Prisoners is a disturbing movie, less for its subject matter - the abduction of two little girls - than its moral ambiguity. Are we really supposed to believe that a father who prays the Lord's Prayer before he allows his teenage son to shoot a deer, and who much later prays the same prayer with a great more difficulty, would become such a vigilante character as to beat a suspect almost to a pulp? And I mean 'pulp'.
Another character, supposedly once a Christian, also goes on about doing her now evil work in order to make people stop believing in God. At least I think that's what she said. Sorry, run that by me again? It sounded like a last minute motivation pulled up out of the hat.
There are also some rather iffy plot-holes by the end of the movie, and quite honestly I almost lost my own plot when late in the piece there was lots of stuff about mazes and snakes, neither of which, as far as I could tell, had much to do with the overall mystery.
Okay, gripes over and done. Hugh Jackman is terrific in his role of the ambiguous father. I couldn't much believe in him as a Christian, but I could understand a great deal of his pain and frustration as a father. Jake Gyllenhaal (whatever happened to movie stars having pronounceable names?) is his opposite number: just as determined to solve the case but only through legal means, and frustrated that those legal means can sometimes cause unintended dire effects. Gyllenhaal always seems to bring great integrity to his roles, and here, even though he plays someone who mostly keeps his anger at bay, he's extremely effective. In fact I thought he was the star of the movie; it's actually Jackman who gets top billing.
The rest of the cast are excellent in their own quirky ways. The black couple who also lose a daughter aren't made of such tough metal as Jackman's character; you long for them to bring integrity and honesty to the brutality that Jackman is imposing on the suspect. When they continually wimp away from this I found it frustrating: why don't they speak out against what Jackman is doing? He's obviously not the friend they'd thought him, and worse, he's likely to get them all put away in jail.
The production values are terrific in every way. Some have complained about the music score; personally it never intruded at any level for me, so it obviously did its job well. I think the movie is overlong. Over half an hour before it finished I was beginning to wonder: how long is this going to go on? There were plenty of places where judicious cuts could have been made, which would have made an already suspenseful movie into an even tauter one. But, this is the movie as it stands, at nearly two hours. There are plenty of great moments along the way.
Showing posts with label suspense. Show all posts
Showing posts with label suspense. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Tuesday, June 09, 2015
How not to plot a story
I know that European filmmakers have long seen themselves as anti-story, anti-plot and the like, and sometimes this has produced some wonderful 'art' movies ('art' here meaning the film successfully does its own thing regardless of the rules of storytelling). More frequently it produces films that meander, that lose the plot at the very moment they should be maintaining the plot and that, as a result, lose their audiences.
Two such movies in the last week: one starring Michael Caine and Clémence Poésy in a film set in Paris. The other, also French, is about a girl who wanted to become a great pianist, was foiled, and then takes revenge. More on this later.
There will be spoilers...
The Michael Caine movie is called Mr Morgan's Last Love, though you may also find it listed simply as Last Love. It concerns an American philosophy professor, Matthew Morgan - Caine, with a varying American accent - whose wife died a couple of years ago. He still talks to her, and seems to have been deeply in love with her; in fact he was so in love with her that his two children, now adults, suffered from neglect. Apparently. He spends his days in a lonely state, refusing to learn even the most basic French, and hating any change to his routine.
Of course Pauline (Poésy) comes along. She's a young dance school teacher, and Matthew falls in love with her, but very quietly, almost trying to avoid saying what he's feeling. She accepts him as he is, just as a friend. When he accidentally (?) overdoses on his sleeping tablets and winds up in hospital, his two American children, Miles and Karen, turn up (Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson - she has a very brief time in the film, regrettably). Miles is perpetually angry - he's the one who's felt most neglected by his father as a child - and furthermore, his own marriage has just gone down the tubes, though he has custody of his young son.
The usual argy bargy ensues, the children claiming that Pauline is a bimbo about to take away everything their father owns - which, of course, is rightfully theirs. (Poésy as a bimbo? Hardly.) So far, all fairly predictable. But then the writer/director, Sandra Nettleback, gets herself into a plot-hole, and never quite makes it out. Don't read further if you want to watch this movie.
