Cinema's Strangest Moments

INTRODUCTION

Ever since pictures started moving more than 115 years ago, Strange But True has been a recurring theme in any discussion about, or reportage of, films and filmmakers. One of the strangest stories of them all still surrounds the unexplained disappearance in 1890 of the French-born but Leeds-based pioneer inventor Louis Augustin Le Prince after boarding a train in Lyon. He was on his way to New York intending to demonstrate his patented film camera for the first time in public, but never even arrived in Paris.

Then there was the curious case of a piece of historic footage shot by Thomas Alva Edison, father of the motion-picture process, at his famous New Jersey studio, a hut covered in tarred paper known as the Black Maria. A seventeen-second archive fragment of that session, probably in 1894, clearly shows Edison’s assistant, W K L Dickson, playing a violin alongside a large cone. It was clearly an attempt to create synchronised sound. Yet it would be decades before a cylinder of that violin music was finally tracked down, and eventually another new millennium when the award-winning American film and sound editor Walter Murch managed successfully to ‘marry’ that age-old fiddling and creaky monochrome image thanks to the latest hightech digital equipment.

This survey begins in 1895, when the public first began to champion a new art form that would become unarguably the greatest of the twentieth century and certainly seems to show precious little sign of diminishing in the twenty-first. From black and white ‘flickers’ in the picture houses of yore to the ear-splitting, eye-boggling entertainments served up in today’s multiplexes, cinema remains one of the great, even occasionally profitable, crowd pleasers, and can sometimes embrace art too.

These three hundred stories – some well known, others hopefully more unfamiliar to all but the most die-hard movie buffs (who should get out more often) – span silents to the very latest blockbusters. There are, for which I must now apologise, too few foreign-language films represented and there is, I admit, a bias towards the last thirty or so years during which I have been a film journalist and critic. Also, I have sometimes stretched the word ‘Strange’ to embrace both ‘Funny Peculiar’ and, depending on your sense of humour, ‘Funny Ha-Ha’.

Ever since reporting from my first-ever location visit in the Home Counties on a long-forgotten Anglo-American thriller called Blind Terror (1971), starring Mia Farrow and Paul Nicholas, I have collected film anecdotes and since compounded the felony on film sets all over the world – from Alice Springs and Tokyo to Simi Valley and Sicily – as well as at festivals such as Cannes, Teheran, San Sebastián and Berlin.

These stories are often the result of research for other various books as well as my journalism for magazines and newspapers such as Screen International, Academy, Exposure, Sight & Sound, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian and Observer. I’ve also indulged (at times been submerged) in the copious reading of an unhealthy number of biographies and memoirs written by or about directors, producers, cameramen and stars. These sources, though not necessarily the eventual outcome of some anecdotes following careful fact-checking, can be found in an extensive bibliography. All film dates refer to the year that the film was released originally in the UK.

Though often as trivial, these real-life yarns of ‘Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing’ – to borrow the useful title of an otherwise moderate 1972 film with Maggie Smith – not to mention frequent helpings of Death, purport to be rather more substantial than just a catalogue of the so-called ‘bloopers’ and continuity errors that seem regularly to pepper every movie production.

But how many of these stories are actually true, or how many are simply perpetuating well-trodden myths? I offer a pair of world-weary quotes to cover my potential embarrassment. The veteran actor Boris Karloff was being interviewed on the British set of his latest film, Corridors of Blood (1958), when he offered this piece of advice to a callow young writer: ‘Wait until I’m dead . . . then make it up!’ And from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), comes this invaluable piece of advice: ‘When truth becomes legend, print the legend.’

My very special thanks go to Anwar Brett and Stephanie Billen for help often above and beyond. Also to Dora Dobson, Peter Duffell, Guy East, Ben Falk, Alan Frank, Philip French, Marianne Gray, David Hall, Peter Hannan, Jamie Harcourt, Iain Johnstone, Mark Kermode, Mike Molloy, Ronald Neame, Michael Pickwoad, Ben Robinson, Mark Shivas, Ian Soutar, Richard Tedham, Adrian Turner, Ivan Waterman and David Young for their extra-special recall.

Finally, I’d like to thank my long-suffering agent, Jane Judd, as well as Jeremy Robson and his editorial team at Robson Books for suggesting Cinema’s Strangest Moments and seeing it through to completion.

