Immediately the motion picture screen was raised, and<br />
Harvey, in street clothes, stepped forward to the applauding audience<br />
declaiming the play’s – and the intertitles’ – closing lines: “It is a far, far<br />
better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far better rest that<br />
I go to than I have ever known.” – DAVID MAYER<br />
57<br />
Prog. 10: Great Expectations<br />
THE BOY AND THE CONVICT (Williamson Kinematograph<br />
Company, GB 1909)<br />
Regia/dir: David Aylott; prod: James Williamson; f./ph: Henry Sanders;<br />
orig. l: 750 ft.; 35mm, 719 ft., 12' (16 fps); fonte copia/print source: BFI<br />
National Archive, London.<br />
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.<br />
Senza riconoscere il proprio debito verso Great Expectations di<br />
Dickens e non nominando mai direttamente i personaggi, The Boy and<br />
the Convict (Il ragazzo eil galeotto) estrapola uno dei temi <strong>del</strong> romanzo<br />
– il rapporto d’amicizia tra il giovane Pip e il forzato Magwitch – che<br />
divide in 13 scene, ognuna <strong>del</strong>le quali girata in un’unica riresa da una<br />
cinepresa in posizione statica. Le prime 6 scene mostrano l’incontro<br />
tra il bambino e il forzato evaso, in cui il ragazzino spaventato gli<br />
procura <strong>del</strong> cibo, prima che l’altro tenti di sottrarsi con la fuga a un<br />
nuovo arresto. “Sette anni dopo” il forzato, diventato ricco, deposita<br />
anonimamente presso una banca un’ingente somma di danaro per<br />
il ragazzo e in seguito lo incontra rivelandogli la propria identità.<br />
Sulle prime il giovane lo respinge con sdegno ma, al sopraggiungere<br />
<strong>del</strong>la polizia, lo aiuta a fuggire. In seguito, il ragazzo (Pip) avvicina la<br />
moglie <strong>del</strong> forzato giusto in tempo per un “happy ending”, peraltro<br />
abbastanza diverso da entrambi i finali alternativi di Dickens, in cui il<br />
forzato, ormai scagionato dalla confessione <strong>del</strong> vero colpevole, gli dà<br />
in moglie la propria figlia. – GRAHAM PETRIE<br />
Making no reference to its debt to Dickens’s Great Expectations and<br />
never naming the characters, The Boy and the Convict extracts one<br />
thread from the novel’s plot – the relationship between the young<br />
Pip and the escaped convict Magwitch – and divides it into 13 scenes,<br />
each filmed in a single shot by a static camera. The first 6 scenes show<br />
the meeting between the boy and the convict, in which the child is<br />
frightened into providing him with food, before the latter attempts<br />
to escape re-arrest. “Seven Years <strong>La</strong>ter” the now-wealthy convict<br />
deposits money anonymously in a bank for the young man and then<br />
later meets him and identifies himself. After initial rejection, the Pip<br />
character encourages him to escape as the police arrive, and then<br />
contacts the convict’s wife and daughter in time for “A Happy Ending”<br />
rather unlike either of Dickens’s alternative endings, in which the<br />
convict, now absolved of guilt through a confession by the real culprit,<br />
is able to give his daughter in marriage to the young man.<br />
GRAHAM PETRIE<br />
STORE FORVENTNINGER (Grandi speranze / Great Expectations)<br />
(Nordisk Films, DK 1922)<br />
Regia/dir: A.W. Sandberg; scen: <strong>La</strong>urids Skands; f./ph: Louis <strong>La</strong>rsen,<br />
Einar Olsen; scg./des: Carlo Jacobsen; cast: Martin Herzberg (giovane/<br />
young Pip [U.S. prints: “Buddy”]), Harry Komdrup (Pip), Esther Kjær<br />
Hansen (giovane/young Estella), Olga d’Org [Olga Belajeff] (Estella),<br />
Marie Dinesen (Miss Havisham), Gerhard Jessen (Joe Gargery), Ellen<br />
Rovsing (Mrs. Gargery), Emil Helsengreen (Abel Magwitch), Peter<br />
CHARLES DICKENS