For the Love of Hitchcock :: Trailer Park :: We All Go a Little Crazy Sometimes. Some of Us Just a Little Bit More Than Others...

When a lovelorn secretary makes the mistake of embezzling $40,000 from her employer and hits the open road to help jump-start a new life with her cash-strapped and alimony-ized beau, her guilty conscience soon gets the better of her. Too bad mother nature had to kick up that storm, then. And even worse: her choice of accommodations to escape the same; an off, off road motel where, well ... Why hear it from me when you can hear what happens next from the man himself:

Video courtesy of RandyX27.

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"I aim to provide the public with beneficial shocks. Civilization has become so protective that we're no longer able to get our goosebumps instinctively. The only way to remove the numbness and revive our moral equilibrium is to use artificial means to bring about the shock. The best way to achieve that, it seems to me, is through a movie."

-- Alfred Hitchcock

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As the legend goes, the main reason Psycho even got made was to test a theory. Seems Hitchcock was intrigued at all the money the cheaper, black and white B-pictures were making in the late 1950's and wondered how much money they'd make if they shot an A-Picture in the same, no-frills style. (One also has to wonder if the director was also intrigued by what these smaller independents could get away with onscreen without all the big studio interference.)


Thus, putting this theory to the test, using the crew from his TV show, and an adapted screenplay by future famed Outer Limits scribe Joseph Stefano, Hitchcock's experiment was shot under the strictest security as not to spoil any of the surprises the director had planned for the audience. And when those shocks were punctuated by Bernard Hermann's buzz-sawing, all string-instrumental score, the audience never knew what hit them, proving that a boy's best friend is most definitely not his mother in some cases and made plenty a'viewer think twice before registering at any off the road motels or closing their shower curtains.


For the record, the nude model who doubled for Janet Leigh, in all those different cuts, covered in Bosco's Milk Amplifier (chocolate syrup), for the notoriously immortal shower-sequence was Marli Renfro, who appeared on the cover of Playboy in September, 1960, only three months after the film premiered -- appropriately enough, photographed taking a shower.


Also of note, the voice of Mother Bates was provided by an uncredited Virginia Gregg, a prolific TV actress and one of Jack Webb's favorite fill-ins.


Eroded over time and diluted by thousands of imitators (-- and most of them pretty damned awful), the film still packs a hefty punch -- especially if you don't look at it as a horror movie, as most misidentify it to be, but as the blackest of black comedies as it was originally intended. A theory, I think, is proven out by that fantastic trailer above. All told, I think authors Robert Harris and Michael Lansky said it best:

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"With Psycho Hitchcock directs the audience more than the actors. Shot for shot, cut for cut, the director knows he was using pure cinema to arouse audience emotions...The film is a flimsy vehicle on which Hitchcock can play with our emotions and miscalculated expectations."

The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
(Citadel Press)

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Other Points of Interest:

The newspaper ads for Psycho 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?

Psycho (1960) Shamley Productions :: Paramount Pictures / P: Alfred Hitchcock / D: Alfred Hitchcock / W: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch (novel) / C: John L. Russell / E: George Tomasini / M: Bernard Hermann / S: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam

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

Shameless Plugs :: The Morgue Rides Again. AGAIN!

First up, I'd like to apologize for the lack of content at the Micro-Brewery over the past few weeks. Now, the reasons for this dearth of posts is simple, and most of you are probably already aware, yes, the rumors are true, The Morgue lives once again and I've been overly occupied with moving it over to some much cooler digs.


Why, you ask? I thought you were tired of over-extending yourself on the Dubbya-Dubbya-Web, you add ... Well, I'll be honest. I missed it. I missed going through the old papers. I missed the hunt. Also, I'm coming to the firm conclusion that I am much, much better at being a film archivist than a film scholar. Thus, I've decided to put my nearly pathological OCD to work on something constructive for a change. And, with the new digs, and a fresh start, after more than a few false ones, I think I've finally got The Morgue fine-tuned, tuned-in, and focused on what I really wanted it to be from the beginning. Click on over, poke around, and kick the posts for a bit, and I think you'll see what I mean as we throw out a much wider net on what will be posted in the future.


Hell, we've already reached 100 posts in just over a week. And it's not just the old stuff being re-posted, either. Nope, though, I won't lie, the vast majority of content will be repeats for awhile as I fold the old Morgue and The Lost Archive into the new site. And once that's done, the post count will probably drop precipitously. But, the old ads are bigger and helluva lot easier to read and it will be a long, long time before I run out of new material.


So, there ya go. Please adjust your links accordingly, and enjoy our latest endeavor.

In Theaters Now :: Sometimes It's Just Easier to Draw You A Picture :: The Avengers (2012)

A totally unscientific method for quantifying
my expectations going into The Avengers:

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A totally unscientific method for quantifying
my reaction coming out of The Avengers:

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(...Oh, and Mr. Ebert?)
(The proper vernacular for that is "nerdgasm.")