MovieChat Forums > jay440 > Replies
jay440's Replies
Thanks for the link, swanstep, I enjoyed the ep., even with the L-R reversal, or Mirror Image of itself, used to beat the copyright bots. I could still catch the on-the-nose foreshadowing of the bus station's ladies room sign, with part of the set blocking LA and leaving DIES behind her head. Like Psycho, it came out in 1960, and Vera Miles looks like she could have walked from one set to the other. She is a strong lead here as she enacts her character's initial disorientation to growing terror and finally catatonic descent. Her character's name, though - Millicent (!) - not quite as poetic as Marion or Madeline.
From Wiki: Rod Serling claimed to have gotten the idea for "Mirror Image" following an encounter at an airport. Serling noticed a man at the other side of the terminal who wore the same clothes and carried the same suitcase as himself; Serling considered what would happen if the man turned around and was revealed to be a duplicate of himself. However, the man turned out to be younger and "more attractive"
It also mentions the Jordan Peele connection. He hosts and produces the new Twilight Zone series, but as a New York Times article notes, the Twilight Zone has been remade many times over in shows like The X-Files and Black Mirror (which I haven't seen), so it may be hard to make this reboot feel fresh.
The idea of Doppelgangers seemed to me just a literary or folkloric invention, a metaphor for duality, but according to Wiki, there have been rare cases of this fear called the "syndrome of subjective doubles," an example of "delusional misidentification syndrome...a belief that the identity of a person, object, or place has somehow changed or has been altered." But, yes, evil twins are always cinematic.
I've never been able to see this episode, it never seems to be run during the occasional marathons some channels run of this show, but a small excerpt online has a scene straight out of Psycho: Vera Miles is, like Marion, a young single woman traveling alone on America's highways in 1960, and, like Lila, she gets frightened when she suddenly catches an unexpected reflection of herself in a mirror.
My Billy Wilder admiration is tempered quite a bit now. Did Hitchcock ever do anything a tenth as cruel to a former cast member as the telegram that Bogdanovich alleges Wilder sent to Tony Curtis after Curtis's son died from a drug overdose ("Like Father, like son.")? And taunting Bogdanovich about Dorothy Stratten as if her murder was a movie plot that just needed some script-doctoring("This is beyond German bad taste.")? Even his skunkiest characters like Sheldrake and Walter Neff were never as venomous as that (Fred MacMurray might be for Wilder what Jimmy Stewart was to Hitchcock, his darker side). I can still love his films, but what an Ace(in the)Hole.
The cold shoulder Bogdanovich got from Hollywood after Stratten's murder sounds like what Roman Polanski experienced after the murder of Sharon Tate. I wonder if the upcoming Tarantino movie set during the Charles Manson murders will have an actor in as Polanski, as Margot Robbie is there as Tate.
His reconciliation with Orson Welles, where each admits that it's hard to get through life "without making a great many mistakes" was gratifying to read. I was also glad to read how gracious and thoughtful Cary Grant was to him. Rays of light in a pretty dark article.
I remember years ago reading about a TV series that was pitched, but never produced, about a struggling rock band that somehow find themselves in an alternate universe where none of the classic rock they know exists, and they become huge playing all those great 60s and 70s FM radio hits.
The movie you link to narrows this premise down to one musician and one group, The Beatles. Since they are my all-time favorite band, it's a gratifying notion that unheard Beatles songs would wow the world today just like they did in the 60s.
I recently found a version of Help gorgeously played on grand piano by Rick Wakeman of Yes ([url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojQaOejYkhE[/url]), and it confirms again that their music will stand the test of time and inspire other musicians (YouTube is full of music gurus with incredibly detailed song analysis of many of their songs, as well as that excellent Howard Goodall doc you linked to once).
I wonder, will Sir Paul be at the premiere?
