A Weblog of Curious Things.
Media referred to by suffix as follows:
Thursday, 1st June, 2006 into Friday, 2nd June, 2006
300.V: A. Hitchcock: Under Capricorn, 1949, 112'
4th viewing, as article threatens to become a full-length study
Friday, 2nd June, 2006
Saturday, 3rd June, 2006, pm
306.V: A. Asquith: A Cottage on Dartmoor, 1929, silent, 87'00"
A striking study of the murderous gaze, amour fou, the frustrations of boarding-house life and watching movies. The sequence inside the cinema is protracted beyond all need but it will probably gather classic status now the film is back in circulation. Cinema looking at people watching cinema: all we really needed was a German photographer with a bayonet hidden in his tripod.
Sunday, 4th June, 2006
Monday, 5th June, 2006
Tuesday, 6th June, 2006
Wednesday, 7th June, 2006, am
139.V: A. Lewin: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1945, 105'23"
Stately version of the famous Wilde story, celebrated for its deep-focus photography, strong cast and unusual hints of depravity for the date. I gather the depraved portrait took the artist a year to complete and it now hangs in a New York gallery. It must have been the inspiration for Father Jack in Father Ted. Hurd Hatfield has been described as the most beautiful man in movies but he is really just a mask with a good bone structure - he is entirely devoid of sex appeal. It is true that his almost oriental air of inscrutibility is quite well suited to this part and practically no other as he had no career to speak of apart from it. Angela Lansbury is Sybil Vane, given a song which is banal enough to be a genuine Victorian ballad. Elsewhere the score features the more baleful numbers of Chopin's Preludes in their original form as well as with a dark orchestral overlay.
I was puzzled by the scene where the wicked Gray entices Sybil to stay the night with him in order to cruelly reject her when she consents. He is seen as plainly cranking a handle to play the music, as if the piano is a form of pianola. In the next shot he is miming actual playing. Possibly the matting in the cinema obscured this odd anomaly. The film does conjure up some of the authentic Wildean wit and aesthetism; George Sanders is excellent. Yet the film does not greatly add anything, except a curious romance with the painter's daughter to underline the ageing of the characters around Dorian. Possibly the excursion to Selby could have been dispensed with. It is about half an hour too long for the material and though enjoyable it is not, I think, a film with any hidden depths. I quite like the quip that San Francisco is the place where people who disappear are always seen. I wonder if Hitchcock was listening. The bird theme reminds us that he had no monopoly on those horrid things. In the main, it ages well!
Thursday, 8th June, 2006, am
141.V: J. Losey: Eva, 1962, b & w, widescreen, producers' cut, 103'21"
Some good cinematography cannot disguise the fact that this sadomasochistic oddity about a false-Welsh-coal-miner-writer(!) in Venice is horribly - and I mean horribly - endebted to La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura. Cut down by the producers, I gather no copy of the original remains. About an hour of it remains missing but I doubt if that could make anyone care about this self-indulgent mess.
Friday, 9th June, 2006, am
148.V: O. Welles: Citizen Kane, 1941, b & w, 114'09"
148.V: BBC Arena Documentary, 1999: Hitchcock: Reputations, Part II, colour, 59'40"
Virtuosic and impressive but fatally lacking in irony. The picture seems to revel in assembling a portrait from various viewpoints but in the end the flat jig-saw is an appropriate image for all it does. The ultimate boys' toys picture, it is essentially infantile, a fact betrayed by the obsessive low camera angles.
Monday, 12th June, 2006, am
152.V: A. Polonsky: Force of Evil, 1948, b & w, 74'43" + 1'15" intro.
Wednesday, 14th June, 2006, am
136.V: Patrick Boronowski: Commentary on La Plage, colour, 11'57"
Beriou: Tableau d'amour, animation, 1993, colour, 5'24"
Gilles Fournier: Digitalis, animation, 1990, colour, 1'40"
Ramoz & Castagné: L'escamoteur, animation, after Hieronymus Bosch, colour, 1991, 12'49"
Patrick Boromowski: La Plage, animation, colour, 1992, 12'30"
152.V: J- P. Melville: Le Samouraï, colour, widescreen, complete subtitled version, 1967, 100'15"
Saturday, 17th June, 2006, am
120.V: A. Volkov: Casanova, silent, tinted, part-Pathé Colour, 1928, 132'20"
A restored version from 1989 by the UCLA, this includes the Carnival of Venice sequence in Pathé Colour, an advanced sytem of applying tints by creating masks made on an elaborate pantographic system. This is certainly impressive. It is a pity that the film reverts to rather ordinary light tints for the remaining minutes. The icon of sexual libertinism is condemned as sorcerer, feminised at the hands of Catherine the Great and returns to Venice to be the incarnation of the spirit of Freedom. In the end, he leaves a few broken hearts but is allowed to escape on a ship taking with him a new girl from the quayside. The film was independently produced by Russian emigrés and suffered much condemnation and censorship, for a long time being in known in versions reduced to little more than an hour. There is much to enjoy at a technical level but the picaresque story is uninvolving. Certain scenes stand out, notably the extraordinary sequence early on in which Casanova impresses his creditors with a magic display, during which he inflates to several times his size by the aid of a rubber suit.
