Rope of Sand, The Gold Rush, Two-Way Stretch, When Eight Bells Toll

Rope of Sand, by William Dieterle,1949

So, here's the problem with being as far behind as I am in reviewing the movies I watch.  Most of the time, I watch good movies and I remember them and still have stuff to say a couple weeks later when I get around to writing about them.  Occasionally, I don't like a movie, and I can usually remember my gripes pretty well. too.  But then there's the occasion where I watch a movie that's just kind of OK.  Forgettable, even.

I guess I should have taken notes while I was watching William Dieterle's adventure film Rope of Sand, because I can remember very little at this point.  It didn't wow me.  Burt Lancaster stars as a guy in Africa who is hiding some diamonds he found from an evil diamond company.  They hire a lady to seduce it out of him and ummmm, I can't remember.  Peter Lorre is in it, and I always like him.  Claude Rains, too.  The movie is fine in the moment as a diversion, I don't recall NOT liking it, but if I'm any indication, it doesn't really stay with you.  Dieterle also directed The Devil and Daniel Webster, so he's still alright in my book.

The Gold Rush, by Charles Chaplin, 1924

Well, OK, I blew it on that last one.  Let's see if I can't do a little better this time.

As forgettable as Rope of Sand was (I even just now blanked on the title, no kidding), Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush is that much more memorable.  It's quite simply Chaplin's Little Tramp character in the gold rush.  Not the gold rush in California in the 1840's, the one in the Yukon at the turn of the century.  The Tramp finds himself trapped in a cabin with a couple of nasty guys, then finds himself in a town, in love with a local girl.  Lots of great physical comedy bits ensue.

My favorite bit was while Chaplin was stuck in the cabin during a blizzard with the two guys.  The two guys are fighting each other over a rifle while The Tramp hides.  No matter where he goes, though, the fighting men always turn so that the gun is pointing directly at him.  It's really funny stuff, in that great, timeless kind of way.  There are also some excellent practical effects involving the cabin being suspended on an icy cliff.

I usually lean toward Buster Keaton when it comes to silent comedies, but I'm not opposed to Chaplin.  He was an immensely talented comic and director.  I haven't actually seen a lot of Chaplin's films, and none of them since, I don't know, Intro to Film in college?  I should look into him a bit more.

Two-Way Stretch, by Robert Day, 1960

Two-Way Stretch is not a great comedy by any means, but it has a great premise and is worth watching if you're a fan of Peter Sellers.  That premise?  It's about a group of crooks living comfortably in prison, who hatch a scheme to break out, pull a heist, and break back into jail before anyone notices they're gone.  Unfortunately, a new warden arrives and tightens things up in the prison, so now they have to sneak around him.

It's a pretty clever premise, no?  The movie is just decent.  I do remember it better than Rope of Sand, which is apparently my new reference point now.  I liked Sellers, and my favorite jokes were early in the movie, when they show just how comfortable life for these prisoners is.  You know, I don't say this about many movies, but Two-Way Stretch would actually be a pretty good candidate for a remake.

When Eight Bells Toll, by Etienne Perier, 1971

Hey now, this is pretty awesome.  When Eight Bells Toll was initially intended to be a competitor with the highly successful James Bond series.  Of course, it didn't stand a chance, but you know what?  It's actually closer to a true 007 story than the Bond movies were at that point.

A young Anthony Hopkins, not long after his debut in A Lion in Winter, plays secret agent Phillip Calvert, on a mission to investigate a hijacked ship carrying a bunch of gold.  It's a fairly standard spy movie, but Hopkins is awesome in it.  He's suave and charming, and badass when necessary.  He even snaps a guy's neck in a pretty awesome way.  He has great dialogue, too.

In 1971, Diamonds are Forever came out, easily the lamest Bond movie yet (at the time, I mean, it may have been surpassed since).  Things had gotten campy and over-the-top ridiculous.  Of course, it was highly successful.  When Eight Bells Toll came out, it didn't do nearly as well, despite the fact that it was far superior.  It feels like a cool, low-tech spy movie (I prefer 'em low-tech), along the lines of the first 007 film, Dr. No.  It's totally worth watching.  In fact, of these four movies, it's the one I recommend the most.  I know The Gold Rush is a masterpiece, but When Eight Bells Toll is one of those little hidden gems.

Sowing My "Wilder" Oats the Fourth: I Give Up On Trying to Rationalize That Title: The Lost Weekend and Irma la Douce

Hey, folks, I'm back with another entry in my little series exploring the work of one of my favorite filmmakers, Billy Wilder.  This will be my last one for a while, since October's coming and that means horror movies.  Billy Wilder should have made some horror movies, so I could review them.

The Lost Weekend, by Billy Wilder, 1945

While most of my reviews so far have focused on the Billy Wilder of the late 50's, the 60's, and the 70's, there's still a good deal of his early films that I've yet to see.  A cautionary tale of the dangers of addiction, The Lost Weekend is a true classic, made just after Wilder had received a bunch of Oscar nominations for his breakthrough, Double Indemnity.

Ray Milland plays Don Birnam, an aspiring writer who lives on his brother's dime, which he mostly spends on booze.  At the start of the movie, Don is ten days sober, or so he claims, as we soon see him pull up a bottle he had hidden outside his window.  Once he gets his brother out of his hair, Don goes on a massive bender, full of self loathing and yuckiness.  During his bender, we see in flashbacks what has led Don to this point, as well as his meeting and courtship with Helen St. James, the woman who loves him and tolerates his behavior maybe way more than he deserves.

The Lost Weekend isn't one of Wilder's screwball comedies.  It's dark and even pretty harrowing for its time, with a serious underlying message about alcoholism, a problem that was on the rise since Prohibition.  That said, there are some laughs, and plenty of that sharp dialogue Billy Wilder was so good at writing.  Perhaps The Lost Weekend's most lasting contribution to society is the scene where Dan is walking while neon signs and stuff dissolve by in the background.  Even if you haven't seen this movie, you've seen that scene in homages and parodies a million billion times.  I'm guessing some of the people who use that device don't even know where it came from.

I'm sure at some point, we've all known, been, or dealt with addicts in our lives.  In the Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder addresses the issue head on at a time when many people just enabled it or swept it under the rug.  And he manages to make it all entertaining and not beat us over the head too hard with the message (there is some beating us over the head, but not TOO hard).

Irma la Douce, by Billy Wilder, 1963

While One, Two, Three was Wilder's next movie after his big Best Picture win for The Apartment, Irma la Douce was his true followup.  I assume One, Two Three was already in production by the time the Oscar nominations came out.  Irma la Douce is that kind of big, maybe a little too big, ambitious movies that a director makes when given extra license by a studio for making them an award winning box office hit.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, Irma la Douce is Billy Wilder's Magnolia.

Though he reunites The Apartment's stars, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, Wilder wisely does not try to replicate the tone of that film.  Instead, Irma la Douce is more of a sophisticated screwball comedy in the vein of Some Like it Hot.  Set in Paris, Lemmon plays Nestor, an idealistic and oblivious police officer assigned to the seedy red light district, where the usual officers on duty take bribes to look the other way while the prostitutes work.  When he finds out what's going on, he stages a one man raid on the hotel and arrests all the prostitutes, including Irma la Douce (MacLaine), a sweet, chain-smoking, green-stockinged prostitute who carries around an alcoholic poodle.  She recognizes his kindness and good intentions, and treats him more kindly than the others.

