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Synopsis: A young
ventriloquist’s assistant, Mary (Betty Compson), draws
nothing but angry abuse from her partner, the Great Gabbo
(Eric von Stroheim), despite her efforts to show her
affection for him. Things do not improve when, during the
pair’s nightly performance, Mary drops a tray while making
her exit from the stage. Quelling his fury, Gabbo goes on
with his act, which involves his dummy, Otto, singing while
Gabbo smokes and drinks a glass of water. Once off-stage,
Gabbo disgusts the theatre stagehands by launching another
tirade at Mary; a stream of abuse that continues until the
two are in their dressing-room. Mary makes an effort to
stand up for herself, warning Gabbo that his blind egotism
will lead to disaster. In the next dressing-room, another
pair of performers, reluctant auditors of this scene, shake
their heads over Gabbo’s treatment of Mary, while the woman
refers to Gabbo’s habit of speaking to Otto as if the dummy
were alive. Next door, the fight culminates with Mary
threatening to walk out, and Gabbo retorting that he doesn’t
care if she does – only to be left in a state of stunned
dismay when she actually does it. Picking up Otto, Gabbo
stares in a bewildered way out of the dressing-room....then
rebukes Otto for trying to call Mary back. Gabbo continues
to insist that he needs no-one but himself, and that, in any
case, Mary will be back. Otto says quietly that he
doesn’t think so. As Gabbo takes a drink in between bouts of
abusing Mary, Otto begins a heartfelt speech about all the
nice things that Mary did for both of them, even suggesting
that Gabbo may have loved Mary. At this Gabbo erupts,
threatening to smash Otto to pieces if he doesn’t keep
silent. Gazing at himself in the mirror, Gabbo insists that
he will be a success – a great success – and on his own....
Time passes, and Gabbo does indeed become a feted Broadway
star, enjoying his celebrity in nightclubs, where unblinking
waiters set an extra place at his table each night for Otto
and offer their best dishes to the dummy for approval. One
night, amongst all the other amused onlookers, sit Mary and
her new partner, Frank (Donald Douglas), who have a song and
dance act in the same review in which Gabbo has found fame.
Frank speaks scornfully of Gabbo’s unconcealed
self-adoration, but Mary shakes her head sadly, saying that
she pities him. Frank leaves for the theatre, but
Mary stays behind. As Gabbo dines, Otto entertains the crowd
with a song. Suddenly, Gabbo notices Mary....but it is Otto
who asks the waiter to invite her to the table; Otto, too,
who speaks warmly of how much they have missed her. Mary
accepts a lift to the theatre. Frank observes their arrival
and, further angered by the discovery that Gabbo has filled
Mary’s dressing-room with flowers, forbids her to have
anything more to do with him. However, while Gabbo is
performing, Mary goes to his room and arranges everything
just as she used to do. Finding this, Gabbo tells Otto
rapturously that Mary is coming back to them. But Mary,
after another scene with Frank, promises that at the first
opportunity, she will tell Gabbo the truth: that she and
Frank are married....
Comments: First Cobra
Woman. Then Devil Bat’s Daughter. Now The
Great Gabbo. By this time, it would be understandable if
regular visitors to this site – both of them – were
wondering whether I hadn’t rather lost the plot. To these
long-suffering souls I can only say, firstly, that in the
coming weeks I will be making an effort to get things back
on track; secondly, that considering that my recent return
to reviewing “legitimate” genre films gave us The
Amityville Curse, perhaps a little cheating now and then
isn’t such a bad thing; and finally, that although The
Great Gabbo is certainly not a horror film – which is
not to say that numerous individuals might not find it quite
horrifying – it is a film whose historical significance goes
a considerable way towards justifying its inclusion on this
site.
And an
historic film The Great Gabbo certainly is, it being
the first ever example of what has proven to be one of the
horror cinema’s most enduring scenarios, the ventriloquist
with the split personality. As is often the case with
seminal films, however, although the familiar framework is
in place, the story plays out in a manner quite different
from what subsequent experience might lead us to expect.
