For the Love of Hitchcock :: Trailer Park :: Tying it Up into One Final Knot...

While a sadistic sexual predator runs around loose in London, leaving a trail of strangled women in his wake, all adorning his signature necktie, a surly and perpetually down-on-his-luck bartender (Finch) picks the wrong time to have a very public dust-up with his ex-wife, especially when the strangler tags her as the next victim! And as the false-witness and circumstantial evidence mounts against him, including the murder of his current girlfriend, our protagonist turns to his best friend (Foster) as his last chance of escape. Unfortunately, the best friend in question is the real killer (-- no, that's not really a spoiler, trust me), who is doing his damnedest to frame our hapless hero and lead the cops right to his doorstep. Knock. Knock...

Video courtesy of OldHollywoodTrailers channel.

In the annals of movie history, has there been a less sympathetic wronged man than John Finch's Blaney? What a pompous, passive/agressive ass. So is it any wonder, then, when the master-manipulator has us in the back of the potato truck, we're sweating it out with Barry Foster's Rusk as he tries to get the incriminating tie-pin back, hoping the killer will succeed -- and thus get away with murder? Wait. What?!? *snap*crackle*pop* goes the rigor'd fingers ... Yeah. Once again, we're all confused as to who we should be rooting for, which is one of the many reasons why I love this nasty and twisted little film so much.


Now, one of the biggest knocks against Hitchcock is How can he be considered such a cinematic genius when all he ever did was keep making the same movie over an over again. It's a legitimate beef, too, though perhaps skewed a bit by target fixation. Here, we've got another wronged man at the mercy of the authorities (The Wrong Man), we've got another hero on the run (North by Northwest, Saboteur), we've got a homicidal sexual pervert (Psycho), we've got several scenes where we're rooting for the more charismatic killer (Strangers on a Train), we've got a killer trying to hide a body in a steamer trunk (Rope), and it even falls apart in the clumsy third act (Dial M for Murder), only to end on one of the greatest "Oh shit!" moments in cinema history. So, yeah, Frenzy could be considered nothing more than patchwork quilt of Hitchcock's greatest hits. But what, may I ask, is exactly wrong with that?


Remember, this is after a couple of box-office swings and misses that were outside his wheel-house (Torn Curtain, Topaz). So, can you blame the guy for returning to London and a genre he knew inside and out? And in so doing connected right on the sweet-spot? And the only thing, I think, keeping Frenzy out of the same breath as the likes of Vertigo, Notorious and North by Northwest as one of the greatest Hitchcock movies ever is the odious comedy relief provided by the chief inspector and his culinary-impaired wife, where every meal felt like an inside joke that I wasn't privy to. Look, I like these characters, but while we should be laughing at these intrusions I got the distinct feeling they were laughing at me instead, and, thus and so, wore out their welcome rather quickly.


Still, there's a lot to like. And what I like the most is the juxtaposition between the murders of Brenda, the ex-wife (Leigh-Hunt), and Babs, the current girlfriend (Massey). By 1972, being pushed aside by the artistic brutality of Argento, Romero, and Polanski, Hitch was on the verge of ... not obsolescence, but, quaintness. But with Brenda, where we see the assault and murder from the beginning to its gruesome end, the old master ditched his usual tricks of implication and showed these young film turks that what they do isn't all that hard. Now compare that to the later murder, where Rusk escorts the unsuspecting Babs to his flat, where the camera follows them up the stairs, but once the door closes, sealing Babs' grisly fate, the camera silently retreats back down the way it came, back into the noisy streets, knowing full well we'll never see Babs alive again, and then ask yourself which has more of an impact? That's right. And this sequence, I think, is the absolute zenith of Hitchcock's fluid, voyeuristic camera tricks and a fine capper on his career. Because, between you and me, I like to pretend Family Plot never happened.


And since this will be my last post for this Hitchcock hootenanny, it's time I fessed up to something. When this Blogathon was announced I figured I'd best get to re-watching some of these movies. Only then did I realize how light my home video library was on the tributee in question. Aside from an old clam-shell VHS copy of Psycho bought at a library liquidation -- which, upon closer inspection, hadn't even been removed from the plastic-wrap -- there was nary a Hitchcock movie to be found, DVD, DVD-R, VHS, Betamax, Laser Disc, taped, recorded, downloaded or otherwise. Nada. Zilch. Somewhere between shit and squat. And as such a self-proclaimed huge fan, I just found it strange that I was never so enamored by any one film in particular to actually purchase it to watch at a moments notice. Sure. There are plenty that could be. But maybe that's not such a bad thing. Keeping some things at arms length may actually make you appreciate them even more when you stumble upon them on cable, or it randomly gets suggested up in your Netflix que, or forces you to go out of your way to see. E'yup. Maybe not such a bad thing at'all.

