Free George Clooney by Mark Browning

of Randy Newman (who appears briefly himself as the pianist in the bar fight) sets the mood and tone, but there isperhaps a greater focus on evoking a bygone era (two-piece phones, the
Ladies Home Journal
, custom-made motorbikes, advertising boards) than the dramatic structure of the narrative. The scene where the Bulldogs are sent off on tour allows shots of old cars to race alongside a steam train (which we see later several times passing through the frame obliquely) despite the fact that the situation scarcely merits such grand gestures. A tracking shot (possibly from a truck or another bike) shows us Dodge riding around looking for his team, motivating views of the car lot and stadium at Ennis Park. The sequence of Lexie and Carter in the waiting room frames them nicely against a window so we can admire the train in the background, but it seems designed to draw attention to art and production design, rather than convey anything about the characters. Similarly, it seems odd that Carter and Dodge are shown walking past the back of the hotel and onto a piece of conveniently well-lit railway line to settle their dispute in a fistfight. Exactly what they are fighting over is also unclear: Carter insults Lexie but he is the one who challenges Dodge.
    The visual style of the film reflects the times in which it is set, 1925, just prior to talkies, with a blend of conventional shot/reverse-shot exchanges and other features more evocative of the silent era and films like
Brown of Harvard
(Jack Conway, 1926) and Harold Lloyd playing football in
The Freshman
(Fred C. Newmeyer, 1925). The long shots of the stadium, the men running, a hero raised aloft as a hero, huge crowds, and the sepia tinting feel oddly reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
(1927) in matters of scale and chronology, even if not its aspect as a political parable. Clooney’s acting in the football scenes is exaggerated in the style of silent-era performance, cartoonishly girding his loins before running at a defender, and a cut as he runs straight into the camera before we cut to the defender, who picks him up with his legs still flailing. He is framed in close-up, pinned in a headlock as other players dive on top. In a later game, he is seen tackled from behind, signaled by a melodramatic throwing up of his arms as he runs at the camera. The new giant player they sign from high school predictably responds to being told to hit anyone who comes near the ball carrier by punching two opposition players and then the referee. In context, such acting style is appropriate and sometimes effective. The problem comes in dialogue-based scenes, where such exaggeration seems melodramatic to contemporary audiences.
    The chase through the back of the speakeasy draws explicitly on silent-era traditions as we have the slapstick of slamming a door in the face of chasing Keystone cop-style policemen and then a change of identity by the jump cut to the theft of their uniform. The bird’s-eye-view downthe stairwell juxtaposed with a piano-led score leads into the visual gag of appearing at an open window just above a man contemplating suicide. We have the low-angle point of view of the crowd below, looking up as Dodge persuades Lexie to jump, and creates a diversion with a “Hey look, there’s two more” as their pursuers reach the open window. The later shot of them peeking out from behind an on-street display makes them look as if they are actually inside a shop window, and the following kiss, the only one we see in the whole film, is framed almost in silhouette, back-lit by this same display.
Screwball
    Clooney opts to set his narrative in the past but the audience is still viewing it in the present and are not necessarily trained in reading a genre, which is rarely attempted, deceptively complex, and requires wit and intelligence in both writing and performance. The first meeting of Lexie and Dodge is highly choreographed. He first spies her in a raised