Now, comes the series of misunderstandings part, because that's what these comedies are all about, right?  Well, Irma la Douce has maybe the most misunderstandings ever in one of these movies, so many, in fact, that the movie has an unwieldy 2 1/2 hour running time.  You see, through a series of misunderstandings, Nestor loses his job, and then another series of misunderstandings leads Nestor to become Irma's pimp.  And when Nestor can't stand the thought of Irma sleeping with other men, he disguises himself as "Lord X" a Brit who pays Irma to be exclusive to him.  Nestor must now work all night to pay for his own girl's services as a prostitute, but not for sex, just for talking.  Nestor's sneaking out to work at night leads Irma to believe he's cheating on her, which leads her to try to run away with Lord X who is really Nestor... and so on.

This movie is complicated, but oh so smart.  I'm not usually big on comedies longer than 90 minutes or so, and you could definitely feel Irma la Douce's length (THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID HEHEHEH).  But I didn't really mind, that much, because the movie was very watchable and funny, and Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine are both great once again.  Lemmon gets to show his range, playing two characters (or one character playing another, I guess) and showing off his physical comedy skills.  It's also, as expected from Billy Wilder, ridiculously mature for its time.  By 1963, his movies are getting pretty dirty, and it's awesome.  If you can commit to that insanely long running time, or maybe just watch it in two sittings, Irma la Douce is an extremely fun ride.  I know I said it's bloated and overlong like Magnolia, but hey, I happen to really like Magnolia too.

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If you'd like, I have a bunch more Billy Wilder reviews and you can follow these links here to read them.

Ace in the Hole

The Front Page

The Seven Year Itch and Sabrina

Witness for the Prosecution and Kiss Me, Stupid

One, Two, Three and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

The Bicycle Thief, Goyokin, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The Bicycle Thief, by Vittorio de Sica, 1948


Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves, depending on who you ask) is one of the best, most important, and most moving films ever made. That's not up for debate, it's earned that. Having seen the film, I can now acknowledge all those things, but I don't know, it was just so sad.

The Bicycle Thief is the relentlessly soul-crushing story of Antonio, an impoverished man who gets a job opportunity that requires he has a bike. He and his wife trade all their sheets to be able to get one, and even then, just barely. Antonio and his family treat the bike as their most precious possession. His son polishes it and has memorized every detail, down to a small dent. When Antonio goes to work for his first day, he carries his bike into the office, refusing to put it down. Then, on the job, which is riding around the city and gluing posters to walls, a man takes off with his bike.

Antonio goes to the police, who just trivialize the theft, as though it's not important. To Antonio, of course, it's the most important thing in the world. He, his son, and some friends go on a desperate search, combing the city for the bicycle. There are thousands of bicycles, and so on. The movie is just really damn sad. There are uplifting moments, and there's actually a lovely message of empathy and understanding to the whole thing. Though Antonio's desperation is blinding him to it, we can see that everybody is struggling, not just him. This is what drives people to steal bicycles.

I'm not NOT recommending the movie, it really is great, but just warning you, grab your hankies. No wait, don't use hankies, those are so gross, use a tissue. And watch something happy or fun afterwards, like cat videos or a cool-as-hell samurai movie or something.

Goyokin, by Hideo Gosha, 1969


I feel like Hideo Gosha was the last great director of the Japanese New Wave of the 50's and 60's. I don't know if this is a fact, because my knowledge is incomplete, but this is how it seems to me. While most of the other important directors of the time began making films in the 30's and 40's and were already well into their careers when they produced their seminal works, Gosha made his first film in 1964. Japanese cinema becomes a whole different beast in the 1970's, and I feel like Gosha kind of bridges the gap between the two styles.

In Goyokin, the great Tatsuya Nakadai (The Sword of Doom, High and Low, Kagemusha, among many others) stars as Magobei Wakizaka, an honorable samurai who looks on in shame as his clansmen slaughter an entire village to steal a shipment of gold. He can't go on as a samurai anymore and quits, but also promises his master and best friend, Rokugo (Tetsuro Tanba of You Only Live Twice and The Twilight Samurai, also among many others), that he won't report this transgression as long as it doesn't happen again.

Three years later, Magobei, living a peaceful life, is about to give up his sword for good when assassins sent to kill him tip him off that Rokugo is planning on butchering another village. Magobei decides to stop it from happening. Along the way, he stumbles across the girl who was the sole survivor of the massacre three years ago, and wins over a mercenary sent to kill him.

This movie is awesome. It's fun, with lots of action and adventure. Tatsuya Nakadai is totally badass as Magobei Wakizaka. There's a great scene where he is tied up and dropped into a deep pit of snow and left to die. The exact details of his escape are left to the imagination, but we're given enough of a starting point to marvel at how cool this guy is. Rokugo's plan to run a shipment of gold into the sea is pretty diabolical, and Wakizaka's plan to thwart this plan is equally clever. And of course, we get a deadly showdown between the two at the climax.

I've seen five or six of Hideo Gosha's films now, and dug them all. Though the film that follows this, Hitokiri, is a lot darker, the rest of the ones I've seen, such as Secret of the Urn have all had this kind of spirit of adventure. Goyokin is tons of fun.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, by David Gelb, 2011


We're going to stay in Japan for our next review, though this is a very different kind of movie than Goyokin. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about Jiro Ono, an 85 year old man who owns a tiny sushi shop that purportedly makes the best sushi in the world. Jiro has spent close to his entire life making sushi, obsessing over every detail, honing his techniques, and looking for ways to improve it. He's like Van Gogh painting the same scene over and over again, trying to find the perfect colors to represent it. Or Stanley Kubrick obsessively looking through thousands of pictures of door frames, trying to find the exact perfect one to include in his film.

We also meet Jiro's two sons; the eldest is in his 50's and is still being primed to take over Jiro's restaurant someday. He has to live with the anxiety that even if his sushi is every bit as good as his fathers, people will somehow perceive it as lesser and thus put his business under. The youngest son has been encouraged to open his own sushi restaurant that is an identical mirror image of Jiro's place. Jiro was not the best father to his sons. He was too busy thinking of sushi, but I guess he's there for them now, in his way.

The documentary is fascinating, though it can be as repetitive and single-minded as its subject. Could you imagine living your life with your brain centered on all aspects of sushi and nothing else? Of course, he's not making the sushi alone. Along with his sons, he has several apprentices. They are given years and years of rigorous training. In fact, they said it takes something like ten years before they're even allowed to handle the eggs.

What's weird is, I'm not an adventurous eater in the least bit. I've never even had sushi, but I still could totally appreciate this movie and Jiro's work. I assume this sushi is the most delicious raw fish one could ever eat, if one were into such things as raw fish. It would be like if somebody in America would dedicate their entire life to cultivating the most perfect french fry in the world... Oh man, now I'm drooling. I've gotta go.

