CHARLEY BRADY
By 1928 the writing was on the wall for the silent film. Many theatre owners were already preparing for the new era by installing sound equipment in order to satisfy a public that was ready for a new novelty – the talking picture. And it’s surely one of Life’s many ironies that, just as the art of cinema had reached a wonderfully refined height, it was about to be set back some years while the new technology struggled to reach the imagination and fluidity of camera movement that silent films had already reached.
Still, 1928 had some great pleasures yet to give. There was Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command, a powerful study that details the fall of a general in the Imperial Russian Army to his position a decade later... working in America as a film extra.
The ‘man of a thousand faces’, Lon Chaney, had three offerings for picture-goers, including his own personal favourite Laugh, Clown, Laugh; and that marvelous goddess of the era, Gloria Swanson, gave one of her best performances, in Raol Walsh’s Sadie Thompson.
Arguably best of all was one of my personal favourites, Carl Dreyer’s haunting The Passion of Joan of Arc, a film that cannot even be imagined in a world without the face of the French actress Falconetti. A sad figure in many ways, her life appears to have been plagued by mental illness, and much about her remains unknown.
Equally, very little is known concerning the comedian Hector Mann, the figure whose giant shadow is cast over the events of Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions (2002). Still, it is down to the author’s skill that he makes the reader believe completely in his fictional character’s existence.
The end of 1928 seems to mark the point at which Mann – with twelve short films to his credit – is set to break into the big time and take his place next to the likes of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton. However, in the early weeks of January 1929, Hector Mann leaves his house on North Orange Drive, Los Angeles; his car is left in the garage and the clothes in his wardrobe are left untouched. He will never return and gradually even memory of him will be lost.
“By 1932 or 1933, Hector belonged to an extinct universe... The movies talked now, and the flickering dumb shows of the past were forgotten. No more clowns, no more pantomimists, no more pretty flapper girls dancing to the beat of unheard orchestras. They had been dead for just a few years, but already they felt prehistoric, like creatures who had roamed the earth when men still lived in caves.”
Then in the mid-1980s, David Zimmer stumbles across one of Mann’s surviving films, and tracking down the remainder becomes an obsession with him, as he works his way through the deep depression that followed the accidental deaths of his wife and son.
As Zimmer attempts to piece together parts of Mann’s life, The Book of Illusions itself takes some unexpected side trips: there is work to be done on a translation of Chateaubriand’s monumental nineteenth-century memoirs and – startlingly – a journey into the seedy world of live pornographic stage shows. And behind it all is the mystery of why brilliant and accomplished people choose to cease their creativity suddenly: J.D. Salinger, willfully walking away from it all; Harper Lee seemingly happy with one book (but what a book – To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t count Set a Watchman); and most baffling of all, the French genius Arthur Rimbaud, who declared just before his 21st birthday that he would never write another sentence. And he never did. ]
But supposing... just supposing that for all these years Hector Mann has been living the life of a recluse in the New Mexico desert? And even more incredibly... just supposing that for all these years he has still been making movies? Movies that no one will ever see; not even after his death.
Under the Stairs.
A recent Spring Clean of my apartment led to the rediscovery of a ton of stuff I had stored away, yes -- under the stairs -- when moving in. The Book of Illusions was one such item. And I thought it might be fun to go through them in some occasional articles. Well, fun for me anyway!
Next up I’ll be going through my prized collection of old-movie magazines. I’ll start with my favourite, the wonderful Cult Movies, with its blurb that I love so much: WE REMEMBER FORGOTTEN FILMS.
As do we. Until then.
charleybrady@gmail.com