The Edge of the World

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD             A                

Great Britain  (81 mi)  1937  d:  Michael Powell

The seabirds were its first owners, and now the seabirds have it for their own again.

―Andrew Gray (Niall MacGinnis)

Among the truly rare and exceptional film experiences that are most memorable would have to include this film, a poignant elegy to the death of a community, featuring some of the most stunning black and white photography ever seen of life on an island off the coast of Scotland, accented by dramatic cliffs and treacherous seas, with humans, like mountain goats, daring to scale these rocky vistas with ease, turning this into a beautiful mix of naturalism and documentary, with utterly surreal moments that elevate what little story there is to a landscape accentuated tone poem.  Framed nearly entirely in flashback, it depicts the last of the island survivors, having to choose between the harsh and often barren soil that can’t sustain itself and returning to an easier life on the mainland.  To that end it’s similar to the choices being made in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), absent the historical slave connections.  Due to an often ferocious ocean, mail delivery travel between the mainland and the island is reduced to just once a year, in effect cutting them off from the rest of the world, having to go it alone, dependent upon their own hard work and self-reliance.  Inspired by the story of the evacuation of St. Kilda in 1930, the most remote island group in Britain, a place of seemingly inaccessible rocky crags rising up from the sea, but for thousands of years it was a thriving community.  Powell kept a newspaper clipping of the story in his pocket for six years, determined to turn the story into a film.  Working as a still photographer for Alfred Hitchcock in early British silent films Champagne (1928) and Blackmail (1929), Powell claims he suggested the climactic ending of the latter film, where he and Hitchcock remained lifelong friends.  Between 1931 and 1936, Powell directed 23 films, up to seven per year, basically mastering his craft, though according to the director all are forgettable, described as quota quickies, hour-long films that satisfied Britain’s legal requirement to screen a minimum quota of British films.  So this is truly his first personal project, gathering together a cast and crew, like the director at the beginning of King Kong (1933), utilizing only those willing to spend months on an expedition to one of the most remote and isolated parts of the United Kingdom, filming on the island of Foula in the Shetland Isles (the northernmost inhabited site in the British Isles, as St. Kilda was considered too dangerous, where the Gaelic language had to be abandoned), where what was most essential was capturing the raw natural beauty of the location. 

Style wise, achieving exceptionally high production values using low budget methods, the film resembles the social realism of Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), especially the depiction of a working class drama, accentuating the harsh and barren conditions of working the land in such a remote region, showing the tilling of the soil, the work in the fields, the herding of sheep over rocky plateaus, and the hardscrabble life on the island, showing plenty of closeups of faces, all set in a world of cold austere beauty, almost like a Dreyer film, viewed as a working collective, eternally anguished by existential questions, with the men convening from time to time in a democratic parliament to voice their views about what to do, as food was shared throughout the community, taking care of the sick and old.  On St. Kilda, fishing was considered too dangerous, as many were drowned with their boats overturning just a few hundred feet from shore, instead they captured seabirds, which the island had in abundance, with the men lowering themselves on ropes from the clifftops, or climbing up the rocks from boats.  Islanders became expert climbers, something they learned in their youth.  The wind on the island was so strong that sheep and cattle were routinely blown off the cliffs, while the sounds of the waves beating against the cliffs was so loud it left villagers deaf for a week.  Trees could not grow there, and what few crops were planted often became polluted with salt water.  In the Roman era, believing the world was flat, St. Kilda was considered the last place on earth, with sailors viewing a giant wall rising from the sea, a reminder to explorers that this was as far as they could go.  This image opens the film, with massive cliffs appearing just above the waves, as a man (Michael Powell himself) and woman (Frankie Reidy, Powell’s future wife of forty years) are on a yacht sailing to the island, intent on staying overnight, against the advice of the sea captain, Andrew Gray (Niall MacGinnis), visiting a shoreline grave marker, with the captain recounting the story of the island in flashback.  How this begins is interesting, however, as Andrew is haunted by a flood of ghosts, the former inhabitants of the island, who stream across his line of vision, adding a touch of the surreal.  Additionally, there is an extremely dramatic orchestral score that includes an all woman’s choir (The Women of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir) conducted by Hugh Robertson that is not only operatic, but often feels otherworldly, along with a dire opening intertitle sequence that precedes the opening credits:

The slow shadow of Death is falling on the outer isles of Scotland. [scrolls up] This is the story of one of them ― and all of them.  When the Roman Fleet first sailed round Britain they saw from the Orkneys a distant island, like a blue haze across a hundred miles of sea.  They called it ― “ULTIMA THULE” [main title] THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

