This Week: North by Northwest at Sixty (NOT OT) - Psycho (1960) Discussion

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

There are a few articles on the internet saluting NXNW on its sixtieth. I think one is in the National Review, so you can take the politics with a grain of salt, but the article quite good. I think this is the one that calls NXNW "the best movie Hitchcock ever made, and maybe just the best movie ever made."

Maybe.

I'm here to tell you that for DECADES, I cited North by Northwest as my favorite movie of all time. I think the reason was simple: early on, young and pursuing a career, I didn't find it quite "normal" to cite Psycho as my favorite. Way back when, Psycho had a sick reputation, so I wasn't going to score career points with bosses and their wives citing Psycho. But North by Northwest? Hell, it had Cary Grant and was, in some ways, "family entertainment" and it had a happy ending and..well, it was easy to say "North by Northwest" was my favorite.

But it WAS. And sometimes, it IS. Sometimes I'll think about how richly appointed the foyer of the Glen Cove mansion is in NXNW, and I'll think of the rather cheapjack rooms at the beginning of Psycho(Marion's bedroom, for instance) and I'm like: "How come I like the little bitty cheapo Psycho when Hitchcock pulled out all the stops on NXNW, gave us our money's worth?"

Well, Psycho gave us our money's worth too is the answer -- even if on a lower budget. Balsam in the foyer of the Bates mansion feels like he is in a place just as important as Grant in the foyer of the Glen Cove mansion.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

One of the 2019 reviews of NXNW on its 60th found something surprising that I should have figured happened: some bluenose 1959 critics were disgusted by the overt sexual come-ons of Roger and Eve on the train. One critic hoped that the censors would remove the dialogue entirely! Another found the dialogue -- intact -- as near-pornographic. To which I say: go Hitch! I've always loved that Grant and Saint are forerunners of Bond and his sexually available "Bond girls," and yet they never take off their clothes at all. Saint doesn't have to wear a bikini to get male fantasies throbbing. Nor does Grant have to don "Thunderball" swim trunks (though he had been quite willing to don same in To Catch a Thief.") They get it all done with their words, their voices, their faces.

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I've written of how Psycho entered my life in 1965 -- with the re-release, with the 1965 showing of the 1960 trailer at a local theater, and a neighborhood suddenly all abuzz with tales of shower murders and corpse disposal. I've written of the aborted 1966 CBS network showing. And I've written of the November 1967 late night debut of Psycho on local LA TV.

Well, NXNW has a little story, too. And it rather tracks with the dates above.

It starts with Saboteur, Hitchcock's 1942 WWII thriller that climaxes on the Statue of Liberty. "Saboteur" got a lot of local TV play in the early 60's -- a full page ad with the word "Saboteur" written scary in the "PSYCHO" logo tradition. I realize now that, for awhile before the "big recent Hitchcock movies" hit network TV in the mid-late sixties, and with Psycho and The Birds as recent hits, Saboteur was a big deal because it was the only Hitchcock movie local channels could really show. (Actually as I recall, Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock's two Universal loanouts , went out together for broadcast, so you got one or the other every few months on the CBS local afternoon movie.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

So I became a big Saboteur fan. It was exciting to read that it would be broadcast in a week or so, it was actually an agonizing wait for it to come. And when it DID come, I was enthralled by the chase, by the jump off the bridge, by the movie theater shootout, by the ship sabotage scene but mostly by what I had to wait the whole movie to see(again and again): the climax on the Statue of Liberty. I thought that WAS cool, and I thought it was really cool how that close-up of the threads of Fry's jacket coming apart presaged his fall from the statue. Even at a young age, I got it: he hung by a thread.

I also loved HOW he fell. At a time when most movies used dummies to signify people falling from great heights, Saboteur had us look into Fry's eyes and watch the man plummet down and away from us. Instinctively, I knew: Hitchcock does it better, gives you more.

With Saboteur as my premiere Hitchcock movie for a few years, eventually, in 1966, I saw a TV commercial on local TV for the re-release of another Hitchcock movie: North by Northwest. Much of the commercial was a jumble to me; Cary Grant moving hither and yon, a man falling dead into Grant's arms with a knife in his back, a crop duster, a pretty blonde.

And then I saw it, in the commercial -- Grant and some blonde woman hanging...from Mount Rushmore. Whaddya know, I thought: Hitchcock went and did it AGAIN. Hanging from Mount Rushmore HAD to be more exciting than hanging from the Statue of Liberty.

My parents took me to a lot of movies in those days, and I recall trying to get them to take me to NXNW in '66, and they were willing to -- but the re-release came and went and was gone. (Note: Psycho had gotten its re-release the year before, in '65, but I never felt to ask them to take me to that one. I knew it was verboten.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I wish I knew what month NXNW got its 1966 re-release, for 1966 was a year in which -- rather delightfully -- Hitchcock movies started to "pop up" and I found myself hearing about them and seeing them for the first time.

This is a heady memory that I can try to communicate here. I knew that Hitchcock was a famous movie maker and TV show host. I had some of his books of short stories for children and I was getting into his "more macabre Hardy Boys" series -- "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators."

But I really didn't know what his movies were. They just started to pop up on the NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. Oh here's one: To Catch A Thief. Vertigo? What does that mean?(I recall being transfixed by the opening chase cliffhanger and fall.)

Vertigo appeared near the end of the 1965-1966 NBC movie season, but at the beginning of the 1966-1967 NBC movie season, it OPENED(along with the school year) with Rear Window. Which got a special painting for its print ad in TV Guide(NBC had commissioned poster paintings of The Man From UNCLE, I Spy, Get Smart, and Bonanza which hung in my room for awhile -- the Rear Window painting was not one that you could order as a poster, but if I coulda, I woulda.) I was duly enthralled by Rear Window -- "hey this is the best one yet!" Alas, also in this period, the family dutifully trotted out to see the new Hitchcock Torn Curtain at theater. I don't recall thinking it was bad or good. I was too young. I do recall thinking that the killing of Gromek was cool, something violent enough to report on at school...except it was summer.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The months moved on, my life moved on, but eventually came the NEXT TV season -- 1967-1968 and in Judith Crist's column about the movies on network TV to come that season was this:

"North by Northwest. Hitchcock's thriller with Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. If you haven't seen Eva Marie skittering down Mount Rushmore in high heels -- you owe yourself the treat. CBS."

CBS. Most Hitchcock movies -- Paramount and Universal -- played on the NBC Saturday Night Movie. But NXNW was Hitchcock's sole MGM release, and was sold with an MGM package to CBS. The summer of 1967, the CBS Thursday and Friday Night Movie series was sold with clips from two movies, and two movies alone: Viva Las Vegas(Elvis and A-M)...and North by Northwest(the crop duster, Mount Rushmore.)

So I was pretty revved up , jazzed and ready when NXNW premiered in September on the CBS Friday Night Movie. That's the first time I saw it, and I fell in love like, immediately. I'd never seen anything like it in terms of how MUCH happened in it. And the Mount Rushmore climax(which rolled out around 11:30 at night, I was staying up later than usual)...well, got me forever.

CBS held onto NXNW for over a year and showed it again in the sweeps month of November 1968 and I fell in love with it all over again. It was MiA in 1969 - but I had other things to do. In 1970 -- just like Psycho -- NXNW entered syndication and played on local channels once a year. (A local ABC affiliate always played NXNW in two parts, in 90 minute slots -- like, on Wednesday night at 6:00 pm and Thursday night at 6:00 pm.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

NXNW haunted the 70's for me in a mix of TV showings and revival house showings -- GREAT full-house revival house showings that were almost always full-house with laughing and cheering start to finish. The once a year viewing of NXNW was, to me, like a holiday -- like The Wizard of Oz on CBS, like Christmas.

Came 1982 and my first VCR, NXNW was one of my first tapes -- but I taped it off of TV, it was too expensive to buy for a few years. Then prices came down. Then VHS turned into DVD...and here we are.

I'll turn in these two personal stories on NXNW, because I personally like them:

ONE: When I first saw NXNW in September of 1967 on TV, my father was there, and rather guided the family through the movie with the continual phrase: "See, this is Hitchcock, right here." Like when Roger is kidnapped at the Oak Bar just like that. Or when Roger faces the farmer across the road at the wheat field. Or when Eve comes on to Roger on the train. Or when Roger is escorted by the cops out of the auction and says "Sorry fellows, but keep trying." Every time, my father said: "See, this is Hitchcock, right here." And thus I learned Hitchcock. Right there.

DECADES later, when my father was very old, we watched NXNW on TCM when I was visiting him. He said, "I know you like this movie...how'd that happen?" And I told him the story from 1967 of "See, this is Hitchcock, right here." And he said: "Really, gee I don't remember that." Damn.

TWO: Family knew of my Hitchcock jones, my Psycho jones, and my NXNW jones. Well, the annual showing of NXNW on local TV one year was the night of my Senior Prom. My date(in her gown) and me(in my tux) were in the living room and I announced to the family: "Hey, North by Northwest is on tonight, but look at me, I'm going to skip it." Somebody said to the girl, "you better believe this guy cares about you!"

Well, its all heartwarming to me. Life is quite a journey.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I guess you could say: my North by Northwest is not your North by Northwest.

But as Cary Grant said in the early eighties(before his death in 1986):

"My favorite movie of mine is North by Northwest. It didn't used to be, but it is everybody else's, so now it is mine, too!"

Happy 60th, North by Northwest.

Psycho...we'll see you next summer....

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

OK

Rolling the dice on a link:

https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/94467/NBC-1966-PREMIUM-POSTER-SET-INSERT-WITH-STAR-TREK

This should show you the four posters that NBC sent out mail order for four of its key 1966-1967 series: I Spy, The Man From UNCLE, Get Smart, and Bonanza.

I hung three of these on my wall. Not Bonanza. But all the spy shows.

Note how I Spy and The Man From UNCLE use the "Ben-Hur Stone Letters" motif to suggest an epic quality not really in the shows.

The Get Smart poster is by Jack Davis, who shared movie spoof drawing duties with Mort Drucker at MAD magazine, but Davis was usually commissioned for "comedy movie posters" from Its a Mad Mad World to The Russians Are Coming and all the way to a "re-release with a comedy emphasis" for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye.

The I Spy and UNCLE poster helped keep a spy fantasy world going into which NXNW would soon neatly fit. NXNW WAS epic.

And, again, for September 1966 TV Guide ads, NBC commissioned a similar poster painting of Rear Window. That one, I can't find on the net. Yet.

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[–] Otter (24464) 5 years ago

I've never really been able to love "NxNW". Unlike you it has no real personal meaning for me, and while it's a very good movie and I'm always happy to spend a couple of hours with Cary Grant and/or Hitchcock, it's one of those movies that just doesn't really work for me. To me, it lacks both height and depth, the light touches aren't up there with Grant's best, and the film doesn't have the kind of emotional impact I refer to as "depth".

So you've said a lot about your personal relationship with the film... do you think you could put into words what about the film itself is great? I'd be interested, it's one of those films where I always suspected I've missed something.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

So you've said a lot about your personal relationship with the film... do you think you could put into words what about the film itself is great? I'd be interested, it's one of those films where I always suspected I've missed something.

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Its an interesting challenge, because surely the first case I've made for my great love of North by Northwest IS the personal dimension.

I think everyone probably has a handful of films seen at just the right time(usually young) with just the right preparation and under just the right circumstances to make a connection that simply cannot be made again.

I think it is interesting for me to note, for instance, that my first viewings of both North by Northwest and Psycho were...on television. Commercial broadcast television, with commercials(but not edited.) Think of that. All the movies I saw first run on the big, big screen(like Its a Mad Mad World, The Great Race...all the way perhaps to The Wild Bunch) and TV screenings hooked me on my two favorite films.

With North by Northwest, it was probably a time when 'what was coming on the CBS Friday Night movie" WAS a big deal. All through the summer of 1967, the commercials ran: this fall, North by Northwest, this fall, North by Northwest. Its coming. In three months. In two. In one...IT'S HERE. The broadcast opened with clips briefly of the title shot from the film("North by Northwest") and then over clips each of the stars faces, as the announcer said "starring Cary Grant....Eva Marie Saint...and James Mason(I recall the shot of Mason was the look on his face right before he threw his fist into the camera.) It was a big deal. I'd waited all summer.

And it did not disappoint.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Compare that to two years later, when CBS spent the entire summer promoting The Guns of Navarone as (as a big premiere that would need both the Thursday night movie AND the Friday night movie to show it.)

The Guns of Navarone is my favorite movie of 1961, but as that CBS broadcast made clear....its no North by Northwest.

A great team of stars assemble for the mission, and the first act is one great thrill scene after another: machine guns and grenades take down a boat full of Nazis at sea(this is perhaps the first "action movie scene"), a storm at sea and a mini tidal wave on the shore; a cliffhanging climb that LOOKS like the Rushmore sequence in NXNW, but the stakes aren't romantic. Then comes a slow second act(full of talk and debates). And then, for the big finale about blowing up the big guns -- slow as molasses. It takes them forever to get the explosives rigged and for the guns to actually blow up.

The missing element: Hitchcock(at his best, at least.) The Hitchcock who knew how to oversee a good script that moves fast. The Hitchcock who knew how to cut suspense and action montages within an inch of their lives. The Hitchcock who worked with Bernard Herrmann (Dimitri Tiomkin's overture for Guns is great, but the overall score is rather "the usual Tiomkin."

Indeed, all sorts of "favorite movies of my youth" rather fail against NXNW as the years go by. Certainly, the Bonds. Check out From Russia With Love, sometime. That film's helicopter attack on Bond is a sloppy remake of the crop duster scene, and the climax is a low budget thing with a few boats on fire and AWFUL B-movie action music. (Meanwhile, the mano-y-mano on a Hitchcockian train between Bond and Robert Shaw is great, but the movie around it isn't.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Goldfinger meanders. Thunderball -- which I loved as a kid -- crawls (and even what I thought was a fun good guys vs bad guys underwater battle at the end ain't much today.) On Her Majesty's Secret Service has some great action sequences, but it takes a long time to get to them. I never felt the Connery Bonds -- despite having the best Bond -- ever matched Hitchcock for pace or climaxes.

So one of the reasons I love NXNW versus other movies is...other movies. The action sequences are nicely spaced -- car drive up front; crop duster mid-point, Rushmore at the end.

About Rushmore: I remain convinced that its the greatest locale for a finale ever committed to film. In fact, just as A Shower was the greatest place to stage a shock murder(the vulnerability, the entrapment, the nakedness and...everybody takes a shower sometime)...Mount Rushmore was the greatest place to stage a chase movie climax. And it really only worked once -- I think Rushmore was used in a few more movies, but not to much meaningful effect.

Consider Die Hard(1988) as a matter of action movie development and sheer bang-bang, boom-boom brio, Die Hard is "better" than NXNW . At least seen today, and yet all they could really come up with for a cliffhanger ending was the bad guy hanging and falling from....a skyscraper. Happens all the time in movies. The Towering Inferno for one. Stick, for another. But only one movie takes the finale to Mount Rushmore.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

That Rushmore sequence still looks great to me today. The matte paintings in the long shots are great. Many favorite moments:

ONE: Grant and Saint run at top speed towards the camera, on top of Rushmore, hand in hand and come to a dead halt(you can almost hear their feet go "screech.") Reverse POV: The four Presidential heads FROM BEHIND. We've never seen Rushmore from that angle before, and the barely seen tops of heads can be seen looking out over a vast horizon. This combination of two shots fills me with excitement and wonder, and I love Grant's matter of fact line: "This is no good...we're on top of the monument." (A better line than what's in the script: "No good this way. We're on top of the monument.")

TWO: The set-up: Valerian the Knife Man is coming at our heroes from stage left(around Washington's jowls.) Leonard the Head Henchman is coming at our heroes from stage right(under Lincoln's beard.) Its a clearly delineated "pincer" movement that creates great suspense. They've got Roger and Eve boxed in. Terror mounts as each man gets closer.

THREE: Side angle(great massive long shot) of Valerian sneaking alongside Washington's cheek, and NOW, Herrmann's slowing rising, slowly rousing music from the first 30 seconds of the movie returns. The finale is underway bigtime now.

FOUR: Side angle (great vertical shot) of Leonard trying to cling to a slightly tilted(inward) wall of rock alongside Lincoln's cheek. In two great connected shots, Leonard plummets down the side of Lincoln's cheek and is saved only by falling face first on a ledge about 100 feet down. Its mainly a stunt man, it looks like that stuntman got hurt and here is how "the movies can show you things you'll see nowhere else."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

FIVE: The love story reaches climax, as Roger and Eve bet on the impossible: surviving this ordeal, and leaving behind their sexual banter for the commitment of marriage(Roger's third, but hopefully, his last.) The dialogue:

Roger: Look, if we get out of this alive, let's take the train back to New York together.
Eve: (In sexual mode, smiling) Is that a proposition?
Roger: (Beat) Its a proposal , sweetie. (The heart swells.)
Eve: What happened to the first two marriages?
Roger: My wives divorced me.
Eve: Why?
Roger: I think they said I led too dull a life.

A more perfect "in love together, forever" final speech, I've never heard. I laugh, I smile, sometimes I actually tear up a bit.

SIX: The complete and utter life and death finale perfection of Eve hanging from Roger's one hand while Leonard crushes his other. Ultra-suspense from Hitchcock and Herrmann.

SEVEN: The late screenwriter William Goldman praised Ernest Lehman here: about 11 plot points are wrapped up in 30 seconds: Leonard shot, the microfilm saved, the Professor to the rescue, Vandamm captured, Roger saves Eve, Roger marries Eve ("Come on, Mrs. Thornhill"), Roger takes the train home with Eve.

EIGHT: But don't forget James Mason's line delivered as only James Mason can: "Not very sporting, using real bullets."

NINE: Phallic train into vaginal tunnel. The thunder of Herrmann wrapping up -- all my audiences went nuts. (After seeing it first on TV, I went on to theaters.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

One more scene for hero worship analysis:

The Glen Cove library. Thornhill meets Vandamm.

Or is it George Kaplan meets Lester Townsend? Because Thornhill thinks Vandamm is Townsend and Vandamm thinks Thornhill is Kaplan. How great is THAT plotting? (And eventually we learn that Kaplan doesn't exist, and the real Lester Townsend gets "a stray knife in the back.")

How the scene takes place as dusk becomes night -- the light slowly lowers as evil takes over(one film later, Hitchcock will do this again When Arbogast Meets Norman.)

How Vandamm circles Thornhill, Thornhill circles Vandamm and Hitchcock's great camera circles everybody.

How Vandamm lights his own scene while looking ominous under lamplight (" A little taller than the others...a little more polished...but I'm afraid, just as obvious.")

The great dialogue (see above, plus the immortal: "Games? Must we?")

The great and grand privilege of hearing Cary Grant exchange dialogue with James Mason. Two of the most unique voices in movie history, a little bit British, a little bit not.

Hitchcock's rule: "Travel the close-up" The camera follows along with Grant (travelling the close-up) after he says "And I know where I'm going, I'm going to the Winter Garden theater" and when he reaches the door and opens it, there's Valerian, and Grant spins around in desperation: "Townsend..you're making a terrible mistake."

How Vandamm says the phrase "Rapid City, South Dakota." I always re-wind and listen to it twice -- and Vandamm is actually predicting where this great movie chase will end.