Vanishing Point, She (1935), and Sleep, My Love

Vanishing Point, by Richard C. Sarafian, 1971


Vanishing Point took me by surprise. I expected a badass 70's car chase movie, and on one level that's exactly what it is. But it's also the story of one man's existential race into oblivion.

It begins with the hero, Kowalski (Barry Newman), a car delivery man who is taking an awesome car (I guess, anyway, I'm not a car guy) from Denver to San Francisco. He bets a guy that he'll be able to get it there by 3PM the next day, only 16 hours from his time of departure. I just did the math, and that means he would have to go a minimum of 80 miles for hour the whole way in order to make that goal, and that's not counting stops. So Kowalski takes a bunch of speed and sets out on his mission.

It doesn't take long before Kowalski gets the attention of the police, and it's no wonder. Nothing is going to stop him. If he sees a road block, he just jumps the median and goes around it on the other side of the road. He's getting help in avoiding the law over the radio from his friend Super Soul, a DJ (played by Cleavon Little of Blazing Saddles) who talks in a secret code of jive poetry.
All the while, the police are bearing down on Kowalski, as he edges closer and closer to the end of his race.

Vanishing Point is a really cool oddity among car chase movies because of its dark, psychedelic, and philosophical overtones. Things get more and more surreal for Kowalski as he goes deeper into the desert, meeting snake handlers, desert hippies and naked motorcycle riding hippie girls on the way. We get an idea of what is driving Kowalski through some sketchy flashbacks of his past, but he never states explicitly why he's doing it.

One last thing: If this review is selling you on Vanishing Point, and you decide to watch it, try to find the UK cut. It was available on the flipside of the DVD I had, so it shouldn't be too hard. It has an extended sequence cut from the American version, a surreal scene where Kowalski picks up a hitchhiker. It's one of the most important scenes in the movie, and we Americans didn't see it upon release because someone decided we were too stupid to get metaphors. That happens to us a lot, doesn't it?

She, by Irving Pichel and Lansing C. Holden, 1935


Based on a popular series of novels by H. Rider Haggard, She is an epic adventure produced by the man who brought King Kong into the world, Merian C. Cooper. It was intended to replicate the success of Kong, and despite its wonderful production design and special effects, it failed to do so, and I can tell you exactly why: NO MONSTERS.

She is the story of a man's quest to a lost land to find the Fountain of Youth deep in the arctic. Family lore has it that his ancestor found the fountain centuries ago. There they find an ancient race of cannibals and their ruler, She Who Must Be Obeyed. She believes the guy is his own ancestor that she had taken as a lover 500 years ago, and She wants him back.

The film is decent, but never achieves the blend of wonder and high adventure that King Kong did. There's never the feeling that you're seeing something you've never seen before. They are, after all, just shooting on a big soundstage, right? Couldn't they have thrown a giant spider or something in somewhere?

Still, She is full of rich movie history. One cool little fact is that She Who Must Be Obeyed was the visual inspiration for the evil queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Another is that it was thought lost until a print was found in Buster Keaton's personal collection. It's a fun, pulpy little movie, and it's totally worth watching, but it's not going to change your world.

Sleep, My Love, by Douglas Sirk, 1948


I've been meaning for some time to watch something by Douglas Sirk. Sleep, My Love happened to be the only one of his films on Netflix Instant, and though it's not one of his more well known titles, I decided to give it a look.

Sleep, My Love stars Claudette Colbert as a New York woman who wakes up on a train to Boston, with no idea how she got there. When she returns to her husband (Don Ameche), we begin to see things take a much more sinister turn. He's cheating on her with a younger woman, and wants her money, and is manipulating her through hypnotic suggestion to drive her mad and commit suicide. It's pretty ridiculous, I know, but it's a fun little movie.

I can see now why women at the time responded so well to Sirk's films. He seems pretty sympathetic toward them. Like, if a 40's or 50's housewife believed her husband was cheating (chances were fair that she was right), most people would just roll their eyes and talk down to her. But she could go and see Sleep, My Love and have all her suspicions validated. See? Husbands CAN be evil. And that younger girl he's seeing is nothing but a money grubbing floozy. And that shrink he's sending me too IS a fraud. And look, she met a nicer man on the plane back from Boston. There's hope!

As I said above, this isn't one of Sirk's better known films, but it's a fun little diversion. I would very much like to see the 1950's films he would later become so well known for.

Pygmalion, Detour, A Hen in the Wind

Pygmalion, by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, 1938

I haven't seen My Fair Lady, and while I probably still should, I instead decided to go straight back to the source. This is a wonderful adaptation of the famous George Bernard Shaw play, largely written by Shaw himself.

For those who might be unfamiliar with it, Pygmalion is a witty and observant takedown of class disparity in England about Henry Higgins, a wealthy dialect specialist who, on a bet, takes in Eliza Doolittle, a girl from the lowest walks of London society, and teaches her to pass herself off as a noblewoman. As his instruction begins to take hold, the two opposites, both equally headstrong, become enmeshed in a stubborn battle of wills.

The dialogue in Pygmalion holds up amazingly well, just as sharp today as it was in 1938 (and presumably in the 1912 play as well). The performances are great too. I loved Henry Higgins' character, played by co-director Leslie Howard, the way he was so sure of his high place in society, oblivious to his own lapses into bad language and slobbish behavior. He's definitely kind of a selfish jerk, but you come to actually like his company in the end, just as he and Eliza grow on each other. Wendy Hiller is also wonderful as Eliza Doolittle, not only playing a thick cockney accent, but convincingly evolving it into a posh English over the course of her training. What's really great about her performance are the subtleties in her pronunciations. Certain Cockneyisms stay with her, and sometimes sneak out, all the way to the end. She always has difficulty with the letter "H" and often puts a noticeable effort into hitting it, which proves Shaw's choosing of the name "Henry Higgins" a brilliant little metaphor for the distance between the two of them.

I'm sure I'll enjoy My Fair Lady too, whenever I see it, but I'm not sure I'll like it as much as I did Pygmalion. It's a true classic, often overshadowed by its flashier counterpart.

Detour, by Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945

It's weird to think that there were a bunch of different tiers in the early days of Hollywood filmmaking. Unlike today, where a movie is either HUGE and Hollywood or tiny and independent, with nothing in between, they used to have movies that ranged from the big Hollywood pictures with all the big stars, all the way down from the movies made on Poverty Row, for dirt cheap and with no-name actors. Not many of those dirt cheap movies are remembered too favorably these days, but Edgar G. Ulmer's film noir Detour is consistently listed as an important American film.

Detour is the story of Al (Tom Neal), a struggling pianist, who sets out on a hitchhiking journey from New York to Los Angeles to reunite with his girlfriend who left him to become an actress. Along the way, he accidentally kills a man and covers it up, and is then blackmailed by a woman who had encountered that man before. There are several interesting twists and turns in the story, especially considering that the movie is only just over an hour long.

