Distorting the facts

Back in 2015 I wrote about the play, Souvenir, which focused on the performances and life of Florence Foster Jenkins. In 2016, Meryl Streep starred in a movie about the same person, which we saw around the time it came out, and then watched again on Netflix last night.

I remember feeling somewhat disappointed in the movie, which also stars Hugh Grant as her husband, and Simon Helberg as Cosmé McMoon, the pianist who accompanied her in her later years. 

We discover that her husband, adoring of her, and deeply in love with her, also had an apartment (paid for by Jenkins) where he kept his 'girlfriend.' In fact, he and Jenkins were never officially married: Jenkins may not have been divorced from her first husband, the one who gave her syphilis. 

A number of things in the movie are based on fact, but equally there are curious distortions. Hugh Grant's character, St Clair Bayfield, is seen as a failed and fairly amateur actor. In fact, he had a long career in the theatre, and was plainly able to act much better than is shown in the movie. 

It's hinted fairly strongly in the movie that McMoon is gay, though this may not have been the case. Helberg camps the character up with constant simpers, quirky looks, and a generally effeminate air. I much preferred the down-to-earth version of Cosmé that appeared in the theatre production. 

Meryl Streep, as always, is brilliant, performing the awful singing with ease (presuming it is her voice, as Helberg seems to indicate in an interview), and she creates a character who is seemingly unaware of her awfulness while being wonderfully generous to those around her - and plainly needing all the love that she can get. 

In the last week we also watched The Imitation Game, supposedly a story about Alan Turing and the breaking of the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, and supposedly based on true events. Yes, there are a few true things scattered about, some actual persons portrayed, but for the most part this is a script based on the idea that it's good to wrap propaganda up in dramatic form, using fine actors to play the main parts and then forget about whether it actually connects with substantiated history. 

Thus Turing's difference (both his homosexuality and his genius) is made a basis for a theme about not bullying people who are different (though Turing is portrayed as even more of an arrogant bully in some scenes, as a man with no regard for the concerns of others). The feminist angle comes in by warping the history of a highly skilled person, Joan Clarke, proving, for the feminists, that women can be just as clever as men. In fact more clever, because she solves the crossword in six minutes instead of the required eight. The fact that she was already at Bletchley before Turing arrived is ignored. 

(The same sort of approach was taken with Hidden Figures in which the black women were treated in the movie as astonishing the male characters - all white, of course. This doesn't align with the facts that appear in the book the movie was made from. But it pleased the female audiences, who cheered at the men being 'put in their place' when we saw it at the movies.)

Cumberbatch adds another of his people-don't-understand-me performances to his CV (it's frequently on a par with his arrogant Sherlock Holmes) and while it's been highly regarded in some circles, he presents a character who isn't any easier to warm to than Holmes was. Quite honestly, when Keira Knightly slaps him, you think, About time. 

Reading kids' books

I read kids' books quite often, and by kids' books I don't mean those aimed at any particular age group but ones ranging from delightful full-colour picture books to books that just come in just under the young adults' age range. I've read some YA books too, but usually they're romances or gloomy apocalyptic things, and I'm not so strung out about those.

I had a real go at Diana Wynne Jones' books in 2011, when I read eight of them (they vary in quality but are always imaginative). I read a couple more earlier this year. Her books are in the same kind of fantasy genre as mine, though of course, so far, she's been considerably more successful than me in terms of a wide readership and lots of sales.

However, in the last month I've read a couple of other books I'd like to mention. The first is Speed. Speed is a word with several meanings of course, and Grant uses that ambiguity in her title and in her book. But it's also something of a speed read, because she piles on the angst and the action. I'm not sure if anyone's yet invented an equivalent of the phrase 'page-turner' for e-books, but whatever the correct phrase is, it applies to this book, which I read on my Kindle.

It's probably aimed at young teens: the hero was around 14, if I remember rightly, and proved to be a pretty tough character by the time he'd got himself through dealing with his parents dying and lying policemen and houses burning down. This book is by the Kiwi writer, Dawn Grant (although she writes under D C Grant). It's the first in a series and I wrote a brief review on Goodreads: The book races along at a great pace with the young hero gradually getting himself deeper and deeper into difficulties. Along the way there's a good deal about coping with grief as well as making the right decisions even if they may cost you your life. 