Miles, surprisingly, falls in love with Pauline. Yup. Which totally wipes out Pauline's integrity as a character. Miles and his dad have a reconciliation, which is good, but it's not good in terms of what's just happened. Matthew commits suicide. Sorry? (Incidentally, this film is billed as comedy and drama on IMDB.) This awful crunching of gears comes as a result of the thing being forced into a corner by the writer. Did she think that the story needed a bit of pepping up at the end? Did she write herself into a corner because she didn't know how the Matthew/Pauline relationship could work? Who knows. The movie got made, and it leaves an odd taste in the mouth.
Caine, incidentally, is very good, as are the two main women - Anderson strides all over the place and should have been given a lot more screen time. Perhaps it would have been better to have made her the main third character, instead of the dull and boring Miles. She would have dealt properly to Caine and Poésy's situation. She certainly livens up what is often a quite slow movie.
The other movie is The Page Turner. It's a tale of revenge, a perfectly acceptable genre, even if we do wind up on the side of the one doing the revenge.
The main character of The Page Turner (or La Tourneuse de Pages) is Mélanie (played with a cold-eyed sweetness by Déborah François). As a child she goes in for an exam in order to enter some music academy. Rather remarkably (from a musician's point of view) she's playing a fairly straightforward piece, one that might get her through a grade in Trinity College exams, but probably wouldn't get her into an academy. She has five examiners. Yup, five. One of them is a famous concert pianist. Ariane - played by Catherine Frot - she begins with arrogance, but later has an increasingly bemused look about her, which may not be surprising, given what her character goes through. Ariane, in an extraordinary piece of plot nonsense, allows another parent into the room while Mélanie is playing, and signs an autograph. It puts Mélanie off. As one reviewer said, 'If something as little as that puts her off, she probably shouldn't be going to the academy anyway.'
Mélanie goes home, shuts up the piano, locks it and never plays again. Hmm. Flash forward a few years and she gets an intern's job in a law firm. Hang on! The lawyer in charge just happens to be the husband of Ariane. Does Mélanie know that when she applies for the job? It's not clear, but she then offers to look after the lawyer's son during the holidays - someone else couldn't do the job. Two coincidences in a row. Okay...passable.
Mélanie recognises Ariane; Ariane never, never, never during the course of the film recognises Mélanie. Nor does Mélanie ever tell her who she is. Consequently Ariane, from now on, presumably wonders why this cold-eyed young woman seems to be doing some very odd things.
Mélanie ingratiates herself into the household: she gets on with the young boy, who also plays piano. She not only offers to turn pages for Ariane at a concert that's coming up, she makes herself indispensable. Ariane has been the victim of a hit and run accident some time before, and is 'fragile' according to her husband. Fragile is putting it mildly. She can barely hold herself together. Furthermore, she starts touching Ariane in what can only be described as in an oddly inappropriate way. Yes, we know what the French are like, but this is a bit over the top. Ariane, at first confused, responds, although it's all low-key.
All goes well at the concert. Okay, you think - because there is a deal of suspense being set up - the next concert will be the one when she doesn't turn the page at the right moment, and laughs maniacally - as an old friend of mine used to say - at her employer's distress. But there isn't a next concert, What were the writers thinking?. Instead there's an audition for an American, presumably a promoter of some sort. No audience, but him, and the agent.
What does Mélanie do? As the audition is about to start she just wanders off somewhere, and can't be found. Ariane makes an absolute hash of playing (even though another page turner is brought in), and the American walks out in disgust. And not surprisingly either: Ariane's playing is ridiculously awful; no career pianist would make such a mess of things however fragile they were. Plainly the director thought if it wasn't obvious to a non-musical audience that Ariane was making mistakes, then the scene wouldn't work.