The tone of Detour is actually very dark and haunting, even for a film noir. My favorite shot was early in the movie, as we see a close-up of Al's hands playing a jaunty song at the club he's employed at. We then see his face as he's playing the song, and it's just about the most unhappy face you'll ever see. I also like that the scheme that drives the main characters in the second half of the film is just as low-rent and sleazy as the movie itself. There's no Maltese Falcon or other such Hollywood film noir MacGuffin. The characters are doing what they're doing to sell a dead man's car and keep the money. When the opportunity for a bigger piece of the pie comes along, the movie stops short of exploring it.

Detour is definitely worth a watch, and since it's in the public domain, it's very easy to come across. A very cool way to spend a mere hour of your time.

A Hen in the Wind, by Yasujiro Ozu, 1948

I'm still quite new to the films of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, but so far, I'm pretty well blown away. The only film I had seen of his was Good Morning, his gentle and loving tale of two little boys who refuse to speak until their dad buys them a TV. A Hen in the Wind is a very different film from the rest of his body of work, but no less powerful.

Kinuyo Tanaka plays Tokiko, a housewife left alone with her son while her husband fights in the second World War. Japan's economy is in a deep wartime depression, and Tokiko's resources have dried up. When her son falls ill, she makes a difficult decision to save him: Selling herself as a prostitute in order to pay for his medical costs. Soon, when the war ends and her husband Shuichi (Shuji Sano) returns home, Tokiko confesses to him, unable to lie, which causes a seemingly insurmountable rift in their loving marriage.

Many have criticized A Hen in the Wind for being so much darker than a typical Ozu film. It even has one of, if not the, only act of violence in one of his films. It's not like a guy getting chopped in half or anything, or even someone getting killed. The act is relatively small in terms of movie violence, but it still feels pretty real and brutal in the context of this story. Despite the realness and brutality, I found the film to be very uplifting and beautiful in the end. Ozu doesn't demonize Tokiko for doing what she did. In fact, it seemed like the only decision available to her. Nor does he make Shuichi out to be in the wrong for his inability to process this. In fact, he does his best to try to understand her, and even forgive her, but still is unable to get her transgression out of his mind. Japan was in a dark place after the war, and the film reflects that, but also looks to the future with a message of forgiveness and new beginnings.

A Hen in the Wind is a beautiful film by one of the true masters, which is all the more surprising that this hasn't found its way onto DVD in the states. I think the Criterion Collection owns the rights, and they've released a lot of Ozu's other films, so it's probably only a matter of time. I had the wonderful opportunity to see it projected on film, and I'm glad that I did. It's definitely a film worth seeking out, should the opportunity arise.

Three Early British Thrillers: Night Train to Munich, Sabotage, Secret Agent

Night Train to Munich, by Carol Reed, 1940

Even though the James Bond movies may have defined the spy genre over the last fifty years, the British had been making great spy movies for decades before that. Night Train to Munich is just one example, directed by the great Carol Reed, who also brought us the post-war masterpiece The Third Man and the Oscar winning musical Oliver!

Night Train to Munich is the story of Anna (Margaret Lockwood), the daughter of a scientist wanted by both the Germans and the English. She and her father are kidnapped by the Nazis, and a dashing secret agent (Rex Harrison) goes undercover as a German officer to rescue them. They hatch a plan together to escape Germany to the Swiss border. Along the way, they get help from Charters and Caldicott, two comical Brits who seem to find themselves in interesting train adventures all the time (they previously appeared in the same roles in Hitchcock's classic The Lady Vanishes, which also features Lockwood in a different role).

The movie is an intelligent, sometimes tense, sometimes funny, thriller. Harrison and Lockwood have a great "I know we hate each other but we have to pretend we're lovers" chemistry going on. Basil Redford and Naunton Wayne provide a bit of comic relief, but also give the audience an everyman perspective on these extraordinary events. It had been years since I've seen The Lady Vanishes, so I forgot that they were the guys from that too, but I think that's totally awesome. The climax, set high in the Alps at the Swiss border, is an action packed shootout revolving around those cable cars that carry you from mountain to mountain. I won't blow the details, but it's a fantastic ending.

Sabotage, by Alfred Hitchcock, 1936

And speaking of great British thrillers, let's move right on to the absolute master. Sabotage is a fairly early Hitchcock film, made not long after he had found international success with The 39 Steps, a good couple years before he repeated that success with The Lady Vanishes, and four years before he moved to Hollywood and became THE Alfred Hitchcock with Rebecca.

Sabotage is the story of a terrorist placing bombs around London while Scotland Yard tries to hunt him down. What is extremely interesting, especially for its time: Hitchcock paints the terrorist as a normal man, hiding among us, a European immigrant with a loving wife, whose younger brother lives with them and looks up to him. We, the audience know his motives all along, though his family is oblivious, which is where much of the suspense is mined from.

Though not Hitchcock's best work by any stretch, we do see a lot of the tricks and techniques that will later become his trademarks. The story itself is pretty daring and he doesn't wimp out when it gets to the climax. My favorite piece of Hitchcockery in the film is when the terrorist sends his wife's brother out with a package, which, unbeknownst to the boy, contains a bomb. He shoots a close-up of the package, overlaid with a shot of gears turning, and then a shot of a clock ticking.

Sabotage is a really cool movie, made at a time when Hitchcock was still defining himself. His voice isn't entirely clear yet, but you can watch him as he figures it out. He would, of course, go on to make many of the greatest suspense thrillers ever. If you've seen a bunch of those, and still want to dig a little deeper, this would not be a bad place to start.

Secret Agent, by Alfred Hitchcock, 1936

I guess I already covered a lot of what I would say about Secret Agent in Sabotage. It was made in the same year as Sabotage, though it seems to be more following on the heels of The 39 Steps. Where Sabotage is darker and edgier, Secret Agent is a spy adventure.

John Gielgud stars as a writer sent on a spy mission, along with two other agents, one pretending to be his wife (Madaleine Carroll), and Peter Lorre as a Mexican, or possibly just a guy who is called a Mexican. Lorre was my favorite part of the film. He was such a great character actor, and this was very early in his English language career (which Hitchcock started two years before with The Man Who Knew Too Much).

I didn't enjoy Secret Agent as much as Sabotage, though it, too is one of those early films where you can see Hitchcock developing right in front of you. Many early examples of his techniques are on display here too. This is probably one for the hardcores only. If you want to be a Hitchcock completist, Secret Agent has its moments for sure, but many of those moments appear in later (and a few earlier) movies with much better execution. This guy made a lot of amazing movies, arguably more than any other great director, so go watch ALL those first, if you haven't already.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and The Naked City

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, by Russ Meyer, 1965

In the heyday of exploitation movies, one of the most important factors in getting butts in movie theater seats was to have a tantalizing title. I doubt there's ever been a title that piques curiosity more than Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Russ Meyer struck gold with that one, I must say. The real challenge is making a movie that lives up to that title.

Well, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a true classic, at least as far as trashy movies go. Look, it's not Gone with the Wind, but it does have a certain quality. It's the story of three badass go-go dancers, Billie, Rosie, and their leader, Varla (Tura Satana). While road racing in the desert, they come across a couple of goofy teenagers. Varla kills the boy and they end up kidnapping the girl. They then find themselves scheming to rob an old man in a wheelchair and his two sons (including a dumb, muscular one named The Vegetable), while their teenage hostage tries to get away.