The second book was one I finished today. It starts off a bit more slowly than Speed, is aimed at a slightly younger age range, and is written by someone living here in my home town, someone I haven't met face-to-face but have corresponded on email with. I'd written to her husband on a few occasions - he writes a column in the ODT called WordWays - and it was he who introduced me to his wife and told me about her book. 

This author is called Beatrice Hale, and she's written an exciting adventure called Ice Escape. (You can see my review on Goodreads here.)  This book has two young narrators, both boys, and while initially it's a bit of a puzzle as to why the second narrator is there, it soon becomes evident that the two lads' lives will connect. 

The story is about a family embarking on a long flight together, on a flying boat. It's set in the 1920s and their adventure is meant to take them around the world. Of course, this being an adventure story things don't quite according to plan. The characters are straightforwardly-drawn, and the adventure itself is exciting enough to make you keep turning pages again. But the interesting thing is that a great deal of information about flying, and living in a perilous situation, and being rescued, and working on a fishing boat is included. There's no sense that it's there just because the writer thinks it's interesting, but because it's integral to the story. 

I probably won't write a thriller like Speed or an adventure story like Ice Escape. But each book you read shows you better how to write your own - quite apart from the sheer enjoyment involved in sharing the adventures of fictional characters. As poet Billy Collins writes in One Life to Live: 
...this is the only life I have and I never step out of it, 
except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel...

Video splurge

Had a bit of a video splurge yesterday. Didn't start out that way, but circumstances just brought it about. I decided to see what Hitchcock films were available on You Tube, and found Notorious, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. It's one of Hitchcock's less action-packed films, relying on the subtle interplay of character, and has only one really big scene: a party hosted by Claude Rains, a Nazi-sympathizer living in Brazil after the war. The characters are vividly drawn, and the dialogue full of sub-text: the love story that underpins the suspense is the main focus of the movie in many ways. I've seen it a couple of times before, but had forgotten some of the story. It stands up well after fifty-plus years.

After tea my wife and I carried on watching the Australian legal series, Janet King, which is apparently a spin-off from some other earlier series about a legal firm. We're up to about episode five or six, and I think I haven't seen a series that's so full of improbable legal stuff in a long time. Because the Attorney General seems to be able to command that people do what they're told, for her own political reasons, the Department of Public Prosecutions (where most of the story is focused) jump and go through ridiculous hoops trying to prove cases that are unprovable. Added to that is the detective and his boss who seem to think that building a murder case on the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence is good police work, and you have a series that while it's full of solid characters requires them to do absurd things. The police seem not too fazed about producing witnesses who tell lies; the legal team seem careless about ethics, and so on. If it wasn't actually interesting, it would have been dumped by now. The main character is a lesbian, living with another woman and their twin children, who are toddlers. The lesbian angle seems to be just that: another hook to throw odd bits of storyline onto.

In spite of all this we actually watched two episodes last night, which goes to show how something that's well done can get away with plot-hole murder.

Puccini

Finally, after having written in one of my other blogs about a production of Puccini's opera, Gianni Schicchi, that I was involved in when I was at the Opera Centre in London in 1969, I decided to see if that was on You Tube too. It is, in at least three versions, and thankfully I picked the best-directed one to watch. The other two were okay (I checked out a minute or two of each) but the 2004 Paris version directed by Laurent Pelly, containing a very mixed European cast, was the one that I stuck with.

The opera, which runs for just on an hour, is a total ensemble piece, with a cast of fifteen or sixteen, nine of whom are on stage the entire time. There's no chorus, just larger and smaller roles (one lasting about two minutes). It's a piece of nonsense about a man, Buoso, who's died and left a very unsatisfactory will - that is, he hasn't left anything of substance to his relatives. They plot to bring in the cunning neighbour, Schicchi, and he, being even more cunning than they've thought, winds up replacing the original will with his own version, in which the bulk of the proceeds go to him.

The cast played the thing in a style verging on the comic grotesque, and there were even some surreal moments (a kind of ballet involving the moving around of the bed which features prominently). It's a lot of fun, and requires the main singers to do a huge amount of work. Those who are on stage all the time have to keep up particular characters constantly: there's no let up. Very enjoyable, even if it was sung in the original Italian with French subtitles....some of which I understood and some of which I probably misunderstood.