If you haven't watched this already, it's a must-see:
22 Musicals In 12 Minutes w/ Lin-Manuel Miranda & Emily Blunt
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_TvKH-qEJk[/url]
From the YouTube description:
The Late Late Show with James Corden
Published on Dec 18, 2018
James Corden welcomes the stars of "Mary Poppins Returns" to perform a musical-inspired Role Call, featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda and Emily Blunt singing classics from 22 musicals covering Evita to The Wizard Of Oz. And Kermit the Frog stops by to help James with ''The Rainbow Connection.''
I'm trying to recall if the three-shot motif figures at the end of Bonnie and Clyde(when the two lovers know its over and look at each other with love)
---
The looks back-and-forth between Bonnie and Clyde uses the film editing technique of "Separation."
"Separation: Shooting people in separate shots who are actually close together. A conversation may be filmed with one person looking right in medium shot and the other looking left in close-up (probably after a two-shot establishing their nearness). A unique tool of cinema which can bring people in closer relation than if they were in the same shot....Hitchcock's construction of psychological tension in the "[Psycho] cop scene" as a result of separation: matching and confronting frames of persons in certain patterns."
The above definition is from a book by late film theorist Stefan Sharff, who goes on to argue that Hitchcock is cinema's best practitioner of this technique.
---
Hitchcock's "bag of tricks" were many, but it was in editing and camera movement and composition that he had it all going on. Gee -- what's left? Sound. I forgot sound.
---
I noticed, after probably dozens of viewings of Bonnie and Clyde, that in the final scene, right before the outlaw couple is shot to death by law enforcement, a flock of birds takes sudden flight from out of the trees. The sound of their rapidly fluttering wings resembles the sound, moments later, of machine gun fire.
And one more. Peckinpah's The Getaway was on TCM a couple of days ago and there it is, ushering in the best scene in my opinion, the hotel shootout, Hitchcock's triple jump cut in to the eyes.
It happens when Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw appear on the first stairway landing and the gang in the lobby below catches sight of them.
- Wide shot - two gang members already looking up at them, a third one steps in to look up also
- Medium shot - the third one finishes stepping into shot, stops and looks up, while another gang member starts to remove his shades
- Close shot - he finishes taking off the shades, we see his eyes
Cut to McQueen and MacGraw on the landing, McQueen drops the overcoat draping his arm, revealing the shotgun, and the shootout begins.
So Peckinpah kept the rhythmic three-shot cut-in straight in on axis and he kept the central focus on eyes as the final destination of this troika, but he added a group of people rather a single person, and also added match cuts on actions (stepping forward, removing dark glasses).
I've pulled out this DePalma quote before, that Hitchcock was the Bach of cinema, he invented all the tunes. I believe he had in mind these kind of little sturdy editing patterns that Hitchcock used all the time.
Come and See is like an extended experiment in subjective/objective camera and sound design that turns this war film into a horror movie. It is a brutal watch, as the boy slogs through a hellscape-mudscape amid Nazi war atrocities.
Spirit of the Beehive and Come and See both rely on lengthy frontal close-ups of very young faces to tell their stories with minimal dialogue. The music in Beehive is very moving and original and contributes immensely to the film's emotional effect. Great recommend.
The editors obviously didn't "cut to the money" when they skimped on Ruth Roman, but the story belongs to the boy anyway. The script and suspense are rudimentary but effective (will the kid drop from the high place or not?). Of your list I've seen all but Germany Year Zero; I finally saw Spirit of the Beehive, which you highly recommended, and it's now an all-timer for me, completely unexpected, so I'll have to run down Germany Year Zero. I would add The Tin Drum to the list for a more modern example, for those of strong belly.
I'm thinking Hitchcock again , here -- the three successively closer shots of Marion screaming in the shower when mother pulls back the curtain.
-------------
And the three successive shock cuts in to the farmer's pecked out eye sockets in The Birds. Maybe the triple take is the extent of human reaction, behaviorists like Hitchcock would know.
