The Great Movies III

The Criterion DVD offers interviews with three effects experts, including Ray Harryhausen, who discuss the film's techniques. It is especially eye opening to see stills revealing the "hanging matte" technique, which creates a background or completes a composition by suspending a matte painting in front of the camera. The camera's 2-D eye is fooled by the painting into making us see foreground as background. Other techniques are simplicity itself: the genie is made to tower over Abu by using an optical printer to combine a shot of the genie (Rex Ingram) close to the camera, and Abu hundreds of feet away. Both are filmed from a static camera on the same beach.

The use of blue screen may seem primitive compared to today's computer-generated animation, but it has the advantage of using real world subjects. The flying horse, for example, is a real horse, with a real actor mounted on it. The flying carpet is a real carpet, with Abu standing on it. Both the genie and the thief seem real in all of their shots, because they are.

The point here is that all of the effects, supervised by the wizard Lawrence W. Butler, are used to further and deepen the story. Consider the remarkable beauty of several scenes showing magnificent cities climbing hills in the background. The cities may be tinted peach or blue, which makes them all the more fantastical. They are all mattes.

Once on a visit to the Disney Studios, I met the famous matte artist Peter Ellenshaw, who was a young assistant artist on Thief. He told me how his paintings used not only a forced perspective, but such devices as deliberate blurring to create the illusion of depth. When two lovers are standing in a balcony in front of a matte cityscape, it would be a mistake to make the painting in a photorealistic style. Its indistinct qualities make it seem farther away.

Korda, a Hungarian emigre who had earlier run Britain's Denham Studios, was now an independent, powerful in the Mayer, Selznick, or Goldwyn mode. He used his brother Vincent as his art director, his brother Zoltan as a director. The already legendary art director William Cameron Menzies also worked on the film, and is said to have directed some scenes. Together they made a film of breathtaking beauty. It is done so well that it does not date. Never mind that today similar vistas could be painted with CGI. These are so gorgeous that we cannot imagine them being improved.

Korda often employed others from overseas. Veidt (1893-1943) was a famous German silent actor who fled Hitler in 1933, became a British citizen, worked in Hollywood, was a major star. Sabu (1924-63) was born in Mysore, India, and as a boy was a servant for a maharajah. In 1937, he was cast by Robert Flaherty in the title role of the quasi-documentary Elephant Boy, an international hit. He was signed by Korda, for whom he made The Drum (1938), Thief, and the great success Jungle Book (1942). Rex Ingram (1895-1969), the genie, was a well-known African American stage and screen actor who graduated from Northwestern University. He achieved fame in films like Green Pastures and Cabin in the Sky.

The energy centers on the film are clearly supplied by Sabu and Veidt, as a boy bubbling with enthusiasm and innocent guile and a man steeped in bitterness and cruelty. Both performances are perfectly pitched to the needs of the screenplay. The romance between Duprez and Justin, as the princess and Ahmad, is rather bloodless, centering on abstract vows; their greatest passion is shown in the scene where they're bound to opposite walls, and under sentence of death. The same low-flame romance was mirrored in Disney's Aladdin (1992), greatly influenced by both versions of the Thief, combining Abu and Ahmad as Aladdin.

Although the film had so many directors (including Michael Powell, two Kordas, and Menzies), it seems the work of one vision and that must have been Korda's. It remains one of the greatest of fantasy films, on a level with The Wizard of Oz. To see either film is to see the cinema incorporating every technical art learned in the 193os and employing them to create enchanting visions. Today, when dizzying CGI effects, the Queasy-Cam, and a frantic editing pace seem to move films closer to video games, witness the beauty of 7hiefofBagdad and mourn.

There are two numbers in Top Hat where the dancing on the screen reaches such perfection as is attainable. They are by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for "Isn't This a Lovely Day?" and "Cheek to Cheek." Because Astaire believed that movie dance numbers should be shot in unbroken takes that ran as long as possible, what they perform is an achievement in endurance as well as artistry. At a point when many dancers would be gasping for breath, Astaire and Rogers are smiling easily, heedlessly. To watch them is to see hard work elevated to effortless joy: the work of two dancers who know they can do no better than this, and that no one else can do as well.