Using three cameramen, Monty Berman (fired early on), Skeets Kelly, and Ernest Palmer, where men are seen as tiny specks climbing over the tops of cliffs, dwarfed by the immensity of their surroundings, a community setting is introduced in the tiny, claustrophobic confines of a church, with people arriving from all across the island, a scene beautifully recreated by Terence Davies in 2016 Top Ten List #7 Sunset Song, with a pastor (Grant Sutherland) speaking a common theme of brotherhood.  With only three dozen people left, surviving on sheep and fish, the story concerns two families, the Mansons and the Grays, where Peter Manson (John Laurie) is the overly stern island patriarch, with a gruff exterior to match the hardness of the island, while his daughter Ruth (Belle Chrystall) is apparently the catch of the island, devoted to her father yet sensuous, exerting a feminine allure, though she behaves more like a movie star, hair always in place, wearing plenty of makeup.  Her twin brother is Robbie (Eric Berry), whose best friend Andrew Gray is his sister’s boyfriend.  The threesome enjoys laying on the grass on the bluffs overlooking the sea, arguing the eternal question, whether to go (to the mainland) or stay.  Peter and his son Robbie are staunchly in favor of staying, while Andrew and his father, always playing second fiddle to Peter, the easier to get along with James Gray (Finlay Currie), constantly seen smoking a pipe, are more inclined to move to the mainland.  The boys get in heated battle where the only way to settle the matter is retreating to the old ways, in a run up the rocky cliffs with no ropes, and may the better man win.  Despite the danger, the fathers agree, and the entire community comes out to watch an exciting duel between two of the strongest lads on the island, set at the bottom by boat, having to claw their way up to the top.  Despite explicit instructions at the outset describing the routes they would take, Robbie makes a dangerous life-altering change, getting stuck under the thunderous streams of a waterfall, hanging on for dear life, and then falling before help can arrive. This tragedy only intensifies the island’s divisions, as Andrew has literally no chance with Ruth, as her father refuses to speak to him, where his silence literally drives Andrew off the island, returning to the mainland.  In his absence, Ruth learns she’s pregnant and delivers a newborn without Andrew’s knowledge.  Due to the scarcity of mail deliveries, she resorts to placing messages in a bottle, helped by her father, particularly when the baby contracts diphtheria and could die without a doctor’s intervention.  Unbelievably, one of the messages gets through, with Andrew sailing through an epic storm to rescue Ruth and their baby, which remains to this day one of the better ocean storm scenes ever filmed, filled with dramatic intensity, creating a life or death urgency.  Finally forced to capitulate, even Peter agrees to be moved off the island, petitioning the government for aid in a monumental Noah’s ark style transport, where everybody and everything is moved off the island, leaving it deserted and undisturbed.  Even how that is depicted is a moving finale and a fitting climax.         

Hors Satan

HORS SATAN            B-                   

aka:  Outside Satan                  

France (110 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Bruno Dumont           Official site [France]

In keeping with a current trend of high profile filmmakers that fail to invent new ideas and instead intentionally revisit their own works, such as Béla Tarr in The Turin Horse (2011) or Aki Kaurismäki in Le Havre (2011), where one could also include David Fincher in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Dumont has returned to familiar themes from L'HUMANITÉ (1999) mixed with a heavy dose of Dreyer’s ORDET (1955).  While something of an experimental and mostly wordless film exploring the mystical ramifications of good and evil, blending them together so that one can look very much like the other, the film is set in the lush greenery of Northern France not far from the coast (seen here:  Images for Parc Naturel régional des Caps et Marais d ...) where most of the film feels like a road movie.  Beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Yves Cape, the film is immersed in the natural world, where humans are seen as tiny creatures that occasionally dot the landscape, but otherwise barely alter the worldly design.  The featured character is Guy (David Dewaele), who spends most of the film slowly walking through the fields and hillsides, where he can also be seen camping outdoors.  He is joined by Elle (Alexandra Lemâtre), a young girl that follows him on long walks through a good part of the film, where they are friends, but remain distant, showing no intimacy of any kind.  Early on, Guy offers a strange and bizarre form of help, the kind that will send a jolt through the audience, as it seems boldly disturbing, yet she is obviously appreciative.  Nearby, there is a young girl that seems caught in a psychological paralysis, as if her brain is nearly dead, where Guy offers a kind of hands on assistance to heal her, behavior right out of L'HUMANITÉ.

