Electric Trio Vol. 5
'The Great Consoler' (1933), 'The Fastest Gun Alive' (1956), and 'Thick Skinned' (1989)
Electric Trio is a column where I look at some of cinema history’s countless underseen, underappreciated, and largely forgotten works. The format (or gimmick, if you prefer) is simple: three films, three paragraphs each. Hopefully these posts will, on occasion, move a few of my readers to seek out a film they were previously unfamiliar with. If not, I hope that reading about them proves a worthwhile experience, at least.
The Great Consoler (1933)
It’s perhaps not entirely fair but Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Lev Kuleshov is best remembered for the famous editing effect which bears his name, an effect which foregrounded montage as an elemental cinematic tool. Structured around a shot of silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine’s face, Kuleshov’s influential 1919 short cuts between the thespian’s expressionless visage and a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman resting on a divan. The idea was that audiences would derive more meaning from how two back-to-back shots interacted with each other rather than from a single shot in isolation. This experiment was supposedly so effective that, according to filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, audiences raved about the range of Mosjoukine’s performance — something of a tall tale, in all likelihood.
Kuleshov did, however, make feature films as well, most famously the claustrophobic drama By the Law, released in 1926, but his 1933 film The Great Consoler is a true oddity amongst oddities. Rough around the edges, sometimes inelegant, and not rarely unpleasant, the film weaves together different narrative layers (both fictional and biographical) which concern the unhappy shopgirl Dulcie (Aleksandra Khokhlova), the imprisoned writer Bill Porter (a highly eccentric Konstantin Khokhlov) — better known by his pen name O. Henry — who struggles to come to terms with his place in the unjust prison system, and the characters and stories the latter concocts. Kuleshov uses this blur of fiction and non-fiction to reflect on and interrogate the role of the artist in society, including the socialist society his country was in the process of building.
Aside from its thematic resonance, The Great Consoler stands out for its form as well: a prison riot is brought to life through electrifying rapid cuts while one of Porter’s stories is staged like a silent film, functioning as a mild parody of the medium’s early days as well as rendering quirks of the writer’s imagination in a memorable way. The boundaries between the film’s different layers are somewhat porous — Dulcie at one point even interacts with a character from an O. Henry story — but the smatterings of meta-indulgence don’t distract from the film’s fiery passion and stubborn hope that, in spite of all the bleakness, a better world may one day come into being.
The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)
These days, writer-director Russell Rouse’s star doesn’t shine quite as bright as that of his wife Beverly Michaels, herself still highly underrated as the cheesecake model turned bad-girl actress who breathed new, more complex life into the femme fatale in low-budget noirs such as 1951’s Pickup or, directed by her then-future husband, 1953’s Wicked Woman. (Chuck Stephens introduced her as “The blindingly blonde fifties no-good-girl” in a 2012 Film Comment piece.) Between getting his start in 1942 and retiring in 1969, Rouse earned himself seventeen story, screenwriting, and directing credits and also snagged a Best Story and Screenplay Oscar for 1959’s Pillow Talk.
His directing career never took flight the way his career as a writer did but three years after the aforementioned Wicked Woman, the scrappy Rouse would pull off his biggest directing coup with the Glenn Ford-led western The Fastest Gun Alive. Like he was with Michaels, Rouse is finely attuned to Ford’s abilities and the emasculated anguish of Ford’s George, the titular fastest gun alive (or is he?), reaches considerable depths as he grapples with his feelings of inadequacy as the son of a notoriously quick-on-the-draw sheriff. Rather than following in his father’s footsteps, he has settled into a quiet life as a shopkeeper which, it’s made clear, is torture for the former sharpshooter, even with his loving wife Dora (Jeanne Crain) by his side.
Drunk and humiliated, George, who has had to flee numerous towns to evade crowing gunmen looking to challenge him, spills the beans about his gunslinging past and shows off his impressive pistolero skills to all the townsfolk. Although they promise to keep it a secret, word nonetheless gets out to a band of criminals, led by the vain, ruthless Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford). Having just sworn to himself and his wife that he would never pick up a gun again, George is faced with a dilemma: duel the outlaw or watch him burn down the entire town. None of this is exactly novel, especially as far as westerns are concerned, but Rouse’s direction — his feel for rhythm and tension is remarkable — and Ford and Crawford’s indelible performances make this an unsung low-budget genre classic, no less powerful a picture than Winchester ‘73 (1950) or The Tall T (1957).
Thick Skinned (1989)
Virtually unknown outside of cinephilia circles, Patricia Mazuy has cultivated a modest but eager audience in her native France and amongst festivalgoers the world over. Over the course of three decades and eight feature films — her latest, Visiting Hours, premiered at this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight — Mazuy has traversed settings, time periods, and the character dynamics and pathologies therein. Inspired by her own family and her annoyance with sentimental depictions of the rural milieu she came up in, her 1989 debut Thick Skinned grafted the Western onto the French countryside, allowing the filmmaker to explore a rather unique (and uniquely twisted) brand of sibling love, rivalry, and insanity.
Mazuy’s unsettling fable unfolds a decade after two brothers, Roland (Jean-François Stévenin) and Gérard (Jacques Spiesser), drunkenly set fire to a barn, unwittingly killing the farm worker sleeping inside. Roland, who took the fall and spent ten years behind bars, is released from prison and returns home to visit his brother, now happily married to Annie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and father to little Anna (Salomé Stévenin, who would go on to deliver an excellent performance in the otherwise mediocre 2005 coming-of-age drama Cold Showers). His arrival is met with enthusiasm from Gérard while Annie is wary of him. Before long, Roland’s presence begins to disrupt the familial tranquility and Annie is confronted with the darker reality of the brother’s relationship.
A quiet menace permeates the film from the jump — there is not doubt that the opening reel, depicting the brothers’ drunken hijinks, will end in disaster — and only grows more charged, more mysterious as it goes on. Interestingly, Mazuy’s urban-set Saturn Bowling (2022), is in direct conversation with her firstling, even as it does away with some of psychological intricacies in favor of a more viscerally upsetting approach. However, Thick Skinned’s unpredictable momentum — the arsenal of editing ideas deserves to be written about on its own — and constantly shifting hierarchies truly announced Mazuy as a singular filmmaking voice.
So the format, so the contents!! Great writing as ever.
Big fan of this format