Little Marlow 2003

BEFORE 1920

TRAIN OF EVENTS

A TRAIN ARRIVING AT A STATION (1895)

The arrival of cinema could not have been more dramatic. Indeed some would say that it also represented the birth of the horror film.

When the Lumière Brothers opened the first movie theatre on 28 December 1895, in the basement of a Paris café, there were several short films on the bill, but the one that caused the biggest stir featured a simple scene of a train arriving from Marseilles and pulling into the platform at La Ciotat station in Provence.

Recorded by the brothers during their family holiday in July the same year, the innocent-sounding footage caused a sensation with audience members ducking behind their seats, convinced that the engine was about to run them over. For the price of one franc each, the Parisians had in effect witnessed the first screen ‘monster’.

It is interesting to note that the success of this short prompted a number of spin-offs, including ‘Phantom Rides’, whereby audiences sat in a mock railway carriage surrounded by a screen that displayed moving scenery recorded by a camera that had been mounted on the front of a real train.

Early movies featuring trains included A Kiss in the Tunnel (1900), La Tunnel Sous La Manche (1907) and the seminal picture The Great Train Robbery (1903), which prompted D W Griffith, excited by the new medium, to make his version of the story, The Lonedale Operator (1911).

The film industry would continue to exploit the dramatic value of trains with the scene of a fair maid tied to a rail track becoming a cliché of silent cinema. An exciting ‘train’ of events had indeed been set in motion by a film that would scarcely raise an eyebrow if shown in cinemas today.

FOUR-LEGGED FRIEND

RESCUED BY ROVER (1905)

Here’s the film – all 425 feet of it (that’s approximately seven minutes) – that probably first established another favourite screen cliché, ‘Never act with children or animals.’

There’s both in the pioneering British filmmaker Cecil Hepworth’s popular short which originally cost under £8 to make and sold some four hundred prints.

Hepworth, who as early as 1897 had written Animated Photography, or the ABC of the Cinematograph, told the story of a kidnapped child rescued by a wily pooch.

Often credited as the UK’s first major fiction film, it was, at the same time, probably the definitive ‘home movie’. Hepworth’s wife, who wrote the story, played the mother, his eight-month-old baby daughter was the heroine and his dog, Blair, was the canine hero. With no titles, the tale was simply told by means of authentic visual flair.

SHOT DOWN UNDER

THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG (1906)

Generally considered to be the world’s first commercial feature film – and promoted on its release in the UK as ‘the longest film ever made’ – this Australian-made flicker followed the last days of the local antihero Ned Kelly.

At a time when a usual evening’s programme consisted of one-reel shorts, The Kelly Gang comprised no fewer than four reels running to more than forty minutes.

The full print no longer exists – some nine minutes only of the footage survives – but it seems to have been an ambitious production that was able to persuade the museum in Victoria to lend it the actual armour worn by Kelly during his exploits a quarter-century before.

It was filmed on location in Victoria over six months, and the cast included Elizabeth Veitch, Ollie Wilson and Frank Mills. Costing only £450, the film went on to make a handsome profit, and helped establish Australia – temporarily at least – as a base for major film production.

The latest Aussie-produced version of the story, this time round costing megadollars and with Heath Ledger as the wily bushranger, arrived in 2003. And, as also the current production base for the Star Wars and Matrix sequels, Australia is firmly back at the cutting edge of global filmmaking.

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD

THE SQUAW MAN (1913)

Modern Hollywood – and all that it entails – was born the year Cecil B DeMille travelled west to make his pioneering western based on the play by Edwin Milton Royle.

Until that time the film industry had largely been based on the East Coast, where the old money and infrastructure was, but DeMille’s vision and the success of his film inspired a mass migration to a quiet LA suburb that would soon become the beating heart of the American film industry.

The Squaw Man was the result of a concerted effort by DeMille, Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) to make a success in the film business after reaching a dead end in the depressed New York theatre.

Money was tight, but the prospect of shooting in the much more temperate climate on America’s West Coast, with the range of scenery it offered combined with the cheaper real estate and labour costs, seemed tempting.

Dustin Farnum was signed to play the lead and New York-based Winifred Kingston was cast opposite him, but the rest of the actors were drawn locally and included Hal Roach, who would later become a great comedy director in his own right.

