46. Conscience: Movies and Ballet on Video, reviewed by Cheryl S.
Sandy and I are making progress on our suite of dances, Visions. Since my solo role is based on Joan the Maid, I’ve been doing research. Not only on how she managed to be convincing to the homeland French but how she appeared to the invading English. To the latter, she seemed a sorceress or witch, and she was punished as a heretic. There had to be something magical or tricksy about her personality – the effect she had on friends (who had to be moved to aid in her struggles) and enemies (especially distant ones from across the Channel).
Pippa has given me a book on the presence of the trickster in folklore and art: Trickster Makes the World by Lewis Hyde. By raising the siege at Orleans and winning battles for her Dauphin, Joan performed something like miracles during her brief life. And the English accused her of one of the most trickster-like attributes identified by Hyde: shape-shifting. The churchmen who sent her to the stake were especially horrified by what moderns have termed her “cross-dressing”: going into battle dressed like a man. (Joan claimed that masculine attire also protected her virtue while consorting with soldiers.) Changing one’s guise is an identifying sign of the trickster archetype. Underneath the mercurial image of a girl taking on the role of an adult military leader, there must have been a mind of steel to have weathered all the obstacles and disappointments of military campaigns and political opposition. Having celestial visions and directives from an early age – and in a backwater peasant environment – must have conditioned her to ask reality to bend before her mission. Shifting shapes would have been the least of it. All of this will go into my portrait of Jeannette in dance, at least in supporting concepts and germinal suggestions. Sandy and I are dealing with the Maid when she was thirteen or fourteen years of age.
Hyde states in his book that the trickster figure is usually male in the literature, whether folk or sophisticated. He claims there are only a few examples of female tricksters. It is certainly true that the classic trickster is often a rogue or comic figure, and class clowns are usually male in real life, aren’t they? When I discussed this with Pippa, she pointed out that female tricksters can be found in American popular art, like the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. And there is one ballet where the heroine triumphs through her ability to turn the tables on the deceptions of pseudo-science: Swanilda’s tit-for-tat magics in Coppélia.
As a result, I’ve been watching films and dance on the internet during the pandemic. With Pippa’s guidance, I’ve been viewing the comedies of Carole Lombard. And the Lincoln Center at Home series presented the third act of the Balanchine-Danilova Coppélia, with the great New York City Ballet principal dancer, Patricia McBride as Swanilda.
Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934) is the movie that many people remember as a John Barrymore vehicle co-starring Lombard. It is in the old tradition of tossing a young actress into the lion’s den of a veteran actor who proceeds to devour fresh talent alive. But Lombard holds her own. I wish the film were more of a favorite of mine. As often happens with this director, the movie begins well and then doesn’t have interesting ideas for its ending. Throughout, Hawks keeps the dialogue (by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) at the same level of near-hysteria, and as a result the style encourages a side of Lombard that is her least attractive: that motor-mouth, breathless, high-strung element in her acting persona. You may find this register to be charming. I’m eventually fatigued. Hawks is so fine at setting up an ensemble acting mode for a movie (especially when portraying a band of male professionals), but the one comedienne who was able to distinguish herself under his direction was Barbara Stanwyck (in Ball of Fire). Pippa agrees with me on this.
On the other hand, Twentieth Century does let Lombard shape-shift. She goes from a timid ingénue to a Hollywood diva with a mouth. In a sense she becomes the untrustworthy Lilith archetype, the woman who is all-trickster all of the time. She is also the female who moves up in the world as her former egomaniacal tutor-lover (Barrymore) goes down. This female-up, male-down formula (see A Star Is Born) might have been a skid-row product of the Depression, except Mitchell Leisen’s 1937 Swing High, Swing Low (with Lombard and Fred MacMurray) also features the theme and is based on a 1920s play, Burlesque. I have to admit that I am a big fan of the 1937 Wesley Ruggles film True Confession, also with Barrymore and also with the Lombard-MacMurray pairing. Lombard is more nuanced there, and her character (a compulsive liar of a writer) is more interesting. Barrymore is more bearable, too. Just a matter of taste.
