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Doghouse (457)
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Is Chalmers really necessary in the movie? He's not the bad guy, but why is he the bad guy Part III
OT: Samuel Taylor Directs!
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"Who knows why stars are stars?"
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Ah, the lost chord, the holy grail of agents, producers and directors. An enduring mystery - right alongside "What makes a movie a hit?" - to which only the public can provide answers, and even WE don't know why.
In his book, Hollywood, Garson Kanin told of sitting with Harry Cohn in his office one evening while the producer was moaning about his inability to put over an actress he thought had the makings of a star.
"I gave her every advantage: the best costumes; hairdressers; makeup; scripts; publicity. And: nuthin! I'm tellin' ya, only the public can make a star."
Kanin mused, "Only God can make a tree."
Cohn barked, "What!?"
Kanin explained, "The poem by Joyce Kilmer. 'Poems are made by fools like me but only God can make a tree.'"
Snatching the cigar from his mouth, Cohn leaned forward and bellowed, "Bullshit! My studio can make the best goddam tree anybody ever saw." Cigar back in, Cohn leaned back in his chair.
After a second or two, Kanin added sympathetically, "But not a star."
The mercurial Cohn was calm again and, shaking his head sadly, confirmed, "But not a star."
Indeed, swanstep. A different kettle of fish? If so, it's on the burner next to the first one and smells perhaps worse.
We've done our share of vintage TV viewing and have observed what you've mentioned as well as attempts to split the difference, combining both cropping and stretching. There were episodes of the '50s - '60s PERRY MASON incorporating those along with time compression to fit an originally 55-minute program into the 45 or fewer minutes syndication allows. Pitch correction had been applied to the audio to avoid sounding like Alvin and the chipmunks, but movement was unnatural in the way 18 fps silents appear when run at 24 fps.
Feature films have contended with those issues when using period footage. TORA! TORA! TORA! cropped it for the 2:35 aspect ratio; MIDWAY took the lazier route by simply editing it in without alteration, and anamorphic projection lenses stretched it out when screened, resulting in the longest B-25s and carriers ever seen. In those instances, I have to prefer cropping but only as the lesser of two evils.
But for TV? Jeez, just leave it alone. Do viewers really object so much to "windowboxed" images on their 16:9 displays?
There's a YouTube channel called Perf Damage where a couple of film professionals (who find themselves more amusing than they are, but that's common among YouTubers) examining issues of restoration in the digital age have focused lately on aspect ratio in the early-'50s transition period from Academy to widescreen, when many films were shot "open matte" (1:37 intended to be masked when projected). A recent one about 1954's THE COUNTRY GIRL illustrated how engineers often have to exercise their own judgement when deciding on 1:33, 1:66 or 1:85 for HD mastering if there's no clear guidance from documents of the period.
A headache, but it sounds to me like a fun job to have.
"And of course the shower scene: JAGGED...JAGGED ...JAGGED. (Starting with the three ever-closer cuts to Marions screaming mouth.)"
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And those were a shock motif he repeated with the reveal of Dan Fawcett in THE BIRDS. It's something James Whale used with the entrances of Boris Karloff in FRANKENSTEIN and Claude Rains in THE INVISIBLE MAN. In the latter, since there's something mysterious but not overtly frightening about a guy wrapped in gauze, Whale added a menacing dimension to Rains' closeups throughout the film by shooting up at him from a low angle.
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"Psycho is always CALLING ATTENTION to its cutting(as The Wild Bunch would 9 years later, and Bonnie and Clyde a little bit in between) and I love that about it. Even the jagged cut into the hotel window suggests the terror ahead. JAGGED."
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I like those observations. So many ways a director can speak to an audience with a camera. And isn't that what Hitchcock called "pyoowah cinemahh?"
"ABC in the US in the 70's -- showed How the West Was Won with the join lines NOT erased. Very jarring -- at the end when the train flies off the rails it is as if the train "bends in three places."
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One of the numerous drawbacks of the system. While the screens displayed the images across a continuous curve like a bow window, the separate lenses were capturing three flat planes - like a bay window - from different angles. As it happened, TCM was running HTWWW just yesterday in the so-called "Smilebox" format intended to mimic the curved screen, and I took a look at a few minutes of it.
And no matter how it's presented, trains, teams of horses, stampeding buffalo or anything else appear to change direction when passing from the range of one lens into that of the next. Because, relative to the lenses, they are.