Stumbling through production, learning as he went, DeMille might lay claim to have made one of early cinema’s first ‘classics’, a film enthusiastically described by Variety as ‘a masterpiece’. More than that, he helped inspire a new generation of Americans to go west, and help found the movie capital of the world.

Hollywood itself was a vast region noted primarily for its citrus groves before this. After a prime piece of real estate was acquired by the developer Harvey H Wilcox in the 1870s, his wife Daeida named it ‘Hollywood’ after an estate in Illinois. Despite its name, holly is not indigenous to the area.

FACE OF THEM ALL

SIXTY YEARS A QUEEN (1913)

You’re unlikely to have heard of Rolf Leslie. He was a busy British actor during the silent era who specialised in strong background character roles. He once appeared as Abraham Lincoln and also played ‘The Old Man’ in a dozen other films.

His finest hour has to be in this re-creation of some of the great events during Queen Victoria’s long reign. However, the clearly versatile Leslie didn’t get to play any of the showier roles, such as Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington, Gladstone or even, in perhaps daring drag, Victoria herself.

No, he’s credited instead with no fewer than ‘27 Characters’, none of them specified, which not only confirmed his versatility but also earns him a place at number one in the all-time multiple-roles chart.

Starrier names such as Alec Guinness, in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and Eddie Murphy, in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000), who jointly tie with eight roles each, seem positively restrained by comparison.

IN HARM’S WAY

THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)

Although he had been directing films for only six years, the former stage actor David Wark Griffith had already built his reputation as a rising star of this bright new medium. His 1915 epic, all three hours of it, established him as one of the first truly great film directors, able to balance grand scale with intimate, impassioned storytelling.

The Birth of a Nation was based on the racy, racist play, The Clansman, by the Reverend Thomas Dixon, a rather partial account of the South’s mistreatment at the hands of the victorious North after the American Civil War.

The tale held personal echoes for Griffith, a Southerner himself, who had grown up in Kentucky and heard stories of the war at his father’s knee. Setting about the story, Griffith persuaded his favourite cameraman, Billy Bitzer, to shoot it for him, knowing that Bitzer’s technical expertise, inventiveness and nerve would help to make this picture something remarkable.

Yet as trusted a collaborator as Bitzer was, Griffith was not above putting him and his assistant cameraman, Karl Brown, in harm’s way for the sake of a good shot.

The risk of being trampled by horses during enormous battle scenes that had the bulky, wooden-cased, hand-cranked Pathé camera in the thick of the action was par for the course. When the bombs, fireworks and squibs went off, Bitzer, Brown and others were similarly heavily involved.

A colourful character who gloried in the name Fireworks Wilson was in charge of all these ‘special effects’, and he was a man whose extravagant moustache might have been his most remarkable feature were it not for the fact that he had only one arm. As he explained the intricacies of his craft to the bemused crew, a fizzing fuse ran down between his teeth as he matter-of-factly chatted away.

Holding the live explosives under his one good arm, he assured onlookers that everything was perfectly safe, and that he had never had an accident in his life.

‘But the silent witness of his stump,’ Karl Brown explained many years later, ‘convinced me that it had not been nibbled off by mice.’

The film was credited with encouraging a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, who featured prominently in the film and used it as a recruiting tool. Despite this, it had seemingly received an official endorsement when it became the first film to be screened in the White House.

‘It is like writing history with lightning,’ President Woodrow Wilson said, ‘and my one regret is that it is all so terribly true.’ Wilson would later distance himself from the film and his remarks about it.

However, the furore surrounding this groundbreaking movie inspired Griffith to write a pamphlet entitled The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (sadly out of print today) and begin work on his next masterpiece, Intolerance.

THE 1920s

FUNNY BUSINESS

ROBIN HOOD (1922)

Douglas Fairbanks had just finished filming his swashbuckling adventure, whose lavish centrepiece was a fantastic castle set – believed to be the biggest ever constructed in Hollywood – when he was approached by his old friend and business partner, Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin asked him if he could use the castle for a sequence in his next film. Bemused, Fairbanks wondered what on earth Chaplin was up to. The little comic showed him. The drawbridge was lowered and Chaplin emerged from inside the castle carrying a kitten. He put it out, then collected a bottle of milk, a newspaper and some letters and went back in with the drawbridge closing slowly behind him.

Fairbanks laughed, but refused permission.

