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Good stuff here, EC.
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Devil of a time getting back in AS EC. Thanks for reassuring me of my identity.
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As to stars that lasted, to continue somewhat in your line of thinking, Newman and Redford managed, together and separately, to hang in there, through the 70s, no surprise with Robert, and not much, either, as I think about, to the always hipster friendly Paul, who aged well (and honestly) and took parts that were right for him, not just a hot project they wanted a big name star for.
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Newman had about a 14 year start on Redford as a movie star -- and about that more in age, yes?.
Somewhat interestingly, Newman and Steve McQueen were the main "paired rivals" in the 60's, with McQueen slowly sneaking up on Newman's star level(McQueen had been Newman's way-down-the cast list SUPPORT in "Somebody Up There Likes Me" in 1956.) McQueen crept up, from The Magnificent Seven to The Great Escape to The Cinncinati Kid(a more fun "Hustler") to The Sand Pebbles(McQueen's only Best Actor nominated Oscar performance, in a role that Newman turned down to do...Torn Curtain!) and then triumphantly riding Bullitt to equal superstardom with Paul as of 1968/1969.
Newman hung in there. McQueen quit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid over billing, other "equal stars" like Brando and Beatty turned it down, and Newman ended up bringing in Redford (who'd put in about 10 years in TV and not-quite-movie stardom) ...and made him a star.
Came the 70's, McQueen sort of retired(after doing The Towering Inferno with Newman) and by 1980, died young at 50.
Meanwhile, Redford became a major star in the 70's as had been Newman in the 60s. When Newman sort of amiably forced himself into The Sting(in what was meant to be a supporting role for Peter Boyle), Redford had to give Newman top billing and a cut of his pay.
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Back to Psycho:
These are probably long gone, long torn away, long thrown away, but wouldn't it be cool to see:
ONE: Saul Bass's storyboards for the Arbogast murder? (Would he have matched Hitchcock's great close up of the slashed face of the victim?)
TWO: SOMEBODY's storyboards -- or rather production sketches -- for the Psycho house. I'm willing to bet that Hitchcock ordered five, ten, TWENTY different sketches to give him ideas for the Gothic structure. And finally, he matched those sketches to a set on the Universal backlot -- and made changes.
But its worse: Hitchcock gave that answer to Truffaut in 1962, evidently never dreaming that, sometime in the 70's, Bass would show that he drew ANOTHER storyboard for Psycho: the shower murder. And THAT storyboard was published in a film magazine and can now be found lots of places (like on the internet).
Oops, Hitch.
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I return with some more thoughts about this.
Some years ago in some book, really good storyboards were printed of the crop duster chase in North by Northwest. The storyboards were perhaps too good: it was clearly Cary Grant's face in them.
Well, I've since read that THOSE storyboards were FAKE, drawn up "after the fact" to promote the movie in some magazine.
And yet: way back in 1973, in a book on Hitchcock called Focus on Hitchcock(which I own), there were some REAL storyboards from the crop duster scene -- just this side of stick figure sketches without Grant being recognizable -- and those were the real deal. Oops: no, they weren't. I just checked. The storyboards were done for an article about the crop duster scene for the book!
Several books on Hitchcock -- notably "Hitchocck at Work," have what seem to be quite legitimate storyboards from Shadow of a Doubt(illustrated as if in an artist's painting) and Lifeboat. So evidently, Hitchcock storyboarded SOME scenes, in SOME movies.
But the issue becomes: how many scenes did Alfred Hitchcock REALLY have storyboarded for his movies? "All the way through the story, start to finish" (as some have contended.) Nah, I don't think so. KEY scenes? (The murders in Psycho.) Yes, I think so.
The Birds got plenty of storyboards for action scenes. I've seen them. And I've seen storyboards for the Family Plot runaway car scene and the cemetary criss-cross(evidently drawn up also for a proposed book on the movie that was never published.)
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One more thought on North by Northwest based on a recent musing and with, as I've been prone to lately, some memories attached(for posterity?)