Sense and Sensibility

I was reading somewhere the other day that Jane Austen's book, Sense and Sensibility presents two contrasting characters, the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who exemplify the two words in the title of the book: Elinor seems to be all 'sense' - that is, sensible - Marianne is all sensibility - that is, she lets her emotions control her life, and can't see how Elinor can be so calm in the face of heartbreak.   But the sisters also exemplify two modes of philosophical thought: whether it's better to look at life sensibly, calmly, almost dispassionately, or whether one should be utterly aware, full of response to everything that happens.

In the book the sisters each learn to appreciate the other's point of view, in due course, but not before both of them have suffered considerable heartbreak and hurt.   I watched the 1995 film version of the book again last night (somehow it's free on You Tube - I suspect it shouldn't be) and the two actors in the movie, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, portray these two approaches to life admirably.  You feel for Marianne (Winslet) in her overwhelming pain when her lover ups and leaves, but equally you feel for Elinor who must not only harbour an unspoken love for Edward Ferrars, but find herself having to keep secret his longstanding engagement to another woman who takes her into her trust.  Marianne can't understand how Elinor can keep her pain to herself; only towards the end of the film does Elinor bitterly tell her what a quandary she's been put into, and only in the last scene is she finally able to give vent to her feelings when she discovers that her lover hasn't married the other woman after all, and that he's free to marry her.  This moment in the movie, when all the pent-up anguish bursts from Thompson in a moment she can't control, is one of the best acting scenes you'll find in the cinema - you see her wanting to weep for joy, and yet she has to deal with getting rid of all the accumulated anguish first.

I saw Ang Lee's movie of Sense and Sensibility back when it first came out in 1995, and I haven't forgotten how effective it was: the look of the movie is wonderful, with the weather playing an important part in connecting the characters' feelings, and the wonderful sense of the period.  The cast are uniformly good: Emma Thompson had written the script, so she knew the piece inside out and plays her role wonderfully; Winslet is the emotional Marianne and superbly delineates the quickly changing emotions that this character is subject to.  Alan Rickman is Colonel Brandon, a man with a gloomy past but also a man of considerable integrity who finds himself having to play second fiddle to a known libertine (played with great energy by Greg Wise).  Hugh Grant is a revelation in this movie: if you've ever thought he was a lightweight actor, check out his performance here.  It's not a large part - he appears early in the movie and then vanishes for a good deal of the time until he comes into his own at the end, but every scene and every gesture and expression count.

And there are a bunch of character roles: Tom Wilkinson for about a minute at the beginning; the twit of a son from The Vicar of Dibley in a wonderful role as his son, a henpecked husband; his fearsomely dominating wife who thinks she's doing the Family some good; Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton as a couple - he can't bear her constant prattle and makes sarcastic remarks about her at every point, and just when you think he's a hard-hearted man he turns out to be warm and sympathetic to those who are prepared to see through his hardness.  Staunton has a great moment when, after hearing there may be a threat to her baby's health, she turns in a moment from her constant prattling to a scream that pierces the heart as she races to move the baby from the house.  Imogen Stubbs plays Hugh Grant's supposed fiancée, a somewhat devious character who gets an awful comeuppance at one point from her future sister-in-law: one moment there's utter quiet on the screen in a close-up of the two women's heads, next moment the camera cuts to a wide shot and there's an explosion as the sister-in-law throws the work she's been doing in the air and simultaneously thrusts Stubbs to the floor with violent anger.  Then there are Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs as in-laws who apparently live in the same house, (they're presumably widower and widow) have the same interests, have the same all-encompassing generosity, fill the screen with boisterous energy (always accompanied by half a dozen dogs) and 'manage' other people.  Yes, they'd be annoying in real life, but they're a wonderful couple in the movie.

I had a copy of the script of this film and the diary that Thompson kept as she was writing it and then involved in the production.  It's as fascinating as the movie and Thompson plainly had a deep love for the book and wanted it translated to the screen in the best possible manner.  In this, I think, she's been completely successful.  I don't know how much the film deviates from the book - I suspect it's only in dramatic form but certainly not in spirit - and my suspicion is that Jane Austen herself would have been pleased with it.  It's a classic.

Favourite Hitchcocks

The Guardian has an article in one of the latest papers asking, What's Your Favourite Hitchcock?  The writer lists several in his article and then the commenters take over.   It's impossible to say any one movie by Hitchcock is your favourite. A whole range of them have things you're glad he did, even if there are things you wish he hadn't. So here are some comments about a big bunch of them that I've enjoyed - or haven't.