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"I saw Bullitt first run in 1968, too, but I "don't remember remembering" that flash from the car wreck. I caught that in later TV and VHS showings."
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Ever since I first started reading and learning about how films are made at maybe 9 or 10, I've watched each one with what amounts to two brains (have I said this before?). One is surrendering to the story while the other is studying technique. One can be gasping, "Omigod, he's the killer!" while the other is thinking, "They should have held that shot a second longer."
I noticed the flash first time I saw it, but also something else: in the 10 -15 frames following the flash, the parked car's dented fender had repaired itself (talk about plasticity). And with a bit of thought, I realized they'd filled in with a few frames from the beginning of the take before the Dodge had entered the shot because the breaking camera ended it sooner than they wanted. Imperfections notwithstanding, I get a kick out of stuff like that.
CONT'd
" Quite frankly, I now see the "German directors cut" as the DEFINITIVE Psycho because clearly Hitchcock put those moments on film (SHOT them, not just WROTE them) and that was his original vision of the film."
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That's a sound argument, and one with which I can take no issue. Ah, but is it YOUR PSYCHO?
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"Now, when I see "the censored shot" of Norman's bloodied hands, it seems way too SHORT."
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Hmm. Maybe that answers my question.
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"Of the other two shots -- the one of Marion pulling her bra off further is just too quick to register as "nude." And those additional stabs down on Arbogast -- just look suspicious to me"
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Or maybe not. With your further remarks about the impact of the extended bloody-hands shot, I also can't take issue. Yet, I've not yet settled on which way I prefer. Sometimes, a quick shot is more like a visual jab for dramatic emphasis. Perhaps I'll never decide which.
Quick glimpses of hands in closeup are something I've considered a little Hitchcock trademark. Norman's snatching the towel from the rod. Roger's gentle grasp of Eve's at the train station as she's moving to walk away. Mark Rutland extending his toward Marnie when he confronts her at the safe, appearing to be calming and reassuring while surreptitiously going for the gun on the desk. Melanie's reaching for the ignition key - not there - when taking refuge from the birds in a parked car. Even as far back as THE LODGER, when Daisy's restrain his lest he reveal the handcuffs. A Hitchcock touch, you might say. Well, I did, at least.
CONT'd
"Another surprise visit from yet another long time ago commenter of much respect. Hello, Doghouse."
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Hi to you and gratitude for the warm greeting. Don't really know why I haven't had anything to say in a while but, even when silent, I'm never far away. Still a regular reader.
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"I was both excited and enthralled by HIS montages -- jagged, cuts-all-over the place sequences of great excitement to me."
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For all its bravura technique, among the pieces of PSYCHO's editing of which I'm most fond is a little "nothing" moment that Hitch and Tomasini made special. Just as Norman has retrieved the newspaper and is exiting the room, a brisk pan to the right follows him as he goes through the door; a cut to outside just before the door slam as he approaches the rear of Marion's car; a brisk pan to the left as camera follows the tossed paper into the trunk which is then slammed shut; another cut to a longer shot of him approaching the driver's door.
The whole thing takes all of 5 seconds. Simple action. Three shots, two edits. Complimentary rhythms of movement (to the right, cut, to the left, cut) and sounds (slam, whoosh, slam) create a five-second symphony for eye and ear that's at once fluid yet staccato. Cool efficiency with tense urgency. And symmetry: cut; slam; slam; cut. As well, both brisk pans cease just a couple or few frames before the edits, rather than the cuts coming on camera movement. An all-business bit of rhythmic counterpoint. It's a moment I wait for when watching the film.
CONT'd
Oh, I feel all of that, swanstep. While all this fol de rol really exploded with the advent of home video, suddenly rendering every deleted scene, alternate take or what-have-you a commodity, it's something that's been with us almost as long as film has, but in a subdued form.
1925's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, for instance, was rereleased in '29, incorporating music, dialogue and sound effects, as well as re-edited with newly shot scenes and alternate takes of existing ones (the famous unmasking among them) and other original ones deleted. Latter day attempts to reconstruct its '25 form have been frustrated by scarcity of documents from the period, and what now appear to be the highest quality restorations are results of great deals of intuition, outright guesswork and reliance on contemporaneous accounts whose accuracy can't always be verified.
Similar circumstances arose from Chaplin's 1940 rerelease of THE GOLD RUSH, but his control of film elements and documentation was, fortunately, more meticulous than most. And then, of course, there were the "roadshow" versions of big films that were shortened for general release, with the original negatives of some inexplicably cut down to conform, and that material discarded. And sometimes, rediscovered years later.
