Downstairs, Study

 Another text from Recrudescence.

Downstairs, Study

The film begins and we know nothing about it. It dates from 1932 and it's not even a classic. Its star (John Gilbert) is faded, forgotten, dead. The name of the director has the look of a gag (Monta Bell). The voice that says a few words by way of introduction doesn't even say if it's a good, rare or mediocre film. The voice isn't selling anything, doesn't want anything. The voice, in truth, is less interested in the man who could (or should) have directed Downstairs (Erich von Stroheim) than in the one who wanted Downstairs (Irving Thalberg).

If Brion* does such good work on television, it's that he is fundamentally for Thalberg and against Stroheim, for the boss of the factory and against the accursed artist. Brion does not really demand of television to posthumously avenge the cinema "auteurs" but to host, half a century later, the "high-end" factory products dreamed up by the great decision-makers of the era. One would need to compare Thalberg, not to Stroheim, but to those who today hold — in principle — a comparable power. But, when it comes to Bouygues or a Berlusconi, will someone one day write lines about them as vibrant as these (by Godard)? "A director of television thinks at most two hundred films per year. Irving Thalberg was the only man who, every day, thought fifty-two films. The foundation. The founding father. The only son. And history had to go through this: a young body, fragile and beautiful, as described by Scott Fitzgerald, for it to begin to exist: namely, the power of Hollywood: the power of Babylon: a dream factory."

A film about which we knew nothing except that it was just airing, one night, on TV: Downstairs is a lovely "documentary" on this dream factory. In it you see how the factory also produced sketches. Incomplete dreams, half-awake, dreamed in their "broad outlines" and with rare details. Dreams that smell of the grease of the factory, of the star's breath and the master's eye. Once we've understood that Downstairs is more of a "study" than a film, we can watch it in a friendly manner. After all, it's not every day that we use television to calmly study a fragment of ancient cinema.

In Downstairs, a hypothesis is tested. John Gilbert, 37, ex-sex bomb of the silent era (famous for his extremely expressive nostrils, an acting style that appealed to Garbo): can he accede to the spoken word, and from there, to more complex roles? Gilbert plays the role of Karl, a lawless chauffeur who seduces chambermaids and blackmails their mistresses. Karl, at war with everyone, never lets up, and if he obtains meagre results in villainy, if he remains after all a small predator in a small costume, with a smoldering look and raw nerves, it's not his fault. It's John Gilbert's fault, whose muffled voice is revealed and betrayed by the sound recording. It's Albert's fault, the well-meaning domestic, who smashes his head in. It's the fault of the screenplay which doesn't go far enough, and of Thalberg who wanted this kind of storyboard "à la Stroheim, but without Stroheim."

The sketch, nevertheless, has the (austere) quality of the early days of the talkie. In 1932, there isn't yet a ton of music in films, we listen to the radio, to the voices, the surprises of wireless broadcasts. In 1932, we're moving away from Griffith-like social epics or De Mille-like high society dramas. No more classes fascinated to excess by their erotic struggle. In Downstairs, what condemns Karl to mediocrity is that the rich, the "upstairs" people, are just typical and dull bourgeois. You have to see, at the end of the film, how stupefied they are to see their class interests defended by their servant Albert.

John Gilbert died — alcoholic and without illusions — four years after this fatal Downstairs where he tries, with furious energy, to stir up trouble for the other characters of the film. But those are so comfortable in their desires, that all of Karl's undermining work never goes beyond domestic scenes. It's infuriating. As for Monta Bell, a friend of Stroheim and the film's signatory, he films rather well this story which can't quite manage to find its actors; he atomises it into a thousand details and naturalistic inserts where bodies, at certain moments, manage to exist. Flashes of a pair of dusty trousers, a fiery skirt hem, or a treasure hidden in stockings. But in 1932, only the English Hitchcock knew how to play with such things.

* Translator's note: Patrick Brion (the voice in the previous paragraph) was the host of Cinéma de minuit, a late night broadcast of classic films on French television.

First published in Libération on December 20th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.