That's basically the story. It almost felt like Meyer and his cowriter Jack Moran were just going "and then this happens", "and then this happens", when they were writing the screenplay, because I don't know how else you would make the leap from "road-racing go-go dancers kill a teen" to "then they end up on a ranch". Not that I'm complaining, though. The movie is weird and plenty of fun. I was amused by how un-trashy this trashy movie seemed. There's not even nudity or anything in it, the violence is tame, it's just, you know, titillation. There's almost an innocence to it. A few years later, this movie would have been wayyyy more exploitative.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a fun and memorable B-movie, but I'm not sure if it would have endured the way it has if it didn't have that crazy title. I'm glad that weird stuff like this exists, though.

The Naked City, by Jules Dassin, 1948

If you traced the police procedural drama genre all the way back to its roots, Jules Dassin's 1948 Film Noir, The Naked City, might have been the starting point. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing it was at least the beginning of the modern era. The Naked City plays like the original Law & Order episode.

It begins with the murder of a model. Two police detectives, Muldoon and Halloran (Barry Fitzgerald and Don Taylor) begin their investigation. We then see the entire investigative process play out, interviewing witnesses, looking for clues, and following leads, until ultimately, they find their man. I know I'm being vague, but look, it's a really successful formula that we all know by heart by now, don't we?

I don't mean to say that The Naked City is formulaic. I don't believe it was at the time. I think it might be a big reason the formula is so prevalent today. It's a great movie, it even won a couple Oscars. The mystery is very well constructed and richly layered. The cinematography, on location in New York City, is fantastic. The characters, including the investigators, suspects, witnesses, and even the murderer are all given depth and dimension. There's a great scene where Halloran goes home to his wife, who begs him to discipline their son, which he doesn't believe in. We learn a lot about his nature in that one scene. He's not going to hit his kid, which says a lot about a man in 1948.

The Naked City is a classic, and a very influential film. Jules Dassin made some pretty groundbreaking movies. In addition to revolutionizing the police procedural with this, he practically invented the heist genre too, with 1955's Rififi (more on that whenever I actually see it). The only other film I've seen by him is Topkapi, which is another fun and influential heist movie.

Black Narcissus, Thieves Like Us, The Bad News Bears (1976)

Black Narcissus, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947

Who likes erotic nun movies? Ew, not that kind of erotic nun movie! The kind that's fit for public screening. No nudity or sex, just tension that you can cut with a knife. Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus is about as good as an erotic nun movie can get. Deborah Kerr stars as Sister Clodagh, assigned to lead a group of nuns in the Himalayas, sent there to educate, care for, and convert the locals. Clodagh soon must try to keep it together when she meets and is attracted to Dean, a local Englishman who helps them out, and the exotic, sensual environment begins getting the best of her and her fellow nuns.

The duo of Powell and Pressburger are a team I am only just now discovering. I had seen a couple of Powell's solo films already (Thief of Bagdad and Peeping Tom), but Black Narcissus is the first product of this famous collaboration that I have watched. Wow, it's quite a film. The lush color cinematography is beautiful. I loved the movie's slow shift in tone into a psychological thriller as the temptation gets to be too much for one of Clodagh's nuns, Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Most movies about nuns have only one hot nun. Black Narcissus has two, so you know there's going to be trouble.

All joking aside, Black Narcissus is an incredible film. It actually reminds me a little bit of Picnic at Hanging Rock, with that unsettling feeling that your very surroundings are overpowering you. I wonder if Peter Weir was thinking of this movie at all when he made Hanging Rock. I can't wait to see more of Powell and Pressburger's work, especially if it is anywhere near as rich and powerful as this.

Thieves Like Us, by Robert Altman, 1974

Nobody made them like Altman did in the 1970's, did they? Thieves Like Us is about a trio of Mississippi bank robbers in the 1930's. Kieth Carradine stars as Bowie, the youngest of the three, and the movie focuses on Bowie's doomed romance with Keechie (Shelley Duvall), the girl he holes up with.

Thieves Like us is filled with all the stylistic flourishes you would expect from Altman. The overlapping, naturalistic dialogue, the searching cameras, the little visual and aural puns and hints sprinkled into the background. I must say, though, I didn't think this was Altman's best work of the era. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn't think it was quite as subversive as McCabe & Mrs. Miller or as nutso as The Long Goodbye. Still, it's a 70's Robert Altman film, and that makes it automatically worth watching, especially if you're already an Altman fan.

The Bad News Bears, by Michael Ritchie, 1976

This is one of those movies I fudged my rules a little bit with. I usually only review movies I'd never seen before, but I make an occasional exception for movies I haven't seen since I was a kid and don't remember very well. I do remember liking it when I was young, though.

The Bad News Bears holds up wonderfully. The story of Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), a washed up drunk pool cleaner who used to play for the minor leagues, who agrees to coach the most ragtag team of Little Leaguers ever. After placing a couple ringers on the team, including his estranged daughter (Tatum O'Neal, fresh off of her Paper Moon win) they begin to turn around, and Buttermaker gets caught up in the thrill of winning, before realizing that winning isn't the only thing that matters.

I love how in the 70's, even kids movies were edgy. This movie has kids smoking, drinking, swearing, saying racial slurs, etc., and it has Matthau drinking and driving and generally mistreating a bunch of kids. Yet, it's still hilarious, full of heart, and has a good positive message at the end. I also liked the simplicity and straightforwardness of the story. It's incredibly hard to tell a story this clearly and without any added distractions. Just now looking it up, I see that the screenplay is by Bill Lancaster, writer of John Carpenter's similarly uncluttered (and most excellent) The Thing.

The Bad News Bears stands the test of time, and resonates as well. I couldn't help but have flashbacks to how horrible I was at team sports as a kid, how much I wanted to be included, and how it ultimately led to me not caring about sports at all. I think I turned out somewhat OK in the end, but it would have been nice to have caught the fly ball like that Lupus kid did just once.

Frilmz Noir: The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street

Before recently, my experience with Fritz Lang's films began and ended with his Expressionist science fiction masterpiece Metropolis. Considering how amazing that movie is, it's baffling that I've gone so long without seeking out more.

1944's The Woman in the Window and the following year's Scarlet Street, are two of Lang's early film noirs, both very dark tales of passion and murder, and both featuring the same main cast. They were made nearly two decades after Metropolis, and by this point he had gone from Germany to Hollywood.

The first, The Woman in the Window stars Edward G. Robinson as Richard Wanley a timid, middle-aged professor who yearns for the adventurousness of youth. After a quiet night of drinking at a social club with friends, he finds himself admiring a painting of a beautiful woman in a storefront window. He is then surprised to meet the subject of the painting herself, Alice (Joan Bennett). They get a drink together and Wanley soon finds himself at her home. Not long after that, her lover comes in, furious and violent. Wanley ends up killing him, and he and Alice work out a plan to cover up the murder.

The rest of the movie is Wanley trying to live with his guilt and cover his tracks, even as his own friends from earlier, the District Attorney, and a doctor, investigate the case and come ever closer to finding the culprit. At the same time, a blackmailer (Dan Duryea) is tormenting Alice with his knowledge of what really went down.

