Reflections in a hollow eye: Four by Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was prolific enough that though he’s the most famous director in history the breadth of his filmography remains unseen to all but the most ardent admirers. One of the pleasures of Hitchcock comes from tracing the obsessions, variations and attempts at reinvention found throughout the corpus. In the latest of their economically priced packages, Turner Classic Movies has smartly curated a quartet of films under the no-nonsense title of TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hitchcock Thrillers. Only one of these rests firmly in the essential canon, but the others are consistently fascinating, complex, often deliciously queer, and above all revealing glimpses into the filmmaker’s psyche. Two of these find Hitchcock deliberately working against established strengths, embracing unfamiliar styles while simultaneously imbuing the films with an unusual abundance of personal content. Not to mention casting actors in roles that ignite a compelling frisson between their star images and private lives.

Joan Fontaine meets Cary Grant on a train. He gropes her in the darkness of a tunnel, inserting himself in her cabin once she fits the bill for his bump to first-class. This is a kind of romance, but Suspicion (1941) is choked with psychological trauma. Grant’s an opportunist, a no-good bon vivant, his ruthlessness disguised by boyish charm, his words of love accompanied by no strenuous efforts at sincerity. Like Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (50) Fontaine spends the film’s duration wondering what violence her beloved is capable of, but in Suspicion the ambiguity never ends—even the final scene feels less like resolution than yet another of Grant’s quick-saves. Though the story was cobbled on compromise—the source novel ends very differently—the result is something marvelous, a pitch-black metaphor for everlasting romantic love. It is everlasting because it can never grow stale from comfort.

Another train, another chance meeting. What strikes me most when I revisit Strangers on a Train, many years after my first awed teenage viewings, is just how utterly homoerotic—perhaps homophobic—the picture truly is. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, this story of men who meet by accident and agree, however tacitly, to swap murders, is most rewarding when read as one of male-to-male seduction, a sort of gay Fatal Attraction (87), where Robert Taylor’s mama’s boy pseudo-aesthete genuinely does seem to act on the hero’s behalf, strangling the hero’s conniving wife, her glasses tumbling into the grass, bearing witness to their owner’s death as he silently lays her down and puts her to sleep. That hunky Farley Granger seems not entirely convincing as the tennis-playing hero trying to marry a senator’s daughter serves the film splendidly. Hitchcock, who’d already deftly exploited Granger’s homosexuality in Rope (48), clearly doesn’t believe his hero’s innocence and neither do we, tainting the ostensible resolution with palpable unease, greatly improving what might have felt like a triumph of closeted blandness over perverse insight.

I hadn’t seen I Confess (53) and always assumed it was a flawed curiosity. I didn’t expect it to be so boldly laced with uncertainty and so gorgeously photographed. Nor was I prepared for Montgomery Clift as the Québécois priest accused of murder. Clift’s performance is itself the most elegantly ambiguity-laden thing in the film, tormented, and conspicuously cagey. I Confess is a film of architecture and faces, mainly, of looming steeples and nerve-wracked gazes. The establishing shots seize the Quebec City exteriors in high contrast, tilted images that upset purely on a design level. Again, Hitchcock’s hero has privileged knowledge of a murder, the killer, somewhat nonsensically, taking him into his confidence, playing out some experiment in loyalty between male outsiders. The killer’s hilariously endowed not only with Hitchcock’s fear of authority but also given a wife with the same name as Hitchcock’s: Alma (Spanish for soul). Again, Hitchcock uses his star’s sexual ambivalence brilliantly. Did the beautiful, troubled Clift abandon romance and enter the priesthood because he’s secretly gay? By the end, Clift’s married ex-girlfriend spills her guts, Alma spills her guts, the killer spills his guts. Everything we need to know about the murder’s been explained. But we never learn what’s really up with Monty. The film’s hero is by far its greatest mystery.

