<i>The Italian Straw Hat</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Italian Straw Hat Shari Kizirian (bio) The Italian Straw Hat; DVD DISTRIBUTED BY Flicker Alley, 2010 The Italian Straw Hat (1927) begins with a bride preparing for her big day amid the perfectly ordinary eccentricities of family. A veil is pinned. A tie needs adjustment. There are struggles with dress shoes not yet broken in. A single glove gets misplaced. Meanwhile, riding his cariole through the Bois de Vincennes, the groom stumbles on a woman in an interlude with a man who is not her husband. When the hat of the title is chewed up by the groom's momentarily idle horse, the plot is set in motion. Later, in the groom's home, which is being prepared to receive the wedding party, restitution is demanded in the form of an identical hat, or else. A figurine is violently smashed on the floor in demonstration. A chase film ensues. Restored under the supervision of David Shepard and released on DVD by Flicker Alley, the movie was assembled primarily from a 35mm English-language negative Shepard had been tracking since the sale of a New York film distributor decades ago. To figure the film's correct speed of nineteen frames per second, Shepard consulted the running time (105 minutes) listed on an original program from the [End Page 118] film's premiere. Missing scenes were pulled from a telecine made of an original print in a private collection in France. Negative was turned into positive, dirt was removed, and jumpy frames were stabilized, and the movie now exists as a high-definition master. Analog artifacts remain in sufficient quantity to attest to its celluloid origins. It is the first complete version of René Clair's penultimate silent work available in the United States. When The Italian Straw Hat finally made it across the Atlantic in 1931, it was cut down to seven reels from eight—one reel apparently too long for American attention spans at the time. The missing scenes restored in this DVD have a higher contrast but do not distract from the pleasure of watching. On subsequent viewings, these differences offer an excellent opportunity to scrutinize a target audience's tolerance for extended comedic touches. In one scene presumably trimmed for length, a pin slips down the bride's dress, and she tries to shimmy it loose. Her continuing discomfort in later frames must have been a mystery to contemporary US audiences denied the specific cause. "They were crazy to cut it," Shepard says. "Every frame matters in a Clair film." The most egregious cut made by US distributors was the elimination of the flashback scene in which the groom's version of the hat-eating incident is acted out by the characters among a painted stage set. It is one of the most whimsical sequences in the film and is a device Clair reused in 1931's Le Million, trapping his bohemian lovers onstage during an opera performance. The film print held by the French Cinémathèque, which screened this past January in Sacramento, California, runs eighty-four minutes, at presumably too fast a speed. It can only be shown with Raymond Alessandrini's score, commissioned in 1986. Shepard tells me that a 16mm print also circulates courtesy of New York's MoMA, its titles written by Iris Barry herself. "Distributors removed the intertitles to avoid paying duty on the extra footage when crossing borders," he says, by way of explaining why the Barry titles appear to have been based on Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel's play, from which Clair adapted his script. The Italian Straw Hat boasts a low number of intertitles for a silent, especially a work adapted from the stage, and the English-language titles were almost completely intact in Shepard's negative. He translated the missing few himself from the French version. These additions are noticeable as the original hand-drawn typeface was impossible to match. That smart quotes are not used in the replacement titles is the only complaint I can muster about the DVD. The Flicker Alley release offers two options for sound tracks: an original score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and piano...