Instead of the classic situation of a performer’s evil or
deranged side showing itself through his dummy, The Great
Gabbo takes the other tack: it is only when speaking
through Otto that Gabbo is not an arrogant, abusive
swine. The result is a production that can probably be best
described as a romantic melodrama – although truthfully,
The Great Gabbo is singularly difficult to classify.
Released in September of 1929, this is a silent-to-sound
transition film par excellence – which is another way
of saying that its makers tossed a bit of everything into
it, up to and including the kitchen sink, and with very
little regard for the coherence of the finished product. For
those versed in the eccentricities of this era, an
examination of the film’s advertising art (reproduced above
and below) is enough to set the alarm bells ringing. When a
film of this time promoted itself as “The All-Dialog,
Singing, Dancing & Dramatic Spectacle”, or as an “All Dialog
Musical Extravaganza”, whilst simultaneously bragging about
its colour sequences (now sadly lost) and the vast numbers
of its extras, you can bet that only minimal attention was
being paid to the actual screenplay.
In fact,
although the first third of The Great Gabbo manages
to stick to the point in telling the tale of Gabbo and his
fatally self-destructive behaviour, the remaining two-thirds
of this film are probably as close as Hollywood ever got to
producing a Bollywood movie; only instead of periodically
interrupting the film’s action with an inexplicable five
minute song-and-dance number, the makers of The Great
Gabbo chose to serve up an hour of inexplicable
song-and-dance numbers intermittently interrupted by five
minutes or so of the story that we’re actually trying to
follow.
It’s hard
to imagine Eric von Stroheim ever being overshadowed by
anything or anyone, but the production numbers in The
Great Gabbo come awfully close to achieving this
remarkable feat. Of all the various film genres, the musical
is perhaps the one that may best be described as an acquired
taste. There are certainly many people who profess to
dislike this form of cinema – although upon
cross-examination it is often revealed that they really only
dislike a certain kind of musical. (I have a friend who’s
fond of telling me how she can’t stand musicals....and how
her two favourite films are Cabaret and West Side
Story.) That said, if you are ambivalent about
this particular genre, a single viewing of The Great
Gabbo might be enough to turn you into an inveterate
musical hater; while if you’re a musical hater already, that
same viewing could well induce catatonic shock. Everything
here seems to have been structured upon the assumption that
more is better, and that sheer weight of numbers can
compensate for anything. At one point, a simple two-part
love song mutates into an elaborate dance production, with
the singers interrupted by a chorus line that makes up in
extent what it lacks in co-ordination, and which is
interrupted in turn by another chorus line of even
greater dimensions and even less synchronisation, which is
itself interrupted by a small squadron of ballerinas
apparently recruited from a treatment ward for sufferers of
functional limb length discrepancy. And this, mind you, is
what we get when they’re being relatively straightforward.
When they try for “art” we end up with “Caught In The Web Of
Love”, in which female chorines dressed up as insects hang
from a gigantic web, as Mary (in fly costume) and Frank (in
spider costume) perform interpretive dance in front of yet
another (insectoid) chorus line; a sequence highlighted by
what looks alarmingly like a genuine death-defying leap by
Mary, when she throws herself headlong off the web and down
into her partner’s thankfully reliable arms. Yet the musical
number that really lingers when The Great Gabbo is
done is a far simpler one, that performed by Otto for the
edification of his fellow nightclub patrons. The song in
question is known variously as “By Special Request” and as
“The Lollipop Song”, but its real title is “Icky”, and
that’s exactly how you’ll feel after listening to this
bizarre little ditty, which manages the impressive task of
sounding completely salacious while not uttering a single
objectionable word. (“Oh, it makes me sick the way it
smears/And gets all over your hair and ears/And I always
drop my lollipop/And it gets all over icky....”)