Something of a drifter along the lines of Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine as “Grasshopper”), the Shaolin monk from the Kung Fu TV series (1972 – 75), the audience senses an otherworldly dimension to Guy, who never expresses his thoughts and seems to perform both good and bad deeds, never changing his facial expression, never eating much, and spending nearly all of his time outdoors, as if gaining strength by the sun’s rays.  Much of this resembles the character of Johannes in ORDET, a slightly disturbed character that is mentally touched in the head but believes he is a living Christ, spending much of the film roaming the countryside reciting scripture to the winds, afraid people believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living one, a fragile creature mysteriously attuned with divine insight.  Here, in contrast, villagers believe Guy holds divine powers, where it’s the audience that may remain suspicious, especially witnessing his willingness to perform brutally violent acts, very un-Jesus like, where it's hard to apply rational laws to an irrational situation, where he does not fit the church’s assessment of a saintly creature.  Instead, like Pharaon in L'HUMANITÉ, it feels like he comes from beyond or outside human comprehension.  This alters the landscape of the film, suggesting nothing is as it seems.  The natural splendor of the world outside, however, remains constant and unchanged, where characters continually walk through verdant grasslands that remain untouched by human development, suggesting there is an Edenlike perfection, but humans, along with the other animals, are not part of it, as they are the beasts that inhabit the earth.  In perhaps the strangest scene of the film, Guy is joined by a female traveler (Aurore Broutin) on the Boulogne Road, a girl looking to camp nearby, where their behavior together borders on beastly, offering a strangeness and peculiarity simply unseen in other films.

Dumont allows the audience to dwell upon Guy’s (and God’s) impact on the landscape, where one wonders what motivates either one of them into action, as mostly both remain a passive, inert force with an unseen darker side that may attempt to help in mysterious ways, where mostly Guy (seen) and God (unseen) simply share time on earth with humans in need, as they’re the ones likely to call upon them.  While we’re clued into the fact both possess unworldly powers, we’re not sure why or under what circumstances either one is prepared to use them.  Mostly nothing happens in this oddly familiar world, set in the isolation of a remote rural landscape where anyone familiar with L'HUMANITÉ, ORDET, or even the most recent Carlos Reygadas film SILENT LIGHT (2007) will have an acute recognition, a déjà vu moment, where Dumont and others have already taken us down this road, where it’s hard to find anything new in this version.  Unlike the other films, which offer an open-ended sense of transcendence, Dumont’s apocalyptic universe is stiflingly predetermined, where humans are no more than specks on the landscape in a cold and indifferent environment, seemingly abandoned by God, having lost their way long ago, where they are seen continually pecking at one another’s open wounds, becoming grotesque, nihilistic irritants in an otherwise Edenesque world.  Like Béla Tarr, it’s this sense of nagging fatalism, that humans are bound to destroy and fail miserably, that one finds continually disturbing in a Dumont film, where despite all mystic and Godlike possibilities, optimism is quickly negated by the darker impulses of the human condition.  

Number Seventeen

NUMBER SEVENTEEN        C+            

Great Britain  (63 mi)  1932  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

Ya don’t have to do nothin’ in this ‘ere house — ya stand still and things happen! 

—Ben Tramp (Leon M. Lion)

This is something of a creaky, old-fashioned drama, the likes of which we never see anymore and quite unlike anything else in the Hitchcock repertoire.  However, that is not necessarily a good thing, as this is an early 30’s Hitchcock film that one would least likely recommend, where it may actually work better as a silent film, as it has all the characteristics, including a highly visual German Expressionist style.  But as is, with dialogue, this is one of the more unengaging films Hitchcock ever made, with no connection to any of the characters, many of whom are interchangeable, where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad.  This abysmal disconnect strikes one as an egregious error on Hitchcock’s part, but one has to acknowledge that this was simply not the director’s area of expertise, and it crops up again and again throughout his entire body of work, as Hitchcock was notoriously hard on actors, where just prior to his arrival in Hollywood he was quoted as saying “all actors are cattle,” quickly clarifying his position, “I didn't say actors are cattle.  What I said was, actors should be treated like cattle.”  Carole Lombard reacted to this comment during the making of MR. AND MRS. SMITH (1941), a divorce comedy where the director acknowledged, “Since I really didn’t understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written.”  Lombard played a famous practical joke on Hitchcock, which he describes, “When I arrived on the set, the first day of shooting, Carole Lombard had had a corral built, with three sections, and in each one there was a live young cow.  Round the neck of each of them there was a white disk tied with a ribbon, with three names:  Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and the name of a third member of the cast, Gene Raymond.”  In his autobiography, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that different directors handle/respond to actors, where in his view:  “Hitchcock told his screen stories as much as possible without help from his actors’ performances.  When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, ‘Just do what you always do.’  Hitchcock relied on his camera angles and his montage…to do what on stage we relied on the actors for.”  As for a final word on the subject, Hitchcock recalls, “When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’  If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?,’ I say, ‘Your salary.’”