There's a whole movie left after the Glen Cove Library scene, and yet I personally feel that the direction, camerawork, dialogue, lighting and acting is at such a level above most movies that I would feel satisfied if this one scene WAS the movie.

But there is so much more...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I truly could go on and on about North by Northwest.

But this: that first time I saw it in 1967, I was pretty young and about all I responded to was the chase excitement of the film. Rushmore to be sure, but also the great crop duster scene(in which about seven minutes of NO action explodes into above five minutes OF action -- none better than the central shot of Grant running as the plane swoops in behind him.) And I loved the opening drunk drive not just for the drunk drive, but for the cliffhanger business that starts it.

But that's about all I saw in 1967. With each year that I saw North by Northwest again, I saw more. I got older, I understood more -- about the crazy plot, about the sexual banter, about the depth of character development even in a "fantasy."

And I don't think I saw North by Northwest on the big screen before 1974 -- and it took on a whole new size and dimension, even though it had ALWAYS been big in my imagination.

(A big screen full house memory: how the audience screamed and screamed as Eve ran towards Roger's car on Rushmore; when she managed to get in JUST SECONDS AHEAD of the baddies -- the audience cheered and applauded.)

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None of this is intended, Otter, to change your mind one whit about North by Northwest. But it is oh so easy to sing its praises and to make sure that the film is saluted for its art and its craftsmanship, as well as its story.

In the early 2000's, the American Film Institute voters delivered a list "100 Years...100 Thrills" listing the 100 best thrillers of all time. Hitchcock got two of the top four:

1. Psycho
2. Jaws
3. The Exorcist
4. North by Northwest

Why North by Northwest? On its own merits somewhat but also because it really did start everything: from NXNW to Goldfinger to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Die Hard to The Matrix, and all action stops in between.

Ok, that's it.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"The great and grand privilege of hearing Cary Grant exchange dialogue with James Mason. Two of the most unique voices in movie history, a little bit British, a little bit not."
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Beautiful description. And your calling attention to those "unique voices" together in one scene brings a number of things to mind.

The first is producer Sid Luft and director George Cukor pursuing - and damn near getting - Grant for a role James Mason ended up playing: alcoholic star-on-the-way-down Norman Maine in A Star Is Born. Cukor visited Grant in his home for a cold read-through of the script, and reported later that it was one of the most moving performances he'd ever witnessed. Grant ultimately shied away for fear his drunk scenes would be perceived as comical. Mason's two in that picture - one alternating precariously between charming and combative; the other self-pitying and pathetic - are among the best ever committed to film. As is Grant's comic NXNW one, with the heavy thickness he was convincingly and miraculously able to impart to Roger's labored speech.

Another comes about from a recent re-watch of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, in which Melvyn Douglas - every bit Mason and Grant's equal in the urbanity department, although filtered through a seemingly midwestern drawl betraying no hint of his actual Macon, Georgia roots - describes Grant's character as "as typical a New Yorker as anyone you'll ever meet."

And yet Grant's was the same voice Tony Curtis exaggeratedly aped to convey an upper crust blue blood in Some Like It Hot by, of all things, accentuating its Cockney origin (which Hitchcock, with his own unique manner of speaking, shared).

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"How Vandamm says the phrase 'Rapid City, South Dakota.'"
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Erstwhile sports/political reporter/commentator Keith Olbermann routinely sprinkled his weeknightly Countdown show on MSNBC with esoteric, okay-if-you-get-'em/never-mind-if-you-don't cultural references.

Reporting a story out of Sheboygan, WI, for example, he interjected, "Mention my NAME in Sheboygan," invoking the song popularized by Vaudevillian Beatrice Kay in the '40s (and which got occasional play on the '70s Dr. Demento radio show).

And when covering one involving Rapid City, South Dakota, Olbermann named it with the familiar (to us) Mason-ic pronunciation, diction and inflection.

Getting back to him and Grant, it's fun to imagine an alternate universe in which their seemingly tailor-made NXNW roles were reversed. While Grant had never had the opportunity to essay cool villainy (and perhaps never cared to), Mason had by that time portrayed more than one besieged and frustrated man-on-the-run. I can see it working.

A similar real-life switcheroo had taken place in 1947, when the Grant and David Niven roles were reversed for The Bishop's Wife. Niven is easy enough to picture applying his roguish charm to Dudley the angel, and the impatient exasperation that Grant conveyed as Jim Blandings would have translated well to the bishop. But when Grant was brought in to replace Dana Andrews (who was traded to RKO in exchange for Loretta Young, who replaced Teresa Wright when she got pregnant), he expressed a preference for the more celestial role, and got what he wanted.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Erstwhile sports/political reporter/commentator Keith Olbermann routinely sprinkled his weeknightly Countdown show on MSNBC with esoteric, okay-if-you-get-'em/never-mind-if-you-don't cultural references.
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Reporting a story out of Sheboygan, WI, for example, he interjected, "Mention my NAME in Sheboygan," invoking the song popularized by Vaudevillian Beatrice Kay in the '40s (and which got occasional play on the '70s Dr. Demento radio show).

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Ha. I'm not familiar with that catch phrase "Mention my NAME in Sheboygan," but I'm very familiar with Dr. Demento as a Sunday night LA fixture in the 70's. I'm sure he held out for years after I left LA for good in the 80's, but he was great for some cram studying with other students, putting down the pen to listen to his truly weird novelty songs. I recall one -- from the forties? -- with a sweet voiced 40's female vocalist extolling how she loves it when "My sailor puts his dingy
in my dock." Must have been a "bootleg" but it goes to show you: sex was alive and well in the 40's.

I think Dr. Demento launched weird Al Yanokovic , who turned Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust " into "Another One Rides the Bus." There was also the great song "Pico and Sepulvida"(a bossa nova conga line number, and get this: Psycho got one of its LA 1960 engagements at the Picwood movie theater, near Pico and Sepulvida (Pico and Westwood, actually, hence the name of the theater.)

I went to a school dance emceed by Dr. Demento. Add HIM to my list of celebrity run-ins in LA...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And when covering one involving Rapid City, South Dakota, Olbermann named it with the familiar (to us) Mason-ic pronunciation, diction and inflection.

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Wow. And I thought it was only me who knew and loved that line and how Mason said it. Goes to show you, everything has a cult.

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Getting back to him and Grant, it's fun to imagine an alternate universe in which their seemingly tailor-made NXNW roles were reversed. While Grant had never had the opportunity to essay cool villainy (and perhaps never cared to), Mason had by that time portrayed more than one besieged and frustrated man-on-the-run. I can see it working.

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Me, too. I'm reminded that we have two stories on the books of Grant ALMOST playing a villain.

The more famous is Tony Wendice(Milland's role) in Dial M for Murder. Grant saw the play at Hitchcock's request and was reportedly keen to play the part, but Jack Warner said no, either over Grant's percentage salary on a 3-D movie(House of Wax was a huge hit in 3-D, and Dial M was famously made in 3-D but released flat, and then famously re-released IN 3-D decades later), or because Warner "couldn't see Grant as a villain."

Somehow I think Grant COULD have played Wendice if he really wanted to, but I don't know. Wendice is a very villainous villain, cruelly setting his wife up for a horrible death(see: Frenzy) and then cruelly framing her for killing the intended killer(and sending her to the gallows and a different kind of strangulation death.) I wonder if Grant just let Warner take the fall...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But also for Warner...when the hit musical "Damn Yankees" went into pre-production, Grant considered his pal (and partner) Stanley Donen's offer to play the villainous "Mr. Applegate"(aka the Devil.) I can surely see Grant turning that role into his own(and singing -- !! -- Those Were the Good Ol' Days -- about the Black Plague and Jack the Ripper among other things).

But Grant turned the Devil down and the role was given to the Broadway character guy who made it his own: Ray Walston. (Walston was My Favorite Martian and a great movie character guy; he stumbled into one lead in Kiss Me Stupid, when Peter Sellers had a heart attack, but his TRUE great lead is in "Damn Yankees.")

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Getting back to him and Grant, it's fun to imagine an alternate universe in which their seemingly tailor-made NXNW roles were reversed.

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I can see it working, too -- and Grant would finally get his villain role. But alas, the script is structured so that Thornhill's in ALMOST every scene(he's not in DC when the Professor gives his briefing on Kaplan, but I think that's it, well the reveal that Vandamm's on the train with Eve), and where Vandamm leaves the movie for the entire second act(which is where Eve Kendall comes in), less a few shots of him and Leonard on the train. Still, I could see that switchero.

The only case of actors switching intended roles that I can think of off the top of my head is Belushi and Ackroyd in "Neighbors" (1981.) Originally, Ackroyd was cast as the dull straight-arrow neighbor and Belushi as the wild man who moves in next door. But with Belushi's greater star power, he asked for the "straight man" role and Ackroyd agreed. I thought it worked, but the movie was a failure anyway (and, I think, the final film made by Belushi before his too-young death.)

I know that Walter Matthau asked to play neurotic neatnik Felix in The Odd Couple because he felt he could do slovenly Oscar in his sleep. Rightly, he was turned down. (Movie or play, I can't remember.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A similar real-life switcheroo had taken place in 1947, when the Grant and David Niven roles were reversed for The Bishop's Wife. Niven is easy enough to picture applying his roguish charm to Dudley the angel, and the impatient exasperation that Grant conveyed as Jim Blandings would have translated well to the bishop.

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Yes.

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But when Grant was brought in to replace Dana Andrews (who was traded to RKO in exchange for Loretta Young, who replaced Teresa Wright when she got pregnant),

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Hold it. So two of the actors who started out in The Bishop's Wife didn't finish it? SOP in Hollywood. And the two "replaced" actors made a great couple in The Best Years of Our Lives.

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he expressed a preference for the more celestial role, and got what he wanted.

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I would expect Grant got what he wanted.

"The same but different": The Sting began as only a Robert Redford vehicle(in a young con man role turned down by Jack Nicholson.) Peter Boyle, a fine supporting guy, was penciled in as the older con man who teams up with Redford. But the director was George Roy Hill, director of Butch Cassidy, and he showed the script to Paul Newman, and Newman was willing to take the Boyle part(somewhat beefed up) and Redford rather grudgingly agreed(Redford noted he had to give up some of his pay to get Newman..but Newman had made him a star by approving him for Butch Cassidy...so what could he do?)

The put Newman, Redford, and villain Robert Shaw's names all together above the title ...but Newman was first in line. On a Robert Redford vehicle.

Of course, together Redford and Newman here got one of their biggest hits accordingly, so it all worked out.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Side-bar on The Bishops Wife. They remade it with stars Denzel Washington (in the Grant role) and Whitney Houston, but as I recall the David Niven role did NOT go to a highly known star. This also happened with the remake of Sabrina, where instead of Bogart and Holden as brothers, we got Harrison Ford and...TV host Greg Kinnear(after some dalliance with Tom Cruise.)

Simply put: getting male stars of magnitude together on screen is harder than it used to be.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

If I may, I'll group my meager responses in a minimum of posts (I've never found long threads as easy to negotiate on this site as on the old one). And not to give any of your thoughts short shrift either; to the contrary, it's just that short is how I often find myself coming up in this fertile field of ideas.
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"Tony Wendice(Milland's role) in Dial M for Murder. Grant saw the play at Hitchcock's request and was reportedly keen to play the part...Grant considered his pal (and partner) Stanley Donen's offer to play the villainous 'Mr. Applegate'...Walter Matthau asked to play neurotic neatnik Felix in The Odd Couple because he felt he could do slovenly Oscar in his sleep. Rightly, he was turned down. (Movie or play, I can't remember.)...Hitchcock wanted Holden for Guy in Strangers on a Train and Sam in The Trouble With Harry..."
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Oh my, the ones that got away (happily so in many cases). Someone could do a quite extensive book on The Films That Might Have Been: George Raft and Ann Sheridan in Casablanca; Laird Cregar as Waldo in Laura; Mary Pickford and Montgomery Clift in Sunset Blvd; Claudette Colbert as Margo in All About Eve.

On a related note, it was common at some studios in the '40-'50s - MGM, Warners and Universal among them - to assemble trailers from takes other than those used in the finished films, and from which one can get a sense of other unmade movies that would have been, as you said, "the same but different" from those we know. I wonder if there was an unprinted take of Mason giving an alternate reading of "Rapid City, South Dakota."

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

Incidentally, I understand it was the play rather than the film for which Matthau suggested himself for Felix. And what a happy thing for Art Carney that he was able to break free of his "Norton" identification for that and other roles like those in Harry and Tonto and The Late Show (in which I feel his work was superior to his Oscared performance).
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"And Grant plays well his hangover the next day in the courtroom. He is finally sober and outraged and terrified about the attempt on his life...but with a terrific headache, well played."
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One of the most valuable skills - or perhaps hardest aspects - of the film actor's trade: maintaining a sense of the story's dramatic arc in the midst of out-of-sequence, a-minute-here-a-minute-there shooting.

I saw one of John Gilbert's early talkies in which he and estranged bother Louis Walheim finally come to blows in an extended brawl, then sit down to clear the air with a heart to heart. Who knows how many hours or days before or after the fight their dialogue happened to have been shot, but only Gilbert plays the scene and his lines through the heavy huffing and puffing of someone who's supposedly just engaged in minutes of fisticuffs, while Walheim plays it with the relaxed sense of exactly what he was: an actor who's merely gotten up from his canvas chair and walked onto the set after an AD has called, "Ready for you, Mr. Walheim."

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I personally can't/don't watch 20s, 30's, and some 40's movies"
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I guess we're polar opposites in that regard. My knowledge of films - and "fandom" thereof - begins tailing off with the '60s, and after, say, the early '80s, I'm hard-pressed to recall even which films I've seen or haven't and when they were made, much less zero in on favorites from '86, '92, '04 or whatever it might be. I marvel at your and swanstep's abilities to keep all that catalogued in your heads.
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"I paid to see Cary Grant do his Q and A session in 1984(two years before his 1986 death.)"
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Color me green with envy. I'd trade my Grant experiences - a couple sightings on the MGM lot (there for the annual stockholders' meeting) and a brief "Hello" and handshake at a 1979 opening night party at Frascati's on Sunset - for yours. I'd even throw in meeting Rita Hayworth minutes before (mindful of their having worked together in 1939's Only Angels Have Wings, I tried to keep tabs on both during the course of the evening to see if they secluded themselves for a reunion or tête-à-tête, but no such luck).

Oh, and backing up a bit to your mention of Pico and Sepulveda, that was recorded by the big band orchestra of the '30s-'40s Freddy Martin, under the satirical "nom de tune" of Felix Figueroa (referencing yet another L.A. street, as you know).

An additional musical/NXNW thought: I recently watched 1951's On Dangerous Ground (brutal city cop Robert Ryan out of his element hunting a rural killer) for which Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and noticed two music cues distinctly recognizable from - and recycled for - NXNW. I don't mean just suggestive or evocative of, but note-for-note. Ah well, happened to the best of 'em.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"I personally can't/don't watch 20s, 30's, and some 40's movies"
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I guess we're polar opposites in that regard.

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And more power to you. I am in no way proud when I make my announcement about those earlier films. I think some of it is my ongoing analysis of how I "came to the movies" and simply put -- I am most responsive to movies that came out while I was alive -- I can attach memories to them, and nostalgia to them.

I can't say I've ever connected well to 30's movies, but from the forties I do know that I find Casablanca to be as modern and dialogue-fun as any modern film, and I love both the emotional score and the emotional epic-style story of "The Best Years of Lives." Both of those movies "break my rule" about the forties. I love them.

And this -- I'm sometimes amazed to remember that if I was viewing forties movies on my 1960's family TV set -- say Saboteur in 1963 -- that was only 21 years after the original came out! The distance(today) from here back to 1998 (the year of Van Sant's Psycho -- not all that long ago.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

--
My knowledge of films - and "fandom" thereof - begins tailing off with the '60s, and after, say, the early '80s, I'm hard-pressed to recall even which films I've seen or haven't and when they were made, much less zero in on favorites from '86, '92, '04 or whatever it might be. I marvel at your and swanstep's abilities to keep all that catalogued in your heads.
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Well, we all have our patterns. I think mine with movies is like sports fans with particular World Series or players over the years -- we all seek some sort of "organized relaxation" from the tougher parts(or the more banal parts) of life.

And it IS turning into something very positive for me -- these memories of all these movies. One can see them as "just an evening's entertainment" or even "a waste of time" but...no. If you are a true movie lover(of whatever type of movie), these movies speak to you, mark your life, mean something.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Incidentally, I understand it was the play rather than the film for which Matthau suggested himself for Felix.

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Well, play and film history proved Matthau to be well directed to Oscar instead.

I like to point out that while Jack Lemmon got the big money($1 million) for The Odd Couple, the role of Felix rather killed his star career...even as the role of Oscar MADE Walter Matthau's star career. Lemmon was just too good as a whining neurotic...Matthau's Oscar may have been a slob, but he was a "guy's guy," cared about his friend Felix, and had a deadpan thing going that made him a movie star in the 70's even as Lemmon become "too serious"(Oscared for yet ANOTHER neurotic in Save the Tiger, a truly depressing film.)

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And what a happy thing for Art Carney that he was able to break free of his "Norton" identification for that and other roles like those in Harry and Tonto and The Late Show (in which I feel his work was superior to his Oscared performance).

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Agreed on The Late Show...Carney is one of those surprises in show business...famous for one particular type of "goofy" role...able, late in the game, to create a whole new career for himself. (And I'd be interested to see his Felix...it seemed so quintessentially a Jack Lemmon role.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"And Grant plays well his hangover the next day in the courtroom. He is finally sober and outraged and terrified about the attempt on his life...but with a terrific headache, well played."
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One of the most valuable skills - or perhaps hardest aspects - of the film actor's trade: maintaining a sense of the story's dramatic arc in the midst of out-of-sequence, a-minute-here-a-minute-there shooting.

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Yes, I suppose Grant had to get some coaching as to "where he was in the story"(a comical drunk the night before, an enraged man today), and one senses the hangover.

Recall Hitchcock saying that Grant came to him about a third of the way through filming and said he couldn't make heads or tails of the script...and Hitchcock told Truffaut "he was speaking a line of his character's dialogue!"

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I saw one of John Gilbert's early talkies in which he and estranged bother Louis Walheim finally come to blows in an extended brawl, then sit down to clear the air with a heart to heart. Who knows how many hours or days before or after the fight their dialogue happened to have been shot, but only Gilbert plays the scene and his lines through the heavy huffing and puffing of someone who's supposedly just engaged in minutes of fisticuffs, while Walheim plays it with the relaxed sense of exactly what he was: an actor who's merely gotten up from his canvas chair and walked onto the set after an AD has called, "Ready for you, Mr. Walheim."

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Ha. Yes, its rough when an actor doesn't seem to have "given it his all in the prep." I've heard that's what separates our truly great film actors from our movie stars.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

If I may, I'll group my meager responses in a minimum of posts (I've never found long threads as easy to negotiate on this site as on the old one). And not to give any of your thoughts short shrift either; to the contrary, it's just that short is how I often find myself coming up in this fertile field of ideas.

