At first it seems as though this film, like a Seinfeld episode, is going
to be about nothing, but in an amusing way — about flirtation not
love, suspicion not jealousy, pique not passion. From the start you
just don’t care, because it’s all done with such delicacy and style.

The performers hardly seem to inhabit the same artistic universe as
Pickford, Keaton, Lloyd — the brash, innocent, plastically
explosive world of mainstream Hollywood movies in the silent era.
There’s a languor, a subtlety, a world-weary wittiness in the playing
that contribute to an overall tone which Lubitsch seems to have
imported wholesale from Europe (by way of Chaplin’s A Woman Of Paris) and cast like a spell over his American actors and crew. No collision of aesthetic strategies here, of the sort we see even in some of the greatest Hollywood silent films — this
artistic vision is of a piece, totally assured, astonishingly mature.

And though this vision derives to some degree from literary sources, from
turn-of-the-century European plays and novels, it has been
fundamentally reimagined in visual terms — intertitles are sparse and
virtually irrelevant. Lubitsch’s visual style is not, however, one of
great plastic power — the felicities of it are on a small scale,
restrained and minutely observed:

A flower falls accidentally from the hands of a woman and lands, in close up, at the feet of a hopeful suitor. There is a pause — we sense the suitor looking down at it in wonder — before he picks it up.

A happily married couple are having breakfast — Lubitsch lingers in close up on the egg he’s breaking, the coffee she’s stirring, until they abandon the tasks and embrace . . . off screen.

A woman at an indiscreet garden rendezvous throws off her scarf
seductively and it blows away — we see it land in close-up at the feet
of her indiscreet partner’s wife, somewhere else in the garden, catch
on the foot of the wife’s importunate companion . . . it’s carried
along by him, still in close up, until the wife steps on it, and they
both realize something is amiss.

A straw hat travels about town during the course of one romantically disastrous night, passed along from one lover and would-be lover to another, forgotten, discovered, brandished, claimed.

Gradually, as the tiny missed connections between people accumulate, as the
minute, half-conscious indiscretions gather momentum, as the
unhappiness of Mizzi, the character at the center of the tale, radiates outward and infects all those around her, the movie becomes profound. Inconsequential acts fill the void at the
center of feckless lives and melancholy, incurable because it’s unexamined, creeps into the farce.

When Mizzi, to distract her husband from some incriminating bit of romantic
evidence, embraces him and says, “I need to be loved,” it’s both a ruse
and a true confession — and the look of bemusement and surprise on the
face of her husband, played with miraculous precision by Adolphe
Menjou, is actually heartbreaking. Just for a moment he believes her —
until that darned straw hat turns up once again and his habitual
cynicism is confirmed.

Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this film, a fact that is admitted and
even celebrated in the finale between the “happy” married couple — who
achieve their reconciliation by a double ruse in which each is deceived
and each the deceiver. Only we, the audience, know the whole story. The
suggestion is that the difference between a good marriage and a bad one
is luck, a healthy dose of ignorance, and just a little extra — almost
imperceptible — application of goodwill.

In the end, The Marriage Circle is not about nothing after all — issues of enormous consequence are caught up in its gossamer threads. It’s very great filmmaking and very great art.

When
they arrive in paradise, the little country is in the grip of a
revolution. The gag that propels most of the rest of the comedy is that
Harold can't imagine that anything that happens in the world isn't
taking place for his personal convenience. He fails to notice the
mayhem around him. Paradoxically, this makes him behave heroically —
since he doesn't perceive the jeopardy, he overcomes it easily at every
turn.


One
can read this as an image of American arrogance — what's a little
revolution in a third-world backwater to us? One can read it
simultaneously as a sort of ironic vindication of American optimism, of
a naive Yankee ingenuity. What one can't read it as, in the context of
the story, is genuine heroism. Harold isn't actually triumphing over
danger, since he doesn't see anything as really dangerous — not to
him.


But
eventually things become more complicated and interesting. When he gets
thrown into jail by the insurgents, he finally begins to realize that
something is amiss — he thought they were escorting him to his hotel.
He's locked into a cell with a violent and gigantic maniac, whose
violence is currently exacerbated by a howling toothache. Harold's
refusal to take him seriously as a menace seems to perplex the giant,
and soften him. “Let's escape,” says Harold, with blithe practicality.
They do, and Harold manages to extract the aching tooth — making the
giant his pal for life, and very soon his accomplice in putting down
the revolution and restoring order.