I saw North by Northwest on the CBS Friday Night Movie in 1967 and it just excited the hell out of me as a movie can do to a person of a young age. With Psycho floating out of reach(unable to see it), NXNW scratched another itch: I just thought it was the most exciting movie i'd ever seen, ESPECIALLY how everything and everybody came together on Mount Rushmore at the end.
Skip ahead a year-plus. 1968. I saw Planet of the Apes at the theater, and i recall being intrigued and somewhat in suspense over the human's inability to speak for so long and where the story went from there.
But Planet of the Apes never reached the pace and excitement of NXNW, and when, at the end, after some "so so action" between Charlton Heston and the "bad apes" and the famous twist ending-- the Statue of Liberty in the sand and the fade out, I thought: "That's it? This movie is just STOPPING? No big chase?"
I think Lady Liberty's presence further invoked memories of the great final chase across Rushmore. I continue to make my case: the Rushmore chase was the most exciting thing in movies for quite some time. And here was Planet of the Apes ending with a nifty twist, but no action, no music. Fade out.
And "Planet of the Apes," I'm afraid, reflected where the action-adventure movie would go for quite a few years in 1967-1970 Hollywood: "prestigous," overblown, serious -- a bit "tight with the budget"(its an A movie, but not much happens on a big scale in POTA.) Ice Station Zebra comes to mind. (But "The Dirty Dozen" does NOT. THAT movie had an action packed explosive finale.)
It would take Dirty Harry, and Jaws and Star Wars to get things rolling up to speed again...and then we never looked back. And I see NXNW more in alignment with THEM than with Planet of the Apes.
A closely related problem that many, undoubtedly very talented writers often have is that their very distinctive voice and personality shines through all their characters' mouths ultimately undermining their characters' supposed distinctiveness.
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Yeah, its noticeable when it happens, isn't it?
I recall back when Woody Allen started using Diane Keaton in all his movies(roughly 1972 through 1979), she always sounded like HIM.
Also with Paddy Chafesky as the "true auteur" of Network, you could say that all the main characters spoke in his voice -- male and female alike.
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I'm currently in the middle of trying to get through Thor:Love and Thunder.
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I elected to put a thread on this board -- with some Psycho/Hitchcock references about "my favorite comic book movies," because I have quite a few. But not THAT many. The flood of Marvel/DC movies in the last decade has buried me -- either with movies I "see once and forget" or see not at all. I have not seen Thor: Love and Thunder but I understand it is comedy-heavy. Maybe I see it, maybe not.
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Among its most trying features is that Kiwi Oscar-winning writer/director Taika Waititi's jokey voice (he also plays rock-monster Korg in the film) has usurped every other character's voice! Even Natalie Portman's Jane Foster top scientist is now a quip-monster and half-wit-if-the-joke-requires-it.
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Ha.
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Waititi's previous Thor film, Ragnarok (a big hit), was pretty silly but very fun
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Yeah, I recall THOSE reviews for ITS humor, too -- and the trailer was pretty funny. Never saw it.
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and, pointedly, still had very separate characters - not everybody sounding like everyone else.
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Well, all it takes is one hit and as you say "free reign" for someone to run their talent into the ground.
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And I love the argumentative pitter-patter banter of Sorkin's best scripts, it entertains me "-- an action sequence using words insteads of bullets." Every scene with Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War is gold -- he gets the best lines or helps Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts with THEIR great lines.
And this goes back in time to "the beginning" Nicholson versus Cruise in "A Few Good Men." ("You can't HANDLE the truth!" put Sorkin on the map, but actually, Nicholson has a LOT of great lines in his only-three scenes in the movie. Said Nicholson about that short part: "It was still worth the money to pay me for those scenes, wasn't it?" Gleeful. He knew he scored those lines perfectly.
But I guess that's the thing: if QT is going to go after North by Northwest(and by inference, its screenwriter Ernest Lehman) he and Sorkin should be called out for THEIR weaknesses. By somebody. And yet most years they put something out...I loved it. QT and Sorkin have quite a few of my Number One of the Year movies. And quite a few Number Twos.
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I think the issue -- which also surfaced in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight -- is that QT does love the sound of his own voice and lets his characters talk on and on and on
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I agree. Sorkin shares this problem.