(While
we’re on the subject, and in light of the various ties
between Eric von Stroheim and Billy Wilder, I can’t help
wondering whether Marilyn Monroe’s eyebrow-raising lament in
Some Like It Hot, that she’s “always getting the
fuzzy end of the lollipop”, didn’t have its origin here.)
But if you
can make it through The Great Gabbo’s musical
numbers, your reward will be the discovery of a performance
from Eric von Stroheim that is considerably more shaded and
interesting than you might anticipate. This was von
Stroheim’s return to work after the debacle of Queen
Kelly, and he must have come to it with mixed feelings –
or perhaps, in the negative sense, with feelings entirely
unmixed. Von Stroheim’s performance here is, at least up to
a point, a classic example of the stereotypical role upon
which too much of his acting career was wasted – although
there is a certain saving grace in the fact that the film
wryly acknowledges as much, by way of Frank’s objections to
the attentions that Gabbo is paying to Mary: “Kissing your
hand – bowing down – clicking his heels – and all that
imported baloney!” Von Stroheim had been trumpeted as “The
Man You Love To Hate” ever since he tossed a baby out of a
window in 1918’s The Heart Of Humanity, and The
Great Gabbo wastes no time in reminding its audience of
the fact. The film opens with an extended tantrum from Gabbo,
in which he abuses Mary for everything from getting the
temperature of his coffee wrong to her failure to remember
his various superstitions to her interfering with his game
of solitaire. Crisis point is reached when, on top of the
humiliation of having to perform in – ulp! – Paterson,
New Jersey (poor Paterson! – it takes a real pounding
here) – Gabbo’s act is disrupted when Mary drops a tray
while exiting the stage. The tirade that follows starts
backstage and continues in the dressing-room, to the disgust
of its involuntary auditors. (Well – mostly to their
disgust: the couple in the next dressing-room, although
sorry for Mary, seem to regard the ceaseless squabbling of
“the Gabbos”, as they call the pair, as a soap opera enacted
for their entertainment.) It is a point in Gabbo’s favour, I
suppose, that in spite of the unending torrent of verbal
abuse that he pours upon poor Mary’s head, we never get any
sense that he is also physically abusive. Still, the verbal
stuff is quite enough for us, as it finally is for Mary. Her
breaking point is reached when Gabbo responds to her threat
to quit by telling her contemptuously, “I don’t care when
you go or where you go, and the sooner the better!” Of
course, no-one is more shocked than Gabbo when Mary takes
him at his word. His parting shot is that he doesn’t
need anyone, that he will become “the Great Gabbo” without
her; hers, that she was getting along all right as a
singer and a dancer before she met him, and will again.
Two years
later, both prophecies have been fulfilled: “the Great Gabbo”
is the headline act in a hit Broadway review in which Mary
and her new partner, Frank, also have a leading role.
Although success and fame are his, it is evident that the
intervening time alone – alone, that is, except for Otto –
has done Gabbo’s mental state no favours. At the same time,
other, less expected changes in his character have also been
wrought. The first big surprise in The Great Gabbo
comes in an odd little scene between Gabbo and his valet,
Louis, who has inherited some (although not, we sincerely
hope, all) of Mary’s previous duties. Opining that “We all
must have romance”, Gabbo asks Louis whether he has “a
sweetheart”, then goes on to dispense what can only be
friendly advice on the conducting of relationships. This is
a Gabbo we have not seen before, concerned and considerate;
but as to the precise nature of that concern and
consideration, and what advice he sees fit to give, many of
us are none the wiser when he has done, as this exchange is
conducted entirely in German! An interruption comes
when Gabbo is called on-stage, and instantly Gabbo is, so to
speak, himself again, ranting and raving and abusing his
employers, the audience, and of course poor Louis – but this
he does in English. (Von Stroheim’s little joke? Who
knows?) The emotional climax of the film comes when, after
courting her from a distance with flowers and having Otto
sing to her at the nightclub, a chastened Gabbo declares
himself to Mary, expressing his regret for the past and
asking her to return to him.