But the strictly 21st-century practice of film makers and/or marketers, unleashed by technology, bombarding the public with ever more "new and improved" versions of consumer favorites inevitably leaves only another question: when is the number of options and choices just too damned many?
EDIT for an afterthought - My natural cynicism kicked in and answered the question for me: never, as long as there's a buck to be made.
There's a similarly awkward edit in the opening of PSYCHO: four smoothly panning shots of Phoenix's low-lying skyline are separated by dissolves as we're brought closer and closer to the "cheap hotel" where Sam and Marion have their afternoon assignation. After the final dissolve, the camera begins to zoom in on a particular window of that hotel, followed by an abrupt cut to a dolly-in on a soundstage replica of that window.
Could present-day engineers smooth that out by interpolating another dissolve between those shots? Sure. They could also eliminate the twitch of Janet Leigh's eye as the camera retreats from what's supposed to be Marion's corpse sprawled on the bathroom floor tiles. But imperfections like these, along with those in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and BULLITT, are aspects of the charm of films we love and come to know so well, and I would - and do - miss them if they aren't there.
So, to all video engineers and still-living directors: indulge all your that-could-have-been-better impulses, and tweak and "improve" and "enhance" all you like as long as the films have been preserved in as close as possible to the forms in which they were originally seen. And that represents what I'd call the definitive version of any film.
A film like HOW THE WEST WAS WON was crafted to be seen as three panels projected onto a deeply curved screen with multichannel sound, as I first saw it. But most audiences would have seen it in smaller theaters from 35mm reduction prints, with mono optical sound, projected onto flat screens. Same movie, no changes except in the presentation. The last time I saw it was on Blu-ray, with the join lines digitally erased and the image looking more vivid and sparkling than ever. No curved screen however, but, dammitall, <i>better</i>. Yet, not what I saw in '63.
What about alterations to the body of a film, then, to erase unintended imperfections? There's an awkward edit in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT during the "walls of Jericho" scene. Wary Claudette Colbert is backed up against the door to their cabin as Gable proceeds in a long shot to demonstrate how a man undresses for bed. When he reaches the point where only his trousers remain, she begins bolting to the other side of the room. There's then a cut to a closer shot of Colbert alone, still stationary against the door, and she begins her bolt again to behind the "walls." Remasters of this film for DVD/Blu-ray have tightened that edit.
The first DVD release of BULLITT eliminated a flash frame that resulted when the Charger, rounding a corner and clipping a parked car, inadvertently mounted the curb and took out the camera. Subsequent Blu-ray releases have restored the flash frame in all its imperfect glory.
In both cases, video engineers were "fixing" small errors that could originally have been corrected in post but, in so doing, were presenting something that wasn't seen by audiences in 1934 or by me in 1968.
CONT'd
There was a similar discussion a while back on another film board I visit. Film as an art form is unique among others in being a compendium of all those existing before it: literature; painting; sculpture; architecture; performance; music; photography. And in applying the last, it created a new one: montage; "The assembly of bits of film to tell a story," as Hitchcock put it. It's unique also in the ability of those bits of film to be manipulated and revised long after the product it represents was considered complete, in the forms of extended "director's cuts," latter day CG enhancements, color corrections and so forth.
The phrase we settled upon to designate these peculiar phenomena was "the plasticity of film," referring of course not to its flexible cellulose physical medium, but to its subjectivity to endless tinkering even after it's "in the can." And we concluded, just as you did, with the same question. It's one to which I'd put a finer point: What, then, is the <i>definitive</i> version of any film?
Let's apply that to PSYCHO. Is it the one released in 1960 in NY and L.A.? Or the one released the same year in, say, Munich and Berlin, with the extended shots of Marion undressing, the blood on Norman's hands and Arbogast's stabbing that Hitchcock couldn't get away with in the U.S.? Film makers like Lucas and Spielberg have lived long enough to take advantage of tools allowing them to enhance earlier work to achieve what they couldn't in 1977 or 1982 but would have if they'd been able. Hitchcock didn't, so what would he have thought about PSYCHO's remixed 5.1 surround, for instance? Enhancement? To be sure, but not what anyone heard in 1960. Or, perhaps, what they heard but not <i>how</i> they heard it. Which raises a matter of presentation.
CONT'd
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