No hawks or hand-saws : Re-visiting North by Northwest (1959)

No hawks or hand-saws : Re-visiting North by Northwest (1959)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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31 July

No hawks or hand-saws : Re-visiting North by Northwest (1959)

When Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein) spot Roger O. Thornhill leave The Plaza's Oak Room*, they immediately decide (seemingly for no better reason than that Kaplan's name has just been paged as Thornhill rose to go to make the call) that he is Kaplan.#NxNW

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 9, 2020

* To make a dutiful reminder to his mother about the theatre that night :

Maybe not untypical of mother / son relationships in other films that star Cary Grant, but Thornhill's attitudes towards marriage / divorce and women seem shaped by that with his (Jessie Royce Landis) ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 9, 2020

Jessie Royce Landis (as Clara Thornhill, Roger O. Thornhill's mother¹)

[...]

However, what we learn of Eve Kendall (if gender-assumptions misdirected us) causes N x NW to unfold into the jealousies of Devlin (Grant, again) for Alicia Huberman (Bergman, again) in Notorious (1946), in the dual role that she played towards Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2020

“I think the Academy ought to set aside a special award for Bergman every year whether she makes a picture or not!” - Cary Grant about Ingrid Bergman at the 1947 Academy Awards pic.twitter.com/WtivqvzQFC

— ingrid bergman source (@ingridbsource) July 18, 2020

[...]

¹ The spell-binding (versus The House of Dr Edwardes, the novel from which Ben Hecht, etc., worked (away)) is additionally of all of :

* Ballantyne, believing what Leo Carroll (Dr Murchison) wants

* Dr Alex Brülov (Michael Chekhov), desiring his old pupil

* We cinema-goers

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2020

End-notes :

¹ Though only a year separated Grant and her in age.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tweets from Cambridge Film Festival 2016 : @SnowdenTheMovie (2016)

Tweets from Cambridge Film Festival 2016 about Snowden (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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27 October

Tweets from Cambridge Film Festival 2016 about Snowden (2016)

Snowden, which has only closing credits, turned out to be the Festival's Surprise Film - with a brief recorded greeting from director Oliver Stone - at 11.00 p.m. on Thursday 27 October, in Screen 2 at Festival Central

If @SnowdenTheMovie (2016) had dared to be more counter-factual, or less respectful, we might have had something more like @MostWantedManUK.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2016

A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Snowden (2016) appears to, but does not, tell us very much about needing [to defy] a Big-Brother-like father-figure : Rhys Ifans' huge head. pic.twitter.com/tFSYZmqusm

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2016

As Snowden briefly plays a sort of Nick Leeson cameo, maybe a need to mention Rogue Trader (1999) - whether even its telling engages more... pic.twitter.com/DgVdiaff49

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2016

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What Hitchock says about Dial M for Murder...

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21 November

Some who scour these pages (I find that Brillo® is best) will already know that I favour a Faber & Faber series of collections, film by film, of interviews with directors.

In this case, it is Hitchcock on Hitchcock, into which I have delved for some revelations of what he put on record about Dial M for Murder (1954) :


First, in ‘Elegance Above Sex' (a very short piece of prose, which was originally published in Hollywood Reporter*), Hitchcock observes, regarding this film and Grace Kelly's part in it :

It is important to distinguish between the big, bosomy blonde and the ladylike blonde with the touch of elegance, whose sex must be discovered. Remember Grace Kelly in High Noon ? She was rather mousy. But in Dial M for Murder she blossomed out for me splendidly, because the touch of elegance had always been there.

(p. 96)

The only other mention of the film in this volume is in a very long-suffering** interview entitled ‘On Style’ : An interview with Cinema***, from which two extracts now follow

H : When you take a stage play, I said ? What do you call opening it up ? The taxi stops at the front door of the apartment house. The characters get out, cross the sidewalk, go into the lobby, get into an elevator, go upstairs, walk along the corridor, open the door, and they go into a room. And there they are, on the stage again. So, you might just as well dispense with all that, and be honest and say it’s a photographed stage play and all we can do is to take the audience out of the orchestra and put them on the stage with players.

I : You didn’t do this completely though. In Dial M ?

H : Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve seen so many stage plays go wrong through opening up, loosening it, when the very essence is the fact that the writer conceived it within a small compass.

I : But you would still treat it cinematically ?

H : Within its area. If I can. As much as I can.

(p. 293)

 

What is of interest here is that the interviewer makes no mention of what is discussed in the review on this blog, i.e. how 3D makes the experience different, on the screen, from that on the stage, with looming bottles in the foreground, and, most of all, that fatal hand, reaching out to the audience, as if for mercy.


Moving on :

H : Well, let me say this as a maker of films. Maybe it’s a conceit on my part. I think content belongs to the original story of the writer, whoever wrote the book, that you are adapting. That’s his department.

I : That’s an interesting statement. You don’t feel then that the director, as such, is responsible for content, as you would select any different …

H : Well look, I make a film – Dial M for Murder – and what have I really had to do with that ? Nothing. It was a stage play, written for the stage, written by an author. All I had to do there was go in and photograph it.