An even more serious, less glamorous film, The Wrong Man (56) finds Hitchcock suspended somewhere between the poles of noir and neorealism. There’s an oft-told anecdote about how Hitchcock’s father had his five-year-old son imprisoned on a lark, and Hitchcock saw his anxieties about police reflected in the strange but true story of Manny Balestrero, a Queens bassist fingered for robberies he didn’t commit. In the wake of McCarthyism Hitchcock conjured his most Kafkaesque vision of America, where the assignation of guilt has the potential to impose guilt upon you. This nightmare scenario unfolds through a hybrid of dream-like artifice—a long, weird dissolve suggests that Manny’s prayers to Jesus are instantly answered by his double, walking a lonely street somewhere—and in some of the most realistic settings in Hitchcock. The subway rumbles past the windows of apartments and offices, through the shops where the cops escort Balestrero and, in a bizarrely malevolent procedure, force him to revisit the scenes of his ostensible crimes. Henry Fonda is perfectly cast as Manny, the jazz musician who neither drinks not does drugs and is always on time. He was the everyman who could be any man. It’s a shame he’d never work with Hitchcock again.

12 men, voluble, tired, not so angry

“Everything here is very Russian somehow,” muses one of the 12 in 12, Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov’s reconvening of 12 Angry Men in contemporary Moscow. The boy on trial for killing his father is now a Chechen and saddled with all the unfortunate baggage that entails. The jurors are still all men, though, as the truncated title implies, they’re not all that angry anymore. This is Russia, after all, and postwar American presumptuousness and obliviousness has been replaced by post-Soviet cynicism and fatigue. Even the lone initial holdout on the required unanimous decision of guilty bares only the vaguest hint of the righteousness, endurance and authority that characterized Henry Fonda’s character in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 sorta classic.

The ostensible Russianness of 12 is compounded by the film’s epic duration, which stays in session for well over an hour longer than its predecessor. Yet the gist of the story’s developments—the airing of racial or classist prejudices, the unearthing of negligent representation of the defendant, the revelation of personal agendas, the swaying of one juror after another—is remarkably faithful to the source material. What makes 12 so long, and what makes it at times feel longer, is a lot of overly elaborate choreography in the school gymnasium that serves as makeshift jury quarters; overlong, melodramatic digressions and tangents on the parts of nearly everyone present; ongoing cutaways to the defendant stoically waiting in his cell; and flashbacks to urban war zones to help us reflect on the sort of unforgiving world the kid comes from. All these elements seem designed to “open up” what was essentially a chamber piece playing out in real-time, but they really just sap the film’s urgency, distract from the issues at hand, and confuse the film’s sense of purpose.

Rather than focus on the ambiguities of justice and the looming threat of infection from reasonable doubts, 12 makes partial attempts to give the audience the trail the jurors never saw—the one the defendant deserved. But the evidence as displayed is wildly inconclusive. All that really matters, or should matter, is what happens in the room. The true tension arises from our inability to know anything more about what really happened than they jurors know, to gradually understand that uncertainty is inescapable, that even if the kid did kill his dad he cannot be lawfully convicted based on what the jurors have been able to glean during the trail.

Of the dozen performers, it’s interesting to note that the strongest, most welcome presence is that of the man quietly controlling everything, onscreen and off. Malhalkov himself plays the jury’s foreman, his large, round shoulders and philosopher’s beard rendering him a grounding force at the head of long table. His character holds a trump card close to this chest until the stretch, a tricky surprise alteration on the original film that’s a curious commentary on the filmmakers’ lack of faith in the Russian legal system and social mores, though it is finally of little consequence with regards to where our story finally falls.

From the Fox vaults: not quite noir, but noir enough

On the back cover of every disc in the Fox Noir series is a serviceable, quickie definition of the noir genre/style/cycle. In the case of the three latest additions, this definition seems to exist primarily to convince the prospective buyer/viewer that the titles in question really do belong under the noir umbrella. In fact none of these films would ever pass as anything like a noir avatar, yet in each, to varying degrees, we’re able to trace a sort of dialogue with noir, and their noir elements tend to comprise their most enduring aspects.