Sunday, 18th June, 2006, am
299.V: A. Hitchcock: Dial M For Murder, 1954, full screen version, Warnercolour, 100'36"
Tiomkin's bombastic score hardly lets up during the first half of this picture - he borrows a lot from Mussorgsky's Boris, of all things to suggest the Clock Scenes? I had always carelessly assumed that it was made in England but this was a Hollywood movie. Hitchcock appears to be having a private joke with all the Freudean implicatuons of all those keys, handbags and pockets. It's as if he is staging an invisible orgy. The connections with Strangers on a Train are obvious enough. The stick foreshadows the disabilities of Scottie and Jeffries while the weapon in the work basket recalls Under Capricorn. What is it with Grace Kelly and table lamps? This ritual of illumination goes on in Rear Window too. By the end the rattling of those Freudean keys seems deliberately skeletal.
It's not a great favourite but the early part of it is best as Milland's silkily ambiguous seduction of his old college chum is chillingly effective and a curious open anticipation of the same act in more covert form by Elster in Vertigo. The description of Wendice tailing his victim is as obsessive as Scottie tailing Madeleine. The observation of his own wife in the act of betrayal is akin to John Laurie in the 39 Steps and Sam under the balcony in UC. In the end, after all the play with keys, Grace Kelly is released from the death cell and her involuntary Orpheus husband must take her place. Hubbard is a curiously camp policeman, the mother or midwife at least of Kelly's delivery. It has been suggested that Hitchcock knew Cummings's limitations as an actor from Saboteur and chose him to limit the audience's identification with the American lover. It is notable that the viewer has by this time enjoyed the wicked elegance of Wendice so much that they forget what is at stake. In the end it seems to suggest that a wife should not be allowed her own key in a relationship or she will take advantage. Kelly looks dragged through a hedge by the end of it and her resolution to save her breakdown falters when she realises the key was the only thing that saved her from the hangman.
Monday, 19th June, 2006, am
299.V: A. Hitchcock: North By North West, 1959, full screen version, 130'35"
North by North West is an entertainment in which Hitchcock sets out to put an advertising executive through a series of iconic torments. This being Cary Grant, there isn't a moment when he seems in danger of getting more than a little dusty. With its action, romance and tongue-in-cheek it isn't a long way from James Bond. The technology is mainly in the architecture, where the giant sculptural forms of airports, stations, hotels prepare us for the giant heads to come. It has been said that the real theme is the reduction of the ad-man to punter status: he certainly loses his smart suit and is recreated by his intelligence contact in off-the-peg slacks and low shoes. Yet it just seems to underline our hero's stay-pressed, drip-dry, stainless quality. At some point along the way he forgets to ring his mother.
One curious unexpected link is Thornhill's arrival at a cantilevered modernist house all lit up at evening with the hope of taking away a woman who belongs to another man. Soon he will be scaling the balcony and a gun-shot will ring out. Then he will be captured by a wicked servant. In front of Eve as she sits at a coffee-table are three open receptacles, one the ash tray into which his matches will be tossed. Shades of Under Capricorn of all unexpected things. For the love theme, Herrmann shamelessly filched great chunks of Vertigo with another reminiscence of the gutter-clinging mofif at the Rushmore climax.
Essentially a glossy romp, North by North West is an audience-pleaser with effective roller-coaster dynamics.
From the mid fifties, Hitchcock used the new medium television to promote himself as a brand. He succeeded in raising his profile with the general public but he was not afforded the respect he was to achieve later. With familiarity came contempt. It was notably outside the reach of the syndicated television shows, among French big-screen oriented intellectuals that his reputation would be rescued. The producers of the television shows liked to come up with ideas which would push the comedic persona of Hitchcock to the limits and were often surprised at how far he would go. He understood perfectly well that he was packaging himself - sometimes literally, for example in the introduction to The Jar, in which he appeared inside a large bottle, comparing himself to the Geni.
In his sales pitch for the Hitchcock brand, he was entering a competitive arena, not just with other tv shows and personalities but even within his own programmes, where he had to share the limelight with commercial sponsors. These could vary from season to season and might be changed as the shows were syndicated. The intrusion of sponsors' announcements was turned into a part of his dark comedic persona, as he would make disparaging remarks and even on one occasion, aimed a shot-gun at the ad-men.