Other Points of Interest:

The newspaper ads for Frenzy at the Morgue.

This, alas, is my last post for the For the Love of Film Blogathon, a new age telethon to raise funds for The National Film Preservation Foundation to help bring The White Shadow (a/k/a White Shadows), an early silent film that a certain master of suspense did just about everything for except direct — assistant director, screenwriter, film editor, production designer, art director, and set decorator, to the streaming masses and help defray the costs of adding a new musical soundtrack.

There’s no donation too small, folks. So please, click on the link above, wherever you see it this week and give what you can. Thanks. For more information, check out the group’s Facebook page. Big thanks, as always, to Ferdy on Film, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod for throwing such a wide net for contributors. Until next time, then, I bid you all a good ev-ah-ning.

Frenzy (1972) Universal Pictures / P: Alfred Hitchcock / AP: William Hill / D: Alfred Hitchcock / W: Anthony Shaffer, Arthur La Bern (novel) / C: Gilbert Taylor / E: John Jympson / M: Ron Goodwin / S: Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Alec McCowen, Michael Bates, Billie Whitelaw

For the Love of Hitchcock :: Trailer Park :: This One's for The Birds...

After a chance encounter in a San Francisco pet shop results in a flirty dust-up between an insolent socialite (Hedren) and a hard-nosed lawyer (Taylor), the smitten lady, in perhaps a spoiled childish snit, clandestinely pursues the man back to his hometown of Bodega Bay, with an alleged peace offering consisting of a pair of caged Love-Birds. Things seem quiet enough in this bucolic hamlet, but strange things soon start occurring, beginning with our visitor losing a chunk of her scalp to a dive-bombing seagull as she putters across the waves. Things begin to escalate from there, with a rash of unexplained deaths. And, as a huge flock of birds begins to mass and circle closer and ever closer to the unsuspecting town, only the stranger seems to realize the avian angle to these atrocities. Alas, by the time the others catch up it may already be too late for everybody...

Video courtesy of OldHollywoodTrailers channel.

Ya know, for a guy whose name is so synonymous with fright flicks I find it strange that out of his entire oeuvre, The Birds is Hitchcock's only true horror movie. (Sorry, to me, the likes of Psycho and Frenzy are just intense, nails-raking-on-a-chalkboard mystery yarns with horrific overtones. And if not that, then the blackest comedies ever made.) The Birds was the third Hitchcock movie based on a Daphne du Maurier story (-- the others being Jamaica Inn and Rebecca), and it was adapted into a screenplay by Evan Hunter -- better known to a lot of folks as crime-novelist Ed McBain.


Originally intended to only be a half-hour episode for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but, when the residents of Capitola, California, were besieged by a flock of seagulls in August of 1961, their brains turned to mush by Domoic acid poisoning, causing them to slam into rooftops and windows while the streets piled up with fallen carcasses, Hitchcock decided to cash-in on the free publicity and expand the teleplay into a feature film. And thanks to some clever advertising campaigns and that brilliant theatrical trailer, it allowed the director to let the expecting audience squirm, knowing exactly what was coming, for almost half the damned movie before the bird-shit really started to hit the fan. (And is it me, or do the attacks get more intense and savage the closer Hedren gets to *ahem* "hooking up" with Taylor?)


While were on the subject of savage intent, making her big-screen debut, Tippi Hedren sure had a rough welcome to Hollywood. The entire sequence where she's attacked in the attic took almost a week to shoot; seven consecutive days with several of Ray Berwick's (not so) trained birds tied to her wardrobe; constantly scratched and pecked, and in one instance nearly losing an eye. When it was finally in the can, the production was shut down for another week while the actress recovered in hospital from nervous exhaustion.


And though Bernard Hermann is listed in the credits, the film has no score to speak off; just ambient sound, with the bird calls channeled and intensified by Oskar Skala on a contraption called The Mixtrautonium to near ear-splitting levels. Almost fifty years later, the F/X in the movie hold up remarkably well -- thanks in part to Disney Studios and Ub Iwerks, whose expertise in the sodium vapor process allowed them to ditch the ineffective blue-screen technique when combing all the elements into one master shot.


And speaking of Walt Disney, I'll end this by relating a personal anecdote: A couple of years ago, when my entire clan visited the Magic Kingdom, one morning as my brother and I walked along the boardwalk of our hotel, munching on some donuts, a flock of seagulls swarmed around us, seemingly growing larger and more brazen with each step, until one of them swooped in and snatched the half-eaten pastry right out of my brother's hand as he raised it to take another bite! I looked at him. He looked at me. And I quickly bogarted what was left of my donut before things got any uglier.

Keep watching the skies, folks. Keep watching the skies.

Other Points of Interest:

The newspaper ads for The Birds at the Morgue.