For the
most part a pedestrian effort, the script of The Great
Gabbo does succeed with its depiction of the impossible
romantic triangle at its centre. The scenes between Mary and
Frank make us acutely aware that Mary has done what a woman
is “supposed” to do, that is, given up on her real but
untenable love and settled for second best with a guy who’s
willing to put a ring on her finger. The sense of “if only”
is still strongly upon her when Gabbo reappears in her life,
however; enough so that she accepts his attentions a little
too willingly, while at the same time treating Frank’s
legitimate objections only as fodder for teasing and
laughter. Consequently, you can blame neither Gabbo for
getting the wrong idea, nor Frank for getting thoroughly
steamed: Mary is guilty here of giving off some distinctly
mixed messages. Accepting at length that her reluctance to
tell Gabbo the whole truth about her circumstances is being
fair neither to him nor to Frank, Mary goes to Gabbo’s
dressing-room to set him straight, only to have him pour his
heart out to her. Mary listens in silence, regret for what
might have been written all over her; and while we see the
cruelty in her letting Gabbo go on, you can’t really condemn
her for succumbing to temptation, and holding her peace as
for the first time, the last time, the only time,
Gabbo emerges from behind Otto, his alter ego, and speaks
honestly of his feelings for her.
The
Great Gabbo is a film full of
blunders, both artistic and technical, but this scene alone
goes a great way towards justifying its existence. This is a
von Stroheim seen occasionally in the silent era, but hardly
ever again in the sound era; a von Stroheim who could be
romantic, tender and humble – and convincingly so.
The upshot is that, rather than sympathising with this
person or that person, the viewer emerges from The Great
Gabbo feeling sorry for all three parties stuck in such
a rotten situation. (We even feel for Frank, who, to be
blunt, seems like rather a prat early on, but who comes very
much into his own as the story progresses.) The other
remarkable thing about this scene is that it lifts The
Great Gabbo into some rarefied company, as one of those
very few films that presents an unpleasant or even violent
relationship, and then bothers to explain it. I mean,
how often do you see a film couple and wonder what on earth
one party to it sees in the other, or why they put up with
being treated like crap? Generally no justification is ever
given (beyond, that is, IITS©). Here,
conversely, we do finally see that Mary was right all along;
that beneath the temper and the selfishness and the conceit,
there was indeed a lonely romantic, a “helpless fool”
needing to be cared for and loved. Alas for both Mary and
Gabbo, this vindication of her two years of suffering comes
too late. Mary must confess that she and Frank are married,
and in love. This abrupt demolishing of the castles he has
been building in the air has exactly the effect on Gabbo
that we might anticipate: in a word, meltdown.
Well – a
kind of meltdown, anyway. In truth, the climax of The
Great Gabbo gives us something less than the really
extravagant von Stroheim explosion that we’ve all been
looking forward to. Instead, having gone nuts in his
dressing-room and tried to “murder” Otto – and having wept
bitterly over the broken little body – Gabbo forces his way
on stage and disrupts the show’s big finale (we can only
feel grateful to him), humiliating himself and getting
sacked for his pains. Prior to this, however, is a sequence
for which anyone who has struggled through the film to this
point will undoubtedly feel a profound appreciation: as
Gabbo parts company with what’s left of his reason, excerpts
from the film’s musical numbers become stuck in his head.
Unable to banish these “visions” from his mind, Gabbo goes
completely insane....
In the
history of the horror movie, The Great Gabbo is
important as the first “deranged ventriloquist” film, but
the relationship between Gabbo and Otto never works as well
as it should. Their act consists primarily of Otto chatting
and singing to the audience while Gabbo eats, drinks or
smokes (all three activities look like the real deal: von
Stroheim probably enjoyed this aspect of the film, at
least). This would be a great act if there were anything
remotely believable about it, but the film makes no real
attempt to convince us that Gabbo is, or even could be,
manipulating the dummy as shown. On the other hand, although
there are plenty of times when Otto seems to be moving and
speaking on his own, there is no sense that the dummy is
“alive”, such as most later ventriloquist film’s give us,
despite what might be going on in Gabbo’s head. These
moments seem to be the result not of intent, but of plain
old careless film-making.