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Somewhere recently, QT said that "Aaron Sorkin is the best screenwriter in Hollywood." I bet he meant "...except for me," but he was clearly honoring that OTHER guy who made his name with his scripts and his dialogue.
And I must admit, though Sorkin wasn't the SOLE writer on these scripts, he wrote or co-wrote my favorite movies of 2007(Charlie Wilson's War), 2011(Moneyball), and 2017(Molly's Game.) And in all three cases, "the seams were showing." For instance, in Charlie Wilson's War, Tom Hanks' Congressman says "I may just be the son of lumber company manager" and Phil Hoffman says "I may just be the son of a soda popl maker" --- Sorkin's style is rather blunt, yes?
Worse: he repeats himself:
The Social Network:
Zuckerberg: If you had invented the internet, you would have invented the internet!
Charlie Wilson's War:
CIA boss: If you had gotten his job in Finland, you would have been in Finland!
Oops.
Still, I like Sorkin's style -- as long as its not his movies about Silicon Valley. Just depressing how rich those guys and gals are.
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Longworth read extensively from Moore's auto-biography on the show including the details of a rape by a family friend (one that Moore claims was partly facilitated by her mom) that Moore suffered when she was 15. The details recounted by Moore are horrific and indeed have a kind of Indecent Proposal meets Marnie angle.
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Some actresses in Hollywood come from wealth or comfortable upper class families but some actresses -- just as with some male actors -- come up the hard way. Hardscrabble roots. Utter poverty. We probably wouldn't want to know that kind of trauma they endured in their young lives. Word is that Demi Moore indeed had a horrible upbringing, but she made it to the top, big money, superstsar husband(Bruce Willis), star husband(Ashton Kutchner) and yet....what was it LIKE, that childhood? I guess we don't want to know more...but she did write about it, eh?
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I never used to think about this sort of stuff really happening but it jolly well does. For a lot of people, then, especially lots of women, Marnie feels a lot more realistic and a lot less of a melodramatic contraption than it has always struck me as being.
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Gee, you're making me re-think Marnie (which has its points.)
Here is a weird childhood memory of Hitchcock's movies after Psycho.
I saw The Birds first run at a theater in 1963. I saw Torn Curtain first run at a theater in 1966. Topaz first run in 1969. Frenzy first run in 1972. Family Plot first run(at its PREMIERE) in 1976.
But I'm sure that I did NOT see Marnie in 1964. And the novel was on our living room coffee table (I thought it read "Marine." ) I suppose my parents just saw that one on their own. I remember thinking it was a new James Bond movie because of Sean Connery.
Anyway, I have affection for everything from The Birds through Family Plot because I saw them all first run -- EXCEPT Marnie.
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A friend of mine at Paramount gave me the script of Indecent Proposal to read, and one element was hilariously off: for a final celebrity auction scene the screenwriter had just thrown in the name of "Jimmy Stewart" as the celebrity auctioneer, all the way through "Jimmy Stewart asks for the first bid," "Jimmy Stewart asks for final bids," etc. In the movie "Jimmy Stewart" became that Scottish comedian Billy Connolly(who would also play a late era Columbo villain as a movie composer who plays the Psycho and Jaws themes for the detective! Such connections!)
One more on the Paramount guy I knew(I still know him, but he's not at Paramount anymore.) He also gave me a script for a movie about to go into production with Harrison Ford called "Night Train Down." 1930's period piece with Ford as a Pinkerton detective fighting bad guys on the train with the help of a black porter (not yet cast). Kind of "1930's Lethal Weapon on a train." Very exciting script, big multi-train collision at the end. The head villain gets attached by his pocket gold watch chain to a train and plunges to his death. I could PICTURE the movie.
And Paramount got a new studio boss, and he CANCELLED Night Train Down, and moved Harrison Ford into Patriot Games, and fired Alec Baldwin(as Tom Clancy's hero Jack Ryan) from that movie and...
..that's how Hollywood works. Night Train Down I've only seen on paper, in my mind.