The ones I'm not desperate to see again, first.

I've never been able to go back to Pscyho or Frenzy because I was scared out of my wits by the first, as a teenager, and I hated Frenzy*when it first came out.  No doubt there are some plusses in it, but I'm not sure that I'll chase it up any time soon. Family Plot was a mess, and even the performances are pretty rough really. The car without brakes scene is one of Hitch's low points. The Birds is just nonsense from go to whoa; worst is the non-ending. For once Hitchcock seemed to be short of an idea. [1.8.12 Though see this post by Xan Brooks]

Let's get onto some goodies:
North by Northwest - almost perfect in every way, even if Cary Grant is only a year or two younger than Joyce Landis as his mother.
Rear Window - immensely watchable: wonderful duo in the leads, and a great cast of 'tenants' in the apartments. [I wrote about this again in November 2015]
Vertigo - this turned out to be a revelation when I caught up with it again. Apart from the long opening exposition scene, and the impossibility behind the story, it's just a dream movie.
The Man Who Knew Too Much - both versions have climaxes that are just a bit too much, but the lead-ups in each case are wonderful. And the casts! - even Doris Day does well in the second version.
The Wrong Man, and I Confess. Hitchcock's 'film noir' period, you might say; two slightly oddball movies, but still full of brilliant moments: as is often the case with Hitchcock, the movies are somehow better than their stories.
The Trouble with Harry: Hitchcock has a field day with black humour, and Mildred Natwick is just one of the many delights in this movie.
To Catch a Thief.  So-so. The story is a bit weak, and there is some dreadful back projection. Even Cary Grant can barely save this one.
Dial M for Murder Hitchcock hardly deviates from the play that this is based on. Surprisingly it works well (the play is excellently-crafted), and the fact that it was made as a 3-D movie barely counts. For another play that Hitchcock managed to turn into a fairly decent movie, check out Juno and the Paycock, one of the least Hitchcockian movies of the lot, except for the way in which the performances work in the ensemble scenes. Hitchcock was always good at shooting scenes around a table - it would be interesting to consider how many there are and how they vary - and there's a wonderful one in this movie.
Strangers on a Train - absolutely fabulous, as is the other movie in which homosexuality features strongly: Rope.  

This book is a great source
of information about Hitchcock
and his movies. 

Stage Fright. A slightly over-the-top performance from Richard Todd (one of the many leading men to disappoint Hitchcock over the years because their performances didn't sync with Hitchcock's intentions), a definitely over-the-top performance from Marlene Dietrich (even a song shot almost entirely in one take). The movie is made more delightful by a brief appearance from Joyce Grenfell, and the total hamming of Alistair Sim.
I haven't seen The Paradine Case since the 50s or 60s so can't comment on it, and I've never seen Under Capricorn. 
Likewise it's a long-time since I've seen Notorious or Spellbound, but I remember them as intriguing movies, which I'd like to catch up with again. The former has a great supporting cast; the Dali dream sequences in the latter were severely hampered by the producer's mucking around with them. [Saw Notorious again in August 2015]
Lifeboat is intriguing; not so exciting on a second viewing as when I first saw it years ago, but Tallulah Bankhead's chewing of the scenery is matched by Walter Slezak's hammy performance as a sleazy German attempting to sabotage the situation. The rest of the cast are great.
Shadow of a Doubt is good, but the best thing about it for me is the supporting cast. I find Teresa Wright too intense now.  Her family, however, are, as is so often the case, a delight. They're cast for their comic abilities rather than anything else and they bring their performances off superbly. This is the case with Suspicion too, where the English supporting players bring something to the movie that is essentially Hitchcockian - almost more than the suspense factor, I think. I like the movies as a whole, but since we know how it's going to end, now, it doesn't quite have the punch it once had.
It would be interesting sometime to discuss the comic roles in Hitchcock movies - as well as the 'table' scenes.  
Saboteur is full of great stuff (supporting cast again, particularly the circus troupe) even though Hitchcock wasn't much impressed with Robert Cummings in the lead role.  
I've never seen Mr and Mrs Smith, but I did catch up with Jamaica Inn on the Internet recently. It was an appalling copy of the movie, but that didn't make much difference. This is also one of Hitchcock's worst, in spite of Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton all giving in-your-face performances. The Daphne du Maurier story is treated badly, and the filming is uninspiring. 
I last saw Foreign Correspondent*** decades ago, and remember vividly the plane crashing into the sea sequence, and also a shot of dozens of umbrellas filmed from above: one of those Hitchcock joke moments in which the hero 'vanishes'.
Rebecca, and The Lady Vanishes. Utterly wonderful movies. One with all that Hollywood could offer in the way of technical expertise, the other filmed a bit more off the cuff in England (with model trains at one point). Both have top notch leads, and wonderful supporting casts. As different as possible - one is all dark and gloomy, with little humour, the other is all froth and bubble in spite of its serious subject.  
Young and Innocent is based on a Josephine Tey story - 'based' only in the sense that one of the characters still appears by name; the rest is pure Hitchcock. Not a bad movie, and another one in which a marvellous family around a table appears. And a delightful child at a petrol pump. 
Now we start to head back into ancient days, with only one major movie still to look at: The 39 Steps. Not quite a total rewrite of Buchan's book, it's basically is a riff on the original idea with wonderful scenes and excellent playing from the leads. John Laurie appears at his best (after being given a dull, melodramatic part in Juno and the Paycock), and there are plenty of other excellent supporting actors.  
The remainder are a mixed bunch: I think I've seen Blackmail, but can't remember enough to comment; Sabotage has its points** (and like Saboteur includes newsreel footage that fits into the action) but to me it's most memorable for the performance of the boy who gets blown up on the bus.  
The remainder are mostly films in which Hitchcock is either restrained by the studio's intents, or 
working with material that he doesn't find compatible.  
So what's my favourite....too difficult a choice!