REACH FOR THE SKY

THE WOMAN WITH FOUR FACES (1923)

Our hero (Richard Dix) is languishing in jail when his girlfriend (Betty Compson), disguised as his mother, arrives to tell him that help will come from above.

It did, literally, for, as the prisoners are later playing baseball in the yard of San Quentin, a plane flies in with a ladder, which he then climbs to freedom.

The trouble was, authorisation to shoot at the top-security jail was still on its way by car when the plane, with the cameraman on board, arrived to begin filming the hazardous scene. It was made even more hazardous when a guard began firing his rifle at the plane, thinking that it was a daringly authentic escape plan.

HANGING AROUND

SAFETY LAST (1924)

Considering he was a man famous for the death-defying stunts in his highly popular silent films, Harold Lloyd was not especially keen on heights. And yet none of his films was more popular, or famous, than his clock-hanging antics after a dizzying climb up a skyscraper.

The plot was inspired by a craze in the 1920s for such ‘human fly’ antics, freestyle and unassisted climbs up the sides of buildings by publicity-hungry characters – some of whom returned to the ground the fast way.

In the story, Lloyd was a small-town guy whose stories of success in the big city inspire his girl to come and visit, leading to all sorts of complications that end in his climbing the side of the department store in which he works to claim a thousand-dollar prize.

Aside from the fact that Lloyd had reportedly hidden his eyes when he saw someone scaling the side of the Brockman Building in LA, he was the man audiences believed could do it for real. But audiences did not know of their hero’s disability – the loss of the thumb and forefinger on his right hand after a movie publicity stunt went disastrously wrong.

Thereafter he always wore a glove on the hand, and despite being a supremely talented athlete had to cede certain physical challenges to stuntman Harvey Parry. Even on Safety Last, safety was an important issue: ‘He gave me every precaution that I wanted in climbing buildings and so forth,’ Parry reported.

False sets were constructed on top of the high buildings, which were shot from such an angle that the one blended seamlessly with the other; yet if either Lloyd or Parry was to fall he would have a drop of only fifteen feet before hitting the safety pads.

The final tragic irony is that when the film opened someone thought a fitting publicity stunt would be to have a real ‘human fly’ scale a building. The poor guy made it successfully to the 32nd floor before slipping and falling to his death.

CHARIOTS OF FIRE

BEN-HUR (1925)

Some twenty years after its publication in 1880, there had been a spectacular stage version – complete with chariot race conducted on a treadmill – of General Lew Wallace’s novel subtitled ‘A Tale of the Christ’. A one-reel film followed in 1907.

Plans to remake Ben-Hur on an altogether more lavish scale would take so long to instigate that one wag joked that it might eventually win an award for being ‘the Best Film of 1940, if there isn’t a world war in the meantime’.

After endless false starts, including constant changes of cast and directors, the final permutation reported for duty in Italy – Ramon Novarro as Judah, Francis X Bushman as Messala, and Fred Niblo, director.

But Niblo was effectively a spectator, and an increasingly horrified one at that, as the film’s two big set pieces – the sea battle and the chariot race – were directed by the action specialist B ‘Breezy’ Reeves Eason.

With footage already scrapped once from a disastrous earlier attempt to shoot the sea battle at Anzio, south of Rome, cameras now started turning at Livorno off the coast of northern Italy.

When the pirate vessel rammed the Roman war galley, the slave extras – many of them nonswimmers who had lied to get work – began to panic and jumped overboard, especially when fire started spreading through the ship. Opinion seems divided as to the final casualty rate.

Then it was back to Rome and the Colosseum set for the chariot chase in which the resulting carnage – some one hundred horses believed dead – was more obvious. One of the equine fatalities occurred when Novarro’s chariot crashed and Bushman’s rode over the wreckage. The actor was uninjured.

Finally, in Italy, after fire tore through a property warehouse, the production relocated back to Hollywood to resume filming the chariot race. An urgent call went out for extra assistants to take charge of the huge crowds.

One was a young man from Alsace-Lorraine who had started working recently at Universal, where his mother’s cousin was head of the studio. He was given a toga and a set of signals so that he could get his section of the crowd to cheer on cue.

The name of the 23-year-old was William Wyler, who, 34 years later, would win his third Oscar for directing . . . altogether now, Ben Hur.

THE MIND’S EYE

THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925)

In film as in most other endeavours, advances are slow and painstaking. Occasionally, though, there are great leaps forward, momentous declarations of new ideas that take hold and spread their influence far wider than ever intended.