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suspect that the ending of Marnie probably works better for a lot of women than it ever did for me because they've got a bone-deep understanding of this well of female suffering and suppressed anger/guilt that I've only slowly discovered intellectually.
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Something to consider in considering a movie like Marnie -- keep in mind that Hitchcock opineI will opine that he, along with George Cukor perhaps, could sometimes be seen as "a male director of women's films."
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Karina Longworth, podcaster extraordinaire, recently covered 'Indecent Proposal' (a film I missed at the time and still haven't seen)
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I saw it. Can't say I wanted or needed to see it again, but the premise WAS important I think. Would a husband let his wife have a night of sex with ANOTHER MAN if the couple got $1 million in payment? Lots of folks seemed to jump right in in articles(the internet wasn't quite ready yet): "Sure, I would -- one million bucks?") But the movie made the most of the aching scene in which hubby Woody Harrelson has to watch rich guy Robert Redford take off with Woody's wife in a helicopter for their night of sex. You could FEEL the agony and yet -- not really a profound film.
BTW, I've noted that Robert Redford first played a villaln in Captain America 2 but I suppose I'm wrong. He was pretty villainous in Indecent Proposal, and already into that period where his great face was mottled from the sun, which added to the villainy. There was a press report that Redford actually beat out Dustin Hoffman for the rich guy part. Hmm.is it worse to give up your wife for the night to Redford or Hoffman?
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Mark's smoothed over a lot of stuff in that climactic scene with Marnie's mother but maybe things are going to blow up again.
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Well, I would say that the ending is at least hopeful...which, famously, the ending of Vertigo was NOT. (And I see Marnie as Hitchcock's attempt to do "Vertigo" yet again, with the hits NXNW, Psycho and The Birds -- as his justification to "go arty and deep again.")
I rather like Marnie "on paper" more than in the playing: a love affair between TWO damaged people -- the "hero" is just as nutty as the "heroine" in certain ways, and perhaps they can normalize as a couple.
But that LOOK. That SCRIPT. (By a woman, Jay Presson Allen, who went on to script Cabaret and said of the "Marnie" script -- "I wrote it, but I think it is in his bottom third.")
Famous: Marnie is the last time that Hitchcock had Herrmann on music, Tomasini on editing and Burks on cinematography. "The gang was all here, one last time." And not served well by the movie. Herrmann's opening music and the opening "turn the pages" credits seemed like a refutation of Saul Bass modernism(in the look) and even of Herrmann's shock-modern Psycho score.
Tougher still: while Hitchcock "dumped" Herrmann (firing him off of Torn Curtain), Tomasini died of a heart attack while camping (in 1965) and Burks died in a house fire -- sudden death ends for two of Hitchcock's chief collaborators -- and Burks did NOT get to photograph Torn Curtain; Hitch had dumped him BEFORE making that movie.
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It's a pretty raw scene but the way it functions as 'the big solution' of all Marnie's problems cuts against that rawness I find. It all feels a bit 'too Hollywood' for me. Some people, of course, feel that way about Simon Oakland's character and scene in Psycho, but it's not affected me that way.
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I recall reading some 1964 review of Marnie(on library microfiche) where the critic wrote, "Hitchcock seems to be in a psychological period." Which fits, in order: The Wrong Man(a shrink is in it, from Hogan's Heroes), Vertigo(a shrink is in it, from The Beverly Hillbillies); Psycho(a shrink is in it) The Birds(no shrink, but the family/Freudian content is in overdrive) and Marnie(a shrink in the book was deleted and his lines given to -- Connery!)
It is perhaps no wonder that Wasserman pretty much forced Hitchcock into doing a spy thriller next -- Torn Curtain.
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Rather, I've always been impressed by the turn Psycho takes immediately after Oakland's speech when we return to Norman/Mother and grapple with the limits of Oakland's tidy explanations.
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True, that final scene -- which you have explored nicely in a recent post -- "undoes the shrink scene" (somewhat, it also is informed by it) and ends the movie on a truly classic for all time final match of image, actor, and music.
