MovieChat Forums > jay440 > Replies
jay440's Replies
<blockquote>Was Balsam wearing his "Arbogast outfit?"</blockquote>
It looks like they went as close as possible without outright copying Arbogast, but the suit, tie and hat could definitely have come from Arbogast's closet. I also got an Arbogasty vibe when he was poking around that general store at night.
For one long-time married couple that I know, Dateline is must-see viewing. Comfort-watching or picking up pointers?
IMDB lists the episode as airing the year after Psycho, so I'm sure a lot of viewers would have gotten the reference.
<blockquote>In the real world, people just ignore/forget about anything poor like that, all that matters for history (unless you're a complete record/video store geek) is the *good* stuff. It just doesn't matter for Hawks' or Hitchcock's or Wilder's reputations that they faded a little at the end (unless perhaps you're a record/video store geek type).</blockquote>
Tarantino agreed with this, at least in 2010: "I remember how I came across Howard Hawks; I saw His Girl Friday and I thought that it was the best movie I ever saw. Then I saw To Have and Have Not and didn't like it as much, but I could tell it was a Howard Hawks movie. My aim is that some kid in 50 years time has the same experience with me and my films. At the end of a director's career you don't look at just one movie - you look at all of them." https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jan/12/quentin-tarantino-bafta
A recent profile in Deadline might give a clue about his future direction:
<blockquote>As part of his research [for his Once Upon A Time In Hollywood novelization], Tarantino wrote half a dozen episodes of Dalton’s series, Bounty Law, and has expressed a desire to direct them as a limited series. </blockquote>https://deadline.com/2020/11/quentin-tarantino-two-book-deal-harpercollins-novel-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-cinema-speculation-70s-movie-deep-dive-1234616927/
<blockquote>Pretty funny when you think about it...and the movie ends with the characters chasing the finger around the hotel room as it keeps sliding away.</blockquote>
John Wayne didn't think it was very funny. According to Howard Hawks, he pitched this very scene to Wayne for Red River, and Wayne was grossed out by the idea and passed on it. Hawks inserted the scene in a much lesser Western, The Big Sky, where a drunken Kirk Douglas has his finger amputated, then insists on getting it back, and the scene ends with the men crawling around the dirt on their hands and knees, butts to the camera, with Douglas bawling "Find my finger, find my finger!" Hawks bragged that Wayne regretted not doing the scene after seeing this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRJXB6ezRwY
Tarantino is a fan of Hawks and I don't doubt this is his homage to him, along with Hitchcock.
I also bet that Tarantino has read Hawks on Hawks, by Joseph McBride, a book of interviews with the director conducted late in his life, where the above anecdote comes from. Francois Truffaut praised the book, and it stands up very well alongside Truffaut's own interview book on Hitchcock.
Another Tony Perkins/baseball connection (from the NY Times obit on Hunter): Hunter played "Jimmy Piersall, the major league baseball player who came back from a nervous breakdown, in a well-reviewed adaptation of the book “Fear Strikes Out” on the series “Climax.” But Warner Bros. refused to buy the movie rights to “Fear Strikes Out” for its teenage idol, and the film was made by Paramount, with Mr. Hunter’s sometime companion Anthony Perkins."
Hunter also played a murderer on Playhouse 90, based on a real life home invader/killer who bludgeoned two women to death in separate home invasions and was executed in California in the gas chamber.
The Times obit also noted his similarity to another actor: "In his autobiography, Mr. Hunter said he had heard that when people mistook Mr. (Troy) Donahue for him, Mr. Donahue would sometimes correct them by explaining, 'I’m the straight one.'"
Also deadpan are those daringly long-held camera shots of that approaching cropduster, so slow and inexorable, approaching from a distance, then terrifyingly swift as it reaches him, Hitchcock playing with perspective. The celebrated shot in Lawrence of Arabia (which came out three years later) of Omar Sharif's approach on camel to the watering hole is shot the same way, with this distant speck of a threat coming across a vast, empty desert vista, slowly getting nearer and nearer as Lawrence and his guide watch in tense anticipation.
Cary had a great deadpan in NxNW, but even he had some stiff competition in that classic film:
https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/1000_Frames_of_North_by_Northwest_(1959)_-_frame_964
Frenzy is not deadpan much at all (not even the corpses) except for a few moments here and there with Chief Inspector Oxford ("Discretion is not traditionally the strong suit of the psychopath.").
Still, nobody beat Hitchcock at this game, "sitting there like a Buddha" as one actor described his on-set demeanor.
Spielberg's West Side Story trailer will debut during the Oscars broadcast.
The original soundtrack was one of the only albums my parents owned that I loved to listen to. I believe Spielberg is keeping Bernstein's great score, but how relevant and current could this film be? Will it be just colorful dance numbers and teenybopper melodrama?
This is new to me, and I had to google WWI aerial bombing London: “Between May 1915 and May 1918, Zeppelins and bombing planes killed 668 persons in the Metropolitan Police District and injured 1,938 more.”
Did Hitchcock live through something like this? Born in 1899, he was a teenage school boy during the war years. I have to agree that the war was on his mind while making the school attack scene.
The review concludes with this: “Thwarted, unfulfilled desire is the wire running through Hitchcock’s work.”
