"The Copper Bowl" (1928)

George Fielding Eliot wrote a few horror stories but spent most of his career as a military man. He was born in the US, joined the Australian infantry, and fought in the Great War at Gallipoli, Somme, Passchendaele, Arras, and Amiens. This story is a notably sadistic conte cruel, with nothing supernatural or uncanny about it, only extreme human cruelty (even if the logistics are somewhat confusing). I read it when I was 12 and mostly thought it was gross. That was 1967 but I don't remember noticing that the story, written in 1928, is set in Vietnam. Yuan Li is some cruel warlord of the mysterious Orient and requires information from the blond Frenchman, Lieutenant Fournet. He requires it toot-sweet. Because of Fournet's status, Li cannot do much to him. So he rounds up Fournet's girlfriend and tortures her. It's fiendish and complicated and doesn't entirely make sense, involving the bowl in the title inverted and fastened to her abdomen, trapping a live rat, and live charcoals to heat the interior space. (Seems like the coals would fall off but what do I know.) The idea is that the rat gnaws its way out of the overheated conditions. And so it more or less goes, although Fournet makes a break to free her and even holds off Li and his minions for a time—nice try. By sacrificing the girl the story gets to have it both ways, in that the good guys ultimately win but the Oriental mind is shown to be full of stunning fiendish brutality. These seem to be the main takeaways anyway. I'm sure the exotic torture strategy must have been part of making the sale, as it seems to be the main point of this otherwise soporific slow-moving story. It was originally published in Weird Tales, the pulp gathering point for H.P. Lovecraft and his pack and many things weird, but evidently with room for stuff like this too. In present circumstances I know it's too easy to call racism and misogyny and such on these quaint old creaky little thrillers, but certainly in this case I don't see how you can't. The whole inscrutably cruel thing about Asians is hard to miss, and the one who dies is not only the only woman but also a Chinese and French mix who has been consorting with a French officer. Tsk-motherfucking-tsk, as someone once said. Oh yeah, also Fournet is forever calling Li a yellow this or a yellow that. Bypass.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Story not available online.

The Crowd (1928)

USA, 98 minutes

Director: King Vidor

Writers: King Vidor, John V.A. Weaver, Joseph Farnham, Harry Behn

Photography: Henry Sharp

Editor: Hugh Wynn

Cast: James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, Bert Roach, Daniel G. Tomlinson, Dell Hnderson, Lucy Beaumont, Estelle Clark

I've always been confused by the title of this silent feature from director and cowriter King Vidor. On one level it's obvious enough, set in the teeming New York City of the 1920s, with thousands of incidental extras thronging the streets in you-are-there shots documentary style. The picture also throws in homilies along the way about peer pressure and keeping up with the crowd and the problems of getting out of step with the crowd, etc. But if "three's a crowd" then The Crowd is more accurately about "company," as it spends most of its time following the domestic trials of a young couple meeting (antiquated) cute, marrying, and starting out. It's obviously inspired in many ways by Sunrise, which came out the year before, and if The Crowd can't match the inspired heights of F.W. Murnau's stone classic (which not many can) it still has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve.

The most famous might be a complicated model shot that sends us sailing through the window of a skyscraper on a high floor and into an industrialized office-worker space with desks set out in columns and rows like regiments in Triumph of the Will. It's famous because it's so well done, like a magic trick, and thus shows up in any number of nostalgic documentary exercises about silent films and/or the 1920s and/or social realism. Billy Wilder shoplifted elements for some of the most memorable scenes in The Apartment. But The Crowd looks forward much more to The Best Years of Our Lives than Billy Wilder or Leni Riefenstahl, each perhaps equally cynical but in polar opposite ways. The Crowd, by contrast, would not know cynicism if it walked up to it and bit it on the nose.

"The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)

Read story by H.P. Lovecraft online.