The whole thing builds toward a beautifully dark, poetic and ironic conclusion. That is, until it's all taken away in the last three minutes by the strict guidelines of the Hayes Code, whose regulations restricted pretty much anything cool in American movies until the mid-60's. That's right, they didn't accept the original ending, so Lang had to tack on a crappy little scene afterwards that negates pretty much everything that went on before. It's very disappointing, but if you just turn off the movie a little bit early (you'll know when), you'll get a story that feels complete, uncompromised, and uncompromising.

Lang's very next film, Scarlet Street, feels like he wanted a do-over after his previous film had been tampered with. It explores some of the same themes, of midlife restlessness, and of the nature of guilt. This time around, Robinson plays Christopher Cross, a timid, middle aged bank cashier in a loveless marriage whose true passion is painting. At a celebration honoring his long years with the bank, he jealously watches his boss leave the party with a young mistress. Walking home that night, he witnesses what he believes to be a mugging. Chasing off the mugger, he takes the victim, Kitty (Bennett), for a drink. Smitten, he tells her about his aspirations as a painter.

Kitty, in actuality, is the girlfriend of the mugger, Johnny (Duryea). Knowing little of the arts, Kitty believes Cross is actually a successful but modest painter, not just a hobbyist. Together, they work up a scheme to bleed Christopher dry, with Kitty acting as a muse for his paintings and Johnny selling them. It all leads to, you guessed it, a murder. And then guilt. I won't spoil the outcome, though.

Of the two, I liked the second film better. The Woman in the Window almost feels like a sketch for what ultimately became Scarlet Street. The characters were all around more three dimensional in Scarlet Street, the plot more fully formed, and the sad ending was not compromised. Also, even though no blood is shown, and the victim is cleverly obscured, the murder scene in Scarlet Street is still really brutal and effective. It takes some pretty sly work for a director to sneak something past the Hayes Code, and Lang gets away with quite a bit here.

These two films were the first I'd ever seen starring Edward G. Robinson, and I have to say, he really surprised me. Like everyone, I associate him with the "Nyeah, see, NYEAH!" voice that he's often parodied with. He's not like that at all in these. In both movies, he's a shy and timid loser-y guy who gets tangled up with the wrong kind of girl and makes a series of bad decisions. He's very sympathetic along the way, and it hurts to see him eaten alive by the end.

If you're in the mood for a good Film Noir double feature, you could do worse than these two movies. They play great as companion pieces to each other, and seeing Edward G. Robinson playing against the type he's come to be synonymous with is really fun. I'd love to watch more Fritz Lang films, especially more of his early German work.

Jane Eyre (1943)

I only have a passing familiarity with the story of Jane Eyre. My wife is a fan of Charlotte Bronte's* novel, though I've never read it myself. I wanted to see the movie version that came out recently, and I heard was pretty good, but I haven't had that chance yet. So that all means that this, Robert Stevenson's 1943 adaptation of the novel, starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, is my first real introduction to Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester.

Jane Eyre is the story of a girl who, after a difficult, loveless youth, finds love in the shape of a stern, grouchy, rich man with a secret. Her journey is full of hardships and heartbreaks, and all of those things that made a good novel in the 19th century.

Our main reason for watching this version of Jane Eyre when we did was to see another movie starring Joan Fontaine, who my wife and I both loved in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. Fontaine makes a pretty great Jane Eyre (or so I'm told by my wife), which is no surprise, since Rebecca is kind of exactly the same story, but with a more modern, suspense thriller vibe. I liked her better in Rebecca, though, especially in the early parts of the movie, when she's all awkward and clumsy and timid.

Orson Welles is Orson Welles, which is great. This was made not long after Citizen Kane. I always kind of wondered if other directors felt weird directing the guy who blew the doors of possibility wide open on the way movies were made. The screenplay was based off a radio production that Welles performed with his theater troup. He makes a pretty believable Mr. Rochester, and is able to find and show us the humanity in such a grouch, allowing the viewer to understand what Jane Eyre might see in this guy.

The director, Robert Stevenson, is actually a very important movie director, though one many of us may not know by name. Starting in the 1950's, he became the Disney studio's go-to guy for their live action kids movies. He directed some true Disney classics, including Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Nutty Professor, The Shaggy Dog, and That Darn Cat. Jane Eyre is made long before any of those movies, and shows that earlier in his career, he could make mature and serious films just as well as he could make whimsical family movies.

Well, there you have it. I finally know what Jane Eyre is all about. Maybe someday I'll read the novel. I do enjoy reading the classics from time to time.

Oh hey, one more thing: Aldous Huxley worked on the script for this. Crazy, right?

*Apologies to die hard Bronte fans, (or Brontesauruses as I have just now decided to call them), I have no idea how to put the two little dots over the E in her name.

A Night in Casablanca

Are there people out there who don't find The Marx Brothers funny? I'm sure there must be, but I just don't understand how. Their brand of comedy is so chaotic and fast paced, blending superb physical humor and witty dialogue, that it's hard to imagine it not working for somebody.

A Night in Casablanca is kind of a spoof of Casablanca, but not really. It isn't copying the story outright, though there are some hints of it. There's a Nazi war criminal in hiding at Casablanca, on the search for hidden Nazi treasure. He has killed the last three manager of the hotel he is staying at, though he has finally met his match with Ronald Kornblow (Groucho Marx), the new manager. Chico plays an opportunistic camel rental owner who takes it upon himself to be Kornblow's bodyguard when he realizes Kornblow is in danger. And of course, Harpo plays the Nazi guy's mute valet, who infuriates him at every turn, seemingly both innocently and intentionally at the same time.

I love that the Marx Brothers could just be transplanted into any setting and there would be a million new opportunities for gags. Here we see Harpo Marx's amazing physical skills in the form of a hilarious sword duel, and Chico's ability to even make the act of piano playing look funny (while actually playing a song, at that!) Groucho does his thing too, usually making snappy jokes at the expense of stuffy, upper class hotel guests and the like. No matter where these guys go, they bring anarchy with them. It's a shame they never did a movie called "A Night on the Moon". Or maybe it isn't.

A Night in Casablanca is actually one of The Marx Brothers' later films, made long after Zeppo Marx left the group. The Marx Brothers are maybe a little past their prime, but they still manage to bring the laughs. Their comedy is timeless.

Rebecca

After a series of successful thrillers in England, Alfred Hitchcock made his way to America in 1940 to make movies for Hollywood. He hit the ground running with Rebecca, an adaptation of a recent bestselling novel that earned him a Best Picture Oscar.

Rebecca stars Joan Fontaine as a timid young woman who works as a personal assistant for a domineering old rich lady, vacationing in Monte Carlo. Fontaine (whose character is never given a name) soon falls in love with Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an aristocrat spending time away from his manor after the death of his wife, Rebecca.

He soon proposes to her, and they return to his mansion, Manderley. Manderley is an unsettling place, a shrine to Rebecca, where all of her things remain untouched, and not a moment passes where the servants, especially the cruel Mrs. Danvers, compares Fontaine unfavorably to the former Mrs. de Winter. Maxim will not speak of Rebecca at all, and flies into a fit of rage when reminded of her. Soon, the presence of Rebecca weighs heavily on Fontaine, pushing her into despair, and ultimately, a confrontation with Rebecca's past.