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Marnie has no counterpart of the return-to-Norman/Mother moment and instead sends us out with something like a 'problem solved!' spring in our steps
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With Marnie's rather misfired line: "I don't want to go to jail, Mark. I want to stay with you." Well, duh.
Formerly ecarle...I had to change usernames to access the site.
But its the same guy responding to you:
I agree with you here too- I think we have similar tastes, any great mysteries/whodunnits to recommend?
My response:
That's hard to say. For instance, for many years I remembered this very movie here -- Mirage -- and its nightmarish premise, its "hip" flash cutting on flashbacks, and that great cast under Gregory Peck -- Walter Matthau above all.
So I would STILL recommend "Mirage" even though, in later years, I found various plotholes and/or weak writing(Matthau leaving the gun with the unconscious George Kennedy , leaving him on the floor -- and not calling the police!)
I'm not sure how many great whodunnits have been made for the screen, but I'll offer:
Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express(made twice)
Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (made twice)
and the original whodunnit "The Last of Shiela"(1973) written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins -- both of whom had made their names in other arts.
The two "Knives Out" movies of recent vintage have their fans -- with Daniel Craig as the Southern Sleuth.
From the 60's, "Charade" is pretty good at hiding the identity of the killer and the location of stolen loot.
Alfred Hitchcock swore he didn't make whodunnits, but there are mysteries to be solved in North by Northwest and Psycho, anyway. And I would recommend ANY Hitchocck movie.
Aside from whodunnits and Hitchcock, these recommendations for thrillers:
Cape Fear 1962 (and 1991 remake).
The Manchurian Candidate 1962
Charade 1963
The Prize 1963
Mirage 1965
Arabesque 1966
Wait Until Dark 1967
Klute 1971
The Last of Shiela 1973
Jagged Edge 1985
Misery 1990
Silence of the Lambs 1991
Fargo 1996
I read the book back around 1967...before the movie came out. Then I saw the movie.
A big deal was made at the time that the book was written by the same author(French) of The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Bridge on the River Kwai was shown on ABC TV in 1967 and got the highest ratings of any movie broadcast on TV til that time.
So -- oddly enough -- Planet of the Apes was promoted very much in connection with the Kwai movie.
All I remember of the book is that it did NOT have the "Statue of Liberty" twist at the end. It had a different twist which, I believe, Tim Burton put on his remake at the end.
In the Boulle book, somehow the Heston character manages to take a spacecraft BACK to earth -- but time has passed -- and: the military jeep that comes out to meet him is driven by an ape.
And this: the two murders in Psycho are historic, classic, shocking and WELL MADE(I'm fine with Balsam's fall) but the final killing in Marnie seems totally botched and amateuristic in comparison , and Bernard Herrmann's music misfires to match the misfired murder scene: the expressions on the faces of the mother and daughter; the light touch of poker to victim(DePalma-esque in "screwing up the set piece.) Just terrible.
I sorta/kinda like the emotion of the mother's confession to Marnie about her past --- as a hooker, as a teenage girl who gave up her virginity to get a football players's letter sweater -- but it is rather too late in a movie that is overall just not good and embarrassing in comparison to the four Hitchocck movies ahead of it. No, five. No, six. No, ten.
Hitchcock famously harrassed Tippi Hedren (in SOME way) on the Marnie shoot and they barely spoke and that may explain its problems.
I read an even BETTER rationale given by one of Hitchcock's assistants for the Marnie failure: "He tried to make a movie too soon after making The Birds...and The Birds had physically exhausted him and he wasn't ready to go back on the set of a new movie. He should have rested for some months first." Fair enough...Marnie looks like the movie of a distracted man.
Heh. Well, every movie maker has to miss sometime. But I'll respect those who like/love Marnie...and I'm glad we have Sean Connery in at least one Hitchcock movie.
I like the silent burglary at the closed office -- all silent, the cleaning woman's sudden appearance, the high heel slipping slowly out of the purse -- classic Hitchcock suspense with a twist -- the cleaning woman is near deaf. I also like, to start this sequence, the very long and extremely "tactile" scene of Marnie hiding in a darkened restroom stall and listening to everyone else in the office leaving for the day, until silence. Pure Hitchcock.