But the scene doesn't work because the Page Turner isn't there! Surely this was a scene in which Mélanie should have once again done her duty effectively, and built up the tension still further. Instead Ariane, by now somewhat besotted with her, just lets her off with a 'sorry.' Good grief. Ariane is super fragile, don't forget.
Where is the big climax in a concert hall full of people, with the will-she-won't-she-turn-the-page scene? The scene where Ariane is ruined for life? It could be done so simply: turning a page at the wrong moment (as anyone who's done it knows) can be seen as an accident. It doesn't have to be deliberate. There's the opportunity in the film for it to be seen as an accident by the concert audience, but deliberate by Mélanie, and yet this scene never happens.
Instead, a couple of other things that have been set up, things that are secondary to the main revenge plot, work themselves out in the last scene, and Mélanie walks off into the sunrise. (She'd got up early that morning.) Ariane and her family are in a mess, but not one of them knows why this invaluable young girl has done what she's done. HUH?
Yes, I know we can become too used to a plot working out according to the normal lines. But an audience also needs to see logic and suspense building to a certain point - think The Man Who Knew Too Much with Doris Day and James Stewart, where no item of suspense is missing, and where even though the audience knows how it will work out, they\re still kept guessing till the last minute. Audience expectation is a great deal of what makes a suspense movie work. Denis Dercourt (again, a writer/director) builds up the tension well, with several suspicious scenes (the discussion of how to kill a chicken, the boy being nearly drowned but it being taken as a joke) but none of these come to anything. At the end we're left with a plot that picks up all the wrong pieces and leaves behind the vital ingredients.
Why am I making such a fuss? Because my co-writer and I are currently working on a very difficult story, the third children's book we've written in the last couple of years. All the bits of the plot have to fit neatly, or something else will fall apart. We know how difficult and frustrating it is to make a plot work, and yet at the end of the day it's very satisfying for the reader to see things click into place. What's the point of building up the suspense if you're going to let it all dissipate?
Dercourt has the directorial touch to have made a suspenseful movie that would build to a solid climax. Instead he lets himself down with an ill-plotted script. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called this film 'a treat for lovers of intelligent cinema.' Plainly I'm not intelligent enough.
Two such movies in the last week: one starring Michael Caine and Clémence Poésy in a film set in Paris. The other, also French, is about a girl who wanted to become a great pianist, was foiled, and then takes revenge. More on this later.
There will be spoilers...
The Michael Caine movie is called Mr Morgan's Last Love, though you may also find it listed simply as Last Love. It concerns an American philosophy professor, Matthew Morgan - Caine, with a varying American accent - whose wife died a couple of years ago. He still talks to her, and seems to have been deeply in love with her; in fact he was so in love with her that his two children, now adults, suffered from neglect. Apparently. He spends his days in a lonely state, refusing to learn even the most basic French, and hating any change to his routine.
Of course Pauline (Poésy) comes along. She's a young dance school teacher, and Matthew falls in love with her, but very quietly, almost trying to avoid saying what he's feeling. She accepts him as he is, just as a friend. When he accidentally (?) overdoses on his sleeping tablets and winds up in hospital, his two American children, Miles and Karen, turn up (Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson - she has a very brief time in the film, regrettably). Miles is perpetually angry - he's the one who's felt most neglected by his father as a child - and furthermore, his own marriage has just gone down the tubes, though he has custody of his young son.
The usual argy bargy ensues, the children claiming that Pauline is a bimbo about to take away everything their father owns - which, of course, is rightfully theirs. (Poésy as a bimbo? Hardly.) So far, all fairly predictable. But then the writer/director, Sandra Nettleback, gets herself into a plot-hole, and never quite makes it out. Don't read further if you want to watch this movie.
Miles, surprisingly, falls in love with Pauline. Yup. Which totally wipes out Pauline's integrity as a character. Miles and his dad have a reconciliation, which is good, but it's not good in terms of what's just happened. Matthew commits suicide. Sorry? (Incidentally, this film is billed as comedy and drama on IMDB.) This awful crunching of gears comes as a result of the thing being forced into a corner by the writer. Did she think that the story needed a bit of pepping up at the end? Did she write herself into a corner because she didn't know how the Matthew/Pauline relationship could work? Who knows. The movie got made, and it leaves an odd taste in the mouth.
