Cinema Year '25: November Discoveries
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler / Public Housing / Splitting Heirs / Streetwalker
Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. November’s discoveries were a robust cross-section of what cinema is for, taking us from the Weimar Republic, to Mexico’s Golden Age, via Chicago’s south side and post-Python Thatcherism. Words by Blaise Radley, Tom de Lancy Green, Ben Flanagan, Kirsty Asher.
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Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922, Germany)
Any film that starts with the line, “You’ve taken cocaine again, Spoerri! You know I don’t tolerate that!” bodes well. When it’s a 1920s two-part crime flick from Fritz Lang, you know you’ve got a banger on your hands. And bang it does, firing straight into one of the titular master criminal’s complex schemes: a shakedown of the stock exchange involving stolen commercial contracts and well-timed market manipulation. As Mabuse buys out the dirt cheap stocks (soon to go sky high once Mabuse reveals his hand), he stands on a counter above a sea of wobbling top hats, imperious to the last. A touch more mystique than today’s crypto rug puller.
At times Dr. Mabuse the Gambler strains against the silent filmmaking format, threaded through with a few too many written clues and dialogues. But when Lang comes to life, experimenting with form and process, the results are electric. See also: one of several hypnotism sequences, in which everything but Mabuse’s head fades into the black, the light colours of his disguise accentuating his stark white glow. The three magic words “Tsi-Nan-Fu” appear everywhere our would-be hypnotisee looks; on his playing cards, or on the table before him, superimposed on every aspect of his vision. As an audience, we too are drawn down the rabbit hole.
Later, Mabuse psychologically overpowers a prestigious Count in front of his wife, forcing him to cheat at cards before carrying her away—not only making a cuckold of him but dragging his good name through the mud. Through Mabuse’s further psychological manipulations, the Count begins to lose his mind, sitting booze-addled and alone at a table surrounded by double-exposed translucent phantoms that sap him of his last remaining sanity. As far as metaphors go for the director as trickster and hypnotist (Mabuse’s later appearance on stage, in which he beckons apparitions from behind the theatre curtain all but confirms this parallel), it’s an oddly cynical one, suggesting that perhaps the illusions of cinema are rooted in a desire to fleece and manipulate. Whether the ultimate triumph of good over evil at the film’s end dispels such notions is hard to say. BR
Public Housing (Frederick Wiseman, 1997, USA)
In programming a series of Frederick Wiseman’s films on the big screen, the BFI has countered their usual hollywood star retrospectives by presenting Londoners an opportunity to engage with an (incomplete but still representative) cross-section of America’s oldest documentarian’s oeuvre, and still one of its most modern.
The October-November bloc collected five ‘institution’ films, three of which (Titicut Follies [1967], High School [1968] and Welfare [1975]) are the earliest works in the programme. Rugged and iconoclastic, their 16mm chiaroscuro carries along a public-access hipness and countercultural disdain for war and poverty: High School and Welfare largely consist of a series of pas de deux between assailant bureaucrats (truancy officers, desk drones) and their prey, benign as separate incidents, but piled high in a juxtapository quagmire of disfunction. These are staunchly negativist, angry films about humanity hamstrung into filing cabinets and KIA telegrams by anti-dialogic public life.
The two films that round out this first bloc, 1986’s Multi-Handicapped and 1997’s Public Housing, showcase Wiseman’s born-again faith in the social fabric, or at least the possibility of one. Reverent and placid, Multi-Handicapped contemplates students at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind as a hushed auditorium might regard a ballerina. Public Housing shuffles around Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing project, ambling in and out of community meetings pregnant with auguries of both self-determination and snake oil. His ambition comes across as modest; but more than any peer or adherent, he aims to browse and sift through the depth and spirit of American public life with a measure of success that makes this ongoing season about the most essential of the current London scene. TDLG
Splitting Heirs (Robert Young, 1993, UK)
Picture it: you are an attendee of the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. You are still digesting the novelistic scope of Farewell My Concubine. David Thewlis’ incessant chatter in Naked rattles around your head. Body Snatchers and Falling Down flaunt the Hollywood production line at its most reactionary, paranoid, and thrilling. Next, you sit down for Splitting Heirs, directed by Robert Young, a British curio journeyman known for the odd Hammer, sex comedy, and for adapting The Worst Witch (1986).
Eric Idle plays Tommy Patel, who grew up in a British-Indian family in Southall. Despite being white and, in the film’s parlance, having no taste for curry, he doesn’t question his heritage. When he discovers his link to the Bournemouth Family dukedom and accompanying fortune, he sets about to knock off the sitting heir: Rick Moranis. It’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) for the post-Thatcher era, from the family tree murder spree down to its storybook voice over. Moranis, whose stardom is ever baffling, embodies the scourge of yanks in London—spouting Yuppie slang, he pratfalls through the city on rollerblades. It’s balanced with a starstruck Idle, whose nervous performance defers to Hollywood hegemony.
Given his history, the Cannes viewer might be desperate to read auteurism into Young, who is nothing if not a British workhorse. Films like Vampire’s Circus have a slight weirdness which always tends to get out of hand, to satisfying ends. His prior TV production, GBH (1991), has an anarchic energy atypical of the period. And here, attempts to titillate—like a young Zeta-Jones kinkily throwing herself upon octogenarian Idle—have a certain sleazy charm. But, caught between British tradition and yankee whizz-bang, it doesn’t capture the easygoing sexual politics that, say, Blake Edwards was achieving at the time.
You rise from your seat at the Théâtre Lumière. Enriched, enlivened, pleased that you saved a ticket fare. The film has been on general release in the states for a month already. BF
Streetwalker (Matilde Landeta, 1951, Mexico)
With Invisible Women’s ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama! Season of Mexican Golden Age currently showing in cinemas across the country,, it was fascinating to witness a primordial telenovela in Matilde Landeta’s Streetwalker. The film concerns itself with Mexican sex workers, particularly Maria (Elda Peralta) who in the opening scene is hit by a car carrying a rich man and his trophy wife, who just happens to be her sister Elena (Miroslava). An incendiary love triangle soon develops when Elena begins an affair with the hawkish Rodolfo, Maria’s pimp (Ernesto Alonsoas), and earnest love is caught in the crossfire of practicality and precarity for women in a deeply patriarchal society.
Landeta experienced an uphill battle to get her films made during the Golden Age (mid-1930s to mid 1950s), and it shows in the production—creaking sets, wobbly takes, iffy edits and montages that gloss over budgetary restrictions. Nevertheless, the film persists in its task of spotlighting working class women and sex workers, all while barrelling towards the inevitable tragic ending of any worthy melodrama. Landeta offers a favourable, compassionate bent to the women, eschewing moralising about sugaring and sex work. When Ruth, Maria’s friend and fellow sex worker, lies on her death bed, Maria and the rest of the working girls keep vigil until she passes. The predictable tart-with-a-heart trope is ousted in how the women support each other as a team, not in one individual being morally superior.
The ending, with both Maria and Rodolpho dead and Elena turfed out on the street by her husband who glibly reveals he knew everything all along, is needlessly cruel as only a melodrama can be. Critics have debated whether or not its ending is supportive of the patriarchy, but I see it as a historiography of sex work. It reflects the tightrope that sex workers and women on the fringes of society have walked through the centuries when it comes to class and financial security, like the courtesans who reached the heights of the social strata only to die penniless. Landeta gives these women flair and dignity in their struggles, and for that I commend her. KA