Though directed by Otto Preminger, who helmed several prototypical noirs of the classier ilk for Fox, including the masterpiece Laura (1944), the genre that best fits Daisy Kenyon (47) is something we used to call the women’s picture. The story, adapted by David Hertz from Elizabeth’s Janeway’s novel, concerns an independent single career woman –played with unusual charisma by Joan Crawford– torn between two equally precarious suitors. Though its final moment is arguably compromised, this is above all a movie about female self-actualization, though lingering within its peripheries, both figuratively and literally, are dark shadows that imbue it with deep intrigue and considerable psychological complexity.

The frankness with which the film’s themes are addressed is conveyed in the first scenes, which evoke Daisy’s love life as a virtual revolving door. Her long-time boyfriend Dan (Dana Andrews), a hot-shot lawyer, married and father to two girls, leaves her apartment just as Peter (Henry Fonda), a veteran, widower and Daisy’s date for the night, shows up. Too sophisticated to put on macho airs, the men kid one and other about their rivalry while exchanging a taxi. Daisy adores Dan –Andrews is a wonderfully understated, effortlessly seductive actor– but the chances of him leaving his wife feel pathetically slim. Daisy’s strangely drawn to Peter, yet he’s clearly, as Daisy herself describes him, “a little unstable.” Haunted by his wartime experiences abroad –a major noir theme– and uncomfortable with what seems a hollow optimism at home, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, able to switch with alarming quickness from amiability to brooding despair. Their first date ends with one of the most disturbing declarations of love I’ve ever seen, desire and resentment spookily commingling in Fonda’s visage before he turns away from Daisy without farewell to walk back into the tranquil night.

Repressed sexuality, child abuse, racism, divorce, death and capitalism’s disenfranchised victims –these themes loom large over Daisy Kenyon, while the marvelous cast and Preminger, with his clean, cool, actor-driven style, engagingly maintain the centrality of their very adult love triangle, an emotionally palpable drama with no clear outcome. In his informative and otherwise insightful commentary track, historian Foster Hirsch claims that Crawford, 42 at the time, was too old for the part –yet this is precisely what I felt most drawn to in the story, what seemed most touching, the urgency that arises from people no longer young yet still desperate for love. If Daisy Kenyon starred an ingénue, I don’t believe it would possess the same layering, maturity and elegance.

The desperation of adult love also features prominently in Dangerous Crossing (53), a thriller so initially draped in mystery and sinister confusion as to evoke David Lynch. A woman (Jeanne Crain) boards a ship with her very new husband, only to lose him just as they set sail and thereafter have the entire crew deny the fact that the couple were ever even registered as passengers. As directed by Jopseh M. Newman, there's a pleasing emphasis of atmospherics, The camera swoops a lot, the foghorn moans a lot. The phone rings –but her husband has time only to tell her to trust no one. She becomes hysterical. Is she nuts and the whole prelude an unreliably subjective detour, or is some conspiracy being exacted? The only ones sympathetic to her claims are a delightful cougar, played by Marjorie Hoshelle, and the ship’s doctor, played by the same weird guy who played the wise alien Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still (51), so we already know nobody’s going to believe him. Where it all finally goes is, unsurprisingly I guess, not as textured and creepy as the set-up might promise, but the getting there’s still pretty fun.

Set within the milieu of the New York theatre elite, Black Widow (54) was, for its time, as shockingly casual about adultery as Daisy Kenyon. While, disappointingly, it culminates with the sort of drawing room kangaroo court whodunit that is the very antithesis of noir, the film overall is characterized by nicely shaded performances and a seething corruption that infects most of the characters. Broadway producer Peter Denver (Van Heflin) begins his allegedly platonic relationship with nubile aspiring writer Nancy Ordway (Peggy Ann Garner, who, oddly enough, played one of Dana Andrews' daughters in Daisy Kenyon) while his stunningly gorgeous actress wife (Gene Tierney) is out of town. When upon his wife’s return Nancy turns up dead in his own home, Peter naturally becomes a prime suspect.