This
is the first stage in Harold's moral rehabilitation — his democratic
solidarity with the outcast giant and his act of simple, practical
kindness towards him get for Harold in return the giant's awesome
strength, which, combined with Harold's wit, makes for an unstoppable
force.





Meanwhile,
Ralston has gotten lost and is hiding out from the insurgents dressed
as a man, a caballero. Somehow this makes Ralston even more vexing,
both to us and to Harold. When their paths cross again Harold is able
to see her, out of the usual nurse's uniform, as a distinct person —
not just as a provider for his needs. All his defenses crumble. “Why
didn't you tell me I was in love with you?” he demands petulantly.
That's the residue of a character he has already started to shed.
Seeing Ralston in danger makes this whole revolution personal for
Harold — his half-conscious or merely practical heroism now becomes
deliberate and important. He is prepared to enter the world fully,
engaged not just as a restorer of order but as a committed lover. He
has grown up.


He and
Ralston and the giant, equal partners now, quickly defeat the insurgent
army and sail off happily for America, where the giant gets a job as a
traffic cop and Harold and Ralston get married. The film ends, sweetly,
with Harold collecting the cop to come and celebrate the birth of his
child.


The
lyricism and romantic conviction of the tale unfold in an unbroken
chain of evolving slapstick incidents which tumble into each other like
the incidents of a dream — perfectly logical until you think about
them for a second. The gags, always ingenious and funny, become
beautiful, too, as they do, for example, in the train sequences of The
General. The girl becomes more than a sidekick or a goal — she
becomes, in fact, the whole motor and point of the story.

At the
beginning of the film, there's a beautiful blue-tinted scene set on the
deck of the steamer taking the party south — a dance lit by strings of
lanterns, with a calm sea rolling along behind them. It's there that we
realize that Ralston is in love with Harold and there that we decide he
ought to be in love with her. It prepares us for a romance — and that
is what we get in the end, in the unlikeliest and loveliest of ways.

Unless you're one yourself it's probably hard to
imagine how wondrous and magical it is for a baseball fan to watch Headin' Home — one of the films on Kino's new silent-era baseball
set.

The film features Babe Ruth looking unbelievably young
and unusually lanky.  The year was 1920 and the Bambino had just been
traded to the Yankees — a year later he would have the most incredible
season any baseball player has ever had and probably ever will have. 
(He hit 59 home runs that year — a recent book estimates that under
modern rules and field dimensions the total would have probably been
101, all with the old “dead ball”.)

Ruth looks remarkably composed in front of the camera,
even in the scenes that call for acting — his minimalist style has
aged very well.  But what's really stunning is just watching him move
— you see a physical grace and ease, an elegant self-possession, that
doesn't always come across in documentary footage of his on-the-field
play.

Roger Angell has suggested that a core appeal of
baseball in the urban America of the early 20th-Century was its aura of
the pastoral — its wide greensward, like a big enclosed meadow, and
its easy rhythms reminding transplanted urban dwellers of their rural
roots.  Headin' Home confirms this insight in a way.  It's conceit is
to construct a fictional biography of Ruth as the product of a small
town and small-town values.  This was a far cry from the Babe's actual
childhood on some of the meaner streets of Baltimore and in an
orphanage, but it represents how America wanted to view its baseball
heroes.

It must have been strange for Ruth to enact the
fantasy youth conjured up for him by the filmmakers — choppin' down
trees, carvin' his own bats, eatin' mom's apple pie and goin' to the
church social — but he looks utterly nonplused by the whole exercise. 
(Ruth
had a delightful and quintessentially American matter-of-fact attitude
to everything.  When asked how he felt about making more money than
Herbert Hoover, the President of the United States, Ruth said, “I had a
better year than Hoover.”)

The film appears to have been shot somewhere in
Upstate New York, and it offers delightful images of small-town America
in 1920, including a wonderful recreation of a local ballgame between
rival small towns. 

The film also incorporates footage of Ruth in action
in an actual big-league game — part of a framing device in which an
old fellow attending the game reminisces about the Babe's youth “back
home” with genial if uninspired cracker-barrel wit.

But it's the physical presence of Ruth himself that
enchants, whatever he happens to be doing — it's like seeing
documentary footage of Achilles engaged in some amateur theatricals or
demonstrating his prowess with a spear . . . documentary footage of a
mythological being.