*Update 12.10.18. I caught up with Frenzy a few weeks ago. Though it still has a couple of very unpleasant and grotesque scenes, it's not a bad movie, and Jon Finch is better than I'd remembered in the main role. But it peters out at the end rather suddenly, even though the 'plot' is worked through.

**Update 16.11.20 I saw this again a few weeks ago. I'd read the original book in the meantime: it's quite surprisingly vicious, especially Mrs Verloc's behaviour after she's killed her husband. And the fellow-saboteurs are a very unpleasant lot - they barely appear in the movie. As always Hitchcock retains something of the original but recasts the story quite considerably to give it an (almost) happy ending. Not a bad movie, though there's some ponderous acting by Oscar Homolka. 

***Update on Foreign Correspondent, 2024

The Wah-Wah Diaries

Seem to be reading a book a day at the moment...it won't last. I need to get on with some other more important things!

Anyway, yesterday while filling in a bit of time at the library, I came across The Wah-Wah Diaries by Richard E Grant. Wah-Wah was a movie written and directed by Grant back in 2004, and the book is a record of the day-to-day trials and tribulations he experienced, less on the shooting of the movie itself than on the pre- and post-production, when his French producer either failed to communicate vital information, or get things done on time, or kept putting various spanners in the works for no good reason - except that she was the producer.

The book starts in 1999, when the idea for the movie was first mooted and the script drafted. From then on it's a constant swing between highs and lows as producers come and go, the script is revised and revised, actors are gained and lost, and the aforesaid producer gets it into her head that everything should be done with French technicians. This book should warn anyone off co-production between England and France forever, though to be fair, there are some very good French technicians involved, the editors in particular.

The actual shoot is a breeze by comparison with everything else that goes on, with near-perfect weather in Swaziland (where it is all filmed, often in places that Grant grew up in and knows like the back of his hand). The amazing thing is that while Grant has some extreme moments of stress and insomnia from all the hitches (and, of course, the French producer), the film gets made, and he survives without going insane. His determination and fortitude prove to be far beyond what he himself thinks he's capable of, especially since this is the first time he's ever directed a movie, and it's an extremely autobiographical one at that.

It's perhaps not the ideal book to read before embarking on getting a musical up and on stage, although the financial aspects of my show won't be nearly as daunting as those Grant faced, nor will we be working with people who don't speak our language - in any sense of the phrase. Nevertheless it shows the value of having a good solid team around you, for support in times of stress and when things all seem to be going down the tube....!