Though director Nunnally Johnson seemed constrained by the dictates of the then-new Cinemascope frame, Black Widow’s dominant aesthetic is suitably theatrical in flavour, if at times awkwardly so, with scenes playing out in large spaces with a minimum of cuts. It’s richest by far when still leading up to the resolution, when it’s still difficult to know who to trust and violence seems always on the verge of erupting. Heflin, who also starred in the superb noir Act of Violence (48), was so skilled, and had such an odd sort of star persona -the large head, the broad face, the round, mesmerizing eyes, the often slack jaw, the paternal ease with which he can take control of a situation, or wrap his arm around a young woman's neck- that his contribution to Black Widow is especially significant: even when we know he’s the hero, he can still kind of give us the creeps.

Some thoughts on Jimmy Stewart, perverts, the mysteries of arm acting, and what, should it need repeating, is still one of the all time greats

The name of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel upon which Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was based is D’entre les morts. As splendid as Hitchcock’s title was, an accurate description of the condition which afflicts both the film’s protagonist and its unsuspecting audience, Boileau and Narcejac’s evoking of the charnel house with the best-whispered words From Among the Dead so exquisitely capture the tone of what must be one of the most genuinely morbid movies ever to come out of Hollywood.

Curiously, Vertigo is also arguably among the best movies ever made, period, its goulishness absolutely matched by a sublime level of craftsmanship on display. From Saul Bass’ incisive opening credit sequence, text slashing across a looming eye like some sly wink to Buñuel's surgery in Un chien andalou (29), through the desperate, white knuckled roof-jumping prelude, through the unfolding of the haunted attraction of acrophobic detective ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (James Stewart) to doomed beauty Madeline Elster (Kim Novak) and the helpless, headlong tumble into psychological and moral collapse that follows, Hitchcock and company place us under a long, fevered trance, incited by Robert Burks’ pulsating Technicolor photography and guided by Bernard Hermann’s score, a thrilling, complex work of art in its own right, punctuated by those tremendous foghorn blasts from the netherworld.

This Sunday, the kind folks at Edmonton's Metro Cinema will screen Vertigo along with Hitchcock’s other most revered collaboration with Stewart, Rear Window (54), a movie that when placed in virtually any other double feature would be considered the residing masterpiece. A murder mystery involving a wheelchair-bound photographer spying on his neighbours, it is in fact more fun than Vertigo while still playfully incorporating similarly obscure impulses into its narrative, this time casting Stewart as a voyeur rather than a necrophile.

For all the praise rightfully heaped on both of these films, it’s often been suggested that Stewart was a poor choice for such shadowy, morose material. This proposal has been articulated most recently by Devin McKinney in the current issue of The Believer, where he argues that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie, for a variety of reasons both attributed to his talents and his tragic personal life. Yet watching his performances you get the sense that Hitchcock found something irresistibly delicious in subverting Stewart’s iconic wholesomeness and peculiarly American optimism into a weary façade disguising a catalogue of repressed perversions. Indeed, there are moments in Vertigo where Stewart's relative blankness of expression appears to me not as an actor's resignation to material beyond his abilities, but as a sort of mask, a defense against a mounting inner horror. Whether or not this was Stewart's intention finally matters little -the effect is striking, even with repeated viewing.

(Admittedly, while his face gives me no problems, I have always wondered about the weird way Stewart's arms always seem to be dangling limply in Vertigo, always functioning primarily from the elbow down. There should be a special study done on the arm acting of American movie stars, and it should begin by analyzing the bizarre poses Bogart holds every time he gets up in The Petrified Forest (33). He holds his arms stiffly, elbows-out, like he's in traction or something. Don't get me wrong, I adore Bogey in the film, but really, what the hell is with that?)

Likewise, Novak is admittedly not of the same elevated stature of many of Hitchcock’s stars. Yet (and I say this with, you know, respect) the whiff of trashiness that lingers around her persona, especially -and purposefully- apparent in Vertigo’s second half, is so utterly perfect for conveying the banal horror inherent in the story, the pathos of Scottie's need to project his fantasy upon her, that I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, especially the lovely and elegant Grace Kelly, Stewart’s love interest in Rear Window.

When regarding films as rich and obsessed over as these, film-lovers can of course debate the balance of merits, deficiencies and accidents endlessly. What’s absolutely essential is that you see these films, especially on the big screen, where the spell they cast takes full effect. Don’t miss your chance.