While this was actually filmed nearly a year “before” Rich and Strange (1931), it was not released until afterwards, supposedly as inflicted punishment for the poor box office showing of Hitchcock’s more favored film, with the director calling it a “quota quickie,” fulfilling his obligation as the final film for British International Pictures.  Another adaptation of a stage play, this time by J. Jefferson Farjeon, which for all practical purposes is two different films, where the overly stagy first half is set in what appears to be an old haunted mansion with the camera fixed on a steep spiraling staircase, while the second half opens up into an action chase sequence taking place on a rapidly moving train.  The staircase and the train are the two main characters of the film, both explored through a cinematic experimentation and curiosity, as all the rest is purely incidental.  The logic of the first half combines Hitchcock’s obsession with old dark houses that were gloomy and oppressive, where the Bates family mansion in Psycho (1960) is virtually a parody of a haunted house, while Hitchcock also had an obsession with stairways, where the director was meticulously picky on every single thing used in his movies, so he made sure the props in his films were as he envisioned, where he was deeply involved in creating the sets for the movies he produced.  According to Alan Vanneman in Bright Lights Journal, November 2003, Bright Lights Film Journal :: Alfred Hitchcock Photo Study: 

Staircases in Hitchcock’s films almost always lead to trouble.  For Hitchcock, the simple act of going up a staircase seemed to be a disorienting experience, taking you away from safety towards the unknown.  Spiral staircases were particularly threatening.  In Hitchcock's films, circular movement — the swirling vortex — implies a loss of control, usually with sexual overtones, and often leading to death.

Hitchcock often used stairs as the place of the most suspenseful and climactic scenes of his movies, a place where something horrible usually happened.  They all had something in common, which was terrible things occurred and were always depicted in a scary fashion.  Borrowing from an outline for a Hitchcock educational course by Dr. Glen Johnson, Spring 2013, Stairs, staircases & levels, several instances are listed.  Some of the more infamous uses of staircases in Hitchcock films would include The Lodger (1927), as it figures prominently in the arrival of the Lodger (suspected as a serial killer of women), where he immediately goes up the stairs, bypassing the main level where the normal family congregates; The 39 Steps (1935), where Richard Hannay descends the stairs after discovering the corpse in his upper-level apartment, later dragging a resistant Pamela, who is handcuffed to him, to the upper-level bedroom, while Pamela eavesdrops at the top of the stairs and hears key information that confirms Hannay’s innocence; Rebecca (1940), the heroine makes a grand entrance to the ball, wearing a costume modeled on a portrait at the top of the stairs that she is tricked into wearing by the malicious housemaid, knowing it is the same costume the dead Rebecca wore, thoroughly disgracing and humiliating her in front of her angry husband, fleeing back up the same stairs; Suspicion (1941), Johnnie climbs the stairs with a possibly-poisoned glass of milk for his wife, using a light bulb in the glass as an exclamation point:  is he or is he not a murderer?; Vertigo (1958), the most famous Hitchcock staircase, the bell tower that Scotty anxiously ascends where Madeleine falls to her death; and Psycho (1960), Detective Arbogast makes his fateful climb upstairs to the fateful domain of Norman Bates’ mother, while later, Lila can't resist descending the cellar steps.  Other films would include DOWNHILL (1927), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Dial M for Murder (1954), REAR WINDOW (1954), The Birds (1963), and FRENZY (1972). 

In an excerpt from Meaghan Walsh Gerard, Hitchcock and Stairs - Meaghan Walsh Gerard (pdf format): 

In Number Seventeen (1932), a man, chasing his blowing hat down the windy street arrives at an empty home, with a ‘to let’ sign.  As he dusts off his hat,  he sees a figure moving in the windows and becomes suspicious.  When he walks up to the front door, it blows open and reveals a long, curving staircase—the central focus of the film.  We follow him into the home, innocent of what awaits.  He cautiously pokes around, then looks up.  The camera  follows his gaze by sliding the shot up the bannister to an oval opening before returning to the man at the bottom, who slowly begins to climb the steps.  As he creeps to the top he finds the moving figure, and a dead body.  At the beginning of the ascent the man is innocent.  He knows nothing of what he will find.  His only purpose seems harmless—to investigate strange activity.  But the moment he decides to climb the stairs he is accepting an encounter with the unknown.  When this happens he agrees to exchange his innocence for knowledge—good or bad.  The entire course of the evening has changed.  Almost all of the action throughout the film centers around this staircase.  Low-key lighting shines through it, making slatted shadows cut across walls and faces.  Worn shoes trod on it.  Heads peek and dead hands flop between the rails.  In this early film of Hitchcock, one can see the beginning of his obsession with the architecture of stairs. 