"Marty" as Arbogast: a few days work for him, and immortality. But yet, he had to keep earning a living. For decades. Movies of the week were a real blessing for Balsam(and a lot of other working actors.)
--------------------------
My first exposure to "Marty" was in one of those TV movies, in a thoughtful, intelligent drama where he played a low-key, quiet TV writer who is honored by the industry but is thrust unwillingly into the spotlight when one of his teleplays inspires a real-life murder. He is very affecting as the shrinking violet writer, used to anonymity and a cozy home life, suddenly caught in the glare of media scrutiny. For me, Arbogast is "young Martin Balsam", he was all over TV in the 70s, whether on series like Kojack and Maude or movies like Little Big Man.
I was happy, and relieved, when the salty O'Steen praised "Marty." I read about an actress on a favorite TV show of mine, Vikings, and the producer gave her the highest praise: "The editors love cutting her stuff." That's what it comes down to for an actor, providing raw footage for the editors. He praised her timing, and I expect veteran screen performers like Balsam could provide editors with tons of choices of reactions, pauses, look-offs, and cutting points to choose from. O'Steen doesn't elaborate on Balsam, just that one mention, but he does mention how proud he is of Catch-22 as a technical achievement, even while reporting that Nichols confessed that the contemperaneous MASH had "more life."
She stars in a 1949 film noir, The Window, directed by Hitchcock's Notorious cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff. It's a Cornell Woolrich story about a boy in a tenement who witnesses the murder of a sailor through one of the windows (shades of Rear Window and Marnie). It's not lit by Tetzlaff, but it certainly looks like it was, it has the look of Notorious. And Ruth Roman is indeed a knockout in this film, playing a murderous tenement hottie, all sexy sizzle in NYC summertime heat. Hitchcock didn't always go for sexiest performance from his actresses, Kim Novak is downright dowdy in Vertigo compared to most of her other screen appearances. Of course Ruth Roman couldn't play femme fatale in Strangers on a Train, that wasn't her plot function, but she does seem underused.
I'd like to see Psycho with the 4K "soap opera" effect operational. It would be like a new "you are there" version of Psycho that would be good to see...once.
-----
And only once. But yes, it has it's curiosity factor, like when Laurel and Hardy were colorized in the 80s, it was fun to see actual skin tones on them, but it didn't replace their old films. I visited the Air and Space museum in DC earlier this year because they had a 50th anniversary exhibit of 2001: A Space Odyssey; they recreated the room at the end of the film with the white lit floors and green bed, and visitors could walk around inside ("But don't get on the bed"). It was a blast (even if they hustled us in and out after just a few minutes), a new way to experience an older film. I'd love a Psycho at Sixty exhibit in 2020, but, that's doubtful, alas.
Weirdly, there are other stories of Scott's deep commitment to Van Devere. For instance, to get her booked on "The Hollywood Squares," he agreed to go on the show , too
---------------
O'Steen actually does say that Mike Nichols didn't want Van Devere but he cast her because George wanted her. I hadn't known that Scott had pushed her for Network and turned down the film when they wouldn't agree to cast her. She was a fine actress, sexy and energetic in the Columbo where she's a murderous TV exec, but probably not really "big" enough for big screen stardom.
Yo, Jay44!
This was a GREAT read. (And, from viewpoint, a perfect example of how a multi-post thread on this unique board is quite valuable to have available.)
I'm going to try to acquaint myself with how to buy a copy of this book -- I'm not much of an Amazon user; I trust it is not out of print.
-----------------
Thanks, ecarle! The book came as an Amazon recommendation and it was only available in paperback, but well worth it.
I haven't seen Straight Time, but I recently saw Scarecrow, with Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, about ex-cons trying to make it in 1970s America, and it had a raw, brutal, unpredictable vibe that made for fascinating watching. If Straight Time is anything like it, I'll be on the lookout for it, but it doesn't seem to turn up much on the tube.
