The 39 Steps

I watched Hitchcock's The 39 Steps again a couple of nights ago. It was even better than I remembered, full of typical Hitchcock moments - comedy in the midst of suspense - and beautifully cast.

I watched it in part to check it against the play, The 39 Steps, which the Fortune Theatre here in Dunedin has just presented. Supposedly this stage version uses every bit of dialogue in the movie's script. Perhaps the Wikipedia description is closer to the truth:

The play's concept calls for the entirety of the 1935 adventure film The 39 Steps to be performed nearly verbatim onstage, but with a cast of four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress plays the three women whom he has romantic entanglements with, and two other actors play every other character in the show: heroes, villains, men, women, children and even the occasional inanimate object. This often requires lighting fast quick changes and occasionally for them to play multiple characters at once. Thus the film's serious spy story is played mainly for laughs, and the script is full of allusions to (and puns on the titles of) other Alfred Hitchcock films, including Rear Window, Psycho and North by Northwest.

Note the use of the words, 'nearly verbatim.' The movie has more dialogue overall, mainly because there are several crowd scenes. What the play does is take the scenes where there are fewer characters, for the most part, and hang its 'played mainly for laughs' production on this. It also adds occasional lines. Furthermore it takes the lines from the original script and overdoes them to such a degree that every line is milked for any possibility of a laugh. You have to see the thing to understand how this can be done, but, in general, it is done. Furthermore lines are elasticated hugely in order to fill them with all manner of business. The result is a two-hour play extended out from a ninety-minute movie.

It wasn't just the Fortune production that was done like this; this is the norm for all productions - UK, Broadway, wherever.

Now don't get me wrong - for the most part I enjoyed the play, but (there's always a 'but' with me) many of the laughs are the result of a nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach. In other words, the audience is constantly pushed to see the humour, however weak it may be. And by the second act I was beginning to tire of this overdone approach to comedy. Comedy doesn't need to be drummed up; is something is funny the audience will laugh. There was plenty of rapid change stuff that was funny in itself; there were lots of daft ideas that were visually funny, and there were even some subtle moments.

Hitchcock set out to make a comedy thriller - it's typical of the British thrillers, for the most part, made at a time when Hitch was in his prime. And it's a precurser to the likes of North by Northwest, made during Hitch's American period. Hence the movie has Robert Donat (as Richard Hannay) and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed to each other for a chunk of the movie; this creates all manner of humorous moments. And there are several excellent characters who are simply funny in themselves (compared to John Laurie and Peggy Ashcroft, who have the most tense scene in the movie, and play it straight). Even Lucie Mannheim, as the spy who appears early in the story, has several charmingly funny lines.

So there was plenty of humour in the story to start with. The stage version is never content with any of this; it dredges humour out of everything, which leaves the piece with no breathing space, and nothing in the way of a suspense.

However, on top of all this, the Fortune theatre production had Patrick Davies as one of the two actors who play nearly every part between them (except the three main women's roles). Davies is a brilliantly physical actor. There's one moment where he does something straight out of the ministry of silly walks - a movement that would cripple most people in two minutes. But as the play goes on, Davies almost seems to take over. His Scots hotelkeeper's wife was a shrill noise, like someone in need of a colon cleanse - the lines were invariably lost under the shrieking. His softly spoken political speaker mouthed absolutely nothing for about two solid minutes - some people, including a couple of my friends, found this hysterically funny. I just wanted him to get on with the play and stop hogging the limelight. And when he's playing the Professor at the end of the play, and is shot, he becomes a marionette, quite unable to lie down and die. I found this embarrassing, to be honest. It unbalanced the play.

All this griping aside, the play had huge energy, the cast likewise, and again and again it showed how it's possible on a stage with almost no scenery, to conjure up all manner of places, rooms and situations. (Incidentally, the Fortune production actually had a cast of six: two women doubled as stage crew and played a few tiny roles. Yet Wikipedia says the cast consists of just four actors.)

Alice in Wonderland

Before I went to see Alice in Wonderland, yesterday, a friend told me that Johnny Depp had modelled his 'look' on Elijah Wood, particuarly the eyes (in the movie, Depp seems to have these permanently wide open). If he hadn't mentioned it, I never would have given it a thought. To me, Depp just plays yet another of his eccentric characters, and whether he's based it on someone else's persona or not hardly seems to matter.

We had the pleasure of watching the movie in 3D, which certainly gave it an extra touch of extravagance. Without that, I'm not sure what I would have thought of the movie. It's overstated in a typically Tim Burton way: everything is extreme, and it's full of extraneous detail that even with 3D you don't have time to catch up with. And the characters, which start out as eccentric anyway, are heightened in this regard by all the possibility of modern CGI.

Thus Helena Bonham Carter (the Red Queen) is not only smaller than normal, but also has a larger head. Crispin Glover (who was, of course, the inept father in the Back to the Future series) here plays a full-blooded villain, whose size is just a little out of sync with the Red Queen's. Anne Hathaway is painfully beautiful, almost a mockery of herself, and yet still plays against her usual naive, sweet screen personality. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter really is mad; but in this world that's hardly noticeable.

The film opens with Alice as a six-year-old, being assured by her father (played by New Zealander Marton Csokas, who suddenly has a bunch of movies in the pipeline after seeming to be invisible for two or three years) that she isn't mad having nightmares - the whole world is mad. Eleven years later and Alice is due to be engaged to a nauseous Lord, and is surrounded by poncy English nobility. She breaks free of this unpleasant crowd, falls down a hole and into Wonderland, where there's some dispute as to whether she really is Alice, since she doesn't seem to remember anything about the place. (Shades of Hook.)

All the old characters are there, and possibly some new ones. I'm not au fait enough with the Lewis Carroll stories to be sure whether everyone who appears here is in the books. The Jabberwocky turns up as the Red Queen's 'champion' for a major fight with Alice at the end, something that isn't strictly Carollian (an unnamed boy despatches the beast in the second Alice book), and various other liberties are taken. Of course, it is eleven years later, so no doubt things will have changed. However, looking at synopses of the original stories, it appears that Burton and his scriptwriter have pulled in characters from both the books without regard to their original places in the stories.

Mia Wasikowska doesn't make the most exciting Alice. She's a bit pale and wan, and lacking in energy somehow. Even her fight with the Jabberwocky at the end is rather tame, and it's more than a little surprising that she manages to overcome him. And when she returns to real life, much more sure about herself, she still seems as though she's missing something in the way of strength. I found her the least believable part of the movie altogether, which is rather ironic.

And CGI has come so far that we almost fail to be impressed with what happens in movies now. Avatar (which I saw in 2D) managed to impress because it viewed the world in an original way. Alice doesn't quite do that. The story is fairly tame (and there are some odd holes in it), and while the CGI really is superb, it's mostly things that we've seen before....except that it was in 3D, which made it rather more exciting. (The sense of being able to reach out and touch the butterfly that hovers in front of you right towards the end is extraordinary.)

We're becoming blase about what can be done in the movies, regrettably. I saw Fantastic Mr Fox not long ago, and it was wonderful....yet.... How can we capture that sense of freshness when we come to the movies now? We've been spoiled silly by what's possible.