The Grin of the Dark

The sun is above the house. It's brighter than white – so fierce that the sky is seared colourless. I squeeze my eyes shut and clap a hand over them, and hear a door open ahead of me. 'Finished at last?' Willie says.

I slit my eyes at her bleached image in the kitchen doorway. Today's shorts are even terser, and otherwise she's wearing just a singlet. 'Unless you've got Tubby Tells the Truth,' I say.

'I was thinking, but I'm sure I don't.' She blinks at the amplified groans in the shed. 'Is that me?'

'You,' I say without much sense.

'Not in the movie. I stay out of sight. Is it one of mine?'

'No, it's one of your grandfather's. I take it that's how he ended his career.'

'Those were his last movies, yes. Don't you think they're worth watching?'

I shut the door behind me to protect the films from the heat. Though the door muffles the girl's voice, I have the idea that the air is still vibrating around me, so imperceptibly that I can't be sure. As I make for the house the glare of the sun feels like a spotlight in an interrogation room. 'I think I've seen enough,' I say. 'Maybe I'm not qualified to judge.'

Willie looks more unimpressed than I find appropriate. 'How about you?' I ask as I sidle past her. 'Were you influenced by them?'

'By the way he moves the camera, sure, and the editing. And I try to bring in humour like he did.'

I'm abashed to have observed none of this. Before I can ask her to be more specific she says 'Need a drink?'

'I could certainly see off a coffee.'

She fills a large mug from a percolator and hands it to me, followed by a jug of cream from the refrigerator. 'So was it worth coming so far?'

I'm distracted by the cartoon frieze of fellatio and cunnilingus that encircles the mug. Until I regain control of my thoughts her question seems as uninterpretable as the intertitles in her grandfather's silent films. 'I'm sure it was,' I tell her.

'You don't take notes.'

'I do,' I say and lurch to my feet. 'I've left them.'

'It's okay, he's bringing them.' She opens the door to the heat and the projectionist, who has loaded the tray with my plate and plastic bottle and the clipboard. 'Gracias, Guillermo.'

'Yes, thank you,' I say before discovering that he has spilled drips, presumably from the bottle, on my notes. Scattered words are swollen and distorted, but at least they're comprehensible. I blot them with a blank page while he converses with Willie in Spanish. As he plods giggling out of the room she sits opposite me. 'Gee, you're some messy writer,' she says. 'Can I see what you wrote?'

'Let me send it to you when it's in better shape.'

'Tell me what you thought at least.'

'I wonder if his sense of humour was too much for the public or the studios back then.' Sensing her dissatisfaction, I feel bound to add 'The world could be catching up with him and Tubby too.'

'You can tell anyone that's interested in reissuing them where the movies are.'

'I will. So how long did he carry on making films?'

'He made the stag movies during the war, and then he tried to set up a radio station. It was supposed to just broadcast comedy, but it ended up too weird for the sponsors. Not stuff you'd want to hear late at night, my grandmother Hart used to say. He'd invested everything he owned in it, even his house. The way she told it, it wasn't the loss that killed him so much as not being able to reach the public any more. Mind you, they were divorced by then.'

'He didn't invest the films you've got, or did he?'

'Nobody wanted them. He gave them to her, because she was in quite a few of them. Leonora Bunting.'

She played Capaldi's moll and Chase's wife in Fool for a Day, and a saloon-keeper with a shotgun in Ticklin' Feather. She must have been at least a decade younger than her husband. Are three films quite a few? I haven't decided whether to ask if she appeared in his later work – surely it's an irrational notion – when Willie says 'He couldn't have known she'd get religion.'

'And yet she still kept all the films, even – all of them.'

'Even the horny ones, sure. She was brought up never to junk anything, and she'd been through the Depression too, but I wonder sometimes if there was another reason. My mom said once it was like Leonora was afraid to let them out of her control. I figured she didn't like the idea of people watching them any more.'

I can only conclude that the actress must indeed have performed in her husband's less reputable work. What else makes sense? I've watched more of his films in a single session than very probably anyone else in the world, and the only noticeable effect is to leave me feeling that I dreamed them and have already forgotten parts of them, if all this isn't just a symptom of jet lag. 'You have, though,' I remind Willie.

'Most of them.'

I don't know why that makes me feel so solitary, but my retort sounds accusing. 'Why not all?'

'So I've still got some left to enjoy.' Perhaps she sees I'm dissatisfied, because she adds 'I never really watched any till I persuaded my folks to let me have these. I did see Crazy Capaldi on television one time, but it was missing a whole lot of footage. All the prints you saw were uncut. I believe some weren't ever released that way.'

'Didn't your parents ever try to get them shown?'

'My mom inherited the frugality gene and that's the only reason why we have them. My folks ran a sporting goods store and they used to keep them in back with the guns and ammunition, but I don't believe they had any kind of plan for them. They didn't want me to watch them, only I guess they figured when I started making movies it couldn't do me any more harm.'

I can't quite bring myself to ask whether they're aware of her genre. Instead I say 'Did they know about his wartime work?'

'He worked with Rogers and Astaire, you ought to realise, but he never got a credit. Their director was a friend of his. Orville wrote a whole scene where Ginger's given a drug and she talks crazy stuff on a radio show, and you can see where they cut it because it was too weird.' Willie shakes her head and says 'You're asking did my folks know he made fuck films? I highly doubt it. I didn't till I watched them.'

Before she has said five words her bare knee rests against my trousered one. I withdraw mine as gently as seems polite. 'So what was it your parents didn't want you to watch?'

'Any of Orville's movies. My pop thought there was stuff in them they didn't own up to was how he put it. He and mom only ever saw the release versions of just a few of them, but they even thought some of those were I guess you'd say blasphemous, though they could never pin down how. They weren't as religious as Leonora got, but they were pretty conservative. My mom once said Orville's movies were like propaganda for a world where you couldn't depend on anything and nothing mattered any more. Still, that's what she said about all kinds of movies that were around while I was growing up.'

'I take it you're saying she was mistaken.'

'You'd think so, wouldn't you, when I've turned into the opposite of just about everything she believes in.'

Have I triggered some buried guilt? 'You haven't told me your view of his films.'

'I like them. I admire them. They're a lot of fun. They make me laugh. I don't believe they deserve to be forgotten.'

'They won't be,' I say, which earns me her hand on my knee. 'Anything else?'

'Sometimes I wonder how much he owes to working with your guy.'

'He's not just mine,' I say and use that as a pretext to sit up in my chair, drawing my leg out of reach. 'Do you know what Leonora Bunting thought of them?'

'I understand she blamed your guy for all the problems Orville had with censors and distributors, even on his sound movies after they parted company. She used to say your guy got inside his head.'

'And did what?'

'Left him still trying to make the kind of movie your guy wanted to make.'

'Which was...'

'I don't know exactly, but she thought he wanted to change the world somehow.'

'I thought it was Chaplin who did.'