There’s some buzz surrounding the gimmick for Hardcore Henry, an action flick that
captures the first person chaos of the video game experience. But it’s not the
first movie to make a go of what the kids call “subjective camera.” It’s
generally agreed on that there were two major moments for the technique in
American film, and both of them happened in those heady days of black and
white.
In 1931, director Rouben Mamoulian experimented with first
person during the opening sequence for his remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mamoulian was something of a genius, and
fond of pushing the limits. (It worked out great until his career ended with
back-to-back firings off of Porgy and
Bess and then Cleopatra. Being a
genius is a messy business.)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde starts with leading man Fredric March’s shadow cast on sheet music as
we watch his hands play the organ. When the doctor’s butler enters, the camera-as-your-eyes
swerves to look at him, then quickly returns to the hands. This swerving motion
doesn’t have anything in common with how a human head turns, so it’s a really
disorienting sequence.
Dr. Jekyll moves to the hallway mirror next, where we first
see him through his own eyes as he looks at his reflection and puts on his hat
and cloak. We stay in his perspective for a few minutes, but not the whole
movie. That’s a relief, because there’s a sluggishness to the forward motion of
the camera. Dr. Jekyll seems to be taking very careful steps as he slowly, slowly makes his way out of the house.
(Jsyk, the rest of the movie is fantastic. Once you get to
feast your eyes on March’s performance, it’s one for the ages.)
The decision to use first person does add an intriguing
element to the story of Dr. Jekyll. Are we, the audience, supposed to feel as
vulnerable as he is to his darker nature? Or are we trapped in Jekyll’s vision
of the world – that there is bad within everyone – whether we think it’s true
or not?
For me, as somebody who doesn’t see anything like Fredric
March when I look in my hallway mirror, it makes the character curiously
hollow. There isn’t anything inside
Jekyll. It’s almost as though Hyde becomes inevitable, potion or not, simply because
he’s the one who desires existence.
Henry Jekyll isn’t a relatable man, he’s a man eager to be
possessed by anything that’s willing to take up residence behind his eyes.
It makes the film more eerie than tragic, and even though
it’s a bumpy start, it sets the audience thinking about what they know about
the story they’re about to see and what they might not have thought of. For an
adaptation of a book that had already been successfully brought to the screen
once before, it’s a refreshing idea.
By the by, the earlier version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1920, starred John Barrymore, was
directed by John S. Roberston, and features its own quick moment of subjective camera
in its opening sequence. Dr. Jekyll is at his microscope, and as he looks
through we’re treated to an image of what he’s looking at on his slide. Nowadays,
that’s not such a big deal, but for 1920, that was some ingenious filmmaking.
Rouben Mamoulian said many times that his interest wasn’t in
creating realism in his films, but what he called “visual poetry.” In that
sense, the ominous strangeness of his opening sequence is a success. It really
does feel like the personal, mysterious pull of a poem with no particular
meaning.
From Robert Louis Stevenson to Raymond Chandler and 1947’s The Lady in the Lake, and the first
full-length film done in subjective camera. And it was directed by none other
than the father of Elizabeth “Samantha Stephens” Montgomery! He wasn’t trying
for poetry, though. He was trying to capture the experience of sharing a
narrator’s memories – which is a substantially more elusive goal, and sounds
kind of bonkers.
Robert Montgomery had been a cheerful rom-com star in the
30’s, had gone to war, and come home wanting to make a shift in his career. In
1945, he gave a haunting turn as a PT boat commander in John Ford’s They Were Expendable. During the shoot,
Ford broke his leg, and asked Montgomery to take over while he was recovering.
It went extremely well, and led to Montgomery’s brief career as a director.
He started with an adaptation of The Lady in the Lake, the
fourth of Chandler’s novels featuring private detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe
had made it to the screen before, in The
Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart, and again in Farewell, My Lovely with Dick Powell. General consensus was that
while the films were satisfying in their own right, they were disappointing
adaptations. They lacked the feeling of the novels.
