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<i>Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card</i> (review)

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.0.0011

1080-6601

Peter Decherney,

Art History and Market Analysis

Reviewed by: Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card Peter Decherney Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card. Susan Delson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Pp. xix + 251. $27.95 (cloth). Dudley Murphy may have the most disparate body of work in film history. He directed the European avant-garde classic Ballet mécanique (1924), the independently-produced adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1933) starring Paul Robeson, and a dozen or so Hol-lywood films with such titles as Stocks and Blondes (1928) and Confessions of a Co-Ed (1931). Yet Murphy rarely makes appearances in film scholarship. Susan Delson has done a great service by unearthing the details of Murphy’s fascinating career and stitching them together into the aptly titled biography, Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card. During the artistically rich period between the World Wars, Murphy seemed to know everyone in Europe and the U.S. and to turn up at the right place at the right time. A partial list of his collaborators includes Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, George Antheil, Julian Levy, William Faulkner, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, members of the Algonquin Round Table, Ayn Rand, Richard Neutra, and many top Hollywood stars and producers. It is tempting to see him as an itinerant hanger-on, whose intermittent successes really belonged to other artists. But Delson successfully makes the case that Murphy was a unique film artist with a coherent and consistent style. Throughout his career, Murphy strove to find a music of images, whether he was interpreting European avant-garde music in the 1920s, Harlem Renaissance jazz, or popular Tin Pan Alley releases. Delson attributes the long stretches of failures between Murphy’s successes to structural rather than individual reasons. In France, filmmakers like Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, and Germaine Dulac moved smoothly between the avant-garde ciné club circuit and the commercial industry. But in the U.S. there was no place for the marriage of experimental art and commerce that was Murphy’s raison d’être. He was a casualty of a society and system that could not accommodate his desire to find a mass audience for modernist films between the 1920s and 1940s. Murphy’s career touches so many aspects of film and modernism that it should be of interest to a very wide range of readers. He began as an amateur making experimental films in the early 1920s, part of the generation Jan-Christopher Horak has termed the “first film avant-garde.” The first film avant-garde encompassed filmmakers like Robert Florey, Jay Leyda, Mary Ellen Bute, and Jerome Hill, all of whom took up cameras to tell local and personal stories. Murphy’s early experiments drew on classical mythology and theosophy and featured his first and second wives (he had many) as nymphs and goddesses. These youthful experiments found some admirers, and one film, Soul of Cypress (1920), enjoyed a long underground life after sexually explicit scenes were added to it. Delson suggests piquantly that Murphy may have added the scenes himself. Just a few years after making Soul of Cypress, Murphy and dada photographer and filmmaker Man Ray were experimenting with personal pornographic films made with Man Ray’s mistress Kiki of Montparnasse and Murphy’s second wife Katherine Hawley. The real value of these early film experiments was the experience they gave Murphy behind the camera. When he migrated to Europe in the early 1920s after a short stint at the Ufa studios in Germany, Murphy’s film experience put him at the center of the making of the dada classic [End Page 578] Ballet mécanique. The authorship of Ballet mécanique is one of the most disputed in film history. Delson adds much new evidence to the story, and she offers an account that manages to preserve all of the conflicting details as if unraveling an unsolved mystery. It has long been assumed that painter Fernand Léger grabbed too much credit for himself, but Delson diminishes Léger’s role even more. Léger seems to have been brought in only towards the end of the production, to help fund the project already underway. Ezra Pound and George Antheil seem...