Rebecca is a quintessential Hitchcock movie, in which he explores how people can often be in the control of other people. Even the dead can hold sway over us. It's a ghost story without an actual ghost. I love the techniques Hitchcock employs to make Mrs. de Winter seem insignificant. In addition to keeping her character nameless, he also made everything in Manderley seem way too big for her. The house itself oppresses her, with huge doorways with handles so high that she has to reach up to open them. Even in a low angle, the walls are so high that they stretch endlessly above the top of the frame. We are given no hint of a ceiling.

The entire cast is great, but Rebecca is Joan Fontaine's movie all the way. She begins the movie young and clumsy and eager to please, full of innocence but with very little self worth. By the end of the events of the movie, she is transformed into a different woman, innocence gone, but walking taller.

I won't spoil the story for those of you who aren't familiar with it, but there is a twist in the third act, that sets the entire story into a different direction. The twist is smart and surprising, and I certainly wanted to see how the rest of the story played out, but the third act is never quite as enthralling as the first two. There's absolutely no way I'm the first reviewer to say it like this, but the first two acts of the movie overshadow the third, much in the way that Rebecca holds sway over the new Mrs. de Winter and Manderley.

Rebecca is still great, though. Hitchcock was already making great movies by this time, but this movie pushed him up to another level.

Bambi

Bambi is another one of those Disney movies that I can't accurately remember if I've ever seen all the way through or not. We had Bambi on VHS when I was a kid, but as hard as I tried, I just couldn't recall any scenes that weren't about Bambi as a fawn. I had the vague memory that he grew up at some point, and of course, I know what happened to his mother. I think a lot of kids might only remember the first portion of the movie, and like I did as a child, lose interest once the young animals grow up.

Bambi is Disney's ode to the circle of life (before The Lion King, I suppose). At the opening of the movie, all the woodland critters are abuzz with the news that the new Prince has been born. They gather around the mother deer and we meet Bambi. We then follow Bambi and his best friend and guide, the rabbit Thumper, as he learns to walk and talk, experiences his first rainstorm, learns the boundaries between nature and Man's World, struggles with mortality, falls in love, and ultimately, has a family of his own.

As a child, I didn't really appreciate Bambi on the level it deserved. It's not really anything like any other Disney film. The closest comparison would probably be Fantasia, Disney's other symphonic ode to nature. I am continually in awe of the way Disney's animators brought life to animals, humanizing them while keeping their behavior recognizable as their species. There are multiple different animation styles utilized throughout Bambi, ranging from the cute, big eyed designs we all know and recognize, to the amazing impressionistic style employed later, during the forest fire. The backgrounds are ridiculously lush. One of the best sequences in the movie is a musical diversion from the main story, the ridiculously earwormy April Showers song, a vignette showing all the wildlife reacting to a rainstorm.

I can see why kids latch onto the early part of the film, and not so much onto the later. It's beautifully done, and I appreciate it now, but there's little to no dialogue at the end, and the characters are no longer relatable to a child. Still, the level of quality maintained by these early Disney features is pretty unbelievable.

For my other reviews of classic Disney movies, follow these links:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Sleeping Beauty

The Lady Eve

Preston Sturges was one of the great comedy directors of the 1940's. 1941's Sullivan's Travels is one of the funniest and most touching films ever made. It's amazing to me that he made that and The Lady Eve, one after the other, in the same year.

The Lady Eve is a screwball romantic comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as Jean, part of a father-daughter con team that sets her sights on Charles "Hopsy" Pike (Henry Fonda), the heir to a huge Ale company. She arranges a chance meeting with him on a ship on his way home from a year studying snakes in the Amazon. He falls right into Jean's hands, and falls head over heels for her, as she starts planting the seeds for the big swindle.

Things are complicated, however, when Jean starts to fall for Pike as well. When Pike's bodyguard, Muggsy, smells a rat, calls in some favors, and reveals her true identity to him, a heartbroken Pike dumps Jean. Jean, furious at being spurned, then decides to get her revenge by reentering his life as a different woman, The Lady Eve, and bleeding him dry.

The two leads are perfect in their roles. Stanwyck is excellent as the manipulative and hard-hearted Jean/Eve, who keeps her vulnerability always under the surface, and Fonda is the perfect mark as Pike, filled with a nearly endless supply of naivete and trust. When Jean reappears in his life as Eve, Pike rationalizes that Jean would never come into his home without a disguise, so the resemblance must be a coincidence.

The Lady Eve is one of the great comedies. It's smart, silly, and romantic, all at once. The dialogue is endlessly clever, and loaded with the kind of snappy one-liners that the best movies of the time (many of them Preston Sturges movies) were known for. I do like Sullivan's Travels more than this, but you really can't go wrong with either.

Miracle on 34th Street

Every Christmas-celebrating household has their own set of traditional movies and TV specials that they watch over the holidays. The other day, I was treated for the first time to the Christmas classic, George Seaton's original 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street, which was not one of those movies for my family. I'm sure that young, dumb me would have balked at the black and white and never even gave it a shot. I never even saw It's a Wonderful Life until a few years ago.

Just because I'd never seen it doesn't mean I hadn't absorbed the entire movie into my brain through cultural osmosis. I already knew all of the famous beats in the movie, since, well, I think everyone does. The rest of the movie was basically filling in the gaps.

As we all know, it's the story of Kris Kringle, a man who may or may not be the actual Santa Claus (SPOILER: he totally IS), who gets a job at Macy's and spreads the Christmas cheer to a cynical, capitalistic world. His biggest challenge is to instill a little magic into the life of a serious, skeptical little girl raised by her mother not to believe in Santa. It all comes down to a courtroom trial over the existence of Santa Claus.

It's all very sweet and charming and magical. Edmund Gwenn's Kris Kringle is probably the best Santa Claus the movies have ever provided. He embodies all the patience and kindness that the spirit of Christmas should. The scenes between him and little Natalie Wood are pretty great.

It's hard not to be cynical in the face of the crass commercialization of the modern day Christmas Machine. In fact, I was going to be all snarky about the movie just now, but I totally fought the urge because that's not what Christmas is about. As skeptical as we can often be, Miracle on 34th Street is there to remind us that it doesn't hurt to let a little bit of magic into our lives once a year or so.

Rope

One of the things I love most about Alfred Hitchcock is the way he would find ways to challenge himself. Sure, he mostly stayed within the thriller genre, so there was always the relative safety of knowing he's doing what he does best. But Hitchcock would sometimes find ways to intentionally restrict himself as a director, such as limiting his camera's perspective to only that which his protagonist could see, in Rear Window.

Rope is Hitchcock at his most experimental, taking away from his arsenal what is perhaps the most important tool a director has for building suspense: editing. Rope is a story told in (seemingly) a single shot. The limitations of the time, specifically the length of a reel, forced him to hide a cut in there every 10 minutes or so. What does Hitchcock do without editing? He finds a million other ways to increase tension.