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You start 'em, doghouse, and I find myself going this way and that with the responses. No requirement to respond to all my responses! But I like the fertile starting points you give me in your own thoughtful takes on these things!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Tony Wendice(Milland's role) in Dial M for Murder. Grant saw the play at Hitchcock's request and was reportedly keen to play the part...Grant considered his pal (and partner) Stanley Donen's offer to play the villainous 'Mr. Applegate'...Walter Matthau asked to play neurotic neatnik Felix in The Odd Couple because he felt he could do slovenly Oscar in his sleep. Rightly, he was turned down. (Movie or play, I can't remember.)...Hitchcock wanted Holden for Guy in Strangers on a Train and Sam in The Trouble With Harry..."
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Oh my, the ones that got away (happily so in many cases).

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Happily so in some key cases. Casablanca's a big one, yes. (And I think George Raft turned down The Maltese Falcon, too.)

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Someone could do a quite extensive book on The Films That Might Have Been: George Raft and Ann Sheridan in Casablanca; Laird Cregar as Waldo in Laura; Mary Pickford and Montgomery Clift in Sunset Blvd; Claudette Colbert as Margo in All About Eve.

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Yes, that's true. I think so many movies had so many possible stars that when you look over the terrain you realize..."hell, it could have been ANYBODY."

I've zeroed in on some. I'm such a Richard Boone fan that I believe if he HAD taken The Sting(and he was sought HARD for that role, they kept re-writing it for him), it MIGHT have gotten him Jaws...and really given him the character star career he didn't quite get.

Meanwhile, Lee Marvin turning down The Wild Bunch and turning down Jaws. It made sense for him to turn down The Wild Bunch(and aging, "not hot anymore" William Holden was perfect for the role), but Jaws could have rejuvenated MARVIN's career, and yet he turned down the chance.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I think Michael Caine was right to turn down Rusk in Frenzy -- putting Caine in that horrific rape-murder scene would have been bad for his star reputation and bad for the movie. Using a Caine-like little known(Barry Foster) gave us a sense of "reality" about Rusk that made the scene as horrific as Hitchcock wanted it to be. (Years later, when Caine DID play a psycho killer in Dressed to Kill..he still wasn't asked to do something as bad as Rusk does.)

Meanwhile, I think it is sort of sweet that Hitchcock pitched various roles in Family Plot to Redford, Nicholson, Reynolds, et al -- but Hitch was too old, the budget too low, and the plot too slight to really attract that level of talent in 1976.

And finally(for here): I'm not sure that Cary Grant doing Tony Wendice would have been very fun to watch. Wendice is an exceedingly cruel man and what, really, would the point have been for Grant to play that?(Grant's cruel for much of Notorious, too -- but he's not a murderer, and he comes round at the end.)

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I'm not sure that Cary Grant doing Tony Wendice would have been very fun to watch. Wendice is an exceedingly cruel man and what, really, would the point have been for Grant to play that?"
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With Grant's famous remark in mind ("Everyone wants to be Cary Grant; even I want to be Cary Grant"), I wonder if this will make sense: while I believe he yearned to be recognized for his acting abilities, it's as though he put himself at a disadvantage by the necessity of taking on two roles for every film he made; he could play Devlin or Robie or Thornhill or whomever, but he first had to play Cary Grant in order to do it.

He could be manic and goofy in The Awful Truth or Arsenic and Old Lace, tearfully sincere in None But the Lonely Heart or Penny Serenade, domestically harried in Blandings or Houseboat, but each had to be filtered through the manufactured (according to him) Grant persona. Father Goose is the only one of his films I can think of that approached a departure from it.

For Wendice, Milland had a bit of an edge with an undercurrent of cold caddishness that he could bring to the fore when required. He'd already done some image-bending with The Lost Weekend, and a few years later, had even played Satan himself in a Faustian exercise called Alias Nick Beal.

Two years before Dial M, he'd also done The Thief, in which he plays a U.S. nuclear scientist smuggling secrets to (presumably) the Soviets. Interesting note about it: there's no dialogue. Not one character speaks a single word. Fascinating and not unsuccessful experiment. I wouldn't be surprised if Hitchcock thought, "I wish I'd tried that."

Milland would have made a fine Thornhill when he was younger (although Grant was three years older). In 1948, he'd done a NXNW meets Die Hard in The Big Clock: framed for murder by Charles Laughton and on the run from the cops, but unable to escape from the high-rise they've sealed off. Very stylish thriller.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"I'm not sure that Cary Grant doing Tony Wendice would have been very fun to watch. Wendice is an exceedingly cruel man and what, really, would the point have been for Grant to play that?"
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With Grant's famous remark in mind ("Everyone wants to be Cary Grant; even I want to be Cary Grant"), I wonder if this will make sense: while I believe he yearned to be recognized for his acting abilities, it's as though he put himself at a disadvantage by the necessity of taking on two roles for every film he made; he could play Devlin or Robie or Thornhill or whomever, but he first had to play Cary Grant in order to do it.

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Yes, I can see that. Movie star acting at its best. Bogart and Wayne did it, too. You create the persona and then "plug that persona into the role."

We know that James Stewart rather famously played guys with a dark side for Hitchcock -- the professor in Rope(smugly chortling over his murder fantasies), Jeff in Rear Window(brutally mocking his gorgeous suitor; voyeurism, a kind of cowardice when Lisa is manhandled by Thorvald); Scottie in Vertigo(quite simply a madman of sorts, into obsession, on the edge of murder.)

Grant didn't go QUITE that far for Hitchcock, but he went far enough. The guy in Suspicion is a crook who could be a killer; Devlin loves Alicia, but he is cruel to her too; John Robie -- a former thief who earned his parole by killing many, many men(Nazis, but still.) Thornhill's actually probably the most regular guy Grant played for Hitch -- but Wendice would have been way over the other side.
I GUESS I could enjoy seeing it, but that was one bad guy who needed punishment.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I'm reminded that Harrison Ford a couple of decades back took on a role as a murderous villain(it was a surprise at the end, so I guess I won't name the movie) and I personally found him VERY hard to take in that role. Whereas Nicholson, Pacino, DeNiro and Travolta seemed to play villains with ease, when Ford did it...it just felt wrong. Hard to watch. And, frankly, somewhat unbelievable. He couldn't really pull it off.

I expect Grant could have.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

(Grant) could be manic and goofy in The Awful Truth or Arsenic and Old Lace, tearfully sincere in None But the Lonely Heart or Penny Serenade, domestically harried in Blandings or Houseboat, but each had to be filtered through the manufactured (according to him) Grant persona.

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I think of that group, his manic guy in Arsenic and Old Lace is the fun one. Capra requested that performance; Grant gave it and later regretted it, but I just love it. He literally screams just like Bugs Bunny at one juncture in the film. But he also "underplays" in the usual manner while watching OTHER men have a knock down drag out fight offscreen. Its "old Cary" in a new way.

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Father Goose is the only one of his films I can think of that approached a departure from it.

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Well, he's unshaven and his shirttail is out and the character is a drunk island recluse who doesn't like women -- I've read that Cary was maybe trying to get a "True Grit" type Oscar for a bit of self-parody. Except, the grumpiness of John Robie is in the part, too -- he can't escape being Cary Grant, even without a shave. I love that movie, BTW, especially the first half where he is more of a grumpy drunk. On the other hand, its a bit too "Universal sitcommy" for its own good as it goes along. Not at NXNW level...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

For Wendice, Milland had a bit of an edge with an undercurrent of cold caddishness that he could bring to the fore when required. He'd already done some image-bending with The Lost Weekend, and a few years later, had even played Satan himself in a Faustian exercise called Alias Nick Beal.

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I suppose after the star casting of Grant had been discarded for Dial M, Hitch had to look over the list of "usual suave suspects" to find his Wendice, and Ray Milland had some bona fides. Mainly that Oscar for a Billy Wilder film; that kept him "cool" for a few years into the 50's(though by the 60's, it was off to Roger Corman and fewer hairpieces, for Milland.)

I would assume that James Mason was also considered for Wendice. He could have done it. George Sanders would have been fine for Wendice -- and fine years later for Vandamm -- but I fear that Sanders "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar for All About Eve rather killed off his leading man career.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Two years before Dial M, he'd also done The Thief, in which he plays a U.S. nuclear scientist smuggling secrets to (presumably) the Soviets. Interesting note about it: there's no dialogue. Not one character speaks a single word. Fascinating and not unsuccessful experiment. I wouldn't be surprised if Hitchcock thought, "I wish I'd tried that."

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I"ve read of that film experiment, and I'll bet Hitchcock was impressed. At the same time, Hitchcock did movies that were PARTIALLY silent that way (Vertigo in its first 30 minutes; the 9 minutes where Norman Bates cleans up the Crane murder and buries her)...I expect he'd be wary of a full movie experiment.

Another movie like that: Robert Montgomery's "The Lady in the Lake," where we get almost the whole movie from the POV of the protagonist. Its disorienting, not at all like "real life" and how we see people. But again, its a technique Hitchcock used sparingly, a lot(fists flying out to hit US in Strangers on a Train and NXNW; Sam and Lila looking at US in response to the unseen Arbogast's "let's all talk about Marion, shall we.")

I think Hitchcock's deal was to use silent sequences and POV shots as PART of the mosaic of his films; not as the entire experiment(less the Rope experiment, I guess.)

Milland would have made a fine Thornhill when he was younger (although Grant was three years older). In 1948, he'd done a NXNW meets Die Hard in The Big Clock: framed for murder by Charles Laughton and on the run from the cops, but unable to escape from the high-rise they've sealed off. Very stylish thriller.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Milland would have made a fine Thornhill when he was younger (although Grant was three years older).

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Grant looked younger than a lot of his younger peers, didn't he?

I think Milland peaked for Hitchcock type heroes with Ministry of Fear, in the forties.

In 1948, he'd done a NXNW meets Die Hard in The Big Clock: framed for murder by Charles Laughton and on the run from the cops, but unable to escape from the high-rise they've sealed off. Very stylish thriller.

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Yes, I've seen it...and the 1987 remake at the Pentagon -- No Way Out(Kevin Costner in for Milland; Hackman in for Laughton.)

Milland had a good star career in the forties and fifties.

And he just kept plugging, in his later years going bald for Love Story and Frogs and The Thing with Two Heads and Columbo. Anything and everything.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

With all our talk about "alternative casting" for movies, I suppose I should review the alternates for "North by Northwest""

Thornhill: Screenwriter Ernest Lehman, starting from scratch, saw this as a Frank Sinatra role, and, I think, as a newspaperman. But Hitch didn't want to work with Sinatra. Hitch sought Grant, but while Grant dithered, MGM pushed for Gregory Peck.

James Stewart famously WANTED Thornhill, but I think that Hitchcock felt, after Vertigo, that Stewart was prematurely aged.

The names above were sought for Thornhill, but I can see Rock Hudson or Bill Holden in this if Grant said no.

Vandamm: In Lehman's early scripts, this character was named Mendoza. Hitchcock wanted bald, formidable Yul Brynner for the part. He would have been a perhaps more "scary" villain, more physical. But with Mason in place, we got a true "doppelganger" for Cary Grant: two handsome graying men in their fifties(playing their forties) with matching nifty quasi-British voices.

Eve: MGM pushed for Cyd Charisse as a realistic choice -- but also for Elizabeth Taylor if the money was there. Grant lobbied for Sophia Loren until their romance cooled down. Evidently Princess Grace was approached "back channel" to no avail(THAT would have been great casting.) Hitchcock must have been THINKING Grace, because I think that's how we got Eva Marie.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Oh, and backing up a bit to your mention of Pico and Sepulveda, that was recorded by the big band orchestra of the '30s-'40s Freddy Martin, under the satirical "nom de tune" of Felix Figueroa (referencing yet another L.A. street, as you know).

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Ah yes...those LA street names are very key to my nostalgia of years lived there.

In my newspaper research, I found that while NXNW played one main LA theater for its opening weeks -- the Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard -- the next year Psycho was released simultaneously all over LA on about 20 screens. Paltry by today's standards, but a "wide release" for its time. Psycho was at the Picwood, and in Santa Monica, and in Pasadena, and in Glendale...just sort of scattered around the "LA basin" of two valleys(San Fernando and San Gabriel) looking to make a fast buck. It did NOT get prestige treatment.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

An additional musical/NXNW thought: I recently watched 1951's On Dangerous Ground (brutal city cop Robert Ryan out of his element hunting a rural killer) for which Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and noticed two music cues distinctly recognizable from - and recycled for - NXNW. I don't mean just suggestive or evocative of, but note-for-note. Ah well, happened to the best of 'em.

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I have read of this before. I really need to see On Dangerous Ground to discover it for myself.

Using Herrmann as an example, what's amazing is how often he did NOT use the same cue. But I tell you, I think I hear a little bit of the Psycho score in Vertigo, when James Stewart goes into the alley to spy on Kim Novak in the flower shop. Now, the Psycho score wasn't written yet, so these would just be "stray notes floating around in Herrmann's head."

The whole thing about how a movie composer's head works is amazing to me.

I'm guessing the composer first "hears the tune in his head", then writes down the notes, then composes it for orchestra.

But its all that "filler" music that amazes me. Not the big credit music, or the big motifs(screech screech screech.) The filler.

From Psycho:

I had that movie on audio tape(some scenes) before I had it on video tape, so I just listened to musical cues a lot. And one audio cue that always intrigued me is of Arbogast returning to the Bates Motel for the second time in his car, getting out, walking to the motel. Herrmann's music here is rather "meandering around" with the detective, but with a tense "murmur" and a certain edginess. And I just wonder: HOW did Herrmann come up with THOSE notes for Arbogast's wanderings?

As I've noted, once Arbo climbs the stone steps up the hill to the house, Herrmann puts a weird, "slinky/looping" cue on the soundtrack, almost playful, as if the HOUSE is saying "Sure, come on up here, Mr. Detective, we have a surprise for you."

All from the musical cue. Nothing "narrative" about it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

On a related note, it was common at some studios in the '40-'50s - MGM, Warners and Universal among them - to assemble trailers from takes other than those used in the finished films, and from which one can get a sense of other unmade movies that would have been, as you said, "the same but different" from those we know. I wonder if there was an unprinted take of Mason giving an alternate reading of "Rapid City, South Dakota."

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That's interesting. Given my "weaknesses" on pre 1960's films, I'm more familiar with the many MODERN trailers where scenes are there that don't make it into the movie, but more intriguigingly ...line readings of the same line that don't make it into the movie. (You can feel the director's plea: "Look, he said it good THIS time too -- just different.")

Mason saying "Rapid City, South Dakota" is cool for a variety of reasons...he is reaching the end of an itinerary for George Kaplan which will become...the itinerary for the movie itself, a map for Roger Thornhill to follow...and smart minds would know: hey, Rapid City means Mount Rushmore! (I also find it interesting that Kaplan "stayed" in Berkeley California and Detroit...didn't Hitch want to do an NXNW scene on a car assembly line in Detroit?)

But Mason saying "Rapid City, South Dakota" is most cool for...how Mason says it...its like a "James Mason impression": "RA-pid Ciiiity...South DA-kota!" with all that air-sucking cadence he had. (Noteable, Mason slightly muffs the line AFTER this about "not deceiving us anymore than we're deceiving you." I expect Hitchcock was willing to sacrifice perfection to get the Rapid City line.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Hi, doghouse...and thanks.

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The first is producer Sid Luft and director George Cukor pursuing - and damn near getting - Grant for a role James Mason ended up playing: alcoholic star-on-the-way-down Norman Maine in A Star Is Born.

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I have read of this. One of the interesting things about Cary Grant in his peaking years of the fifties into the sixties(well, he was already a star in the 30's and a BIG star in the 40's, but with the rise of superstar power in the 50's and 60's, he was HUGE), is some of the "important dramatic films" he came close to doing but pulled out of. A Star is Born is one(though, really, the idea of Grant playing a star in decline feels harder and harder to believe.) The Bridge on the River Kwai(Holden role) is another. On that one, I've read that Holden and Grant competed for the role and Holden won outright, or that Grant got it first, and turned it down.

Hitchcock and Wilder evidently exchanged ironic remarks about how while Wilder always wanted Grant for certain roles(and had him pull out after saying yes, or just turning them down), Hitchcock always wanted Holden (from 1950 on) for certain roles , and never got him. Grant was ALMOST in The Major and The Minor; Sabrina(which would have paired Grant and Holden as brothers, a better match-up than Bogie in the final film); Love in the Afternoon and....some other one.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Hitchcock wanted Holden for Guy in Strangers on a Train and Sam in The Trouble With Harry. Hitch missed both times. But they weren't really great roles. Its my contention that had Hitchcock been willing to "give up" Cary or Jimmy for one of their great fifties roles, Holden would have taken them. I am thinking Holden for The Man Who Knew Too Much or Rear Window(but not for Vertigo). Holden would have been fine in To Catch A Thief or North by Northwest -- but Grant was "finer"(a more cosmopolitan man for To Catch a Thief, a better comedian for NXNW.) I'm also not sure Holden could have played that reprehensible scene in Rear Window(in the theme, not the making) of Stewart whimpering, gnawing his knuckles and asking his NURSE, "what do we DO?" as Raymond Burr attacks Grace Kelly across the courtyard.

Holden got prematurely puffy in the the sixties, and was older than Hitchcock was liking in his leading men(Gavin, Taylor, Connery and Newman were the "new normal"), but I can see him in The Birds and in a "long cameo" in the John Forsythe role in Topaz.

But maybe Hitchcock just couldn't get Bill Holden because he either offered the wrong roles or withheld better ones for the better fit of Cary and Jimmy.

Noteable: for the four roles that Grant accepted for Hitchcock(Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and NXNW), we are reminded of the ones Grant turned down: Foreign Correspondent, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Spellbound, Rope(where he committed as the "attached star" but backed out, likely seeing the role as villainous), I Confess, Torn Curtain. (Of Marnie, Grant said "Hitch didn't ask me")

Meanwhile, back at Grant and some roles he turned down for others...

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Cukor visited Grant in his home for a cold read-through of the script, and reported later that it was one of the most moving performances he'd ever witnessed.

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Grant turned down the heavier stuff, but there is evidence in what he DID do that he could be very moving. Even in the last stages of NXNW, you can sense Thornhill's compassion for Eve(he doesn't want her to die) and his admiration of Eve(for going into danger for the US government) even as he is falling in love with her AFTER having dabbled in lust with her. Its rather touching.

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Grant ultimately shied away for fear his drunk scenes would be perceived as comical.

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An interesting reason. I'm not sure if it is quite the REAL reason(again -- I think Grant could have PLAYED failure and decline, but nobody would believe him -- in real life, his career NEVER failed or declined.)

I was reading a '60's interview with John Wayne the other day, and somewhere in it he said this: "Who's that one fellah? That comedian...oh yeah...Cary Grant." That comedian. Its funny, I think Grant made some comedies and had a facility for comedy, but you'll also find him being quite serious in Suspicion, Notorious, None but the Lonely Heart, Penny Serenade, Crisis, People Will Talk, The Pride and the Passion...

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Mason's two(drunk scenes) in that picture - one alternating precariously between charming and combative; the other self-pitying and pathetic - are among the best ever committed to film.

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Yes. If you couldn't get Grant, Mason was a good, skilled substitute. And Mason is GREAT in A Star is Born, capturing all the pain on the way down and his love for Garland. I expect Mason's great dramatic star turn in A Star is Born is just one reason he didn't much enjoy his secondary role and lower pay(than Grant) for NXNW.

Years later, in 1978, when Grant turned down the Mr. Jordan role in Heaven Can Wait(a Claude Rains role in the original, after all)...Mason took it. And was fine.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

As is Grant's comic NXNW one, with the heavy thickness he was convincingly and miraculously able to impart to Roger's labored speech.

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You can add the entirety of the drunk scene to the reasons why NXNW is such a great film -- and also, I think, why it has risen to the top as the "Greatest Cary Grant Movie." I always see or hear the word "arguably" before that, but its pretty clear that Grant's name is attached to that movie more often than anything else. (Likely because it got, like Psycho, a spectacular "after life" of decades. Its screenwriter, Ernest Lehman said, "it was a hit on release, but not considered anything special. But it grew and grew over the years as a classic, and got a cult.")

Cary's funny in the drunk scene as the baddies put him in the car, he's funny without saying a word and trying to focus on the road during the drunk drive - and then he indeed hits all those slurring, overdone but subtle notes as a drunk in the Glen Cove Police Station. Noteable: Grant is outraged and terrified -- he's DESPERATE to tell the cops that bad men have tried to kill him and can be found at that mansion -- but his goofy, slurred drunk's speech prevents him from projecting that. He is "fighting himself." Not to mention tossing one liners("Open your mouth and say ah" "You'd better stand back" -- "His name is Emile Klinger...no, I didn't believe it either") in the middle of all this.

And Grant plays well his hangover the next day in the courtroom. He is finally sober and outraged and terrified about the attempt on his life...but with a terrific headache, well played.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Another comes about from a recent re-watch of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, in which Melvyn Douglas - every bit Mason and Grant's equal in the urbanity department, although filtered through a seemingly midwestern drawl betraying no hint of his actual Macon, Georgia roots -

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"I did not know that," about the Georgia roots. Its funny about Melvyn Douglas. He's one of those actors who worked long enough to seem to have had an entire career as the "addled old man" : Hud, The Americanization of Emily, Hotel(my guilty pleasure), The Candidate(an old politician telling his son Robert Redford, "Congratulations...you're a politician" like a leering insult), playing one old Senator in that Alan Alda movie and another old politician(or rich guy?) in Being There(about which, upon getting his Oscar nom for that said, "I'm in competition with a 7 year old boy"(Kramer vs. Kramer.)

And yet -- here's Douglas with a whole younger career as a romantic leading man, and willing(in Blandings) to give the final romantic win to ...Cary Grant. I like that movie and I like both of those men in it.

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describes Grant's character as "as typical a New Yorker as anyone you'll ever meet."

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Ha. I don't remember that line.

I refer back to Grant and Mason as British-born actors who somehow lost the full Britishness of their accents, in NXNW at least. Grant's accent was called "mid-Atlantic" and in NXNW, you can sense some East Coast American breeding to the character(daddy's evidently dead, but Roger and Mom have dough). Meanwhile Mason had that wonderfully sinister(when he wanted it to be) "air-sucking superiority." It almost had a touch of the Germanic; Mason played a few Nazis in his time. Movie stars are(were?) very much about their voices, and these guys had the goods.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And yet Grant's was the same voice Tony Curtis exaggeratedly aped to convey an upper crust blue blood in Some Like It Hot by, of all things, accentuating its Cockney origin (which Hitchcock, with his own unique manner of speaking, shared).

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Come with us now to 1959 and 1960, in which a handful of movies and their stars "criss-crossed," as if by a larger coincidental fate:

Cary Grant had two of his biggest hits in 1959: North by Northwest in the summer, Operation Petticoat at Xmas. Petticoat, the lesser of the two, was actually the bigger hit. I chalk that up to peaking Tony Curtis as Grant's co-star and the naval military movie theme(a lot of veterans and their families going to the movies.)

While North by Northwest was out in the summer of 1959, down the street was "Some Like It Hot," with Tony Curtis -- when not in landmark cross-dress along with Jack Lemmon -- trotting out a slightly overdone but really right on Cary Grant for all his scenes as a "fake rich guy." 1959 summer moviegoers could get two Cary Grant movies in one summer...if they accepted Tony as Cary for awhile.

Meanwhile , a pretty young actor named Anthony Perkins had turned down a role in Some Like It Hot(the Lemmon one), evidently wary of cross-dressing. When it hit very big, Perkins felt he HAD to take the cross-dressing role for another great director in Psycho(though, as we've noted, the actual cross dressing for Tony Perkins in Psycho is bare minimal.)

Meanwhile, the then-WIFE of Tony Curtis(not Perkins) was starring with Tony Perkins(not Curtis) in Psycho -- and making her mark in screen mortality. Tony Curtis yelled from the stage at the Golden Globes in 1960: "Tony Perkins -- stay out of my wife's shower!"

Those were the days.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Meanwhile, in Operation Petticoat with Grant and Curtis is a supporting actress of handsome middle age who ends up the love interest of Arthur O'Connell. She is Virginia Gregg, perhaps the "dominant" voice(over male Paul Jasmin, who also did some takes) of Mrs. Bates in Psycho. You certainly hear Mrs. Bates when she speaks.

So in scenes where Cary Grant talks to Virginia Gregg in Operation Petticoat...Roger Thornhill is talking to Mrs. Bates!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A bit more...perhaps my own "boilerplate" on North by Northwest in my life, and others.

Its got a thread on its (fairly dormant) board of over 300 posts where the OP wrote something like "Probably great in its time but doesn't hold up today."

And the debate begins.

That's how it will always be with "old movies"(remember, I personally can't/don't watch 20s, 30's, and some 40's movies), and I suppose that's how it REALLY is with both North by Northwest AND Psycho.

Because, once upon a time, NXNW was the most exciting action movie ever made, and Psycho was the most terrifying movie ever made. They held those titles as the years rolled by. But action films got more and more "action-y"(though not really the case in Bullitt and Dirty Harry, I'm talking more from the eighties on), and North by Northwest now looks slow, talky, and quaint. (Though I say it is anything but slow, it is well paced on talk and cinema, just light on action.)

Its funny: though Psycho had landmark violence and content, there were really a lot more "Psycho"-type movies in the marketplace when it came out than North by Northwest type movies.

Here's why: to get a "North by Northwest" green-lit, you pretty much needed to be Alfred Hitchcock, who could command top budgets(though not Ben-Hur level budget) and top stars at his peak. "North by Northwest" required -- and got -- the budget to be what Ernest Lehman called "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures."

But Psycho-type cheapie horror was all around in the late fifties. Willliam Castle, yes, but also Roger Corman and, pretty much every B-minus purveyor of one-shot horror films working in the US and Europe at the time(The Crawling Eye, It the Terror Beyond Space.) All you needed was two squeeze bottles of Bosco chocolate sauce and Psycho outgrossed NXNW on a lower budget...with a higher profit in Hitch's pocket.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The ability of B artists to make Psycho ripoffs through the sixties left NXNW as perhaps a more "special" classic during those years. Take one look at The Prize (1963) -- written by Ernest Lehman with a few homage scenes to NXNW -- and you can see how a high-budget Hollywood movie(with Paul Newman, yet) could be done as badly as NXNW was done well. The Prize is muddled, superslow, poorly constructed -- and totally falls apart in the staging of its suspense set-piece scenes.

The Bond films of the sixties outgrossed most of Hitchcock -- but they didn't have to be good movies to do so. Sean Connery was a true superstar -- getting better and brawnier and more handsome with each Bond film -- but the films themselves were often poorly put together and slow. Still, they sold action and sex and violence and fantasy and ...they helped kill Hitchcock's spy movie, off , frankly. Hitch himself noted that North by Northwest "got near the Fleming bit," but clearly Torn Curtain(Newman again, but better than in The Prize) and Topaz did not.

So NXNW just sort of sat out there by its lonesome for a long time before Hitchcock copycats and action filmmakers flooded the marketplace.

Every summer action movie of the past three decades outdoes NXNW in ACTION, but its getting pretty redundant. I can still think back to how Spider-Man 2(2004) had a big elevated train action scene and then Batman Begins(2005) had a big elevated train action scene. Except the Spider-Man scene wasn't the climax. Still, it was embarrassingly "going to the same well for action." (And that was two Spidermen ago.)

Meanwhile, go take a look at the summer movies of 1959 against which NXNW competed. Some Like It Hot -- a comedy(albeit with gangland murder and chases). Anatomy of a Murder -- a courtroom drama. Rio Bravo -- a Western(SOME action, but mainly great buddy-talk.) But I can't think of any 1959 summer movie that gave NXNW competition for action and adventure that year.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I discussed The Guns of Navarone up thread, and the more I think about it, the more I think it WAS pretty good competition for NXNW.

Navarone came out in 1961, I think more in the fall than the summer. I remember hearing about it as a kid from other kids at recess(I think I thought it was called "The Guns of Minestroni" hah), but for some reason I never saw it on release. I had to wait til that September 1969 CBS Thursday/Friday night two-part presentation. I recall liking it, but not loving it. Later re-viewings proved to me, why.

I assume that Navarone had a bigger budget than NXNW, and though the best-seller's author, Alastair Maclean, developed a pulp action writer's reputation(Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra), it was mounted like a "serious war drama and prestige picture" and cadged the Best Picture nomination to prove it(NXNW was evidently too "frivolous.")

One pays for that seriousness in "Navarone." Its a long time getting started, and it bogs down a lot along the way(I looked at the climax again, and I STILL think it takes too long for the guns to blow).

But I gotta admit, when the action kicks in, its pretty great. And the matte painting of the cliff mountain where the guns lord over the crossing is rather -- Mount Rushmore-ish in the long shots.

Dimitri Tiomkin's opening score over the Columbia lady liberty logo is as thunderous as North by Northwest and -- I'm guessing --played by a larger orchestra(budget again, I'm guessing.) But after the logo fades, the movie settles into some opening voice over narration and "quiets down" -- only to eventually return for the opening credits with Tiomkin on full excitement orchestration -- for awhile.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Because eventually, the Navarone score turns into typical Tiomkin, and I always felt he was a bit limited. Which is funny, because Hitchcock used Tiomkin a LOT - second in number to Herrmann, maybe? Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train(the best Tiomkin Hitchcock score, the best Tiomkin Hitchcock MOVIE), Dial M (the best Tiomkin murder music over the attack on Grace Kelly), I Confess....basically the all the Warners movies.

Tiomkin's score to Rio Bravo is great but I'm always a little disturbed by it. It sounds a lot like Strangers on a Train at times. So does the Western sound like a thriller, or the thriller sound like a Western? That's the problem with Tiomkin to me: too generic.

Imagine if Tiomkin had been given Psycho to score. The mind quakes. First of all no "screech screech screech." But...oh, I can't bring myself to think about it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Hitchcock got Grant, Mason and Saint for NXNW...but producer Carl Foreman and Director J. Lee Thompson got Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn in for Navarone. All star casts in both pictures; a boy's club in Navarone. I suppose Grant trumps Peck...but Peck looks great in Navarone(like Bill Holden and Grant for me, he's great to watch as a hetero man watching a hetero man) and he's very commanding.

Indeed, though Peck had been a star starting in the 40s(in Spellbound early on) and all through the 50's, he reached some sort of peak in 1961-1962: The big hit Guns of Navarone followed by the scary thriller Cape Fear(opposite never-better Mitchum, with Balsam and Herrmann along from Psycho), followed by his crowning, Oscar winning achievement as Atticus Finch. Peck looked his best and did his best work here. (He would slowly peter down as the sixties continued; Arabesque in 1966 is probably his last real hit as a real leading man; though I love Mirage from 1965.)

All through the summer of 1969, CBS advertised the coming CBS movie season with The Guns of Navarone. I saw one clip of Gregory Peck again(June) and again(July) and again(August) to the point where I can do a Peck impression from it:

(To unseen person, in a controlled rage): "You're in this now..up to YOUR NECK!!"

This would always be accompanied by fast-paced pop rock instrumental music that segued into a mixed chorus singing: "The best television ON television...C...B...S."

Yeah, we got movies all over cable and streaming now...but there is something to be said for that long summer's wait til "the big movies arrive" on network. It was an era.

I tried to find this bumper on You Tube, no good. But OTHER bumpers for movie nights are on there.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

By the way, the man at whom Peck is raging "You're in this now...up to YOUR NECK!" is David Niven, who -- The Guns of Navarone proves -- made a good career out of looking good and sophisticated but NOT as good as a leading man like Gregory Peck, he of the manly but cute good face and Voice of God.

Niven's character in Navarone is an explosives expert who is also a cynical pacifist...and come film's end he has been shamed out of his position and comes through as a hero. Its a role that Dean Martin turned down(he didn't want to work in Europe) and Niven makes it his witty own.

And he DOES come around, saying rather sheepishly to Peck near the end: "You're right. I am in this now..up to my neck."

I forgot that.

Star Number Three in Navarone: Anthony Quinn, perhaps a landmark "ethnic star" in Hollywood, going back to the forties, winning an Oscar in the fifties(Anthony Perkins, also nominated, though "Anthony..." was him when it was being announced; oops), available to play Mexican-Americans, Greeks(Zorba and Navarone), Italians, you name it(he was Italian-American in Joe Stefano's first produced screenplay, The Black Orchid, which Hitchcock watched for ten minutes and turned off.)

Anyway -- and maybe losing the lead -- I suppose that The Guns of Navarone was action on an NXNW scale , with a Cliffside mountain fortress, cliff-hanging adventure, and a lot of bang-bang/boom-boom that NXNW didn't have (but remember: the crop duster scene has both machine-gun fire and an explosive ending.)

But ultimately, Navarone is more of a war movie and a prestige picture than a "slice of cake." (Hitchcock: "Other people's movies are a slice of life. Mine are a slice of cake.") And --falling again upon the rankings of film writers over time -- Navarone never scores higher on lists that NXNW does.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Back a bit to NXNW(stray thoughts pile up):

As I think I noted up thread, its screenwriter Ernest Lehman, said that the movie "gained its following over time," and its interesting to me.

I paid to see Cary Grant do his Q and A session in 1984(two years before his 1986 death.) They opened with a long group of his clips. Mild applause greeted each clip -- until they reached North by Northwest. And then the crowd went nuts -- huge applause, cheers, whistles. And it was Grant and Saint kissing in the train car! The applause was even bigger when it was the crop duster and Rushmore's turn.

I realized then and there that I was not alone in my jones for North by Northwest. Maybe it was the Hitchcock connection. But I'll bet that I wasn't alone watching the movie on that 1967 CBS broadcast and getting hooked for life.

I think a big selling point for NXNW is that (from the male POV) , this big giant adventure happens to a "regular guy"(who looks like Cary Grant and has money, but we can still relate.) He's having business drinks after work and whoosh -- he begins an adventure that will end on Mount Rushmore with the love of his life. THAT's a wish fulfillment fantasy.

Moreover, as compared to what James Bond does -- and "nobody does it better" -- what Roger Thornhill is called upon to do could be done by ANY fit man: drive a car while drunk; run a few sprints being chased by a crop duster; and even climbing down Mount Rushmore(his route might have been an easy stroll had not those assassins been chasing him.) Men can RELATE to that. (Women, too, when Eva is on Rushmore, too.)

cont

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Thornhill's "fight" with Valerian is a short affair. After a harrowing roll down the cliffside with his opponent, Thornhill ends up luckily "on the bottom" with his back on solid rock, as Valerian tries to stab him(the knife gleams like Mrs. Bates at Arbogast in Psycho), one push sends Valerian plummeting, and Valerian didn't have a good purchase. MAYBE all us guys could do that(but maybe too, I'll bet that Roger Thornhill works out and plays sports, and probably saw service.)

Anyway, all the action hero requirements in NXNW are " do-able."

Compare that to Bond: a top skier, a top shooter, a top fighter(Kung Fu AND fists), a top scuba diver, a top skydiver, and able (in at least one movie) to dive after a plummeting plane with no chute and climb into it to fly it.

NONE of us could do all that. Gimme Roger Thornhill's action assignments, any day.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

But I can't think of any 1959 summer movie that gave NXNW competition for action and adventure that year.

Ben-Hur?

In general tho' I think most of us roughly mentally partition period/historical action pictures (and maybe also future and fantasy action pictures) away from broadly happening 'now'/ 'it could happen to you' action pictures.

Charade, Bond, especially Goldfinger, and soon after Euro things like That Man From Rio (1964) & Topkapi (1964) are *really* playing in NbNW's pond in a way that BH, Spartacus, Argonauts, Alamo, Mag 7, Navarone, Lawrence of Arabia aren't.

Boundaries *do* get blurry tho'! Ride The High Country & earlier things like The Man From Laramie *feel* so real that their period-ness largely drops out. And Bad Day At Black Rock feels more period than it is. And It's A MMMM World carries a lot of NbNW dna despite being overwhelmingly broad, slapstick comedy.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But I can't think of any 1959 summer movie that gave NXNW competition for action and adventure that year.
Ben-Hur?

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Ha. Well, I gave myself an out: I said SUMMER movie. Ben-Hur came out around Xmas 1959, I think. Indeed, it moved Psycho -- an actual 1960 release - to Number Two box office for 1960 AFTER Ben-Hur. But that happened a lot with Xmas blockbusters. The Exorcist and The Sting were Xmas 1973 releases that made most of their money in 1974, for instance.

THAT said...yes, the 1959 version of Ben-Hur's chariot race is one of the greatest action sequences ever put on film, and all the more incredible because there's no process at all(I don't think.) Of course, I think some horses died and stunt men were injured.

THAT said.. I think I mean that NXNW was more of the template for "summer action blockbusters" which became practically weekly in the 00's, but simply didn't exist in the year of NXNW. It was the only one.

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In general tho' I think most of us roughly mentally partition period/historical action pictures (and maybe also future and fantasy action pictures) away from broadly happening 'now'/ 'it could happen to you' action pictures.

Charade, Bond, especially Goldfinger, and soon after Euro things like That Man From Rio (1964) & Topkapi (1964) are *really* playing in NbNW's pond in a way that BH, Spartacus, Argonauts, Alamo, Mag 7, Navarone, Lawrence of Arabia aren't.

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Agreed on that.

I have mused that when Hitchcock had his back to back hits of North by Northwest and Psycho as the 50's became the 60s..suddenly everybody wanted to do a Hitchcock. This had not been the case in the 40's and 50's. I'm not sure what happened. Probably the high box office of the two films.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Came the 70's, a new generation of filmmakers got downright "reverential" about Hitchcock : homages rather than competitive thrillers. Sisters. Obsession. Carrie(at Bates High School.) Marathon Man, Silver Streak. Foul Play....maybe Jaws. And Coppola purposely sought to stage his Godfather murders "in the Hitchcock manner."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And It's A MMMM World carries a lot of NbNW dna despite being overwhelmingly broad, slapstick comedy.

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Both films are about "a cross country chase"(though in both films, its really only across a few states, only two in MMW.) Both films end with matte painting cliffhanger finales accompanied by thunderous music(for excitement in NXNW; for comic joy in MMW.)

I certainly do see the links.

Mad Mad World screws up my "best movie of the year" lists. It was pretty much my favorite movie of the 60's DURING the 60's. I think I moved Psycho up because of its haunting grip on me. And I call Charade my favorite movie of 1963, because its such a cool all-star thriller but really -- MMW was a bigger deal than that.

I think what MMW and NXNW share for me is the sense that the filmmakers "spared no expense, pulled out all the stops" to give us an adventure we would never forget, whether slightly comic(NXNW) or mostly comic(MMW -- which nonetheless ends in horrible defeat for its "hero," Spencer Tracy -- a very bitter ending.)

There have been articles about why another MMW cannot be made with "today's comics." Simply put -- whether movie comics or TV comics - they are just too expensive. And evidently unwilling to drop their pay. MMW was able to field top comedians who still worked cheap back then(Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, the two TV giants of the fifties; former Number One star Mickey Rooney -- "new guys" Buddy Hackett and the incomparable Jonathan Winters. Not to mention Phil "Bilko" Silvers -- Don Rickles before Don Rickles.)

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I suppose I'm "losing my lede" here, but I would summarize by saying that whereas NXNW and its Rushmore finale were "one of a kind in their time," modernly, every week (in summer at least) we get the thrill ride sequences piled on as a matter of expected course. Too much of a good thing.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

I just got around to watching Thunderball (1965) for the first time... A *huge* hit at the time, it's reputation is as a lesser Goldfinger with serious third act problems. I found the reputation deserved but I'm still glad to have seen it. For one thing, the film's strong suit turns out to be its array of Bond-girls: Bond's main romantic interest,Claudine Auger's Domino, is genuinely lovely (though the film botches her relatively interesting motivation that sees her killing the big villain with Grace under fire, i.e., a la Grace Kelly in High Noon), as is the main Spectre bad girl (who gets a spectacular kill and surprise reveal) played by an Italian actress, and most of the tertiary females in the film are not just eye-catching but also have some fun bit of characterization that makes them memorable.

The overall vibe then is that this is a "hot" Bond to make up for its limping plot & action & sfx.

I mention all this because this aspect of T clarified for me how Bond represents a wrong turn from NbNW. Roger Thornhill is a romantic lead & we believe his attraction to Eve. That women generally throw themselves at Roger and that he's a bit jaded from all that with his ex-wives *doesn't* interfere with his main (very satisfying for the audience, just as it had been with Grace in To Catch A Thief) romantic arc. The trouble with Bond (aside from OHMSS and the Craig CR) and its Playboy-like commitment to Bond bedding all and sundry is that it diminishes Bond as a romantic figure. There's no real audience pleasure to be had from him getting together with Domino let alone from having her save him with her Grace under fire moment (which he crucially manipulated). We rather just wish the poor girl would just make her own money & stop hanging out with predatorial, lying men. So T fails even in its strong suit. By injecting Marie Saint/Kelly-level loveliness T reminds us of NbNW & also of how far we've fallen from Roger & Eve, from Lehmann's wit, and from Hitch's eye and overall quality control.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I just got around to watching Thunderball (1965) for the first time...

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Wow, swanstep...moments like this are pretty amazing to me, as a comparative matter.

For I saw Thunderball on first release, way back in 1965 (Xmastime?) with my parents and then with some boys at the beach the next summer in 1966. The beach theater is of particular memory because Thunderball is a movie ABOUT the beach(Nassau) and the ocean...and sharks(10 years before Jaws, when sharks were in small groups and just didn't have the personality) and...and...and..a big undersea finale as Bond led the "good guys" in their scuba outfits against the bad guys in THEIR scuba outfits.

I remember liking that finale as a kid. The "gags" were well developed -- like how Bond lured a bad scuba diver to go into an underwater "room" and threw a grenade in there with the baddie. It played for laughs. The baddie's one sole flipper floated out of the room.

There's also, in Thunderball, a great opening fight with a "Psycho" edge: Bond punches a widow woman in the face -- revealing that she is a "he"(a killer man spy in disguise) so Bond has to fight a man who is wearing a dress to the death.

But between that crossdresser fight action opener and the underseas battle at the end, Thunderball is...endless. I didn't think so in 1965, but I did in later viewings. That said, there are lots of good things in Thunderball along the way -- certainly the scene in which the main female baddie and her male henchmen stalk Bond through a "festival" parade and dance. Bond maneuvers the woman, while dancing with her, to take the bullet intended for him, and puts her body down at a table with some people: "You mind if she sits with you? She's just dead."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A *huge* hit at the time,

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It really was, I've read. After strong enough starts with Dr. No and From Russia With Love, the Bond films turned into "events" with Goldfinger and evidently rose even higher with Thunderball.
Suddenly these were "line around the block" blockbuster epics(I think with near-Titanic grosses adjusted for inflation.)

And yet: all fads fade. By the time they got around to the "final Connery"(of his first set) -- You Only Live Twice in 1967 , it seems that the box office dropped off from Thunderball. And then it dropped lower when Lazenby took over. By the 70's (Connery back once; the Roger Moore years), the Bond franchise made money, but was nothing special.

However: Goldfinger and Thunderball, for whatever reason(possibly the loss of JFK and the coming of the Beatles/British invasion) were HUGE.

And, I think, they really killed of the Alfred Hitchcock movie.

At least, the OVERALL type of Hitchcock movie. I'm not thinking Psycho(though its emphasis on both sex and sadistic violence is in the Bond ballpark), I'm thinking North by Northwest(as the biggest and the best of Hitchcock's spy tales) and then all the OTHER Hitchcock spy tales (Man Who Knew Too Much, Foreign Correspondent, Notorious) which would now be rendered old fashioned and over by the Bond template.

Hitchcock ran into Bond head-on in NYT Bosley Crowther's review of 1966"s Torn Curtain. Crowther cut to the chase: with James Bond(most recently in Thunderball) out there offering up all manner of terrific action and sex, Hitchcock's new , dour dramatic spy film simply failed.

This was an odd review; Crowther was basically saying that even if Torn Curtain was well-made and intelligent, it was dull compared to Bond...and Hitchcock better start making HIS movies like Bond movies if he wanted to compete. And yet: how COULD Hitchcock want to emulate Bond movies? They simply weren't made with his kind of care for themes and cinematic touches.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Recall that, after Torn Curtain underperformed in the summer of 1966, Hitchcock pretty much went into hiding for the duration of 1966; all of 1967(a big movie change year) and 1968, emerging near the end of 1968 to try to make ANOTHER dramatic, non-Bond spy movie, and doing so(Topaz.)

Hitchcock quietly went his own way in his final years(Frenzy, Family Plot), but you could say that even if Bond beat Hitchcock, Bond didn't beat other comers. Thrillers of a different sort would appear - The Exorcist, Jaws. Eventually, Lucas and Spielberg would fashion Indy Jones as a "new kind of Bond"(more for kids, de-sexed) and then the 80's would spawn action heroes by the multitude. Hitch couldn't have kept up with all THIS, either. The luck of his career was to make most of his spy thrillers BEFORE James Bond came along.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Back to Thunderball:

it's reputation is as a lesser Goldfinger with serious third act problems. I found the reputation deserved but I'm still glad to have seen it.

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Thunderball is a key Bond, I think. First of all, all the Connery Bonds are good because Connery stars in them. And Thunderball was, I think, the "peak Connery Bond." Money in the budget. Connery's new stardom. This was The Big One.

And that great Tom Jones theme song!

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For one thing, the film's strong suit turns out to be its array of Bond-girls:

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I DO pay attention to those things. For my money, the most gorgeous "Bond girl"(THAT term) is the woman who played Domino here. And indeed, the "bad girl" has great red hair and a further "international" feeling beyond Domino.

Next is the extremely attractive British woman who --early in the film -- puts Bond on an exercise machine at a spa. The baddies rig the machine to kill Bond; he escapes. The woman says "please don't tell my bosses" (about the machine being rigged) and Bond basically says he won't as long as the woman has sex with him. Which she does -- in the steam room. This is very playful, erotic stuff -- but there can be no doubt that "sexist Bond" haters have claimed he is coercive in the scene. (I think it plays carefully enough to suggest that both Bond and the woman WANT this, they have just set up a little game to make it a bit coercive.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The overall vibe then is that this is a "hot" Bond to make up for its limping plot & action & sfx.

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As I recall, Connery posed for a photo with the four main women from Thunderball and it kinda proved he had four distinct beauties in this one. (Domino, the redhead villainess, the spa woman and...some forth one.)

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I mention all this because this aspect of T clarified for me how Bond represents a wrong turn from NbNW.

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Aha!

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Roger Thornhill is a romantic lead & we believe his attraction to Eve. That women generally throw themselves at Roger and that he's a bit jaded from all that with his ex-wives *doesn't* interfere with his main (very satisfying for the audience, just as it had been with Grace in To Catch A Thief) romantic arc.

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You are edging here into the fact that NXNW, being an "old school movie" is commtted to its main man finding love with its main woman, committed marital love.

Hitchcock toyed with this theme a bit in establishing that Thornhill is twice-divorced. TWICE he went for the "permanent commitment" of marriage. TWICE it ended(though as he tells Eve, THEY divorced HIM.)

We also learn at the beginning of NXNW that Roger may be twice divorced but he's right back in the game, playing the field. We can imagine that maybe his two wives were pretty shallow in some way, these weren't really committed matches, EVERYBODY's playing around. It certainly makes for a different kind of hero, this twice-divorced ladies man.

And yet, in some ways, this is part of Thornhill's "fallen state" from which he will rise given the NXNW adventure and the hand of the fair Eve at the end(a woman who has proven to have all sorts of bravery and daring.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The trouble with Bond (aside from OHMSS and the Craig CR)

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I get it on those, and we'll return to them...

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and its Playboy-like commitment to Bond bedding all and sundry is that it diminishes Bond as a romantic figure.

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Well, this was the "replacement" of the standard romantic hero that Bond brought us in the 60's. It was an incredible new development, very much sex-based, very much a fantasy and...overall, fairly dangerous to the structures of everyday romantic life and marriage.

For the Bond movies told us: "In each episode, Bond will bed several women and end up at the final clinch, with the best one. But when the next episode arrives, that best one is gone...and Bond begins his sexual quests all over again."

In other words, for the most part, the Bond movies were NOT meant to end in marriage and commitment(and babies, and a workaday job) for Bond. He's a secret agent, a warrior, a killer. He could die at anytime. Women are a sexual release, playthings...not for permanent love.

I recall how American TV series like The Wild Wild West and The Man From UNCLE cast from a bottomless pit of "pretty women," each of whom was the spy heroes' woman...for that episode only. It was the Bond fantasy multiplied out by 30(episodes a year.) Sex was off the table -- but kissing wasn't. And these were gorgeous women.

For both men and women, the James Bond template became something to struggle with in real life. You SHOULD settle down with one person...but CAN you?

For most men, I think the answer is yes. Yes, because we don't look like Sean Connery. Yes, because we aren't spies and to-the-death action fighters. And yes because...bless nature...men AND women tend to zero in on ONE mate, ONE love. Oh, there may be a sequential group of multiple spouses and lovers over one's lifetime -- or the wonderment of just ONE spouse to the end -- but the model of commitment, and a home, and people who care...eventually trumps sexual pleasure.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Still, the "Bond fantasy" was heady, and the women in Thunderball in particular are a dream of sexual gratification and pleasure.

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I'll note here that in Robin Wood's seminal book, "Hitchcock's Films," in his chapter on North by Northwest, he zeroes in on the Bond films as horrible, horrible alternatives to the polished qualities of the Hitchcock film. Wood says "even an entertainment is a work of art, or it is not." NXNW is a work of art, says Wood. Goldfinger is not, and has no plot, but is rather "just a series of bits laid end to end to titillate the viewer."

Wood also says that "no Hitchcock film has the excess of sex and violence in a Bond film," and I guess he's right. Psycho has two big violent scare killings, and some Bond-level sexual kissing up front, but violence and sex aren't constant in the film.

Wood also castigizes the Bond films as "like comic papers for boys." Oops, Robin -- you had no IDEA where the world was going, did you?

Noteable: when some interviewer asked George Lucas if "Star Wars" had turned the movies into TV-like, serial-based entertainment, Lucas said "No. The James Bond films were there first."

Back to Hitchcock: there was no way that Torn Curtain and Topaz could best Bond movies as "sexy action entertainment," but I suppose if Hitchcock HAD wanted to compete with Bond, he simply should have put together some MORE NXNW action films(it can be done; that's how Bond films have been done for decades.) But Hitchcock was in no mood to compete.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The trouble with Bond (aside from OHMSS and the Craig CR)

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I get it on those, and we'll return to them...

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I said I would...and here I am.

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond famously chooses to get married at the end(to Diana Rigg, famed British Avengers ass-kicker and pretty Brit.) The audience feels the pleasure of this choice("Well, its about time, James") but...she is murdered right after the ceremony. This marriage haunted the Bond series, I think. Yes, he went on to bed other women, but "in the know" Bond fans knew that this guy HAD been wiling to commit, that one time.

Eva Green in the Daniel Craig Casino Royale is a different matter. I think the best way to see that movie is as "an origin tale." Bond doesn't like his martinis shaken not stirred at the beginning of this film...but he will. Bond doesn't say "Bond, James Bond" in this film at the beginning , but he will (at the end.)

And Bond isn't TOO much of a ladies man in this film. He seems well committed to a permanent relationship with Eva Green. And then she dies...horribly, he can't save her. And we are given THIS origin for Bond: having lost a love early in his career(for career reasons), he will never love again. Only lust.

Both OMHSSS and the Craig film certainly mess with the "Bond casual sex formula," but each film earned a certain respect for doing so.

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[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

For the Bond movies told us: "In each episode, Bond will bed several women and end up at the final clinch, with the best one. But when the next episode arrives, that best one is gone...and Bond begins his sexual quests all over again."

This didn't bother me much when I was younger, but I guess that now the idea of the 'best girl' each time being ultimately as disposable as all the rest seems to me to make Bond a figure to be pitied. I don't need Bond to be on the doorstep of marriage each time to be satisfied, but, particularly when they start building up the main Bond Girl as Thunderball definitely starts to do, Bond seems thick if he doesn't try to make things work out at least a little with the 'best one'. OHMSS got this right - you'd be a damn fool to let Tracy/Diana Rigg/Emma Peel out of your life. The actual marriage was't necessary in my view for her death to be meaningful. In Thunderball, I'd have been charmed if Domino and Bond at the end had been seen vacationing together or splitting an apartment in Paris or....something a bit continuing anyway.

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[–] vranger (444) 5 years ago

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

While I'm know you were pouring your heart out here, you'd make a better point with some brevity. It's the rare reader who is willing to wade through not only one, but numerous lengthy comments about how much one person loves a certain movie.

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Yeah, I know. I wish I could approach the task differently...but I can't. The way I figure it, if I am trying to make THE case for a favorite movie, I have to give you the whole story. (Its up to you if you wish to read it or not. I certainly understand not.)

And I think -- at this fairly late point in my life -- I am trying to make a case for the importance of ALL movies to those of us who love them. North by Northwest for me. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for others(I find that one gets a LOT of cult love.)

I've never really felt that somebody putting an old movie in the DVD player today -- for the first time -- gets the experience of when the movie came out, or how it was presented in another form.

For instance, in writing out my thoughts here, I'm reminded of how big it deal it was -- in the 60's - for major motion pictures to get their debuts on network TV. As I've noted, "the big movies coming in the fall" were part of an entire summer promotion of commercials. You were meant to get really excited that "North by Northwest" was FINALLY coming to your home...but not for another three months.

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But back to the brevity thing. I've gotten better over my years posting here(and at imdb) but sometimes, I just feel like putting an essay out there. No one is expected to read it unless, perhaps, they want to.

And this: its weird to me, but I really feel the NEED to make sure that a record is left of "The CBS Friday Night Movie" or how Psycho was cancelled for that network movie night, but allowed some local "Late Show" showings. Its oral history to me.

But not very brief!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

One more thing. How moviechat works: you are allowed a fairly long OP, but from then on, you have to keep it to two paragraphs per post. So I create these "7 post long" essays...but they are really one long post followed by 6 short ones.

Maybe that makes it better?

Maybe not.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I'm a fan of the movie, but it's because I'm a Cary Grant fan... nothing particular about North by Northwest. And it's not at the top of my list of Cary Grant films: The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Mr. Blanding Builds his Dream House, An Affair to Remember, Arsenic and Old Lace, Holiday ... and in the genre, I'll take To Catch a Thief (2), or Charade (1) in preference every time. (And that's just off the top of my head).

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Well, there you go. Though I've made the case that Cary Grant himself was surprised to see NXNW zoom to the top of his list of movies in polls...that doesn't "make it so." Still, I witnessed (in 1984 at that Cary Grant Q and A) the audience go nuts for NXNW clips at a volume higher than the other clips. I guess its the old saying: "You may not know what you like, but you like what you know."

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I think one reason for my marking North by Northwest down is the airplane attack. It's ludicrous and nonsensical. Clearly included only for first time shock value, it fails in any way to stand up under even the most modest critical analysis. I'm not really sold on climbing around Mt. Rushmore, either. LOL

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To this, I go to Hitchcock's standard quote on NXNW: "Its a total fantasy." See, I've never seen it as a spy film in the manner of LeCarre or Eric Ambler. Its "The Wizard of Oz for adults." Grant slays a flying dragon(the crop duster) and rescues the damsel in distress from the villain's mountain castle. That the movie manages to develop adult themes(and adult wit) out of somewhat childish material...is part of the charm of the film to me(and forerunner for the "infantilization" of Lucas and Spielberg to come. Or of the Marvel movies of today. And when Hitchcock DID try to make "serious" spy films(Torn Curtain and Topaz)..he flopped. (Though I think both are intelligent films.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Psycho" plays roughly the same way as "NXNW". "Childish"(in a good way) atmospheric material: the Old Dark House, the Monster Mother Who Jumps Out at You, the swamp...but given jolts of adult level shock and thematic influences.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But I'm happy you enjoy the film. I've watched it a few time myself. :-)

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One person's focal point is movie life is another person's...entertainment a few times. Hah.

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We don't agree on Psycho at all. I watched it once and curled my lip. Just not my bag, along with the other thrillers/horror titles you associated with it. You have it as the inspirational point of origin for all torture porn, which isn't much of a recommendation to me.

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I will go to my grave trying to deal with my fixation on Psycho. I find myself going into detail about how "great" it was how Hitchcock creatively staged these stabbing deaths of innocent people and I find myself literally "putting on the brakes" when I do so(what's so GREAT about how Hitchcock staged the lengthy process by which Marion Crane became a corpse, or how Arbogast took a brutal slash to the face before a painful staircase fall and a brutal finishing off? What's so uplifting about that? The cinematics were dazzling, but the content was...sick.)

Well...all I can say is...I am NOT a fan of torture porn in general, or most "hard gore" horror movies, but Psycho DID haunt my youth in a way that I think meant...something. (And not just MY youth...the youth of practically every youth around me at the time; I wanted to "belong.") And I do think that Psycho was "necessary" to the movies to take them up to a new level of excitement(the shocks) and reality(about adult behavior).

On the other hand, my qualms about "Psycho" are why I make sure to talk up "North by Northwest" as much as I can.

All these years later -- mercifully -- "Psycho" is pretty mild and I feel less guilty about liking it.

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[–] vranger (444) 5 years ago

Luckily, theaterwide hi-def penetration in the market has improved the home experience. We have never cared for sitting up front in the theater (I prefer about 2/3rds of the way back, center) -- although arriving late for a crowded show has put us up front a time or two. LOL

Our TV is 55", but at 8 or 9 feet across the room, it's very similar to our view of a screen in the theater. And with bluray (I have 4K, but there just isn't overwhelming support in content yet), we're often seeing a superior picture to that seen by theater audiences -- particularly for films from earlier decades -- this may not be true for IMAX screenings.

While TCM isn't a hi-def channel, their commitment to showing the original aspect ratio generally makes their films a good experience.

Kudos on your dedication to the record. I was aghast at the volumes of useful and interesting information that the IMDB message board nix would dispose of. But, after seeing Amazon kill the discussion boards on their site, I suspected they would mandate the same at IMDB sooner than later. So when I stumbled across this archive, plus continuing support -- big smile here. :-)

I just wish they would devise a way to hook up our IMDB history to our live account here.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Luckily, theaterwide hi-def penetration in the market has improved the home experience.

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This is another aspect, I think, of how the movie going experience has changed.

I saw North by Northwest first on network TV -- on a black and white set (my parents were late to the color TV party.) I had to IMAGINE the color and the scope of the thing, but somehow I did. I think I saw it in color about three viewings in. And then eventually on the big screen in revival.

Modernly...the "home theater" can give you a near-theatrical experience. So you can "go to the movies" OR watch it at home with the same kind of scope.

I keep talking about full house screenings with people screaming or yelling or laughing but at theaters modernly -- I don't get that so much. I guess maybe it was a more innocent time , back then. We're all pretty jaded about our entertainment these days.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

although arriving late for a crowded show has put us up front a time or two. LOL

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I've had a few "amusing" experiences of seeing a movie from two rows back or even just ONE row back -- the screen gigantic and distorted above me, the stars faces like Mount Rushmore giant size, me leaning back so far I might as well be lying down. Memorable...but not good.

I go to the movie theater a lot, still -- but in the last year my local chain has driven me nuts with "required reserved seats." It means, usually, that I am jammed into a row with a person on either side of me -- even with other rows entirely empty. I have to wait until the movie starts...and move.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Kudos on your dedication to the record.

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I'm still pretty "young at heart," but the ol' clock on the wall tells me the years are dwindling. Maybe when it is all over, this little project of making a record-- however long it remains on the net -- will have had some sort of meaning to someone. I hope so.

"Watching the movies" has been done so many different ways over the decades that I sometimes think new generations should hear how it used to be.

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I was aghast at the volumes of useful and interesting information that the IMDB message board nix would dispose of. But, after seeing Amazon kill the discussion boards on their site, I suspected they would mandate the same at IMDB sooner than later. So when I stumbled across this archive, plus continuing support -- big smile here. :-)

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Its a real gift. I realize that message boards attract a lot of hate and craziness -- and youthful "flaming for fun" -- but ...I try to keep quiet here over at "the old movies."

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I just wish they would devise a way to hook up our IMDB history to our live account here.

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That would be nice.

PS. Speaking of "making a record," often when NXNW screened on local TV in the early 70's with commercials and shortened time to show it -- entire CHUNKS of the movie were removed. The part with Roger and his mother, for instance. It was missing for about three years in a row of showings. (I think they cut from the scene with Mrs. Townsend at the Glen Cove mansion..directly to the UN scene. It worked.) I also saw the crop duster scene reduced just to the "action part" -- they took out the long wait.

And yet -- that's the only way we could see the movie back then, so we took it and liked it.

All of this angst ended with the coming of VHS movies in the early 80's. Uncut, no commercials, didn't have to wait a year to see it. But the 60's and 70s were a long haul getting there!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Its worth considering how/when/why one "obtains" a favorite movie. Or two or three.

If there has been one "eye opener" about defending North by Northwest as that movie -- or Psycho as that movie(which is easier as a "cinema history" matter and harder as a "sick content" matter) -- to me, it is that in some ways these choices were made FOR me, from deep within me, driven by powers I've taken for granted for decades now. Its somewhat interesting to review them.

I can back up and note(again) two things:

Once these two movies "locked in" as my favorites, when they were broadcast it was always an EVENT. I can't really even say that I considered them movies...they were something more than movies, something above movies.

I recall that North by Northwest was shipped to a local channel as one of an "MGM" package for showing on Monday nights(the local channel PRE-EMPTED network programming to show these movies), that included titles like "Home from the Hill," "The Mating Game," and "Battleground,"all of which are noteable movies in certain ways, certainly "Battleground". But when one of THOSE movies got its print TV guide ad, I took notice and ...didn't watch. When -- finally, North by Northwest got ITS print TV guide ad...I marked my calendar, took on a certain anticipatory excitement(TV Guide usually published the week BEFORE things were broadcast. I developed a KNOWLEDGE that "Home from the Hill," "The Mating Game" and "Battleground" existed(hence my "inner library of film history") but I didn't watch those movies. I didn't watch movies. I WENT to movies(at the theater) and watched old ones very selectively(though this: I do recall "Battleground" getting some "guy talk" at school the day after it was shown.)

But "North by Northwest" had its own gravitational pull.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Psycho" -- famously around here, is "the movie I couldn't see." Now one time, EVERYBODY couldn't see it -- when CBS pulled it from the CBS Friday Night Movie in 1966. But thereafter, I was simply not ALLOWED to see it, and had to get the movie in my head from kids who did.

But here's the count:

Saturday, November 18, 1967 -- KABC late night showing; I couldn't watch at all, I got reports from other kids on Monday.

Saturday, February 17, 1968(barely three months later on the same "ownership") -- KABC second late night showing; I watched it literally until Marion was driving in the rainstorm. I recall thinking "this can't really be Psycho" as these long scenes with the cop and the car lot man unfurled.

Psycho thereupon disappeared from TV runs while ownership passed from Paramount to Universal. I couldn't go to the 1969 Universal re-release in 1969.

It was only when Psycho went out for syndication in 1970 that I could finally see it, and two things were interesting: (1) My parents' ban had not only been lifted, it had been forgotten about. I just turned the movie on the night it debuted in Universal syndication on Friday late nights in1970(along with Charade, The Birds, and Mirage) and watched it; and (2) I realized that as much as my kid friends had given me a pretty good synoposis of the film and its scenes...no, I never saw Psycho until I saw it for myself. It TRANSFORMED. I remember the key surprise: I had pictured Arbogast getting killed in the DAYTIME, not at night. I had to re-think my imaginary version of the Arbogast murder for the real version.

"North by Northwest" had locked in because I felt it was the most exciting movie I"d ever seen; "Psycho" locked in as "forbidden fruit." Together the two films have kept their "favorite" status in my life even as scores of movies have been made that have more action than NXNW and more murders than Psycho.

They made their way into my psyche in a way that they simply will always have to be honored first.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Beyond those two seminal films, I think I have to honor "Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" as my favorite -- it was this "big deal of the sixties" that feels, even more than North by Northwest -- like the biggest chase movie of all time. ALL those great comedians(Jonathan Winters uber alles, but also Dick Shawn and Phil Silvers). ALL those great chases. Some pretty good gags.

I suppose what tamped down my MMW love was reading reviews -- as I entered my "serious film" period -- which beat the movie down as "not funny." Not funny. Not funny?

Well, it IS funny. And now it is nostalgic beyond all bounds. To my childhood, to growing up in the sixties, to those entertainers, to the locations of the film(many of which I knew as a kid.) It even has a weird connection to that "Burke's Law" whodunit series of my youth -- many of the same guest stars on the show were in this movie.

Plus: Spencer Tracy, right near the end, commanding the screen as an old guy.

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And the only other one of that seminal decade to top my list?

The Wild Bunch. In retrospect: because it was the same kind of forbidden bloody fruit as Psycho, but as action exciting as NXNW. I think the final gunbattle is the most magnificent "Hitchcock montage on steroids" sequence in movies. The HIDDEN draw? That suicidal ending -- a bunch of buddies(BAD buddies), joining together in death...its a movie I've not yet had to fully confront because in the end, its about the End.

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I do think that as the hormones of youth faded, and the responsibilities of work and family emerged, the movies changed for me. Birth me later and maybe The Godfather would be my favorite. Or Jaws. Or The Untouchables. Or Burton's Batman.

But they all came too late in my life.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I think I have to honor "Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" as my favorite -- like the biggest chase movie of all time. ALL those great comedians(Jonathan Winters uber alles, but also Dick Shawn and Phil Silvers)."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MMW was truly the movie event of the year for this 10-year-old. Everything about it was BIG: screen; production scale and scope; locations; action; running time; cast. An "all-star" one. BUT...not an all "movie star" one. This was a big, all-star movie with only ONE big movie star among the lead players: Tracy.

Rooney had once been one, but not for 20 years. And in what other kind of film would the other marquee names have been Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Ethel Merman, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Dick Shawn and Dorothy Provine? All culled from other media: TV; nightclubs; Las Vegas; Broadway.

With the exception of Winters, every one of them had indeed done multiple films (as had every other person in the huge cast), but there were no current comedy headliners among them who'd first made their names in movies: no Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, Danny Kaye or anyone else you might expect. Terry-Thomas would qualify, but not for U.S. audiences, and two more, Jack Benny and Jerry Lewis, appeared only in 10-second cameos.

But it avoided the danger of the film becoming a "star vehicle" for any one of them, while solidifying one of the aspects I enjoy most: the opportunities it provided them in such a major undertaking. Caesar, Merman and Thomas shine especially: it's not just schtick; it's true comedy character acting. And for Rooney, a return to the top of his game, yet not as the lovable, irrepressible quadruple-threat audiences came to love in the '30s-'40s, but as an abrasive and combative guy who was, by his own admission, much closer to his offscreen personality than Andy Hardy was.

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"And now it is nostalgic beyond all bounds. To my childhood, to growing up in the sixties, to those entertainers, to the locations of the film(many of which I knew as a kid.)"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Yet so terribly modern, so up-to-date at the time. It was OUR SoCal. Watching Laurel & Hardy shorts or feature films of the early-'30s back then, I got a wistful feeling for a SoCal I had missed: just-developed neighborhoods of tidy Spanish-style bungalows alternating with vacant lots; two-lane blacktops lined with towering eucalyptus trees and open fields beyond; the stubby palms of Beverly Hills or shady pepper trees of Sunset or Wilshire boulevards that were, respectively, stretching to the sky or gone by '63.

Our MMW SoCal is now equally relegated to a distant past (nearly twice as distant now than that of those early-'30s films when I first saw them; howzat to bring you up short?).

There's a website for which someone has laboriously photographed, in the 21st century and from as near to the original camera placements as he could get, every last MMW location, with corresponding frame grabs from the film for comparison. He even found the very rock upon which Durante rested his head along Hwy 74, and dutifully shot it from the appropriate angle. Only Durante, Winters's right hand and the dented Brew 102 can are missing. How grateful I am for such diligent fanatics, bless 'em.

And also for the film's now so-valuable documentation of that time and those places, as well as for my own recollections of them.

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

Also terribly up-to-date was the film process itself. "Single-Lens Cinerama" was a phrase ballyhooed in much of the original release marketing. Seamless. No join lines.

And no Cinerama. The last feature film produced and released in that process had been - and remains - How the West Was Won. MMW and every subsequent film "presented in Cinerama" was shot on standard 65mm negative and projected from 70mm prints.

Other than the optical rectification done in the lab to compensate for curved Cinerama screens, this was the same system that had been used for Raintree County, Ben-Hur and Mutiny On the Bounty (originally billed "Camera 65" and later re-branded "Ultra Panavision"). Some later "presented in Cinerama" films, like Grand Prix and 2001, were shot in Super Panavison ("Ultra" added anamorphic squeeze/stretch).

And so, the Cinerama Dome, the first terribly up-to-date theater in SoCal designed and built for Cinerama, never exhibited a first-run Cinerama film.

Even as a kid, I didn't care much for the original 3 lens/3 projector process. Aside from the seams, there were disorienting distortions inherent in the system that I found off-putting. I later came to understand these were symptoms of the 3 fixed 27mm lenses, imparting a distending and vaguely "fish eye" effect to any shot, especially one in which anything or anyone came too close to the camera.

A thread archived here on MovieChat from the old site is entitled, "Gregory Peck's Massive Claw," referencing the magnifying effect on the actor's arm and hand when gesturing in the direction of the camera in How the West Was Won. A similar effect occurred if a player took a single step toward the camera, appearing instead to have traveled about 10 feet, and is what made closeups impossible. Hence, the many scenes staged with players at apparently abnormal distances.

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

Debbie Reynolds told of the awkward nature of shooting in the process. If she and Robert Preston, for example, were in a shot together but on opposite sides of the screen, they couldn't look directly at one another. If they did, the curvature of the screen would give the illusion that they weren't when projected. Each instead had to play to empty space downstage of the other so their sightlines, altered by the curvature, would look right to audiences.

The way those lenses were aimed also caused anything crossing the screen from one panel to another - a covered wagon, a train, a buffalo stampede - to bend in the middle and change direction as it passed. Those lenses had the same unfortunate effect on people.

Cinerama was great for scenic travelogues and the like, but not at all suited to traditional character-driven story telling. So although not true Cinerama, shooting in single-negative 65mm, with lighter and more-mobile cameras that could accommodate a variety of lenses to achieve any shot desired, allowed these films' directors and DPs to return to making them in the flexible and relatively unfettered manner to which they were accustomed.

The "motion picture miracle" in which NBNW was shot, VistaVision, wasn't about screen size, although it could accommodate that. It wasn't about picture width, although it could accommodate that too. Of all the processes born in the '50s to compete with TV, VistaVision was the shortest-lived as a production medium: 8 years. Yet it endured into the '90s for complex special effects photography by virtue of its ace in the hole: image quality. The first photochemical "hi-def" process.

Cont'd...

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

NXNW was the probably closest Hitchcock ever came to "epic" film making. If not of the production scale of MMW, the scope of its story and action was broader in theme and geography. And what separated both films from most "epics" of the time was their modern settings.

Seeing it for the first time only 3 years after MMW, and going into the theater knowing next to nothing about it (it was the second feature to The Naked Prey), it generated excitement not unlike that of the Kramer film, but with a little something extra, engaging the senses and imagination in ways that no elaborate physical stunts could, not only in set pieces like the crop duster, but in the quieter battles of wits and cunning between Thornhill and Vandamm, which were every bit as harrowing in their way.

It encompassed style, flair and creativity that I'd reacted to when seeing my first Hitchcock film, Saboteur, at no more than 9 or 10 and Lifeboat not long after; something that gave it a stamp that other films didn't carry. "This is different. This is special," I thought then. There was something interesting and compelling happening every minute, and they spoke to me and carried me away on a wavelength other films didn't reach, and on which I'd soon connect when seeing Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and others on broadcast over the next couple of years.

There was a lot more to this eccentrically funny little guy I'd been seeing introducing stories on TV every week, and it all seemed to fit together whether he was before the camera or behind it. It all said, "We're going to have some fun here: I'm going to worry you and frighten you, and show you danger and death, and perils and traps you haven't imagined; won't that be amusing?"

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"And now it is nostalgic beyond all bounds. To my childhood, to growing up in the sixties, to those entertainers, to the locations of the film(many of which I knew as a kid.)"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Yet so terribly modern, so up-to-date at the time.

---

---

It was OUR SoCal. Watching Laurel & Hardy shorts or feature films of the early-'30s back then, I got a wistful feeling for a SoCal I had missed: just-developed neighborhoods of tidy Spanish-style bungalows alternating with vacant lots; two-lane blacktops lined with towering eucalyptus trees and open fields beyond; the stubby palms of Beverly Hills or shady pepper trees of Sunset or Wilshire boulevards that were, respectively, stretching to the sky or gone by '63.

---

Growing up as a kid in 1960s LA -- a different experience that my later life collegiate life there in the 70s -- I watched those same old movies and had that same sense about "what LA had been" . At the time, it was perhaps 50 years ago, sometimes less -- well that's not even how far back MMW is from today. Everything's relative. My parents weren't IN the movie business, but they LOVED the movies, and many of our weekend car trips would be to go look at the Hollywood area, to see the studios from the outside and look at various locations. (Charlie Chaplin's old studio, which became Herb Alpert's A and M Records Building, was a key place to see. Right there on a city block -- Fairfax?

But yes, to see those "old" houses and streets when they were young -- when Hollywood was pretty much a desert town - amazing.

Our MMW SoCal is now equally relegated to a distant past (nearly twice as distant now than that of those early-'30s films when I first saw them; howzat to bring you up short?).

--

Oh, yeah. Time is SO relative.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"Charlie Chaplin's old studio, which became Herb Alpert's A and M Records Building, was a key place to see. Right there on a city block -- Fairfax?"
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La Brea, a half-block south of Sunset. When the studio was first built and for years after, that half-block was occupied by the estate of Chaplin's brother Syd, who had abandoned his own acting career to become Chaplin's agent and manager of all the business aspects of his enterprise.

Before Herb Alpert took the lot over, it had been one of the home studios for the Perry Mason TV series. And after A&M, it became the home of Jim Henson's operations (with a statue of Kermit topping the tallest part of the mostly-unchanged facade).

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Also terribly up-to-date was the film process itself. "Single-Lens Cinerama" was a phrase ballyhooed in much of the original release marketing. Seamless. No join lines.

And no Cinerama. The last feature film produced and released in that process had been - and remains - How the West Was Won. MMW and every subsequent film "presented in Cinerama" was shot on standard 65mm negative and projected from 70mm prints.

--

Yes. It took me some years to "get that," but its a real irony: the first movie to play at the Cinerama Dome wasn't really in Cinerama (MMW). Nor were other movies upon which the "Cinerama" logo was stamped on the posters: The Battle of the Bulge, Khartoum...Krakatoa, East of Java(to be seen playing the Dome in the new QT movie, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.)

Still, the logo SAYS Cinerama, so I guess it was one TYPE of Cinerama.

And honestly, the "real" Cinerama style of How the West Was Won -- I only learned when watching it on TV in later years -- was terrible. Big vertical splits in the screen and if something moved across them(like a train or a buffalo stampede)...it BENT. I guess in the original three-projector versions of West, this did not occur? (I saw it, with my family, as a kid in 1963 at the Hollywood Warner Theater. It was a 1962 release, but it took awhile to see.)

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"Still, the logo SAYS Cinerama, so I guess it was one TYPE of Cinerama."
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You could say it was Cinerama projection, if not Cinerama production. But given the overall improvements in the final product, it more than got the job done.

I have a lovely Blu-ray of MMW that looks as good as any. But truth be told, on even a hi-def video delivery system, the improvement of image quality over that of a similarly-mastered film originated on 35mm is negligible.

But I will say this for the original Cinerama: when I watched a Blu-ray of HTWWW a few years back (with the three panels properly lined up and join lines digitally erased), I was bowled over by the image quality, in spite of the system's other deficiencies. Even on a flat TV screen, it was the first time I really appreciated it.

Those three film strips, each frame of which was actually higher than it was wide, combined to form an exposure/projection area larger - and with consequently finer grain - than any of the 65mm negative/70mm positive systems. The largest, in fact, until the advent of IMAX.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"I think I have to honor "Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" as my favorite -- like the biggest chase movie of all time. ALL those great comedians(Jonathan Winters uber alles, but also Dick Shawn and Phil Silvers)."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MMW was truly the movie event of the year for this 10-year-old. Everything about it was BIG: screen; production scale and scope; locations; action; running time; cast. An "all-star" one. BUT...not an all "movie star" one. This was a big, all-star movie with only ONE big movie star among the lead players: Tracy.

---
This is going to be fun. A deep dive into probably the most pleasureable movie of the sixties, if you were of the right age then and hence the right age now.

As we know, this was a time when the "movie business" was in the business of fighting "the TV series business" (even as studios were producing a lot of TV) by going BIG. IN the fifties, it had been big EPICS, and often with a Biblical underpinning.

But came the 60's , methinks filmmakers thought maybe "big" could be applied in other ways. With Cinerama as the gimmick, first we got the all-star How the West Was Won -- five "episodes" about the West, each anchored by a different star or two(James Stewart in one; Gregory Peck in another; John Wayne in another; Henry Fonda in a fourth), with a fictional family including Debbie Reynolds and George Peppard bridging the episodes. And oh -- Spencer Tracy as the crisp narrator holding it all together. "How the West Was Won" was my favorite for a few years (though now its not my expressed favorite of 1962.)

And then came Mad Mad World. With -- whaddya know -- Spencer Tracy as the anchor again. Funny for Tracy: scores of films in the 30s, 40s, and 50s...but maybe he goes down in history for his final handful in the 60's -- that "white haired old man."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Living in LA and going to the movies in 1962 and 1963, I recall that there was a "local ad" during the usual trailer run, promoting two things at once: (1) the new "Cinerama Dome" -- soon to open in 1963 and (2) Mad Mad World , which would be the ONLY "event movie"(it was suggested) that was big enough TO open the Cinerama dome. This "trailer" consisted of an announcer hyping the new Cinerama dome while the camera floated around a Jack ("Mad Magazine") Davis poster of MMW, with the entire comic cast chasing Tracy and the satchel of money, as the announcer called off the names (Sid Caesar! Milton Berle! Mickey Rooney!)

So excitement was high for Mad Mad World for at least a year before it opened. Maybe two. And it played the Cinerama Dome for a couple of years. I did not see it there. I saw it first years later(this is incredible but true) -- in 1967! (Hey, this was that NXNW/Psycho year, I guess everything arrived at once -- my favorite thriller of that year, Wait Until Dark too.)

Yes, here I confess: I saw Mad Mad World 4 years after its release. Here's why: the family went to see it without me the first time -- I was sick and allowed it. I was told "its always playing, we'll make sure to take you again" and it took until '67 to get there. That's OK, I saw and liked lots of other movies during that time, I just sort of forgot about MMW.

And -- like a lot of favorites -- MMW had a great 'afterlife." It was re-released in 1970("If ever this mad , mad world NEEDED Its a Mad Mad World -- Its NOW!") and we saw it at a big theater that had played Paint Your Wagon and would play "The Godfather" -- really big place. Then it was on NBC TV as an event. Then it got all sorts of TV play -- network and syndication --for years.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And revival theaters. I recall seeing MMW with a group of guys in big old palace theater in 1980 and we said to each other, to a man -- "That looked co CLEAR...like it was made LAST WEEK!" We also kept up with trading our favorite comedy lines from the movie: "But...but...this is a GIRL's bike...this is a bike for a little girl" .. "I cawn't see! I cawn't see! He cawn't see!" etc.

So MMW was there, always staying epic while gaining nostalgia, for decades after its 1963 release.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Rooney had once been one, but not for 20 years. And in what other kind of film would the other marquee names have been Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Ethel Merman, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Edie Adams, Dick Shawn and Dorothy Provine? All culled from other media: TV; nightclubs; Las Vegas; Broadway.

---

This is one of those casts where, as the names add up, one almost takes them for granted. But here were Sid Caesar and Milton Berle(each of which had practically OWNED American network television in the 50s) AND Phil Silvers(a star from movies in the 40s, and Sgt Bilko in the 50s/60s) AND Buddy Hackett(roly poly, smashed voice -- a comedian who could play to kids AND to adults) AND... Jonathan Winters(really given his greatest showcase here, he does tend to take the movie over.) Mickey Rooney had indeed been a Number One star, and rather niftily did a double act with "new guy" Hackett as his comedy partner.

---

With the exception of Winters, every one of them had indeed done multiple films (as had every other person in the huge cast), but there were no current comedy headliners among them who'd first made their names in movies: no Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, Danny Kaye or anyone else you might expect.

---

That's often been noted about a MMMW. It really DIDN'T have the biggest names in TV or movie comedy at the time. Bob Hope and Lucille Ball were still above the marquee movie stars (together in The Facts of Life and Critic's Choice). Danny Kaye was still a movie star(The Man From the Diner's Club) , but not much longer. Jackie Gleason was a huge TV star dabbling in movies(The Hustler.)

It was as if director Stanley Kramer knew he could STILL put together a great comedy cast by going maybe "one tier down." (Caesar and Berle HAD been giants, but no longer were.)

--

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Terry-Thomas would qualify, but not for U.S. audiences,

--

T-T represented "the British contingent." My mother was the pipeline to these movies. She saw a LOT of British comedies at a local college area theater, and sang the praises of Sellers and T-T and Lionel Davies and Dennis Price and others. Plus the "Carry On" films. Sometimes, we kids went to those, too.

Of the British contingent, Peter Sellers was the bigger deal at this time -- just about to break loose in The Pink Panther and Dr. Strangelove, but Thomas was the guy you get if you can't get Sellers. (And Terry Thomas did a Burke's Law -- Sellers? No way.)

Note in passing: Terry Thomas and Peter Sellers had sold themselves well to the Kid's Market as the comedy villains in George Pal's "Tom Thumb" (1958) so I knew them from there --not from the 1958 release, but I think I saw a re-release.

Note in passing: Terry-Thomas complains to Milton Berle in the film "What is this American infatuation with BOOZ-UMS? All it seems you can talk about is women's BOOZ-UMS!"

Said a significant other of mine during that scene, "Hasn't that guy seen the British Hammer Horror flicks -- they're nothing BUT bosoms."

But I digress.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

and two more, Jack Benny and Jerry Lewis, appeared only in 10-second cameos.

--

Listed in the credits as "and a few suprises." It was interesting -- Lewis was clearly too big (and egotistical) a star to simply appear in the ensemble, but he "blessed" the movie by his cameo.

Jack Benny was a TV star but not a movie star like Bob Hope still was. Indeed, Benny looks a bit old and pale in his cameo, not well on display. Still, Benny was huge in our household(him AND his show, its a forerunner of Seinfeld in certain ways) so I think his cameo honored his special status as "the comedian's comedian."

I guess "The Three Stooges"(seen briefly, not heard) were one of those "surprises," too. Only Moe and Larry of the originals, with one of those substitute Curlys. (Around this same time, I saw THIS team at a county fair and watched them poke each other in the eyes. They were my Three Stooges that year.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But it avoided the danger of the film becoming a "star vehicle" for any one of them, while solidifying one of the aspects I enjoy most: the opportunities it provided them in such a major undertaking.

---

Yes, I think these folks were all grateful to know they had been put in something this "major" and high budget. Stanley Kramer's reputation was "all star and serious" -- Judgment at Nuremburg, On the Beach. These comics were being treated quite seriously.

---

Caesar, Merman and Thomas shine especially: it's not just schtick; it's true comedy character acting.

---

Sure. I gravitate to Winters because he kind of owns the movie(that gas station destruction for one), but the others all have "character impact." And Merman has to sustain a "human monster" (the bellowing mother in law from hell) while showing glimmers of intelligent thought.

---

And for Rooney, a return to the top of his game, yet not as the lovable, irrepressible quadruple-threat audiences came to love in the '30s-'40s, but as an abrasive and combative guy who was, by his own admission, much closer to his offscreen personality than Andy Hardy was.

---

Mickey Rooney played a LOT of these abrasive guys in his later years, and he had a certain edge to his work, then. (He was a killer on Burke' Law, this way.) There's a kind of tough hipness to him in this period(he'd also played the psycho gangster Baby Face Nelson for Don Siegel) and it shows up here. Interesting that he's paired with the goofy Hackett though -- its the old "sharp guy/soft guy" routine. Except HACKETT has an edge, too.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

There's a website for which someone has laboriously photographed, in the 21st century and from as near to the original camera placements as he could get, every last MMW location, with corresponding frame grabs from the film for comparison.

---

I guess I'll go looking for THAT.

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He even found the very rock upon which Durante rested his head along Hwy 74, and dutifully shot it from the appropriate angle. Only Durante, Winters's right hand and the dented Brew 102 can are missing.

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Ha. Details!

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How grateful I am for such diligent fanatics, bless 'em.

---

They put me to shame, that's for sure.

---

And also for the film's now so-valuable documentation of that time and those places, as well as for my own recollections of them.

--

The "front half" of MMW was filmed in the desert areas near Palm Springs, but once all the characters descend on a rather ficitionalized "coastal southern California"(anchored by the fictional Santa Rosita Park)....its a grand tour of a LOT of SoCal cities --(north to South): Malibu, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Palos Verdes Estates,...all the way down to San Diego(for the city park in front of the building where the fire escape gives way) -- with San Diego "merged" into Long Beach(about 100 miles north of there) to create one cityscape.

You also get the cars driving around a long "circular Rainbow Pier" next to the Long Beach New Pike amusment park. Both the pier and the New Pike are long gone. One of the times I saw MMW was IN Long Beach. We literally exited the theater onto the streets where some of the car chases take place.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And: in the 70's at one of those "movie seminars" I attended in LA, the effects guy for MMW, Linwood Dunn, brought along on a table a great big matte painting of a building and the city skyline surrounding it...with lots of "black painted squares" surrounding the building on the painting.

Dunn then projected on a big movie screen this same model with black spaces...and one by one, filled in the black spaces. Put in the skyline of Long Beach up there. Put in the San Diego public park down there. Have the stunt men doubling the comedians climb down a fire escape up over there -- on the side of a hill at Universal Studios(near the Psycho house, no doubt.) And "merge" that hillside fire escape into the painting of the building. VOILA! You have the final cutaway long shot for the "cliffhanger comic fall finale" of MMW.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

About that cliffhanger comic fall finale:

Looking at it today, you can certainly see the fakery of Linwood Dunn's matte paintings and inserts of film footage in all those black spaces. Its hardly seamless, its not CGI.

And the Harold Lloyd-ian way all the comedians get flung and tossed(from a runaway fire engine crane upon which they are all piled at the top) through the air to all manner of injuries(says I: everybody would have been killed in real life) well...its kids stuff.

But GREAT kids stuff. If there is one memory I have of that sequence at the end -- and its a match of sorts for Rushmore in NXNW -- is the EXHILARATION of the sequence, especially with the music thundering away. I have a memory of a sensation of happiness, deep happiness, wide happiness.

I didn't need drugs.

And it is why I"ve determined that on my list of favorite films, Its a Mad Mad World is moving up. For 1963. Which means the very fine, very cool, very well-cast thriller Charade drops down(if not off.) I suppose MMW gets to serve double duty: the favorite kids movie of a kid that still works for an adult. (That cast; Winters' lines; Silvers' lines, etc.) The Great Race is there for 1965, for the same reasons (the two films were compared, but The Great Race was more of a three-major-star vehicle.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A thread archived here on MovieChat from the old site is entitled, "Gregory Peck's Massive Claw," referencing the magnifying effect on the actor's arm and hand when gesturing in the direction of the camera in How the West Was Won. A similar effect occurred if a player took a single step toward the camera, appearing instead to have traveled about 10 feet, and is what made closeups impossible. Hence, the many scenes staged with players at apparently abnormal distances.

Debbie Reynolds told of the awkward nature of shooting in the process. If she and Robert Preston, for example, were in a shot together but on opposite sides of the screen, they couldn't look directly at one another. If they did, the curvature of the screen would give the illusion that they weren't when projected. Each instead had to play to empty space downstage of the other so their sightlines, altered by the curvature, would look right to audiences.

---

I've read up on all this and it must have felt like "anything but acting" to try to do scenes in that movie. I realize that acting on film ALWAYS requires some adjustments to be made, but this was ridiculous.

The three-screen Cinerama had really been developed first for travelogues and documentaries. How the West Was Won(and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm before it) showed how impossible it would be to maintain Cinerama for dramatic acting.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The "motion picture miracle" in which NBNW was shot, VistaVision, wasn't about screen size, although it could accommodate that. It wasn't about picture width, although it could accommodate that too. Of all the processes born in the '50s to compete with TV, VistaVision was the shortest-lived as a production medium: 8 years. Yet it endured into the '90s for complex special effects photography by virtue of its ace in the hole: image quality. The first photochemical "hi-def" process.

--

doghouse, my posts responding to your "technical" posts area starting to land out of order everywhere and --due to poor reading on my part of your posts -- rather duplicating your observations where we are acting from the same thought process. I apologize here for the overlap.

That said, your technical knowledge remains much higher than mine(as does swansteps) so I should maybe "quit while I'm ahead, talking technicals." H ere are some summary thoughts:

VistaVision: I never understood how it really worked -- it doesn't look wide screen to me in revival theaters, but it was a cool name and when a Hitchcock Paramount movie opens with the VistaVision logo sailng out at us -- I'm impressed. (NXNW was shot in VistaVision for MGM, but I guess Paramount wouldn't let the logo fly out of the MGM screen on that one.

Cinerama: How the West Was Won Version: Very Bad(split screens, bent trains, people talking to space) Mad Mad World/Khartoum version: Pretty good, but not REALLY Cinerama. (But better than How the West Was Won so...?)

Panavision: I always like Panavision movies and I noticed when I saw them: The Professionals was in Panavision. El Dorado wasn't. The Wild Bunch was in Panavision. True Grit wasn't.

Cinemascope: Same as Panavision, and I loved the musical flourish when "Cinemascope" came up on screen after the Fox logo. (Fox has been sold to Disney , does it all go away?)

And: Hitchcock never used Cinemascope or Panavision. Not even on North by Northwest.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

NXNW was the probably closest Hitchcock ever came to "epic" film making. If not of the production scale of MMW, the scope of its story and action was broader in theme and geography.

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I guess its a "mental thing," but both movies seem to have the same overall concept: a great big, cross country chase ...that climaxes with cliffhanging and falling and above all, exhilarating music to accompany the action. (A nod here to Ernest Gold for MMW; I believe he won for Exodus in the year that Herrmann's Psycho score didn't even get a nom.) Each is like a fantasy journey we love to take, and very much regret leaving at th eend.

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And what separated both films from most "epics" of the time was their modern settings.

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That's a big deal. They are setting the pace for "the modern movie." As I discussed with Swanstep, Ben-Hur has as much action as NXNW(and the chariot race is right up there as one of the greatest action scenes ever filmed), but so much of the rest of it is historical and dramatic, and religious. NXNW and MMW paved the way for "realistic" movies to be BIG. And exciting. And fun.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Seeing it for the first time only 3 years after MMW, and going into the theater knowing next to nothing about it (it was the second feature to The Naked Prey),

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You saw NXNW with The Naked Prey? This must have been that 1966 re-release.

On The Naked Prey -- if there is ONE movie that makes a joke of my parents' ban on Psycho back then, its The Naked Prey. I saw The Naked Prey with them in my pre-teens. I can't say it destroyed me, but here was a movie that opened with African natives torture-killing several white members of a hunting party, and then stripping the survivor down to nakedness...to hunt him on foot. There followed many grisly, bloody fights to the death between The Naked Prey(star Cornel Wilde, on the down arc of his career but amazing here) and the natives, often ending with a knife sunk into a naked chest by the victor. Psycho, schmyko. The Naked Prey. The film ultimately came to a kind of "understanding" about racial cultures -- mutual respect even with death on the menu.

North by Northwest and The Naked Prey. Now there's a double feature (and hey -- both are chase movies.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

(NXNW) generated excitement not unlike that of the Kramer film, but with a little something extra, engaging the senses and imagination in ways that no elaborate physical stunts could, not only in set pieces like the crop duster, but in the quieter battles of wits and cunning between Thornhill and Vandamm, which were every bit as harrowing in their way.

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Yes. I can't remember really "connecting" NXNW to MMW when I saw it, but I suppose the INTERNAL mechanism with both films was: delight and engagement with the chase and -- this is key -- a belief that the filmmakers were "pulling out all the stops" to tell a big, entertaining story. So often a thriller of the 50's or 60's did not do this. ( Example: The Prize, with Paul Newman.)

But of course, I saw NXNW as part of a burgeoning Hitchocck jones and -- with parental introduction to the Master's style -- sensed that this was top of the line filmakign of a special sort. The crop duster scene is NOT a traditional action scene, it is "something else" - a tale about building up suspense along with a sense of the abstract, and the comic.

There comes the Hitchcock bit where he keeps cutting from Grant's calm face to a POV of the plane, getting closer, closer, closer...its Hitchcock all the way: funny and suspenseful and exhilarating.

And the "set piece within the set piece" is the big moment when Grant starts a run from the plane with the plane in the frame BEHIND him, with him, the two moving together at us. Exhilarating, there. And Rushmore is yet to come.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

It encompassed style, flair and creativity that I'd reacted to when seeing my first Hitchcock film, Saboteur, at no more than 9 or 10 and Lifeboat not long after; something that gave it a stamp that other films didn't carry. "This is different. This is special," I thought then. There was something interesting and compelling happening every minute, and they spoke to me and carried me away on a wavelength other films didn't reach, and on which I'd soon connect when seeing Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and others on broadcast over the next couple of years.

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This was the run for a lot of us, I think. Psycho had hit in 1960, but for a lot of us, the sixties that followed was our introduction to much ELSE about Hitchcock films that was great and special. And he made so many of them that they were everywhere in the 60's. On network mainly, but certainly on local channels: that's where I saw Strangers on a Train and Dial M and The Wrong Man.

Irony: as the sixties brought Hitchcock so much to the fore with his past work being broadcast and re-released, he was really slowly pulling back. Cancelling the TV show in 1965 (after TEN seasons.) Taking almost four years off between Torn Curtain and Topaz. The disappointment of those films. Didn't matter, NXNW and Vertigo and Psycho were still in control of the imaginations of a generation.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

There was a lot more to this eccentrically funny little guy I'd been seeing introducing stories on TV every week, and it all seemed to fit together whether he was before the camera or behind it. It all said, "We're going to have some fun here: I'm going to worry you and frighten you, and show you danger and death, and perils and traps you haven't imagined; won't that be amusing?"

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Yep. He certainly intimated that he felt his films - however nightmarish or brutal sometimes --were meant to give us PLEASURE. I remember his quote about how human beings have adrenal glands with all sorts of chemicals to excite us to danger "in the animal world" -- but we live so safely we don't need them. "Why not use a movie" said Hitch, to use those glands.

For me personally, this was all leading to my ownership of the book Hitchcock/Truffaut and a long, long look at how this Hitchcock fellow operated. Yes, I jumped to the NXNW/Psycho chapters(without, for a time, being able to look at the murder scene photos), but I dutifully educated myself about the silent, the British films, Selznick, the whole career.

The other great formative book about Hitchcock of my youth was Robin Wood's "Hitchcock's Films," which was beautifully written and which gave me my "fix" on Hitchcock as "peaking with a series of masterpieces," said Wood, from Vertigo through Marnie. (Marnie?) Oh, well, Hitchcock/Truffaut and the Wood book were my bibles and set me on course for the rest of my life with Hitch.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I do remember, during the time of Hitchcock/Truffaut and the Wood book, buying one other paperback that I TRIED to use to teach myself film.

It was called "Interviews with Film Directors," I think, and part of the new wave to heroize them all. I bought it because there was a Hitchcock interview in it(the one where he said he made Psycho because it was fun, like a jaunt through the haunted house at the fair.)

But there were also interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, John Ford, John Huston, Otto Preminger, Howard Hawks..Kurosawa. I read all those OTHER guys interviews and did what I could to become their fan , too. But over time, it didn't take. Not with all of them. Still...I tried.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Well, hasn't this thread gone hither and yon..I apologize for the scattershot nature of it, but not for the experience of engaging in it.

Here is my revised list of favorite films of the 60's:

1960: Psycho
1961: The Guns of Navarone
1962: The Manchurian Candidate.
1963: Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
1964: Dr. Strangelove
1965: The Great Race
1966: The Professionals
1967: Wait Until Dark
1968: Bulliltt
1969: The Wild Bunch

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"VistaVision: I never understood how it really worked -- it doesn't look wide screen to me in revival theaters..."
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One of the advantages that Paramount touted was its adaptability: it could be shot in any ratio from the standard 1.33 to 2:1, and printed "hard- or soft-matte" without appreciable loss of image quality, due to the increased negative area gained by running the film horizontally through the camera - exposing a frame 8 perforations wide rather than one 4 perfs high - instead of vertically. It's the same thing IMAX does with a 65mm negative (to VistaVision's 35).

Most went with the 1.85 "widescreen" that had become the default by the mid-'50s. Not as wide as CinemaScope, but wider than Academy or TV 4:3 ratio.

In the early days of home video, there was a full-frame release of NXNW that revealed the tops of sets - the Townsend house interiors, a taxicab, for instance - that didn't show when masked for 1.85 projection.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"And: in the 70's at one of those "movie seminars" I attended in LA, the effects guy for MMW, Linwood Dunn, brought along on a table a great big matte painting of a building and the city skyline surrounding it...with lots of "black painted squares" surrounding the building on the painting.

Dunn then projected on a big movie screen this same model with black spaces...and one by one, filled in the black spaces. Put in the skyline of Long Beach up there. Put in the San Diego public park down there. Have the stunt men doubling the comedians climb down a fire escape up over there -- on the side of a hill at Universal Studios(near the Psycho house, no doubt.) And "merge" that hillside fire escape into the painting of the building. VOILA! You have the final cutaway long shot for the "cliffhanger comic fall finale" of MMW."
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THAT sounds delicious. And how I would've eaten something like that up.

It's an example of what I often say was among the great advantages of living in L.A. in the '70s: right in the heart of the industry, with scores of veterans of all disciplines still around who'd so happily and generously share their experiences, knowledge, expertise and trade secrets at such presentations.

If there was a time in my life of which I could choose to activate total and linear recall, that decade would be it.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"There's a website for which someone has laboriously photographed, in the 21st century and from as near to the original camera placements as he could get, every last MMW location, with corresponding frame grabs from the film for comparison.
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I guess I'll go looking for THAT."
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There are actually several, but this is the one I had in mind:

https://get.google.com/albumarchive/111293404383775855107/album/AF1QipP-VtQXxv6ERT1ddJ9VikPR5QLhdg4Ab7ngtkXY

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"Mickey Rooney played a LOT of these abrasive guys in his later years, and he had a certain edge to his work, then."
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The Bridges At Toko-Ri, for example (in and out of the hoosegow for starting bar fights). By MMW, he'd become almost as typed for those scrappy characters as he had 10-15 years before for the bundle-of-energy teenagers in the Hardy films and let's-put-on-a-show musicals with Garland.
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"Except HACKETT has an edge, too."
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Yeah, he had that Brooklyn thing going:

"LOOK! We figgad it seventeen different ways. And every time we figgad it, somebody din' like da way we figgad it. So now, dere's only ONE WAY ta figga it."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Mickey Rooney played a LOT of these abrasive guys in his later years, and he had a certain edge to his work, then."
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The Bridges At Toko-Ri, for example (in and out of the hoosegow for starting bar fights).

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And Operation Mad Ball...a military comedy where he's just plain nuts.

(BTW, Rooney is very touching alongside Bill Holden in the climax of Toko Ri. Friends forever.)

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By MMW, he'd become almost as typed for those scrappy characters as he had 10-15 years before for the bundle-of-energy teenagers in the Hardy films and let's-put-on-a-show musicals with Garland.

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I would zero in on his "Baby Face Nelson" psycho killer for the "over the top" version of all this. But yeah, he refined that down to a certain belligerent scrappiness -- fed by his small figure(we all know there are small guys who make up for it WITH scrappiness.)

Rooney lasted a long, long time, but I think what he began to project is what more than a few "show people" do: a certain dangerousness borne of their poor backgrounds and their sudden fame and fortune. These are ANGRY people, at heart, who fought hard for what they got and will not give it up easily. The issue is: some of these actors can hide that anger better than others. Rooney seemed unable to .

And this: I used to make the case that Tom Cruise was a new generation's Mickey Rooney: short, scrappy, but a Number One star. I stuck by this for years and finally hit pay dirt: a photo of Cruise AND Rooney at some event, making the comparison all the more clear. (Nothing was PROVED by this photo; its simply seeing them side by side...I saw it even more.)
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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Except HACKETT has an edge, too."
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Yeah, he had that Brooklyn thing going:

"LOOK! We figgad it seventeen different ways. And every time we figgad it, somebody din' like da way we figgad it. So now, dere's only ONE WAY ta figga it.

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I like reading these lines.

They are "razor thin" characters(I can't remember why they are together or where they are going)...but Rooney and Hackett were just sublimely paired in this: the established star and the new guy, the acerbic little hustler and the smash-mouthed overweight guy.

You have to wonder: this pair was probably written on paper with no casting. I'll bet the general idea was that they were meant to be an "Abbott/Costello type team." And that was probably all there was. Kudos to Stanley Kramer -- or his casting team -- to figure on putting Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney in there. I'll bet Hackett was under consideration(new comic) but Rooney wasn't. I'll bet an enterprising Hollywood agent sent forth Rooney for the role.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"They are "razor thin" characters..."
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Yeah, with about a dozen primary ones, not much room is left for development. You either write them with strong personality traits that are apparent at a glance, or refine them to reflect such traits suggesting themselves with the casting. Or some combination thereof.
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"... (I can't remember why they are together or where they are going)…"
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All that survived the final cut was Rooney's mention of being on their way to Las Vegas. Among the deleted footage appearing on an earlier DVD release was some in which Hackett reminds Rooney, "We promised Jerry that we would be in Vegas before six o'clock, and if we don't get there he's gonna be awful unhappy."

Hmmm.

Are they musicians, and "Jerry" is a club owner? Shills/ringers for some high-stakes game of poker that "Jerry" has lined up for a deep-pockets mark? Comedy writers, and "Jerry" is Lewis? Intriguing possibilities.

Each gets at least a mention of their purposes: the Crumps are on a second honeymoon; the Finches and Mrs. Marcus are on their way to Lake Mead; Lennie's van of furniture has "got to get to Yuma;" Hawthorne ("Leftenant Colonel, actually") is "on a spot of leave from Vandenberg" and gathering cactus. The only thing we ever hear about Silvers, including his name, is Charles McGraw's passing reference to "the salesman, Otto Meyer."
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"I'll bet an enterprising Hollywood agent sent forth Rooney for the role."
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The stories we never hear. I love that Rooney is in the film, reuniting him and Tracy in the last few reels after about a half-dozen films together at MGM 20-odd years before: Father Flanagan and Whitey Marsh, together again. Come to think of it, Whitey was a pretty combative little guy, at least in the beginning. Maybe I'll have to rethink my assessment some.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

Among the stories I HAVE heard, whether apocryphal or not:

The Keaton and Durante roles were originally intended for each other. Keaton ended up playing a guy named Jimmy; Durante, one called Smiler. Cute when you think about it.

Another has it that Kramer wanted Stan Laurel for the Benny bit (culminating in Stan's dissolving into tears in place of Benny's trademark "Well!"), but Stan stuck to his vow never to work again after Babe Hardy's death.

One version of it is that the second unit footage of a man in a vintage car wearing a derby had already been shot by the time Kramer gave up, so we get Benny in the uncharacteristic-for-him headgear. Much easier to stick a derby hat on him in the studio than go back to Yucca Valley to reshoot.

Again, I stress: possibly apocryphal.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"Jonathan Winters(really given his greatest showcase here, he does tend to take the movie over.)"
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Part of the appeal of the film's "comedy buffet" (take what you like) is the way different viewers respond to different characters/performers.

For me, Caesar owns the show (if anyone can be said to), with his impotent frustration matched by attempts to assert his masculinity: "NOW I'll show 'em what kind of a man they're DEALING with;" "Why do you always imagine I can't do things for myself;" "Come on over here, GET over here;" "You wanna start?" It's a nice touch to have the burly Caesar and the diminutive Rooney have it so much in for each other.

One of the deleted (and now restored) scenes puts a fine point on it as he's whaling away on the door with a sledgehammer, and Edie Adams, calmly engaged in pinning up her torn dress, passive/aggressively challenges, "What's the matter Melville: can't you DO it?"

Ouch!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Jonathan Winters(really given his greatest showcase here, he does tend to take the movie over.)"
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Part of the appeal of the film's "comedy buffet" (take what you like) is the way different viewers respond to different characters/performers.

For me, Caesar owns the show (if anyone can be said to),

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Here we have something I always like to see:

A different point of view. These days on MMW, I type in "Jonathan Winters owns this" practically as personal boilerplate -- he's the one I enjoyed the most.

But that's just me. This movie certainly had its share of trained farceurs.

Its interesting, the "pairs" in this film:

Two guys (Rooney and Hackett)
A man, his wife, and her mother(Berle, Provine, Merman)
A man and his wife(Caesar and Adams)

The play out is that in the "Berle marriage," he's henpecked and milquetoast and his wife and he don't seem like a great pair -- and the mother-in-law runs the show.

Whereas in the Caesar/Adams marriage, we see the direct dynamic of an equal marriage: two good looking people, the man with some macho edge, the woman prepared to taunt him about it...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Note: I have read that originally, Edie Adams real-life husband Ernie Kovacs was set for the Sid Caesar role. But he died in a car crash. It would have been a little piece of history to see Kovacs and Adams on the big screen together, but we lost that. Getting SID CAESAR in to replace Kovacs was not chopped liver.

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with his impotent frustration matched by attempts to assert his masculinity: "NOW I'll show 'em what kind of a man they're DEALING with;" "Why do you always imagine I can't do things for myself;" "Come on over here, GET over here;" "You wanna start?" It's a nice touch to have the burly Caesar and the diminutive Rooney have it so much in for each other.

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As you point out, there IS characterization going on with Sid Caesar here. Frankly, with everybody. The issue is : all that money. Who's got the b'lls(even among the women) to do what has to be done to GET that money? Each character reacts in his or her own way and comes under his or her own personal pressure based on their personality(macho Caesar, milquetoast Berle.)

I like how Caesar and Adams are thrown into TWO separate comedy set-pieces (1) Flying to the coast in a decrepit crop duster type plane...with cars moving more quickly below them; and (2) getting locked into the time-locked basement of a hardware store -- goodies galore! (Fireworks, electric lines, paint cans as far as the eye can see -- all used for comedy.)

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One of the deleted (and now restored) scenes puts a fine point on it as he's whaling away on the door with a sledgehammer, and Edie Adams, calmly engaged in pinning up her torn dress, passive/aggressively challenges, "What's the matter Melville: can't you DO it?"

Ouch!

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Ha. That "man/wife thing." A delicate balance. I also like when she asks him to hit that door "just one more time." "Really? Its a really heavy door..." and the slapstick consequences.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"Here we have something I always like to see:

A different point of view. These days on MMW, I type in "Jonathan Winters owns this" practically as personal boilerplate -- he's the one I enjoyed the most."
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I should go on record here that, at the time of the film's release, Winters was my favorite comic. I had two of his albums, and every appearance with Jack Paar or on any variety show was a special occasion for which I'd haul out the tape recorder, so I could replay them as incessantly as I did those albums. And it was his appearance on the big screen I was most excited about.

And damned if I didn't laugh hardest at Caesar from the get-go.

I should give some props to Berle here, too, whose image was along the lines of an overbearing spotlight-hogger. The unassertive, put-upon Russell Finch certainly sidelined that.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I cawn't see! I cawn't see! He cawn't see!" etc.
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Backus got not only to echo the then well-known Western Airlines slogan, but to preview his Thurston Howell character.

When I watch it now, it's those smaller moments I most enjoy: Caesar's sputteringly exasperated attempts to explain the "shares to everyone, and for everything" concept and mathematics; Winters's thrown-away line following Hackett's, "May you just drrrrrrop dead:" "Alright, we all agree on that," earning him a take from Merman and a double-take from Caesar; Thomas's breathless indictment of "this God-forsaken country;" Jesse White's deadpan, "Why don't we just shoot 'em down and be through with it."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"I cawn't see! I cawn't see! He cawn't see!" etc.
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Backus got not only to echo the then well-known Western Airlines slogan, but to preview his Thurston Howell character.

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Also classic about MMW is that, right below the "lead" comics in the main roles, we have this cavalcade of guest stars, most of whom, like Backus, capture their moment in time, right here. "Its the only way to fly..." indeed. And of course, Backus was Mr. Magoo so saying "I cawn't see" is of some relevance, too. (Luckily in this one he cawn't...and then he cawn._

Speaking of interesting pairings...how about Eddie "Rochester" Anderson(from the Jack Benny Show) and Peter Falk as cab drivers who join the chase at the end. Where else will you get THOSE two together? (And: is Peter Falk the sole shared player between MMW and The Great Race? Maybe.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

When I watch it now, it's those smaller moments I most enjoy: Caesar's sputteringly exasperated attempts to explain the "shares to everyone, and for everything" concept and mathematics;

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The two or so scenes of trying to properly split up the money - led by Caesar -- are pretty funny, because they START with logic, but slowly fall apart as everybody feels they aren't being treated "fairly." Its a pretty classic look at group negotiation. (Doesn't work.)

And the anger and resentment created in these negotiation sessions triggers the "all-American competitive drive" to take it all.

Winters at the end of a negotiation squabble, slowly backing away from the others: "Now..there's enough for you...and you....and YOU...and me...." and he realizes, no there isn't...and the race is on as Winters runs to his truck first. Great bit.

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Winters's thrown-away line following Hackett's, "May you just drrrrrrop dead:" "Alright, we all agree on that," earning him a take from Merman and a double-take from Caesar;

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See I love how the supposed pay off line(may you drop dead) pays off MORE after. That's great comedy.

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Thomas's breathless indictment of "this God-forsaken country;"

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That's about all the conflict we could take in 1963: the British versus the Yanks(

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Jesse White's deadpan, "Why don't we just shoot 'em down and be through with it."

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Ha. The refrigerator repairman who was "the lonliest guy in town" because he never had to repair those great refrigerators.

I saw Jesse White in my audience at a movie in LA in the 70's. He had a big cigar in his mouth and just a little bit "on" -- you knew he was a celebrity, of a certain type.

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

"I recall that there was a "local ad" during the usual trailer run, promoting two things at once: (1) the new "Cinerama Dome" -- soon to open in 1963 and (2) Mad Mad World , which would be the ONLY "event movie"(it was suggested) that was big enough TO open the Cinerama dome."
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Here's a "whodathunkit" tidbit: Kramer had no thoughts toward Cinerama when producing the film. It was only quite late in production that he was approached by Pacific Theaters, which by then had bought the Cinerama name and corporation, with the proposal to exhibit it in that format as the debut feature for their newly-constructed Hollywood venue.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"I recall that there was a "local ad" during the usual trailer run, promoting two things at once: (1) the new "Cinerama Dome" -- soon to open in 1963 and (2) Mad Mad World , which would be the ONLY "event movie"(it was suggested) that was big enough TO open the Cinerama dome."
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Here's a "whodathunkit" tidbit: Kramer had no thoughts toward Cinerama when producing the film. It was only quite late in production that he was approached by Pacific Theaters, which by then had bought the Cinerama name and corporation, with the proposal to exhibit it in that format as the debut feature for their newly-constructed Hollywood venue.

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Hmm...this one's under the heading of "Hey, maybe I got it all wrong." The memory banks are working , but faded, and I probably misremembered. (Mitch Brenner would catch me, so would Arbogast.)

Let's try it this way: Its possible that once Mad Mad World opened AT the Cinerama Dome.....they ran the "local theater commercial" not to say "Its coming" but to say "It's here!" So -- "Drive on into Hollywood and go to the NEW Cinerama Dome theater to see the NEW comedy epic A Mad Mad World."

Yeah, I remember it now...I'm making a mental picturization of it....

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[–] Doghouse (447) 5 years ago

I wouldn't say my "tidbit" and your recollection are incompatible.

Kramer wrapped principal photography in Dec '62, with nearly a year of post to follow (and as much construction work left on the Dome). Plenty of time for everyone to get their promotional ducks in a happily marching row.
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"Yeah, I remember it now...I'm making a mental picturization of it...."
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What is the phrase? I saw what you did there.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I wouldn't say my "tidbit" and your recollection are incompatible.

Kramer wrapped principal photography in Dec '62, with nearly a year of post to follow (and as much construction work left on the Dome). Plenty of time for everyone to get their promotional ducks in a happily marching row.

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Oh...well, possible then. I tell ya, I'm amazed I could summon up the memories OF that "in theater advertisement" for both the opening of the Cinerama Dome and the debut of Mad, Mad World. Memories are nice...if not always clear.

Personally, I was also tickled by how I "dredged up the memory" of seeing MMW in 1967. It tells you that back then, I didn't have the "craving" that has been developed to "see the new hit opening day -- or opening week." Movies stayed in some theaters for a couple of YEARS. You just had to decide when you wanted to drop in and see them. It was like deciding to visit the zoo or an art gallery. "You would go when you go."

As a corollary: I recall two blockbusters of the 70s -- The Godfather in 1972 and The Exorcist in 1973 -- in which while I WANTED to see them, I knew that I could NOT see them, perhaps for weeks or months -- because I had to wait for the sell-outs to cease and the long lines to get shorter. BTW, I stood in long lines both times to see them(maybe a two-hour wait each time), even weeks into their run.

That's all over now, as movies get released to 3500 screens and pretty much, if you want to see the new movie this week...you can.

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"Yeah, I remember it now...I'm making a mental picturization of it...."
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What is the phrase? I saw what you did there.

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Ha.

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[–] hurricane (1959) 5 years ago

Psycho was a good film, wasn't it?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

It sure was.

Hah.

We're just having some "OT fun" here. And "Psycho" is important to North by Northwest, Thunderball, and Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Personally, I'll be back with some Psycho posts soon....

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