Caine, incidentally, is very good, as are the two main women - Anderson strides all over the place and should have been given a lot more screen time. Perhaps it would have been better to have made her the main third character, instead of the dull and boring Miles. She would have dealt properly to Caine and Poésy's situation. She certainly livens up what is often a quite slow movie.
The other movie is The Page Turner. It's a tale of revenge, a perfectly acceptable genre, even if we do wind up on the side of the one doing the revenge.
Mélanie goes home, shuts up the piano, locks it and never plays again. Hmm. Flash forward a few years and she gets an intern's job in a law firm. Hang on! The lawyer in charge just happens to be the husband of Ariane. Does Mélanie know that when she applies for the job? It's not clear, but she then offers to look after the lawyer's son during the holidays - someone else couldn't do the job. Two coincidences in a row. Okay...passable.
Mélanie recognises Ariane; Ariane never, never, never during the course of the film recognises Mélanie. Nor does Mélanie ever tell her who she is. Consequently Ariane, from now on, presumably wonders why this cold-eyed young woman seems to be doing some very odd things.
Mélanie ingratiates herself into the household: she gets on with the young boy, who also plays piano. She not only offers to turn pages for Ariane at a concert that's coming up, she makes herself indispensable. Ariane has been the victim of a hit and run accident some time before, and is 'fragile' according to her husband. Fragile is putting it mildly. She can barely hold herself together. Furthermore, she starts touching Ariane in what can only be described as in an oddly inappropriate way. Yes, we know what the French are like, but this is a bit over the top. Ariane, at first confused, responds, although it's all low-key.
All goes well at the concert. Okay, you think - because there is a deal of suspense being set up - the next concert will be the one when she doesn't turn the page at the right moment, and laughs maniacally - as an old friend of mine used to say - at her employer's distress. But there isn't a next concert, What were the writers thinking?. Instead there's an audition for an American, presumably a promoter of some sort. No audience, but him, and the agent.
What does Mélanie do? As the audition is about to start she just wanders off somewhere, and can't be found. Ariane makes an absolute hash of playing (even though another page turner is brought in), and the American walks out in disgust. And not surprisingly either: Ariane's playing is ridiculously awful; no career pianist would make such a mess of things however fragile they were. Plainly the director thought if it wasn't obvious to a non-musical audience that Ariane was making mistakes, then the scene wouldn't work.
But the scene doesn't work because the Page Turner isn't there! Surely this was a scene in which Mélanie should have once again done her duty effectively, and built up the tension still further. Instead Ariane, by now somewhat besotted with her, just lets her off with a 'sorry.' Good grief. Ariane is super fragile, don't forget.
Where is the big climax in a concert hall full of people, with the will-she-won't-she-turn-the-page scene? The scene where Ariane is ruined for life? It could be done so simply: turning a page at the wrong moment (as anyone who's done it knows) can be seen as an accident. It doesn't have to be deliberate. There's the opportunity in the film for it to be seen as an accident by the concert audience, but deliberate by Mélanie, and yet this scene never happens.
Instead, a couple of other things that have been set up, things that are secondary to the main revenge plot, work themselves out in the last scene, and Mélanie walks off into the sunrise. (She'd got up early that morning.) Ariane and her family are in a mess, but not one of them knows why this invaluable young girl has done what she's done. HUH?
Yes, I know we can become too used to a plot working out according to the normal lines. But an audience also needs to see logic and suspense building to a certain point - think The Man Who Knew Too Much with Doris Day and James Stewart, where no item of suspense is missing, and where even though the audience knows how it will work out, they\re still kept guessing till the last minute. Audience expectation is a great deal of what makes a suspense movie work. Denis Dercourt (again, a writer/director) builds up the tension well, with several suspicious scenes (the discussion of how to kill a chicken, the boy being nearly drowned but it being taken as a joke) but none of these come to anything. At the end we're left with a plot that picks up all the wrong pieces and leaves behind the vital ingredients.