The story follows two old prep school chums, Brandon and Phillip, who in the film's opening, have just finished strangling a man (David, a third "chum") to death. Brandon believes they have committed the perfect crime, Phillip is not so sure. All that's left to do is to wait until dark, and take the body out to the country to dispose of it.

It's not going to be that easy, though, is it? Brandon is so cocky and brazen, his head so full of philosophical justifications of his own intellectual superiority, that he can't help but see just how far he can dangle his accomplishment over everybody's heads without them catching on. The best way to do that? Throw a dinner party before they go, the guest list full of associates and loved ones of the victim himself.

Among the guests are their housekeeper, David's girlfriend, his father and aunt, the 4th chum in their Chummery, and Rupert, their old teacher, the one who filled Brandon's head with these philosophical notions (played by Jimmy Stewart). James Stewart is the biggest name in the movie, so you know he has a meaty role.

Brandon takes every chance he possibly can to drop little hints of what he and Phillip did in front of the guests. Phillip is just trying to keep it together. Rupert can see that something suspicious is going on, and is putting the pieces together. It's pretty much one of Hitchcock's "perfect murder" setups, where a character starts off thinking they're secure, and we get to watch as their schemes slowly crumble do to a missed detail here and there.

The fun of the movie is in Hitchcock's inventiveness in finding tension and suspense without edits. The camera swoops all around the apartment, following different conversations as they happen in real time, and panning in on objects, letting the audience in on details that the characters may not be aware of yet. The music is only source music, never soundtrack, and it is provided by the jittery Phillip, nervously fumbling through an off-kilter, lilting piano tune.

The lighting is pretty masterful, as well. Set in a New York high rise, the movie uses a phony backdrop of the New York skyline outside. The movie is set at dusk, though, so with some clever trickery, the backdrop is replaced with darker and darker ones as the sun sets. Things reach a crescendo when the blaring neon lights on the building across the street burst on, washing the room in anxious reds and greens.

Some of the edits in Rope are more subtle than others. Most of the time, Hitchcock just pushes in on the back of an actor's jacket and hides the cut there, where the screen is all black. There's a particularly seamless one early in the film, where he cleverly overlaps the sound of piano and dialogue from the next shot in with the previous.

Rope is more known for its gimmick than its content, but I found the story to be quite entertaining. Jimmy Stewart is always fun to watch, isn't he? Hitchcock was the master of pulling our strings, and there's a subtle psychology to the way he would put together a story, especially within his editing. It's interesting to see that he was just as able to mess around with us without the benefit of his greatest tool as he was with it.

The Uninvited (1944)

A couple of years ago, around Halloween, I found a list of director Martin Scorsese's favorite horror movies. I didn't watch any of them that year, but I saved the list. If you can't trust Martin Scorsese's taste in movies, then who can you trust, right? The Uninvited, a haunted house film from 1944, directed by Lewis Allen, is the first of the movies from that list that I'll be reviewing this month.

The Uninvited stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as Rick and Pamela, a brother and sister who stumble across a beautiful abandoned cliffside home. The first sign that something is weird about it is that their dog wouldn't come with them up the cliff. They had to carry him. But then the dog sees a squirrel and all is right with the world again. It chases the squirrel into the house and they follow. As Rick and Pamela explore, they fall in love with the beautiful house, and decide then and there (well, Pamela does) that they must buy it. Isn't it weird that this brother and sister are acting married? I thought so too, but be quiet, these were more innocent times.

Tracking down the owner in town, they negotiate a deal. He's willing to let it go for insanely cheap. They meet with some resistance from his 20-year-old granddaughter, Stella, whose mother used to live there, but they buy the house. After they move in, strange things start to happen. They discover a studio room in the house that gives them the willies. A bouquet of flowers wilts and dies in moments. Rick hears a woman crying at night. Their dog runs away.
Rick has become infatuated with Stella and they let her come visit. She becomes possessed by some force that makes her almost walk off a cliff. Luckily, Rick catches her.

These strange incidents cause them to do some digging around on the history of the house and Stella's family. What they find is a winding trail of secrets and intrigue, and the only way for them to unhaunt this house will be to sort it all out.

I've got to say, The Uninvited sounds a lot more fun on paper than I had watching it. It was definitely an interesting story and a well made movie, but I felt it moved too slowly and the creepy stuff happened far too infrequently to hold my attention. There are long gaps between the haunting events, and I just wasn't invested enough in the family intrigue.

But it's not all bad. It's actually a pretty important film, from what I've learned. It was apparently one of the first times in Hollywood history that ghosts were used as something unsettling and otherworldly as opposed to for comedy. The cinematography is excellent, really atmospheric and moody. There are some really interesting and effective haunting scenes, a highlight being a seance they conduct for Stella. They could have got away with not showing an apparition at all for the ghost, but they do show it, and it looks pretty cool, especially for its time.

So The Uninvited wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean it's not for anyone. I'm guessing people more interested in horror film history will appreciate it. Martin Scorsese did, so who am I to judge?

The Maltese Falcon

Is it wrong to say that I didn't love The Maltese Falcon? I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still a good movie. I enjoyed it. But isn't it supposed to be, like, the big daddy of all film noir? I was surprised at myself.

The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, stars Humphrey Bogart as hardboiled detective Sam Spade. He and his partner, Archer, is hired by a "dame", or, in our modern parlance, a "woman", to follow a guy. When Archer and the guy both wind up dead, Spade becomes embroiled in a deadly standoff over a solid gold falcon statue from Malta.

Bogart is pure Bogart as Sam Spade. I've only ever seen him in Casablanca, but that's pretty much what he does. I like him alright, I guess, but he's not my favorite star from that period. He delivers a lot of his dialogue extremely deadpan, almost emotionless. I suppose that's how we know he's tough. My favorite moments with him, though, are the ones where he changes up his normal delivery and shows a little more humanity. As Sam Spade, he plays all sides of the case, making everyone believe he's working for them. When he's with criminals, he makes himself seem corrupt. When he's with the cops, he cooperates with them. Things can get pretty hairy when cops and criminals are in the room together, and that's part of the fun of watching him work, figuring out exactly where his loyalties lie.

My favorite character in the movie was Joel Cairo, the sniveling henchman played snivelingly by Peter Lorre, master of sniveling characters. I always like Peter Lorre in things. He was an interesting actor, and always brought a quality to his roles that only he could bring.

My real problem with The Maltese Falcon, and what really kept me from loving it, was just the sheer volume of telling when compared to the lack of showing. I know it's from a different period, budgets were lower, cinema was a lot different back then. But so much of the movie is people standing in a room, telling Spade exactly what they did, in as much detail as possible, and then Spade telling them what he did too, or what he's going to do next. Very rarely do we actually see things being done. Maybe I'm a little impatient, or maybe I've been spoiled by all these new-fangled movies where things happen.

The Maltese Falcon was made in the early 40's, which was really the onset of the film-noir genre. I'm not even sure if Citizen Kane had come out yet and revolutionized the language of film. They weren't really playing with lighting and angles as much as they could have been at that point, which is when film-noir got really fun. Still, it was an important movie for the genre, and I'm happy to have finally seen it.