Thwarted and unfulfilled certainly applies to Scotty in Vertigo, but I think also to each main character in Psycho as well: Sam and Marion in their secretive, long-distance love affair, Norman’s desperate solitude, and even Lila, played by pin-up beauty Vera Miles, seems not to have any love in her life, only her sharp, tense disposition.
I believe at some point I’ll be adding this to my Hitchcock collection, but through Kindle. I’m not at the point of browsing through a bookstore just yet, but soon enough.
I'll add my thanks for the write-up too, ecarle. I’ve got the Chinatown book in my Kindle but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I first read about this Hitchcock bio earlier this week in a New York Times review. The reviewer had a suggestion for a 13th Hitchcock: “The Dissembler, for Hitchcock’s own joy in issuing contradictory statements about his life.”
Also: “The traditional task of the Hitchcock biographer has been to locate the defining event that became the wellspring for his lifelong interest in paranoia, surveillance and sexual violence. The biographer as detective, as it were, wandering the Bates home in Psycho, searching for the body of the mother, the all-revealing trauma.”
Hopefully with more success than Arbogast.
And also: “Hitchcock rarely discussed — the death of his father and the strain of living through war — ‘the very type of tortuous suspense and grinding anxiety that was the adult Hitchcock’s stock in trade.’ Neighborhood children and infants died in the air raids, and White suggests that The Birds — with the attacks on a school, and the pioneering aerial shots — can be seen as Hitchcock’s way of reliving the terror.”
My favorite scene from Amadeus is when Mozart, on his deathbed, dictates his last score to Salieri. It could be dramatically viable, but maybe not when stretched out over the entire length of a film.
From what I've read about Toland, the schoolmarmish "It can't be done" to rebellious upstart Welles is probably dramatic license, as Toland was always a tinkerer and constantly invented new ways to photograph films. I gather that they were thick as thieves during the production and egged on each other's creativity.
RKO 481 is on YouTube, a clean copy, and scrolling through the scenes, I was pleased to see that they rebuilt sets from Kane and we get to see them in glorious color, something that the making-of-Psycho film Hitchcock sorely lackerd, as has been discussed on these boards.
My fantasy making-of film would include Gregg Toland's great deep focus photography for John Ford that he took to the limit in Kane, and a look at the work of the art director, Perry Ferguson I believe, who hung great sheets of black velvet all over the set that photographed like deep space.
Hitchcock could do stuck in a wheelchair, stuck on a lifeboat, stuck at a murderous dinner party. Fincher should have been up to the challenge of stuck in bed.
Speaking of pretty shocking, see below:
Oscar nominations that CITIZEN KANE (9) and MANK (10) have in common:
Picture, Actor, Director, Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound, Score
Noms exclusive to MANK:
Supporting Actress, Costume Design, Makeup
Noms exclusive to KANE:
Screenplay (Winner), Editing
Kane's only win, Best Screenplay, is a category that Mank, a screenplay about screenwriting, didn't get a nomination in.
One of my favorite film books is about the making of Kane, with lots of production stills, special effect breakdowns (Kane is loaded with them),
shots from other films that influenced Kane, audio innovations, etc.
I would love a film about the making of this technically ground-breaking movie, and though I haven't seen it, it sounds like Mank is not it.
The Hollywood studio system offered Hitchcock the kind of resources and effects he just couldn't get in England. One film scholar compared Hitchcock's move to Hollywood to Haydn's move to London; for the first time he had a great orchestra at his disposal.
And The Stranger (1946) has it's own psycho monologue at the dinner table scene, with Welles expounding on Nazi philosophy just enough to arouse investigator Edward G. Robinson's suspicions. I wonder if Hitchcock and Welles were just trolling each other!
224 Bunny Lake Is Missing Otto Preminger, 1965
Definitely a BPKO, set in England, with Keir Dullea's Nice Norman/Psycho Norman performance and Carol Lynley's climactic Lila-like search through the mansion, all in glorious b&w. Saul Bass even designed the poster and the Psycho-ish opening credits.
In the movie's trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwQ5qZA_BxU) Preminger mandates an "iron rule: that nobody may be admitted to the theater after the picture has started."
Cast also includes Hitchcockians Laurence Olivier (Rebecca) as a detective (no Arbogast ending here for Sir Larry) and Anna Massey (Frenzy).
Your description of Unhinged reminds me of the 80s Rutger Hauer road thriller The Hitcher, where the pretty blonde lead, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is, like in Psycho, SPOILER brutally killed before the end of the film. She is tied between two trucks and then pulled apart when Rutger, in one of the trucks, releases the clutch.
He plays a homicidal maniac who is also suicidal, willing to take any risks, including entering a police station and killing the officers to unlock the cell holding lead actor C. Thomas Howell, who, in a Wrong Man situation, framed by Rutger, is thought by the police to be the killer-on-the-loose.
Bonus Psycho connection to Unhinged for one word title that means insane. Drink!
Hitchcock could "compose" with sound effects, as he does in that "Farewell to Babs" sequence, which begins as Babs rushes out of the bar onto the sidewalk, and the bustling STREET NOISES quickly FADE OUT to SILENCE as the camera snap-zooms into a close-up of her troubled face. She then whips around to see Bob Rusk, and they start the walk (her last) to his apartment.
The scene ends in a aural reversal, where the eerie SILENCE of the staircase gradually FADES UP to the roar of STREET NOISES as the camera recedes out of the building, drowning out any possibility of anyone hearing her scream.