I like the camera swoop at Connery's mansion past all the dinner guests til it reaches: Martin Gabel.
I like the harrowing horse ride which leads to disaster and Marnie having to mercy kill the horse -- one of the few tearjerker moments in Hitchocck (and there are sometimes tears for me at the end, too.)
Its the old story: Hitchcock simply could NOT make an uninteresting movie.
But my beefs with Marnie lie in the overall "package": the script is just too long and endlessly expository and "bogs down" into one scene after the other of the bullying Connery catching Marnie in lies(its Arbogast versus Norman with none of the fun, and done in scenes back to back to back.) I don't like the LOOK of the movie -- the Universal interior sets look cheap, like their TV show sets. I don't like the overt yellow color scheme -- its a hard movie to LOOK at. (Even Frenzy had some great colors in the costumes, Rusk's hair, the blue night sky.)
Marnie got a lot of hits for "bad matte paintings and process" but...I think Torn Curtain is just as "bad" and not NECESSARILY bad. Its clear that when Gromek tails Paul Newman through those museum rooms, we are MEANT to be in a fantastical Expressionistic world. So too it is with Marnie, but -- after the great effects of The Birds and the great house shots in Psycho...its lesser.
I dunno. There is just something about Marnie that rubs me the wrong way -- not the least of it Tippi Hedren's brittle, pissed-off performance (Connery is already the commanding movie star he will be past Bond, but fighting his character all the way.) Marnie surely would have been more interesting with Princess Grace Kelly in the role...but if not her, some more professional actress would have helped.
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Ari Aster is at it again (as part of his Beau Is Afraid media push), this time in a video store in Paris:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEH0CRi50-A
He picks one Hitchcock to discuss (maybe too charitably?): Marnie.
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I'll take a look. And I must admit this:
As excited I"ve always been about NXNW and Psycho(above all) in the Hitchcock canon, and as surprisingly supportive as I am of ALMOST all of Hitchcock's post-Psycho films, there is one that just stops me dead every time: Marnie.
Its hard to be so enthralled and warm and supportive of NXNW and Psycho when Marnie always feels to me like it is as "anti-entertaining" as those other two are.
And here is a point: I much prefer the two "films of decline" AFTER Marnie -- Torn Curtain and Topaz -- cold war spy thrillers both -- to Marnie.
I mean its like Marnie sticks out like a sore thumb when I read through the list of Hitchcock movies from Strangers on a Train through Family Plot. I like I Confess better.
What's interesting is that "in the larger Hitchcock critical world," Marnie seems to sometimes get billing as "the last great Hitchcock movie." One beyond The Birds. Now Frenzy did better in reviews and box office, but Truffaut put it out there in a late 70's article: "I much prefer Marnie to Frenzy."
And one can see why. Frenzy is heartless at heart, cold and mean and -- to some --misogynistic (though not to me.) Marnie is a love story at heart -- between two twisted people -- and it DOES have a happy ending with hope for the couple(unlike its direct forbear, Vertigo, which does not.)
And I like individual Hitchcock moments in Marnie: the opening shot (very Eurofilm) of a black-wigged Marnie and her yellow purse walking on an empty train platform -- FLASH CUT TO: Martin Gabel: "Robbed! Cleaned out!" Both the silent Eurofilm imagery and the sudden cut to a modern boss man in America snarling his lines, seem very wonderfully Hitchcockian to me.
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Meanwhile, over at Psycho: Hitchcock, perhaps cognizant of his audience not wanting to have to listen to Arbogast and Norman THAT long, gets their conversation up and running much more quickly, with great lighting(its getting to be nighttime and Arbogast fades into darkness) camera angles(under Norman's bobbing bird-like throat) and banter. Then out of the office and onto the porch for a final confrontation. Then over -- Arbogast leaves, for now.
I rather support QT's being allowed to let his characters talk all they want to, as long as they want to -- I liked ALL the long monologues in The Hateful Eight where others didnt -- but I think his lack of discipline over scene length puts him a bit behind Hitchcock in professinoalism and craftsmanship.
