John Farrow

I went to MOMA tonight to revisit Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement, and found myself watching John Farrow's 1940 remake instead. (The switch was noted in small print at the bottom of the daily schedule at the front desk, but the ticket seller at MOMA didn't feel the need to warn me. That's pretty much par for the course at MOMA....) As I took in Farrow's somberly lit, solemnly dramatic staging, I thought of how Cukor likes to goose heavy material, getting the actors to yell or jump across the room or do anything to liven the joint up - and then throws in a bit of sleight-of-hand naturalism to trick us into accepting the extravagance as part of the character development.

None of that here...but Farrow is an interesting guy too. It's a mistake to overrate him, and certainly this film isn't one of his career peaks: probably no one could do anything much with this wacko play, and Farrow characteristically accepts the drama at face value, sticking with the arc of dramatic tension instead of exploring subtext.

There was one striking visual motif, though. As the story starts climbing its arc, Farrow produces his first good effect, panning the camera so that a servant enters the room behind Maureen O'Hara, through a door in the middle background of the shot. It's a small moment in itself, but the rejection of the stage-left/stage-right convention couples with the rising tension - I thought of Dreyer, in the way the composition was changed by blocking only. A moment later, O'Hara is jittery at finding the front door open, and the servant has to calm her down, after which she strides into her living room: and Farrow scores big with his third door effect in a row, as the open door through which O'Hara has entered mysteriously closes, and we see for the first time the Adolphe Menjou character, hiding behind the door in long shot as the camera reverse-tracks with O'Hara and loses Menjou.

This proclivity for making people materialize from the center of the frame can be found in other Farrow films: I instantly thought of Ray Milland's uncanny appearances in Alias Nick Beal.

Farrow's camera, which gets very mobile in the late 40s, is only modestly fluid in this film. But I noted one Farrowesque moment where the camera is following Menjou and C. Aubrey Smith out of a room, and Menjou has an angry outburst that momentarily swings him into the distorted foreground of the still-moving camera.

That's all. If you want to check out Farrow, don't use this film: try Five Came Back, You Came Along, Two Years Before the Mast, The Big Clock, or Alias Nick Beal. Thanks to David Thomson, whose entry in A Biographical Dictionary of Film tipped me off to Farrow.