In My Man Godfrey (1936), directed by Gregory La Cava, Lombard is a ditsy, spoiled society girl, Irene, who plays a trick on her cynical sister Cornelia, who then plays a trick on Godfrey the butler (played by William Powell), who turns the trick back on her. In fits of pique, Lombard transforms that mobile face into a classical mask of tragi-comedy while squalling to get her way. She’s utterly unselfconscious about her looks. And the way she gazes into William Powell’s eyes! (They were briefly a Hollywood married couple.) No film actress could look adoringly into a man’s eyes the way Lombard could. (See the Powell-Lombard 1931 film Man of the World for more of such ardor.) One forgets what a great star Powell was beyond his Thin Man series with Myrna Loy. I like Godfrey very much except for the last thirty minutes, which are too predictable. My favorite La Cava film is the 1937 Stage Door. That film has a female ensemble – a brilliant one.
In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Lombard is a stage actress turned spy for the Polish Underground during World War Two. Asked by a Nazi to consider becoming a member of the party, Lombard responds by bringing up scruples. (“What are we going to do about my conscience?”) By that point the movie is so adept at moving its theatrical milieu surrealistically into the theater of war, you are not sure how to take the loaded language. The invasion of historical reality by the artifice of Underground actors is so persistent in To Be (and so dazzling), Lombard must shift shape over and over, looking like a refugee one moment and a svelte poule deluxe the next. She can turn on a dime. There is a silvery white silk gown that is featured both on stage and in the Gestapo headquarters that shows off Lombard’s gorgeous figure. She becomes an Art Deco idol in an instant. Twice, Lubitsch photographs her as she stands in that gown at a door with her back to the camera. You want to freeze-frame. You also want the air-tight script to develop her character further, but no luck. Lombard gives a performance of such poise and precision, it is like comedic cut-glass. I love the way she accepts a proposition from a Nazi spy: “I’m terribly frightened and terribly thrilled. Bye!” The way she chirps that line manages to be both hilariously camp and disarmingly seductive simultaneously. Lombard’s voice is as unique and expert a tool as Claudette Colbert’s, and that is saying a great deal.
In the Ben Hecht script for Nothing Sacred (again, that year, 1937), Lombard’s Hazel Flagg also brings up her “conscience”. (“I’ve got something worse . . . I’ve got a conscience!”) This is a period signal that we are watching yet another “dark comedy”. Hazel is the hick-town young woman supposedly dying of radium poisoning, but she gets a medical reprieve and with the help of a New York newspaper converts her “last weeks” into an all-expense-paid vacation in the Big City, complete with rampant publicity to goose circulation. Since this is another Ben Hecht film (directed by William A. Wellman), the modern metropolis turns out to be just as tricksy as she is. Even more so.
Wellman likes to occlude his Technicolor imagery with a tree branch or a packing crate to remind his audience what a special, oblique vision this is. We listen all the more attentively to the ripe dialogue. In Gotham, Hazel participates in so many spectacles of fake sympathy and phony pomp that the movie audience can only find her version of deceit preferable. Look at the way the script allows Lombard to shift shapes. She is sequentially sick, revived, celebrated, inebriated, hung-over, KO’d, and (in time for the finale) disguised in dark glasses. And through every change, Lombard heroically finds a way to remain funny and fascinating. She does a charming drunk scene at a garish nightclub. And she falls in love with the newspaperman played by Frederic March and he with her. Thus does Hecht supply his female trickster with a redeeming “conscience”. In an early scene Hazel says that she feels “born twice”. This is a reference (according to Pippa) to ancient initiation rituals. New York baptizes Hazel, but she leaves her mark on the cityscape as well. It may also refer (again, according to Pippa) to ancient Babylonian temple customs, where a young woman accepted the love of a stranger from a foreign clime for one night. Hazel is visited by such a stranger – and she accepts his love. Hopefully for more than one night.
The story of the ballet Coppélia is out of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman. It allows the peasant girl Swanilda to uncover and expose her village’s pseudo-magus, Dr. Coppelius, as a misogynist and charlatan. In so doing, she rescues her boyfriend Franz from his infatuation with one of the doctor’s mechanical dolls. In effect, Swanilda fights sorcery with deceptions of her own. In the brilliant second act mime-scene, our heroine impersonates one of the doctor’s dolls (shape-shifting!) and animates herself by dancing Spanish and Scottish variations. The New York City Ballet production was staged by George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova in the older Maryinsky style they brought to the West. Only the Act Three wedding celebration was included on the Lincoln Center all-Balanchine program, but you do see Patricia McBride triumph in its climactic pas de deux and finale.