In what appears to be an immersion into vertical space, this film is a monument to Hitchcock’s obsession with stairways, three floors connected by a central staircase, with a smaller staircase behind that is unseen by the viewer and only made available to various characters, making it hard to distinguish between them.  The film starts off with Detective Barton (John Stuart) arriving at a house, the number 17 of the film's title, marked for sale or rent, though he never identifies himself as such, so the audience is clueless to his identity, calling himself Forsythe until the end, where he could simply be any ordinary man wandering in out of curiosity.  Ben (Leon M. Lion) is a Cockney tramp who keeps his pockets stuffed with food and remains blind drunk throughout, where his speech is near impossible, though he appears to have wandered into this old abandoned building purely by chance, as is their discovery of a dead body near the top of the stairs, lighting a candle to see more clearly, where Hitchcock blends plenty of shadows on the wall into the mix, altering reality and disorienting the audience, where a similar technique was used to much greater effect the same year by Carl Theodor Dreyer in VAMPYR (1932), creating an existing netherworld, a kind of shadow world unseen by humans where vampires roam.  A stream of people arrive on the scene creating utter chaos and confusion, with the camera continually moving back and forth between them, where there’s not a whit of difference between any of them, except Ben, who’s completely unintelligible and dead drunk all the time.  First Rose (Ann Casson) arrives, and then her father (Henry Caine) with some telegram alluding to a stolen necklace, followed by a trio of jewel thieves looking for the necklace, including a deaf and dumb girl Nora (Anne Grey) who later reveals she hears and speaks perfectly, suddenly trying to help them when they’re taken prisoner, a device used later in The Lady Vanishes (1938), while the corpse disappears only to return very much alive as Sheldrake (Garry Marsh), coincidentally Fred MacMurray’s name in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). 

Much of the black humor is lost in this film, becoming a series of nonstop acts of misdirection and concealed identities, where the true detective is only revealed at the end, with people continually coming and going, subject to poorly staged fisticuffs, locking people in rooms, prisoners being tied up, a few harrowing escapes, and what amounts to changes of allegiance, where the thieves escape through a cellar door that leads down a very long flight of stone steps to a train station.  The film finally amps up the manic pace for a runaway train sequence, where thieves hijack a train while following in close pursuit is a commandeered bus, where Hitchcock achieves the desired  effects though quick edits and his clever use of miniatures and scaled down models of a train, bus, and ferry designed by William K. Everson.  This sequence has silent film written all over it, cutting back and forth between the speeding bus and the train barreling down the track, with a transport train ferry waiting at the end of the line, where the frenetic pace achieved is an example of pure cinema, though the ridiculous story throughout couldn’t be more absurd.  Instead it appears Hitchcock is playing around with toys, having fun with his new train set that he got for Christmas, where it lacks the cohesiveness of a finished work, but appears to have captured his interest for only a short duration.  Perhaps he needed to tinker with a film like this in order to make The Lady Vanishes (1938), which mirrors the chase scene exactly, though with a far different outcome, showing a certain railway expertise behind the camera, combining Hitchcock’s fascination with trains and his ability to tell a good story.  This film, on the other hand, is an example of the difficulty Hitchcock had making the adjustment from the silent era to talking pictures, taking him at least five years before he made the successful transition with The 39 Steps (1935), where these earlier more experimental films are reminiscent in some way to technological achievement films, which today include many Hollywood blockbusters, where the entertainment factor is an explosion of special effects which are achieved at the expense of overall character development and human understanding.  The film was a box office disaster, though it is notable for being the first use of a Hitchcock MacGuffin, in this case using the stolen necklace as a decoy in the overall plot twists. 

Note – There is no confirmed Hitchcock cameo in this film, but just after the fifty-one minute mark, there is a quick glimpse of a passenger on a speeding bus filled with other panic stricken passengers, but this one is wearing a dark coat and hat, facing away from the camera, bouncing up and down from the bumpy ride for about four seconds.