Although production designer Richard Sylbert doesn't get a mention in the book, he is probably responsible for the water and jungle imagery in The Graduate.
He also designed The Pawnbroker, Virginia Woolf, Rosemary's Baby, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, Shampoo, and he was fond of visual metaphors: Jake Gittes in Chinatown always walking uphill in his search for the truth, the desert colors to show the drought (he called this color palette "burnt grass"), and no clouds shown in the sky which might rain. And he re-uses water imagery in Chinatown, when he makes the glass doors and windows of the offices look like frozen water.
Bobbie O'Steen singles out this scene as an example of a "film that was saved in the cutting room."
When Mrs. Robinson enters the bedroom with Ben inside it depositing the purse, she slams the door shut behind her, and he swings his head around to see her. To make the moment bigger, O'Steen cut together three takes from the same angle, so we see him swing his head around three times. She says, "Sam did this, because we - along with Benjamin - are in a state of shock; so it's almost as if we're suspended in time and would, in fact, double or even triple take."
And the first time they ran the scene with Benjamin reacting to the naked Mrs. Robinson ("Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God..."), Nichols and O'Steen realized it didn't work, and didn't know why. O'Steen found an outtake of Ben taken from over Mrs. Robinson's shoulder, the only shot with him and part of her body onscreen together, and used this take whenever he cut to Ben, so "the audience would always know what he was looking at...Sam didn't need to cut to Mrs. Robinson's face at all...Sam wasn't locked into using conventional cuts to establish Mrs. Robinson (he could play her dialogue offscreen), he had the freedom to try something that filmmakers had just started to experiment with: subliminal cuts...making the cuts of her naked body a subliminal repetition of images...Benjamin is in shock; he can barely look at her, yet he can't look away...Sam experimented with one, two, and three-frame cuts, and found out that three frames register on the viewer, but only like a flash."
She adds: "Why did it work? Maybe Mrs. Robinson's disembodied voice and the subliminal cuts made the scene more surreal and somehow funnier."
Sam O'Steen mentions that he and Nichols tried subliminal cutting before on Virginia Woolf (I can't remember it in there), but he credits Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker with being the first, although Alain Resnais deserves that credit, I think.
There's no discussion of color-grading, Blu-Rays or DVDs in the book, although that would have been invaluable, since they are so acute about analyzing the various movies visually. Sam O'Steen died in 2000 and his wife, Bobbie, a generation younger, who met him while editing Straight Time, holds classes in Manhattan discussing these films and their editing techniques.
In the book, they discuss visual elements of The Graduate, which include the theme of water. Sam O'Steen: "...in that first party scene, Benjamin keeps trying to catch his breath. And that's why water is the theme in the movie, because Benjamin is suffocating, drowning...Later, when his parents make him try on the scuba gear, they keep pushing him back down in the water. Even before he gets in the water, you can hear him struggle for air...His only escape is the bottom of the pool. He's completely alone, he doesn't know what to do...then as we pull back he becomes smaller and smaller the blue water almost makes him fade away. That's when he's really drowning." If the 4K version turns the white into blue, it could be a reinforcement of the water theme visually, but I would doubt it, and it's probably more about referencing the blue, or teal, of the infamous, overused teal-and-orange color combo that Michael Bay popularized and seems to have taken over Hollywood films. O'Steen also references Mrs. Robinson's jungle theme, in the furniture, plants outside her den, and jungle print outfit,..."she was like an animal trying to devour him." I haven't seen the Blu-Ray, but I wonder how these scenes turned out in the new color transfer.
Finally, in the It-Must-Be-Nice Dept., Bobbie O’Steen relates an anecdote about casting The Graduate: “Initially Robert Redford was to play the part of Benjamin, but then Nichols realized Redford couldn’t play an underdog. He asked Redford if he’d ever been turned down by a girl. Redford’s answer: ‘What do you mean?’"