This post is part of the For the Love of Film Blogathon, a new age telethon to raise funds for The National Film Preservation Foundation to help bring The White Shadow (a/k/a White Shadows), an early silent film that a certain master of suspense did just about everything for except direct — assistant director, screenwriter, film editor, production designer, art director, and set decorator, to the streaming masses and help defray the costs of adding a new musical soundtrack.

There’s no donation too small, folks. So please, click on the link above, wherever you see it this week and give what you can. Thanks. For more information, check out the group’s Facebook page. Big thanks, as always, to Ferdy on Film, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod for throwing such a wide net for contributors. Until next time, then, I bid you all a good ev-ah-ning.

I’m participating. Are you?

The Birds (1963) Universal Pictures / P: Alfred Hitchcock / D: Alfred Hitchcock / W: Evan Hunter, Daphne Du Maurier (story) / C: Robert Burks / E: George Tomasini / M: Bernard Hermann / S: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright, Ethel Griffies

For the Love of Hitchcock :: Neighbor, Go Screw Thyself :: Looking Out the Rear Window to See The 'Burbs.

To pass the time while recuperating from a broken leg, and help fight off a near terminal case of cabin-fever, a house-bound shutter-bug uses the telephoto lens on his camera as a portable keyhole to spy on his neighbors. And while most windows he peeps through show nothing except the mundane routines of his quirky, but more or less normal neighbors, things get a little squicky when he settles on the apartment almost directly across from his own. Here, where there once was a bickering husband and wife there is now just a husband who's acting rather peculiarly: obsessive cleaning, a strange fascination with butcher knives and saws, followed by two or three trips a night with several, dismembered-body-part-sized packages tucked under his arm.


After putting two and two together, it doesn't take long to also convince both his girlfriend and cranky physical-therapist that something sinister is up across the way, but the friendly neighborhood detective scoffs otherwise. Undaunted, if it's more evidence that's needed to convince the authorities, then more evidence this amateur trio of sleuths will get -- even if it puts them at risk of being chopped up and hauled off in tiny, parcel-sized pieces themselves.


Thus, the stage is set for Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window ... But now, let's jump ahead from 1954 to 1989, toward the climax of director Joe Dante's similarly themed, and totally underrated, The 'burbs, where everyman Tom Hanks -- after mounting a covert expedition for more concrete evidence of mass-murder next door that ends both in epic failure and the accidental destruction of the suspect neighbor's house -- goes on a rant, as only Hanks can, about how the normal, albeit paranoid, "people" who're doing all the spying and conclusion jumping, and who're too quick to judge and easily led to believe the worst in those around them, are the real menace on the block, not those whose suspicious quirks and idiosyncrasies brand them as outsiders (or worse).


It was a bold statement for such a comedic vehicle, but, of course, in the end, the film cops-out when we find out Hanks was basically just digging for bones in the wrong place. Which is why, when the end-credits rolled, I found that I liked the first conclusion more satisfying.


Circling back to Rear Window, then, even though presented with the same tangential and circumstantial evidence of murder, there never seemed to be any doubt to the neighbor's guilt -- I mean, Would you mistrust Jimmy Stewart's gut instincts? Still, as a viewer, I took some grim satisfaction that Stewart, even though he was right all along, didn't escape all that snooping and nose-poking completely unscathed. It's a comical final twist that he winds up with another broken leg, but, let's be honest, there is something morbidly poetic about it.


Anyways ... I think Rear Window is Hitchcock at his most static/cinematic best. Frankly, I could have spent the whole movie ogling at Grace Kelly; as I don't think she's ever looked better in any other film than she does here. And Ritter and Corey prove perfect curmudgeonly foils for our alpha hero and heroine. And through them, as we effortlessly zoom from window to window and life to life, with nothing but ambient sound (-- musical cues would only break the spell --) the giant, enclosed and fully functional set gives the whole thing a surreal quality, like you're actually looking/watching at/a life-sized diorama through a keyhole shaped glass -- which, technically it kinda was. A true feat of engineering, the converted stage was excavated and dug-out to form the courtyard -- Stewart's second-story room was really at ground level, and it took so many arc-lights to light it the resulting heat kept setting off the sprinkler system, scrubbing several days of shooting.


And all that effort culminates in the scene where Burr finally zeroes in on who's been spying on him and fixes his stare directly at the camera, seeing us, the audience, along with Stewart, shattering the protective glass keyhole, resulting in a most astonishing piece of verisimilitude. Luckily, though caught, when it was all over, we, unlike Stewart and Hanks, were able to leave the theater under our own steam.

Barely.

Other Points of Interest:

The newspaper ads for Rear Window at the Morgue.