Why am I making such a fuss? Because my co-writer and I are currently working on a very difficult story, the third children's book we've written in the last couple of years. All the bits of the plot have to fit neatly, or something else will fall apart. We know how difficult and frustrating it is to make a plot work, and yet at the end of the day it's very satisfying for the reader to see things click into place. What's the point of building up the suspense if you're going to let it all dissipate?
Dercourt has the directorial touch to have made a suspenseful movie that would build to a solid climax. Instead he lets himself down with an ill-plotted script. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called this film 'a treat for lovers of intelligent cinema.' Plainly I'm not intelligent enough.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
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.
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.
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. |
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.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
The Private Patient
Just finished reading The Private Patient (an Adam Dalgliesh mystery) by P D James.
The pervading tone of this latest James’ mystery is Gloom. It’s a while since I read any of her other books (The Murder Room was the last, I think), but I can’t recall there being previously quite such a bleak atmosphere. It’s as if with her exalted age (going on 90) she feels that not only is everything going to the dogs (as one of her characters also feels) but that there isn’t much that’s good in the world. We’re constantly reminded, for instance, whilst in the beautiful Dorset countryside, that small animals are being killed by larger.
Dalgliesh(he of the easily misspelt name) eventually gets married in this one, but there’s little sense of joy about the approaching marriage. Or rather, though James tells us that he experiences joy, as a reader I didn’t feel he did.
And there’s virtually no humour to leaven the gloom; the characters almost all have a kind of dourness about them, or an ugliness. Even the attractive young man, Robin Boyton, is regarded by his friend, Rhoda Gradwyn, as typical of people on whom beauty is wasted, because, in her experience, such people are often mundane, ignorant or stupid. He isn’t, but James gives the impression that he might as well be.
For some reason, James gives us Gradwyn's 'exit signs' in the first paragraph - we know she's going to be the murder victim from the outset, which seems to undermine any suspense.
The plot is convoluted in a typical Jamesian way, almost to the extent that I gave up trying to figure out who did what (let alone whodunit). By the time I’d finished I was still rather puzzled about the murderer’s motives, and what half the other people had to do with it all.
James is a stylish writer, but few of the characters in this book seem to breathe real life. Two or three of those in minor roles briefly give things a lift, (particularly Mrs Skeffington) but the bulk of the main characters talk in such well-ordered language that you strain to think of any real person who’s quite so articulate. (The supposedly 'comic' character, Mogworthy - "Nobody can be called Mogworthy" complains Gradwyn - is as dull as ditchwater.)
Along with Dalgliesh and his bride, another couple gets married at the end. This couple ties the knot without having given the slightest hint throughout the rest of the book of being in the least bit interested in each other.
I know how they felt.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
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.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Play Misty for Me
We watched Clint Eastwood’s early directorial effort, Play Misty For Me, last night. Roger Ebert claims it grips the audience even in the parts that don’t appear to be suspense-focused. Well, it might have done thirty-something years ago, and certainly there are several nasty shocks, but the quiet bits just seemed quiet, almost inconsequential, rather than undercut with suspense. And in some scenes, where the characters carried on an ongoing conversation while seeming to flit from location to location reminded me of those old comics where the artists do the same thing with their characters. It’s just a little irritating.
There’s no doubt Eastwood is a good director; certain scenes in this film are excellently done, and the build-up of confrontation between the character Eastwood plays and his nemesis, played by Jessica Walter (far better known as a tv actress than a big screen one), is good and solid. Donna Mills, however, is weak in her role as the woman Eastwood really loves, and there are a couple of characters in the film who could have been excised without anyone missing them. This is more the fault of the script than of Eastwood’s directing.
Eastwood has gone on to direct much better movies than this, such as Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, so there’s no need to be too hard on this early effort. It’s a small-scale piece not quite up with the later Hitchcock style, but still worth watching.
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