Since I did not witness this ballerina’s stage career, here is what I see when I watch the video of her Swanilda, Act Three. McBride is magical. She has wonderfully flexible, floating bourrées in the opening adagio which connect the dance passages in her work with her partner, Helgi Tomasson. She is particularly masterful when she travels laterally, to her left or right, or when she varies her speed into a weighted turn in place. There is something mischievous about this Swanilda in showing off her glides and hoverings. McBride makes her pointe work look infinitely variable in its placement of accents.
The partnering mirrors this quality in the number of times that Tomasson lifts McBride into the air or onto his shoulder, and this accession of aerial command is echoed as well in the many unfoldings that the choreography asks of the ballerina, those développés and ronds de jamb that extend her figure beyond, into the space around her. This brings up one of my favorite topics: the way classical choreography (and especially Petipa and Balanchine) uses the directions of the body, especially croisé and effacé positions, for their mixture and sequencing. For example, the ballerina will begin with movements that involve croisé placement and then she will pivot or turn and end in effacé for a fully displayed moment. This is obviously an inheritance from Petipa, but Balanchine’s ballerinas are granted a special emphasis on such precise figural presentation. McBride really exploits it for powerful lingerings and phrasal punctuations.
Since McBride has a special genius for allegro, the choreography shows off her space-covering movement. The viewer sees how much of the stage she can traverse in three short repeated phrases – and this is on what was then called the State Theater stage, which demanded increased travel from performers. And when McBride uses her reach, she does so without relinquishing her femininity. She is light in her landings, and her airborne trajectories are substantive. No effort is revealed.
Then there are the tricks of the ballerina trade. In her solo variation, McBride does wonderful emphatic dégagés travelling back on the diagonal. For the last of the series, she slows down and increases slightly the depth of her supporting leg’s pliés. It is a moment of intimacy between the ballerina’s mind and her instrument – they are sensed as complicit with just a hint of condescension toward the usual idea of ballerina “technique”. Who knew that “shop talk” could be so witty?
And there are the stunning examples of emphatic pointework – taquetterie -- in the coda: those moments where McBride jumps to the side onto her pointes on a stress in Delibes’ music and does so while covering space in a manège. I am told that the ballerina risked bleeding toes from moments such as this, and that a cadre of S.A.B. students would help her out of the theater on nights when her injuries required their loyal attention. But the effect is so compelling, perhaps the pain was worth it?
McBride was not a statuesque dancer – she was of medium height -- but notice the way she has achieved articulation along the full length of her instrument: the way light pours between head and shoulder, around the extension of the arms, along the vibrato of the lower limbs and about the articulate foot. This is fully visible animation, aimed, as in the old Maryinsky style and its Balanchine updated version, at releasing varieties of rhythmic energy throughout the dance silhouette. McBride gives the viewer a model of such achieved legibility. This is particularly beautiful in the ballerina’s port de bras for the ballet, just a touch of Cecchetti roundness to the arms, and everything reaching upward from deep in the back with a calm alertness to the possibility of a coming opportunity for contrapposto in the musical timing. The stability of McBride’s figure makes us all the more sensitive to moments of rubato and syncopation – when they arrive, they make us ache for more. So witty, so canny, so mischievous.
And there is that doll-like aspect of McBride’s facial make-up, so perfect for this role. The high-style “mask” that this ballerina uses is ideal for a comic character who would provoke the laughter of the gods.
A ballerina on McBride’s level becomes the conscience of a ballet company, a model for all of its corps members. McBride was a living template for a number of N.Y.C.B. seasons. You can see her imprint in this Coppélia. Perhaps next streaming time, we will be allowed to see McBride’s other acts as well, especially the ballet’s central mime scene in which Swanilda works her wiles on the mad doctor and her adored Franz.
As far as trickery is concerned, Pippa holds that deception is central to the strategies of war and to the fine and performing arts. Everything depends on how illusionary tools are used. A leader in the arts rearranges stylistic hierarchies from within their practice, just as Joan of Arc altered contested playing fields of her time. An actress like Carole Lombard and a ballerina such as Patricia McBride point in new directions for film and dance and consolidate existing strengths in their arts. They set new standards and allow us to find equivalents for today. Back to our Jeannette. In order to make new worlds, Sandy and I must refine our deceptions.
C.S.
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