So it was with Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Soviet drama. The intent of this suitably political tale of sailors who inspire a revolt against the cruelty and oppression of the tsar’s rule in 1905 was simple: a celebration of the individual’s heroism over the unjust cruelty of an evil regime.

So far, so familiar. Just how Eisenstein achieved many of the most harrowing sequences, shot and edited in such a way as to sustain the tension throughout a greater portion of the film’s 75-minute running time, is like a masterclass in film theory.

The director used montage to spectacular effect, intercutting between scenes and sights that created a fresh image of the whole. A baby crying, a woman screaming, a Cossack’s blade slashing downward – three separate sequences that, when run together, immediately imperil the innocent victim of a heinous crime.

Another pioneering Soviet director, Lev Kuleshov, was an influential figure on Eisenstein, and gave his name to the Kuleshov Effect, which creates an emotional context from otherwise unrelated scenes edited together in this way.

Ironically, it was the lack of resources at Soviet Film that led Kuleshov and his students to pay such attention to detail. At one point they simply experimented with a print of D W Griffith’s Intolerance, arranging the scenes and shots in a different order to create a different effect each time.

Those teachings found perfect expression in Eisenstein’s masterpiece, a film whose influence continues to this day in ways that are both obvious and sublime. Perhaps the most memorable sequence involves a pram trundling out of control, down the Odessa steps while all around is chaos and carnage. It has been much imitated since, notably by Brian De Palma in a station sequence Scene in The Untouchables (1987) and the Zucker Brothers, altogether less seriously, in the third of their Naked Gun films.

WHERE THE MOUTH IS

WINGS (1927)

The first ever Best Picture to receive the Cedric Gibbons-designed gold-plated statuette (yet to be nicknamed ‘Oscar’) was actually released two years before the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on 16 May 1929.

The director William A Wellman, who was a nineteen-year-old pilot in the Lafayette Flying Corps during World War One, was in a perfect position to recreate authentic-look aerial action in his silent classic, filmed on location in Texas with the US Army’s full cooperation.

He also found himself doubling as a stuntman both in the air and, later, quite literally on the ground. After the extras, playing German soldiers in retreat, first balked at the prospect of being trampled by advancing American troops, Wellman had to show them the way.

THE UNKINDEST CUT

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928)

Perhaps the strangest scene in cinema – a close-up shot of the slicing of an eyeball – came about as a result of a surreal collaboration between two visionary Spaniards, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the artist Salvador Dalí.

While staying with Dalí at his house, Buñuel told him about a dream he had in which a cloud sliced the moon in half ‘like a razor blade slicing through an eye’. Dalí had had his own disturbing dream and the pair decided there and then to create a revolutionary, low-budget short film using images from their subconscious minds.

Audiences were spared nothing. In the opening sequence, we see Buñuel sharpening the blade of a razor and cutting his fingernail to prove its sharpness. He leaves the room and looks at the full moon. As in the dream, a cloud moves to bisect the moon. Buñuel forces open a woman’s eye, the cloud cuts across the moon and the razor slices the eye (actually a calf’s eye) apart. Needlessly shocking as the scene still seems to many, it is to others the key to the whole, disjointed enterprise.

As the French film maker Jean Vigo would put it, ‘Can there be any spectacle more terrible than the sight of a cloud obscuring the moon at its full? The prologue can hardly have one indifferent. It tells us that in this film we must see with a different eye. Er, all right.

LOVE ON THE RUN

THE KISS (1929)

This searing courtoom drama about adultery and murder was MGM’s, and their star Greta Garbo’s, last silent film.

After the first day’s shooting of scenes making love to her young leading man Lew Ayres, Garbo was anything but silent. She turned to her French director, Jacques Feyder, and said, ‘I wonder if you would mind introducing me to this boy – we have not met.’

Owing to some oversight, 21-year-old Ayres, three years Garbo’s junior, hadn’t been presented to the star before they were required to embark on their passionate affair in front of the camera. From then on, after every love scene, Garbo would look at Ayres and smile, saying, ‘Have we met?’

A year later, with the posters trumpeting ‘Garbo Talks!’, audiences heard the reclusive star speak on screen for the first time in the title role of Anna Christie (1930). Those huskily delivered lines were, ‘Gimme a whisky! Ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.’

SOUNDS RIDICULOUS