Mike Gray

Michael Gray, whom I accompanied only three weekends ago, has won himself the New Zealand Opera Society 2009 opera grant. It's going to help fund a trip to the Cactus Language School in Bologna in June next year.
Mike's been a busy singing boy over the last few years, and as well in the last twelve months he was encouraged to switch from baritone to tenor (something another Dunedin singer, Simon O'Neill, did a few years back). He's moving up the scale, but of course it's a process, and he has a bit of a way to go to be entirely comfortable up there. He'll make it. He's a great musician, and performs well.

Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief

Just watched To Catch a Thief for the first time in forty years or more. It’s entertaining, though hardly suspenseful. Things that might have had the audience gasping back in the fifties, such as the car chase, are tame by comparison with more recent similar chases, and the story itself is pretty mild.
Still, as lightweight Hitchcock, it’s good value. The script (and on set cast additions to it) are subtle and full of innuendo, and Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis and John Williams make the most of the lines. Landis plays Kelly’s mother in this movie, but Grant’s in North by Northwest. Here he’s too old, in truth, to be Kelly’s lover; in the other movie, he’s almost the same age as his screen mother (she was only six years older than him, in fact.) But his charm is undeniable, and the edginess between him and Kelly is intriguing. Apparently he didn’t want to do the movie, having pretty much retired (!), and there’s a certain misogynistic streak in his playing off against Kelly.
A great deal of the film is actually studio-shot: even though the company spent time in the Riviera, the use of VistaVision meant that many of the location close-ups weren’t satisfactory (the backgrounds got blurred), and in the end there’s a lot of use of filmed back projections against which the actors work. It might have looked good at the time, but in the DVD version I’ve just seen, the contrast between the real actors and the back projection isn’t satisfactory. Grant particularly seems to come off badly: his sunburnt ‘look’ is often too dark in contrast to the filmed scenery behind him. (This might be to do more with the DVD copy than the original film.)

North by Northwest

I watched Hitchcock’s North by Northwest again the other night. I don’t think I’d actually seen most of it since it was first shown; some of it I caught up with on television a few years ago, but obviously not all of it as there were many scenes that I’d forgotten.
It’s the sort of Hitchcock movie where the plot is irrelevant; the set-pieces are what make it: the climax on the Mt Rushmore faces (very little of which was actually shot there); the wonderful sequence where the crop-dusting plane attacks Cary Grant in the middle of nowhere; the nonsense Grant makes of a very dignified auction. The film was virtually written around these sequences – it’s one of the few Hitchcock movies that isn’t based on a book. (Not that he ever stuck to the books: in most cases he took a few key ideas and made his own film.)
North by Northwest epitomises Hitchcock’s style. The suspense, you say. Well, yes, up to a point, but once you know what’s going to happen, the suspense goes out the window. No, I meant Hitchcock’s humour. Very few of his movies lack some aspect of humour (except perhaps I Confess, The Wrong Man and Psycho – and even Psycho has a few humorous moments early in the piece).
For instance, it was a nice surprise to find that in one of his earlier movies (Young and Strange, I think it was) there isn’t just the suspense, but some wonderful moments of humour – much of involving children, who often play a humorous role in his movies. Both the American and English movies have some glorious humorous sequences – North by Northwest is full of them (with Grant at his ironic best), but Stage Fright, which I caught up with again recently too, has some great moments, particularly those featuring Alistair Sim, whom apparently Hitchcock didn’t take to and objected to his ‘mugging’ – in spite of that, there’s a great deal of Sim in the movie, along with a marvellous scene he shares with the inimitable Joyce Grenfell. I still remember how delighted I was to find her in a Hitchcock movie when I first saw Stage Fright years ago.
Back to NBN. The cast is great. Eva Marie Saint – who never appeared in another Hitchcock movie – is wonderful: elusive, persuasive, romantic; a quiet surface hinting at considerable passion beneath. Why he chose to use Tippi Hendren, for instance, in later blonde roles remains a mystery, when Saint was available. James Mason does a subtle villain, and Jessie Royce Landis (only a couple of years Cary Grant’s senior) plays his mother with considerable aplomb. Cary Grant (who mugs almost as well as Alistair Sim at times) thoroughly enjoys his role, even though he was far too old for the part – but Hitchcock delighted in using him, in spite of that.
And the crop-dusting scene remains a triumph of crafty filmmaking: Grant is actually more in the studio than out of it during the sequence, even when he’s being chased by the plane; and an analysis of the scene, shot by shot, would reveal just how well planned the whole thing is – and how economically.