No matter. I like Hitchcock. I like QT. I'm sorry that QT -- rather than saying "Hitchcocks movies are just too old and mild for me" said "North by Northwest' is a medicore film or Psycho II is better than Psycho.
One more thing: when you are as superich and superfamous as QT you can dump on Hitchcock and NXNW all you want and us little folks out here will never get the chance to meet him and rebut him -- and what if we DID? He'd just say "welll, I think you're wrong. North by Northwest IS mediocre." And that would be all.
But QT at least puts his ideas into the MARKETPLACE for other to discuss among themselves. And I guess that's a public service.
Still, here's to Martin Scorsese who is ALWAYS respectful of the movies of others and of the past, in his comments.
OK, so QT likes Psycho II better than Psycho, fair enough but what the hell? (I"d like his explanation of that finale in which Meg Tilly is dressed like Mother to convince Norman to be n ice, and accidentally stabs Robert Loggia in the heart and he plummets off the staircase and lands EXACTLY to drive it deeper nto his heart and then Perkins -- in a total refutation of his nuanced 1960 performance -- slobbers and jibber jabbers his way down the stairs into the fruit cellar arguing with Tilly -- and...aargh.
But meanwhile, I some years ago noticed something about a famous -- and celebrated -- scene in QT's Inglorious Basterds, which, I think , paled in comparison to a similar Hitchcock scene overall -- even though the QT scene finally ended in triumph on its own.
Inglorious Basterds: "Jew Hunter" Nazi Chris Waltz enters the home of a French farmer and slowly interrogates him about the whereabouts of a missing Jewish family in the region -- reaching his key point: is the farmer hiding them?
Psycho: Private eye Arbogast enters the office of Norman Bates and slowly interrogates him about the whereabouts of a missing woman from Phoenix -- did she stop here? Is she still here?
When I bought the Inglorious Basterds DVD, I noted that the opening Waltz interrogation actually took up TWO chapter stops...it runs well over ten minutes, or feels like it. It sure gets suspenseful at the end(as the farmer gives up the family and only one escapes) but it sure is LONG getting there. Two chapter stops.
I think the issue -- which also surfaced in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight -- is that QT does love the sound of his own voice and lets his characters talk on and on and on and SOMETIMES it works(Pulp Fiction, Sam Jackson) and sometimes it doesn't.
There is also the business of Waltz producing a giant smoking pipe to "outrank" the farmer's little pipe. Funny but a bit self indulgent.
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More famously: at the end of the Mount Rushmore climax, as Leonard falls dead off the mountain and it is revealed that he has been shot down by a ranger on Leo G's orders, James Mason's Vandamm gets a great curtain line:
"Not very sporting, using real bullets."
Well, at BOTH full house screenings, we could never HEAR James Mason's line because the crowd was cheering and applauding and whooping it up at "Roger and Eve being saved." The emotional commitment had been two strong. There WERE some laughs at the shot of the little group of men up there on Rushmore looking down -- but overall, the audience was simply going nuts and -- when we suddenly ended up in the honeymoon train car going into the tunnel -- the cheering got even louder and on "The End"(with Berrnard Herrmann's thunderous score reaching its climax)...standing ovations. Both screenings.
I don't think that QT ever experienced North by Northwest THAT way.
BTW:
James Mason said "I just couldn't get that final line in." I guess he knew from the applause?
Cary Grant -- who had been dubious about NXNW as being too incoherent in plot -- attended a preview of the movie in Santa Barbara and experienced all that roaring and the standing O at THAT screening and promptly phoned the film's screenwriter Ernest Lehman after the screening: "It was incredible, Ernie -- the cheering and applause! I'm happy for me, for you, for Hitch."
So Mason and Grant "got it" in a way that I'm afraid QT did not. Decades later, Grant saw NXNW henchman Martin Landau at some event and said, "You know Martin, I don't know what I did, or you did, or Hitch did, but somehow we all did something right on that movie. That movie hit a nerve with audiences that none of my other movies did."
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So QT all wet.
I still support his work and I believe that he has gotten some of what Hitchcock got as a popular filmmaker showman.
But I'm going to go after QT one more time...
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