This post is part of the For the Love of Film Blogathon, a new age telethon to raise funds for The National Film Preservation Foundation to help bring The White Shadow (a/k/a White Shadows), an early silent film that a certain master of suspense did just about everything for except direct — assistant director, screenwriter, film editor, production designer, art director, and set decorator, to the streaming masses and help defray the costs of adding a new musical soundtrack.

There’s no donation too small, folks. So please, click on the link above, wherever you see it this week and give what you can. Thanks. For more information, check out the group’s Facebook page. Big thanks, as always, to Ferdy on Film, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod for throwing such a wide net for contributors. Until next time, then, I bid you all a good ev-ah-ning.

I’m participating. Are you?

Rear Window (1954) Patron Inc. :: Paramount Pictures / P: Alfred Hitchcock / D: Alfred Hitchcock / W: John Michael Hayes, Cornell Woolrich (shorty story) / C: Robert Burks / E: George Tomasini / M: Franz Waxman / S: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey, Raymond Burr

For the Love of Hitchcock :: North by Northeast :: In Defense of Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942)

When a man is wrongly accused of fire-bombing and destroying the aircraft plant he works for, resulting in the death of a close friend, he realizes the only hope to clear his name and avoid the gas chamber is to catch the real saboteur himself. But with the law on his heels and a reluctant damsel in distress in tow, this leads to a treacherous cross-country chase from Los Angeles to New York, where, along the way, comes the realization that they've both stumbled onto something larger and more sinister than a single malcontent with an axe to grind.


Of course, being a public fugitive, barely staying a half-step in front of the authorities, makes it kind of hard for a person to do his patriotic duty. Will our hero and heroine be able to, as the ads screamed at us, destroy this rat's nest of Fifth-Columnists and Facist Sympathizers before it's too late? Or will they be destroyed themselves?!


When Alfred Hitchcock migrated to America in 1940 to work a four-picture deal with David O. Selznick, after the persnickety production of their inaugural effort, Rebecca, the director spent the next few years constantly and consistently out on loan to other studios so Selznick wouldn't have to deal with him. Saboteur was a war-time quickie shot for Universal and it doesn't take a genius to see that it's basically just a rehash of the The 39 Steps, but I'd rather like to think of it as a very successful dry-run for the later North by Northwest.


One of the film's biggest knocks is that the cast keeps it from germinating properly. Now, I probably owe Robert Cummings an apology for all the grief I've given him over the years for his oafish portrayal of the bumbling square-jaw who nearly derails all efforts to exonerate Grace Kelly and let Ray Milland get away with it in Hitchcock's 1954 nail-gnawer, Dial M For Murder. And the actor, mostly known for his comedies (-- Beach Party represent!), gets a lot of similar grief for not being able to carry the dramatic weight of the hunted Barry Kane; as does his co-star, Priscilla Lane, who most feel failed as the obligatory love interest.


But I actually think the dopey, everyman look and approach of Cummings suits the part better than the chiseled features and can-do doing of a Gary Cooper or Joel McCrea, the director's first choices. And the people who knock on the top-billed Lane? Well, they're just idiots 'cuz I think she's great. She's got spunk. And I love spunk. So, there. *thhbbbttthhhhh*


Admittedly, as a propaganda piece, Saboteur is very grounded in the era in and for which it was made (-- a fancy way to call it dated), but it also explains the film's lack of subtlety in its clear-cut message and demarcation between us and them, making the viewer work a little harder to properly see it in that context. And if they can, there's a pretty damned good movie to be seen, here.


To me, there's something about the smart and snappy dialogue, Robert Doyle's eye-popping set-pieces -- from the gruesome inferno, to the interlude in the circus wagon, to the grande ball, to the (not very subtle) finale atop the Statue of Liberty -- that, for one, makes this one of Hitchcock's most under-appreciated movies, and two, why I will always count Saboteur as one of my favorites of this particular director.

Other Points of Interest:

The newspaper ads for Saboteur at the Morgue.

This post is part of the For the Love of Film Blogathon, a new age telethon to raise funds for The National Film Preservation Foundation to help bring The White Shadow (a/k/a White Shadows), an early silent film that a certain master of suspense did just about everything for except direct — assistant director, screenwriter, film editor, production designer, art director, and set decorator, to the streaming masses and help defray the costs of adding a new musical soundtrack.

There’s no donation too small, folks. So please, click on the link above, wherever you see it this week and give what you can. Thanks. For more information, check out the group’s Facebook page. Big thanks, as always, to Ferdy on Film, The Self-Styled Siren and This Island Rod for throwing such a wide net for contributors. Until next time, then, I bid you all a good ev-ah-ning.

I’m participating. Are you?

Saboteur (1942) Frank Lloyd Productions :: Universal / P: Frank Lloyd / AP: Jack H. Skirball / D: Alfred Hitchcock / W: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker / C: Joseph Valentine / E: Otto Ludwig / M: Frank Skinner / S: Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger