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Hitchcock's Frenzy and Tarantino's Theory That "Directors Final Films Are Their Worst"

posted 3 years ago by ecarle (14979)
5 replies | jump to latest

As I post this in July of 2021, writer-director Quentin Tarantino has come out of COVID lockdown to promote a new work: a paperback version of his movie "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."

He's doing a lot of interviews, and in most of them (particularly one with Bill Maher) QT has repeated that he will only do 10 films -- he's done 9(says he) -- and then retire.

Why? Because, QT says "I know film history" and as film directors age they make worse films than in their peak years. On Maher, QT used the example of Don Siegel(Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick) -- "If he had stopped at Escape from Alcatraz, it would have been perfect...but he made two more final, lousy movies."

QT seems to wobble a bit on his theory. Final two films are bad? Final FOUR films are bad? And what age does the director have to be when he/she gets "bad."

In certain ways, QT is right -- certainly about directors from the Golden Era, when 70 was the new...70...health regimens were nonexistent and drinking was rampant.

Let's use the last four films of these directors:

Wilder

Avanti
The Front Page
Fedora
Buddy Buddy

..yeah. Old man films, and Buddy Buddy was so bad Wilder didn't get anymore jobs at all. Wilder -- like QT -- writes his own films, he wrote a 1959 script for the 1981 Buddy Buddy.

Hawks

Man's Favorite Sport
Red Line 3000
El Dorado
Rio Lobo

Maybe. El Dorado is a "not bad" remake of Hawk's Rio Bravo, but Rio Lobo is a TERRIBLE remake of Rio Bravo. Hawks was "out of gas" and HE didn't get work anymore. Man's Favorite Sport is actually pretty funny and Paula Prentiss is sexy and funny with a great voice. (Rock Hudson, in for Cary Grant, is not bad here either.)

Ford

Two Rode Together
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Cheyenne Autumn
7 Women

Yep. Not good. There's one classic in there -- Liberty Valance -- but that's because of a great script and great stars. The movie looks rather TV-ish and tired.

Hitchcock

Torn Curtain
Topaz
Frenzy
Family Plot

Hmmm. Torn Curtain and Topaz were generally badly reviewed -- except Vincent Canby called Topaz "Hitchocck at His Best" and put the film on his Ten Best List of 1969; and any number of critics(Andrew Sarris) and modern filmmakers have heralded Torn Curtin for its mid-film murder scene(in which we are shown just how hard it is to REALLY kill a man.)

Family Plot(Hitchocck's final film) in 1976 drew both raves and some vicious pans , a split decision.

And then there was Frenzy. Two films from the end for Hitchcock, made when he was 71 and 72. (A healthy age these days for Spielberg and Scorsese, but Hitch was ailing.)

Canby put Frenzy on his "Ten Best of 1972" list, just as with Topaz. But OTHER critics, fro other periodicals put Frenzy on THEIR Ten Best Lists: Time("Hitchcock's droll little study in terror.") Newsweek ("He has fooled us again. Frenzy is one of his very best.") Life. The New York Times. The LA Times. Rolling Stone!

Frenzy was heralded as a "comeback" film with reviews often using the same heading: "Return of Alfred the Great." "Return of the Master." "Still the Master."

During Hitchcock's Centennial year of 1999(he was born in 1899) , a group of film directors(including Scorsese, as I recall) picked Hitchcock's Top Ten of ALL TIME. Frenzy made the list. Rear Window did not!

And so..QT's theory about the final films of old directors doesn't work with Hitchcock....or does it?

Clearly the movies all around Frenzy -- the movies after The Birds(which had problems), the movies from Marnie on through to Family Plot -- DID show signs of an aging (drunken?) director with health problems. And Frenzy itself was "an old man's film" -- lacking the big action of North by Northwest, with its set-pieces devised for "close quarters on the sound stage"(a woman's office; a stairwell, the back of a potato truck.)

Hitchcock himself -- smarting after the one-two-three floppage of Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz -- evidently went to great lengths to make Frenzy a better film. He took a year off for R and R to get his health and energy up(he even went to Hawaii); he looked over 1500 properties before deciding on the book "Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leiceister Square" which he renamed as Frenzy(the title of an attempted 1967 film that Universal rejected at the script stage.)

Perhaps most effectively of all, Hitchcock got a really GOOD screenwriter for Frenzy -- Anthony Shaffer, newly hot from the play "Sleuth." Its possible that Shaffer, not Hitchcock, was the true young brain who gave Old Man Hitchcock such a vibrant(if brutal) film. And this: DP Gil Taylor(Dr. Strangelove, Star Wars) evidently did the technical direction of the film.

But still, Frenzy was "Hitchcock's baby" -- he approved the script, he approved the set-pieces, and it is a good, maybe great, film.

And so...QT was wrong. That one time. With that one director. But if any old man was going to beat QT's analysis...it would have to be Hitchcock.

[–] seagal72 (1960) 3 years ago

No offence intended (but here goes)

Stop giving less than half an Ethiopian (wet) fart about what some (eternally) lucky (lantern-jawed) plagiarist says about cinema, given that his first movie (after much bullshittery) was discovered to be a complete rip-off (and future endeavors have been similar 'homage-frais)

By all means, see the movies he's namedropping, but make your own mind up (instead of constantly listening to the biggest fraud in Hollywood)

Btw, 'ROUGH CUT' (1980) is better than anything Tarantino could ever attempt to rip off (as are Hitchcock's final duo)

[–] [deleted] 3 years ago

Frenzy is a pretty good thriller, and is quite different than his previous movies. It showed that he was staying current with what was going on, still learning and evolving. I wouldn't call it an old man film because it lacked things like big action set pieces, though. He went with a restrained, realistic approach to the genre here. I agree he had better material, but the movie doesn't give the impression of being made by someone who was old and stuck in the past.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

Frenzy is a pretty good thriller, and is quite different than his previous movies. It showed that he was staying current with what was going on, still learning and evolving.

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Yes. Unlike some of his fellow "older directors," Hitchocck kept a private screening room and watched all sort of movies -- not just thrillers -- to "see what was going on." That's how he found the horror movies that led to Psycho. That's how he saw the foreign films that inspired the international look of Topaz.

With Frenzy, Hitchcock knew that the R rating was here, and that certain elements of sex and nudity (and language) were now available to him. I feel that he felt he MUST try a movie of that nature. (Having done it, he downshifted to "nicer" with Family Plot, next.)

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I wouldn't call it an old man film because it lacked things like big action set pieces, though.

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Well, I guess the truth of it is that Hitchcock did NOT make that many action movies even when he was younger. There are action sequences in North by Northwest, The Birds, and the carousel sequence in Strangers on a Train -- and a very complex stop-the-assassination sequence in The Man Who Knew Too Much. But a LOT of his movies were just as small scale as Frenzy, I suppose.

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He went with a restrained, realistic approach to the genre here.

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Frenzy is reminiscent of Strangers on a Train with its "doubles" of male hero and male villain. Strangers on a Train is a bigger scaled film, with that incredible carousel climax. But I find that Strangers on a Train gives its psycho villain, Bruno Anthony(Robert Walker) a few too many silly lines to say about his madness -- like how he can smell flowers from miles away on the moon. Made 21 years later with more realism, Frenzy could be much more adult and real about its psycho(and his impotence) -- and about its characters , with their failed and/or strained marriages, their business troubles, etc.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

I agree he had better material, but the movie doesn't give the impression of being made by someone who was old and stuck in the past.

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Hitchcock's friend and assistant, Norman Lloyd(also the villain who falls from Lady Liberty in Saboteur) saw the film in a private screening with the Hitchcocks , When it ended, Lloyd sprung up and said "Its the film of a young man!" Mrs. Hitchcock cried.

I think that there is an intelligence in all of Hitchocck's "lesser" films after The Birds (well, actually after Psycho, The Birds has its problems), but he had other constraints in those films that aren't there in Frenzy. So Frenzy could be intelligent AND entertaining. And powerful.

In his 1972 Newsweek critic Paul Zimmerman said that Frenzy "is one of Hitchcock's very best."

In HIS 1972 review, Time critic Jay Cocks said that Frenzy "is not at the level of Hitchcock's greatest work, but it is shrewd and smooth and dexterous..ample proof that any director trying to make a suspense film is but an apprentice to this old master."

I tend to "wobble" between Cocks' respectful but not fully impressed view AND Zimmeran's "very best" rave. And I find myself more inclined to go with Zimmerman. Vertigo may be a "bigger" classic with its beautiful cinematography and its lush Bernard Herrmann score, but that film will always have problems with plot; Frenzy does not -- and is much more suspenseful and compelling in its own savage way. And Frenzy JOINS Psycho in having some slightly banal dialogue scenes (Sam and Lila in Psycho; Blaney and Babs in Frenzy) in between cinematic greatness.

The main, historic thing about Frenzy -- and it was amazing at the time -- is how all of a sudden Hitchcock went from considered a "has been in decline" to a relevant fillmaker, yet again. It was stupendous, if you were a Hitchcock fan, to live through it.

[–] ebhaynz (3688) 3 years ago

when 70 was the new...70...health regimens were nonexistent and drinking was rampant.

If we're going to talk about movie directors and health regimens in today's world QT is a perfect subject. Over the years he didn't just get fat, he got obese. There's a lot of photo's out there where he was getting close to morbidly obese. He seems to be better off now but honestly he doesn't seem to have aged gracefully. Putting on the lbs. saps a lot of energy out of a person. QT used to be young, skinny, and energetic, he has NONE of these advantages today.