Lonesome

Paul Fejos' (pronounced Fay -yoosh) Lonesome was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. at Universal, shot between February and March in 1928 and, then, shelved until September of 1929.  (The pictures seems to have been withheld to prevent it from competing head-to-head with King Vidor's somewhat similar The Crowd).  By the time the picture was actually released, movies had cautiously embraced sound and so the film was retrofitted with a pre-recorded musical score and sound effects and, also, provided with three short sequences of dialogue -- they account for six minutes of the seventy minute film and seem contrived to demonstrate how stilted and ineffective early dialogue sequences could be; these static scenes of naive chatter are so bad as to seem some kind of joke, possibly the director's protest against the coming tyranny of sound.  The movie, surprisingly, was a box-office hit and very popular in Europe as well.  However, Fejos is an eccentric figure in the history of film.  He abandoned Hollywood for Europe and, later, abandoned the narrative cinema for a career as an anthropologist and documentary film maker working in places like Indonesia, Siam and Peru.  (Fejos was a restless spirit: he made some movies in his native Hungary, claimed to have worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, and spent several years as a lab researcher specializing in biology before traveling to Hollywood to work for a couple seasons with "Uncle" Laemmle and his family at Universal.)  The movie was (poorly) remade as an all-talking feature in 1935 and, in an act of spectacular self-vandalism, the original negative of the film was destroyed by Universal in 1948 with the company's entire silent film archive -- with the exception, apparently, of the perennially popular Phantom of the Opera.  Never quite lost, the movie enjoyed a high reputation among European critics (both Kracauer and Michelangelo Antonioni admired the film) and it was restored by the Eastman House from a French nitrate print in 2012.  

Lonesome is a mash-up of the City Symphony film (lyrical quasi-documentary images of urban existence) and the Everyman slice of life picture -- movies like Vidor's The Crowd and Siodmak and Ulmer's Menschen am Sonntag.  It is shot and edited with great technical elan and represents the height of silent film visual fluidity andpictorial achievement.  The plot is spare, but effective.  A man named Jim rises, gets ready for work (he does some half-assed calisthenics) and rides the subway to his job as a punch-press operator.  A girl named Mary rises as well in her small room without running water or a toilet.  She gets dressed, eats at a cafeteria (while Jim goes to a diner) and, then, works for a half-day as a switchboard operator.  Both Jim and Mary are lonesome as the title shows us.  Both of them reject invitations to go to the beach with their co-workers (all of whom have girl- and boyfriends) and, after work, return to their small airless-seeming apartments.  It's Saturday, July 3 and the eve of a holiday.  Both Jim and Mary see a bandwagon on which African-American musicians are playing "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" and advertising that people should go to the amusement park at the beach.  The first half of the film is an elaborate example of the so-called Kuleshov effect -- parallel editing suggests to us the inevitable:  that is, that the two narrative tracks will merge when the young people inevitably meet.  

Mary and Jim ride a double-decker bus out to Luna Park.  A predatory masher affronts Mary and she threatens him with a deadly-looking hat pin that she wears in a flower on her bodice.  Jim sees Mary and wants to meet her.  He chases her around the crowds at Luna Park and, ultimately, they chat at the beach.  After swimming, they sit together in the sand until it is dark and the amusement park flares with its lights and colors behind them -- an impressive shot involving deep blue tint and bright flashes of red and orange light painted onto the film.  They wander together around the amusement park.  Jim wins a doll for Mary throwing baseballs to knock down  mechanical cats prowling on a simulated city alley fence.  They go into a kind of tunnel of love, "the Honeymoon Ride" pulled into the darkness on a cart by a sad-looking and tiny donkey.  While riding a rollercoaster named "The Jackrabbit Racer", they are separated and, indeed, danger threatens Mary -- the wheel of her wagon sparks into fire.  (This is an amazing effect, a speed-blur of  blood-red flame spinning wildly in the darkness.)  Mary faints from the smoke and fumes and, when Jim tries to reach her, he is dragged away by the cops.  He talks his way out of the predicament, but now has to find Mary among the thousands of people in the amusement park.  They haven't yet exchanged their real names -- Jim has briefly pretended to be a stockmarket tycoon and Mary says she is named "Mary Smith".  Jim can't reconnect with Mary at the chaotic fun fair and, then, there's a thunderstorm with torrential rain.  Both protagonists return to their apartment sad, lonely, and drenching wet.  Jim plays the song to which they danced at the amusement park, Irving Berlin's "Always".  Mary hears the song.  It turns out that they have been living in adjacent apartments all the time and, yet, never met or encountered one another -- such is the indifference of the great city.  There is a final embrace and the film ends.  

As I have said, the first third of the film plays as an example of the Kuleshov effect, enlivened by an tour de force montage of the two workplaces, the switchboard (with superimposed images of people calling one another on the telephone) and the factory where Jim labors at his press.  The images are a cascade of superimpositions with the image gliding right to left and vice-versa to show seamlessly the phone operators and the ballet mechanique of the rotating and lunging machines where Jim works.  (This right to left and vice-versa effect is accomplished by "optical printing" -- the first example of this technique in film history.)  The sequences in the middle of the film are crammed with hundreds of extras all wiggling around frenetically -- everyone is pressed shoulder to shoulder waving their hands in the air, throwing balloons and balls back and forth, frantically embracing and wrestling and pushing and pulling, people spinning in ring-around-the rosy dances, a wild Dionysian display of activity that becomes increasingly oppressive and frenzied as the film progresses.  The crowd scenes take place in incongruous showers of confetti and streamers and make no sense realistically -- it's the kind of ecstatic furor that one sees in paintings by Paul Cadmus, for instance, of crowds at Coney Island and its beaches.  In one scene, Mary loses her antique wedding ring, an heirloom from her mother.  But the lost is found -- a little kid picks up the ring and is playing with it.  The rescue of the ring seems implausible in light of the enormous crowds and the chaos on the beach.  Later, when Jim and Mary consult a spooky fortune-teller, he seems to describe a happy life for Mary with a man who may not be Jim.  This sets up the last third of the film involving Jim's attempt to find Mary who like her ring has gone missing in the nocturnal orgy of the amusement park.  The last part of the movie is abundantly nightmarish and, indeed, seems most similar to the sort of anxiety dreams that everyone has -- I have gone somewhere with someone, but they are now missing and so is my car and how will I ever get back home?  This part of the movie packs a genuine emotional wallop -- we're invested in the characters and want to see them together but how can this possibly happen given the thousands of people milling around in darkness that is further complicated by an immense and torrential downpour with lightning blasting beneath the stylized towers of Manhattan?  The new dimension of sound is invoked to re-connect the characters so that the film can have a happy, if slightly unconvincing ending.  

The Criterion disk containing the movie has an excellent commentary track and Lonesome is continuously interesting and chockful of fabulous special effects.  Ultimately, the movie is impressive but not all that interesting and, probably, noteworthy mostly as an example of one of those rare confluences in which technical innovation and, even, experimental cinema pleased the general movie-going public.  The picture is an antique but worth seeing if you have an interest in film history.