In North by North West, he created his own glossiest and most commercial product, featuring that most polished of self-created products Cary Grant. He starts out as the arch-manipulator, a Madison Avenue executive, secure in his belief that people enjoy being manipulated. Mistaken for a shell man in the game of espionage, he becomes successively a punter, a consumer and a product wrapped and unwrapped by others. It isn't a profound conception and the story is more a series of episodes than an incremental development of character. Along the way he encounters a house full of imposters, a diplomat whose identity is stolen as a prelude to his murder, a double agent whom he endangers, a policeman whose name he doubts, a minder who redresses him, a frumpish woman who seems to recognize he is Cary Grant as he passes through her bedroom. Somewhere along the route, he forgets to call mother. In fact she disappears from the picture as soon as he meets Eve. In the Finale, he is reduced to a tiny insignificant blot on the monetary façades of Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock wanted to put his inside the mouth of one President but permission was refused. We would, in other words have seen him eaten by the face on the dollar in a neat reversal of the line he uses in the opening scene about gold-wrapped chocolates being like eating money. Then the gift is meant as an apology for his own desertion.
Tuesday, 20th June, 2006, am
161.V: A. Hitchcock: Marnie, 1964, full screen version, from BBC2 transmission, 1999, small cut near end, 124'27"
Panned and scanned print recorded off the BBC many moons ago - well seven years back. The DVD seems to have a slightly bigger picture area but Universal have dumped an inferior full screen print on the UK market. I have never seen this picture properly framed - the excerpts in the documentary suggest it is much better looking than these television-style versions, which are not even open-matte. The BBC version also has the cut in the narrative near the end where the mother tells Marnie bluntly that she had sex as a school-girl for a pull-over. It's only about 20 seconds but the edit is untidy and it does reduce the impact. Oddly, all the lurid scenes with Bruce Dern seemed to be intact.
Tuesday, 20th June, 2006, pm
095.D: The Trouble with Marnie, documentary, 2000, Theatrical Trailer & Gallery, 4'42" + 58'25" etc
Wednesday, 21st June, 2006 am
292.D: A. Hitchcock: The Ring, 1928, b & w, 89'15"
010.D: North by North West, making of, documentary, 2000, 39'24"
010.D: A. Hitchcock: North By North West, 1959, wide screen version, first 72' only
Another viewing of North by North West suggests that it is more than just "audience-pleaser with effective roller-coaster dynamics". While Exchange of Guilt has long been a standard way to analyse Hitchcock's films, N x NW is filled with exchanges which make it one of his more radical works. While it has been said that during the film, Cary Grant undergoes a humbling process which takes him from manipulator of public tastes into becoming a punter, I think the process is more far-reaching. Essentially the whole film is a package notable for its seeming emptiness. Yet it could at least be ackowledged as a picture about added values.
We first hear Grant dictating notes on the hoof to his long-suffering secretary. Among the notes is one to apologise to a woman with a gift of chocolate wrapped to look like money. Next he grabs a cab from a competitor by claiming his secretary is ill, his excuse being that the act will make the man feel good. In the hotel, he is substituted for George Kaplan - or Kaplin - the name seems to change from minute to minute and the name sounding distinctly Jewish reminds us of all those Garfields who began as Garfinkles. At the Townsend residence he meets a false Townsend and is subjected to a form of torture by two luxury products, booze and a Mercedes. Later a false maternal figure will meet his own mother as the events of the night are falsely reconstructed. Kaplan is a name with nothing inside. His own wallet full of ID cards may remind us of Marnie's multiple identities. Even the cop who interviews has a name he does not believe - Emile. The line, "Pay the two dollars" is an old punchline from a vaudeville sketch? At the hotel, the staff think they know him. By the time he meets Eve Kendall, he is assessed as a product himself and packaged like a sardine. He is a hidden person, a non-person, hiding in bathrooms and bunks. Eve assesses him as a better pastime than the book she has started - presumably because she judged it by its cover. Ironically, she sells the trout on the menu to him by excusing it for being, "A little trouty but quite good," as if any such authenticity is a flaw. She refers to the bunk key as the can-opener.
In a famous scene he passes through the hotel room of a frumpish woman and she is clearly delighted to see what? Kaplan? Thornhill? No, Cary Grant surely! He is redressed in anonymous down-market clothes by his minder.
Wednesday 28th into Thursday, 29th June, 2006
305.V: G. Tornatore: Cinema Paradiso, long version, 1989, wide screen, 167'21"
Over sweet and over long, this movie is one that is probably best experienced in its shorter version. Looking on the imdb, I see it has legions of fans. Yet for all its reflexivity, I don't feel it makes the best use of all the classic film excerpts. The affectionate and nostalgic look at Sicilian life is the best section but the film seems to get ever slower as we pass through the rather clichéd love story. It is with some dismay we realise that another fifty minutes is given over to middle-aged regrets. The problem is that I never for a moment felt outside the cinema and there is little subtlety or room for ambiguity here: if we are not convinced by the emoting, there is precious else to do except enjoy the pretty pictures. Not one I shall view again in a hurry.
©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006