Montgomery’s solution was daring, and also a total mess. Marlowe’s
strength as a first person narrator, he thought, could be captured with a film
from his perspective. Like his physical
perspective. Unfortunately, this totally misses the mark, because the best part
about being in Marlowe’s head was his wry observations and insightful
descriptions, which is why previous films had leaned heavily on narration.
Just prior to release, two breaks were inserted into Lady in the Lake where
Montgomery-as-Marlowe sat at his desk and explained pieces of the story that
couldn’t be captured with the limitations on the camera. This was a major
warning sign that the film wasn’t going to work.
But, of course, that didn’t stop MGM hyping the crap out of
it as the first movie starring… YOU! Like it was some choose your own adventure
book where you got to solve a really boring murder.
There are a lot of unique choices in The Lady in the Lake, including eschewing conventional
orchestration for a choir (the movie takes place at Christmas, and employs
something between a Greek chorus and office carollers), and attempting long,
hyper-real sequences. It’s these unblinking shots that create the most problems.
They force you to notice the theatricality of leading lady Audrey Totter, who
can’t really get up close and personal with Marlowe if he’s a camera that’s far
away enough to capture her costume and all the nifty lighting tricks that are
setting the noir mood.
Totter, along with Leon Ames and Dick Simmons, is stuck as a
talking head with limited range of motion and emotion. Instead of being
visually interesting, it makes the scenes with other characters dull and
repetitive. And it's not like these were bad actors who weren't trying. The deck was really stacked against them.
The sluggishness that plagued Mamoulian wasn’t solved by
Montgomery, either. Marlowe lumbers, vision too high, hands out of place, until
it becomes a way better movie if you just imagine that you’re not a private
detective at all, you’re Lurch from The
Addams Family, and that’s why everyone is standing so far away from you.
When Marlowe stands by mirrors – three times to let us get a
look at our leading man – it feels like his eyes are in the wrong spot. Less
like the fascinating twist of character we suddenly experience with Dr. Jekyll,
and more like the audience is actually his invisible best friend. Or possibly
an imp riding on his shoulder.
There’s one sequence that works wonderfully, though.
Marlowe is making his second visit to a gigolo named Chris
Lavery when he finds the front door unlocked. The steady, careful motions that
make the camera’s view unnatural in other moments gives us a chance to notice
all the little things that are strange and wrong.
Lampshades askew. Two empty glasses on a living room table.
An unmade bed late in the day. The choir starts to vocalize softly. Ominously.
Somewhere, a faucet is running. Marlowe finds that the tap is turned on in the
upstairs bathroom. He swings the door open wider, and there are cracks and holes
in the glass of the shower. Five of them.
Two bullets are lodged in the tiles.
The rest are lodged in Chris Lavery.
The predictability of the discovery is what creates the
suspense. We – the audience, Marlowe, anybody tuning in by chance – all know
that Lavery is dead. We know it as soon as the camera takes us into the house.
But we all have to look at him, to confirm his death, in order to proceed.
There’s no watching someone’s horrified expression, there’s
no hearing it from a secondary character. There’s just the dead man, and our
obligation to the story to see him.
Ultimately, in both Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Lady in
the Lake, it’s the unnaturalness that does the most harm. Everybody watching a movie knows how it feels to
be behind a set of eyeballs, even if we don’t consciously think of it. So all
the little falsehoods that don’t seem wrong or out of place when we’re thinking
of the movie as a movie are glaringly weird when we’re thinking of the movie as
the physical view of a single character.
Since Lady in the Lake,
FPS games and RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout have ironed out a good deal of
how we expect first person to be blocked. Hardcore
Henry will no doubt be benefitting from this progress more than it’ll owe
any debt to Robert Montgomery. But games have something that films lack – the
anticipation of a choice. You choose to how respond in the dialogue wheel or
whether or not you want to cast a spell or hide from that attacking dragon.
That’s what makes them immersive.
So while Hardcore
Henry has probably overcome the Lurch-cam and the Zoolanderesque inability
of its predecessors to turn left, it has a whole new stack of problems to
contend with. Mainly a target audience that’s going to get bored with someone
else calling all the shots.
One day, subjective camera might be legitimized the way 3D
has. But until then, it’s just the latest Smell-O-Vision.
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