(The other
thing I feel compelled to mention here is that Otto, with
his perpetually raised eyebrows and bulging eyes, is
frickin’ creepy – and even more so once Gabbo has
attacked him, and punched one of his eyes out, or rather,
in. It’s a funny thing about ventriloquist films: the
less creepy the dummy is intended to be, the creepier I
usually find it. I have the same problem with the Child’s
Play films: the original “Good Guy” doll always seemed
scarier to me than Chucky in any of his incarnations.)
Psychologically, the ground is firmer. Having decided, in
his pursuit of fame and fortune, that nice guys finish last,
Gabbo uses Otto as the outlet for all those annoying
emotions and sentiments that, he obviously considers, will
only get in the way as he heads for the top. The
unanticipated side-effect of this is that Gabbo has trapped
himself with a conscience that cannot be silenced – or that,
with a strange, displaced kind of honesty, he will not
silence. For all that he rants and threatens, Gabbo does not
lift a hand as Otto reproves him for his drinking and his
temper, and forces him to face the fact that he loves the
woman he has driven away. “Little Otto, there, is the only
human thing about you,” Mary says sadly, just prior to
walking out. Two years later, when Gabbo steels himself to
ask tentatively, “Did you – miss us?”, she replies, with a
dry double meaning, “I missed Otto.” But in
distinction from the other films of this genre, the transfer
of personality is not complete, nor is Gabbo unable to
control his relationship with Otto. What Gabbo does, he does
voluntarily, as is made clear to us when, at last, he does
speak to Mary as himself and for himself. And as he does so,
the two sides of his personality fuse: once Gabbo has
spoken, Otto never speaks again. The tragedy, of
course, is that all this comes too late. Devastated by
Mary’s rejection, Gabbo does finally become violent – but it
is Otto he attacks, not Mary or Frank. This brief outburst
is both ludicrous and moving. It ends with Gabbo clutching
the shattered remnants of his own better nature, weeping as
his final mental breakdown approaches....
These days
The Great Gabbo strikes the viewer as a film of
missed opportunities. However, it must be kept in mind that
its makers set out to give the audience, not a horror film,
but an “All-Dialog, Singing, Dancing & Dramatic Spectacle”;
to condemn it for not being what it was never meant to be is
hardly fair. For all of the film’s faults, its central
premise was one that struck a nerve – and continues to do so
in one form or another right up to the present time. (By the
time The Simpsons got hold of it, of course, one of
those curious cultural compressions had occurred, giving us
a dummy named “Gabbo”.) The difference between The
Great Gabbo and its descendents lies in the realisation
by later film-makers that by reversing the psychological
basis of the story, they entered upon a realm of true
horror. Again and again over the following decades, up to
and including 2007’s Dead Silence, writers and
directors would return to the same scenario: the
ventriloquist who might or might not be mad; the dummy that
that might or might not be alive.... The various re-workings
of this theme all have their adherents: the Twilight Zone
episode “The Dummy” and its Alfred Hitchcock Presents
counterpart, “The Glass Eye”; the low budget British
production, Devil Doll; the ambitious but overblown
Magic. But for many people, myself included, the
outstanding example is that found within the 1945 British
anthology movie, Dead Of Night, which gives us an
unforgettable performance by Michael Redgrave as the
tormented ventriloquist Maxwell Frere, and a dummy, Hugo
Fitch, who will haunt your nightmares.... This sequence
frightened me half to death the first time I ever saw it,
many years ago, and still gives me cold chills to this very
day. If there is in fact anything scarier than a clown after
midnight – and mind you, I said if – then that one
thing might well be a ventriloquist’s dummy at any
time of day....
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Director:
James
Cruze