H.P. Lovecraft's signature story takes a familiar route for horror fiction, making it about an investigation and certain key documents. Like Dracula or Jekyll & Hyde, it practically gets carried away with the conceit, creating busy thickets of circumstances. During a period of time in late March and early April, an artist is troubled by nightmare visions accompanied by strange hieroglyphics he doesn't understand but transcribes onto a clay bas-relief (because it was convenient?). He then takes this sculpture to a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University, who is also his uncle. Uncle George recognizes the language and images from previous disturbing events in his life, which are then detailed. He also conducts a kind of survey and discovers that many people, especially artists, had similar dreams during that time. Slowly, the consistencies come into focus: the image of a hideous writhing head, the names "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh," and a haunting phrase all the investigators interpret as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." All the problems and pleasures I've had with Lovecraft are well represented here. The language is often stultifying, and the writing strategy hews uncomfortably close to word salad, relying on batteries of fantastic adjectives. Too often it tells rather than shows—even the showing is often a tiresome matter of telling too much detail. And the plotting is way too busy, a more general problem with horror of the past. Yet there's no denying a palpable sense of mounting dread oozing off this. Cthulhu is alien by definition—he is not of this planet, and never has been, though he has been connected with it longer than humanity itself has existed. It is not evil so much as infinitely cold and uncaring about humanity. He views us the way we view vermin. He can't quite stamp us out, but he's trying, and he's very powerful. It's hard to imagine what people thought when they encountered this story in a Weird Tales magazine in 1928. Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine that many even finished it. It's rather long, built out of big fat paragraphs with ponderous long sentences. It seems to do most of its work after the story is read and put away. It stretches the brain with its concepts of time. The hideous visage of Cthulhu is a bit like scenes from the 1933 King Kong movie, overdetermined yet vivid enough and redundant enough to get by the disbelief filters. Lovecraft's universe is vast, cold, and mostly empty, which isn't far from reality. The fact that there's a giant writhing octopus-head that means us no particular good lurking about the galaxies is unnerving in surprisingly penetrating ways.

The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

"The Third Prize" (1928)

Story by A.E. Coppard not available online.

A.E. Coppard's story is a kind of morality tale with an ironic twist—which isn't that ironic, or even much of a twist, at least not to today's cynics. Two young Britons are both "very fond of foot-racing." During an August bank holiday they travel to a town that is holding races as part of a larger festival. They pick up a couple of chicks. In the one-mile race, one of the men, George Robins, wins third prize—a sovereign. When he goes to collect he finds there has been a clerical error, and another man is listed as the winner. George first claims he is that man and collects the sovereign. After a little while he goes back and sets the record straight, upon which he is awarded another sovereign, with apologies. His friend is unhappy about this deception, seeing it as a character failing, but the girls are impressed. Shortly after that they see a blind man playing music for money in the streets. A shady character has stepped forward to help him. George hands off one of the sovereigns to the shady character, intending it for the blind man. The girls are even more impressed now, and if his friend still has misgivings, at least George seems to feel he has set any sin to rights. Meanwhile, the shady character pockets the sovereign and doesn't give it to the blind man. The end. Though not even a century old, the language of this story is dense and antiquated, often dancing around its points, sometimes barely making them even indirectly. Parsing is required, in other words. This one tried my patience, to get to my point. What was intended as color—and may have read that way, and may still to some—feels much more like caricature, with an air of condescension. It's hard to make out much beyond good old irredeemable human depravity, rendered lightly as joke, though I saw some summaries that talked about the ins and outs of redemption and intentionality, so heads up, if you're into redemption and intentionality scenarios. But for me it's a couple of guys go to the carnival, have some harmless adventures, and come home again, no harm no foul. I'm not sure I even understand why this story exists, let alone what it's doing in an anthology of short story masterpieces edited by Robert Penn Warren. Is it really the color?

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

La passion de Jeanne d'Arc, France, 82 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Carl Th. Dreyer, Joseph Delteil
Photography: Rudolph Mate
Editors: Marguerite Beauge, Carl Th. Dreyer
Cast: Maria Falconetti, Eugène Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean d'Yd, Louis Ravet

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of those films with a history notably beset by exceptional troubles, all too easily raising fatuous speculation on God's will. Though it did not suffer the production setbacks of, say, The Exorcist, once Joan of Arc was in the can it encountered a remarkable series of problems. In fact, in the end it was never given many public screenings at all. Vociferous objections came almost immediately from French authorities, British censors, the Catholic Church, and elsewhere, all of whom had a stake in the way the story was told, each with an agenda based on thin-skinned self-interest more than anything else. (On the changes demanded by the Catholic Church, for example, one historian of the film has written that they left only "an annoying, Catholic film in which the Rouen tribunal had become almost sympathetic.")

Then a fire destroyed the original negative. Director Dreyer painstakingly reassembled his film from second takes, deeply disappointed at the overall inferiority of this second version, though others argue there is not that much difference. But the second negative soon after burned in a fire too. The Passion of Joan of Arc thus languished in gray obscurity for decades, as prints of it were found and bowdlerized and otherwise revised to various ends, all of which only increased Dreyer's despair. He fought them but went to his death in 1968 thinking his early masterpiece was little more than a lost cause and footnote to film history.

But expect a miracle, right?