(p. 297)

The interview is all about the element of 'style' mentioned in the title (as against 'content'), and Hitchcock contrasts the situation of this film with that of North by Northwest (1959), where his co-writer and he created the scenario, and he most interestingly goes to talk about the expectations that he sets up and then upsets in the famous crop-spraying scene.

Just for this interview alone, the volume is a very useful insight, through Hitchcock's own descriptions of what he was about with Psycho (1960), and how much more that it is that we think that we see, rather than the material that the cutting (pun intended !) actually used.



End-notes

* Vol. 172, no. 39 (November 20, 1962, 32nd Anniversary Issue).

** The unnamed interviewer, 'I' in the interview, claims (in response to Hitchock's enquiry as to what Cinema is) to be asking questions on behalf of the ?? intelligent cinema-goer ?? [actual wording needs to be checked]. However, he or she does not know what cross-cutting, art direction, or even 'a cut' are, and Hitchock - seemingly patiently - has to explain. (Why do I have the impression that Hitchock had a reputation for being 'difficult' - or was that at another time, or on set ?)

*** Originally published in Cinema 1, no. 5 (August – September 1963) 4–8, 34–35.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Drowning the piglets

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

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25 September

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

When, after the film, I encountered @mob61uk, I hesitated to elicit another one-word review - mine was, in its true sense, Awesome...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 25, 2013

We agreed that it was well made (as, at any rate, we did about The Taste of Money (2012)), and @mob61uk assented to my assertion that Amy Seimetz was excellent (as Kris).

I then propounded that, as many a film does, it treats of mental ill-health - here, the appearance that Kris had a breakdown and lost her job is belied by seeing how she had been deliberately infected, thereby rendered incapable of independent thought, and had been manipulated to cause her to obtain multiple amounts of credit, and use the equity in her home, on the pretext that she was finding the ransom for her kidnapped mother.

The financial excess, the wild behaviour, would easily have landed her with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and with the two chunky tubs of tablets that she puts on the table in front of Jeff when first they get to talk properly, saving them, as she puts it, 3 to 4 weeks. He does not quite understand what it might matter, what the implications might be, but does not seem put off.

One level on which the film works is a bit like that of Contagion (2011), of tracing the infection back to its root, and, thereby, of validating the experience of Kris (and others), even down to the pigs. Or The Matrix (1999) - when Neo is first captured by Agent Smith and, with the help of two other Agents, a literal, living bug is put into Neo's body, getting it out is as wrenchingly disgusting as when the deceiver makes Kris vomit. Not the only similarity, because there is feeling, when Jeff is directing Kris through the building at work to where the car is, of Cypher or others directing, say, Trinity to an exit, and of the same sense that the real feels unreal.

Back further, we have such touchstones of <i>Madness in Movies</i> as Cary Grant (as Roger Thornhill) being framed in <i>North by Northwest</i> (1959) (so everyone else seems mad, and he to them, for not believing him), likewise exploiting James Stewart's weakness as Scottie in <i>Vertigo</i> (1958), or, on the other hand, Stewart being credited by a psychiatric Ingrid Bergman in <i>Spellbound</i>, or Sean Connery (Mark Rutland) looking out the psychological basis of Marnie's (Tippi Hedren's) behaviour, because he loves and believes in her.

In Upstream Color (2013), Jeff is an Ingrid or Sean to Kris. They wear each other's identical ring, and there is more than a chemistry between them, because, through each other, they can trace the pig-farmer, and, just as he seems able to project himself into places and to observe people unseen, so Kris sees him, and looks right through him.

I think that this is really a tremendous piece of work by Shane Carruth of writing, directing, producing and starring in this provocative exploration of the nature of reality, and I can see myself hoping to watch it again very soon.


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Short films at Festival Central (4) - Man in Fear (2011)

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2 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Will Jewell

This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.

Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)

Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.

Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…

A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.


Back to the Joy of Six menu from here


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Balancing Hitchcock

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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28 October

* Contains spoilers *

I will always make time to try to see a Hitchcock - as, broadly, with any film - in the cinema.

Often enough, it is a restoration, and the BFI has done a fair bit of that recently with his early films. There may be one screening (or a limited number), but one can usually hope to make it.

However, when the strand at this year's Cambridge Film Festival put on twelve films in the only eleven days that it ran*, there were inevitably going to have to be compromises, if trying to do all of them did not become an aim in itself, dictating that one could not see nearly as much of others' work. I therefore chose to limit myself to three (although, if domestic arrangements had permitted, I would happily have made an excuse to reacquaint myself with North by Northwest (1959)).

Vertigo (1958), I have already found time to talk about separately here, which leaves Blackmail (1929) and Marnie (1964), very different times, as we needed to be treated to piano accompaniment to the former. (Sadly, the festival web-site does not credit the pianist for his superb work, but I am able to name John Sweeney, because I have spotted his name in the programme (where I least expected it).)

I think that there may be similarities and preoccupations that I can identify, and, straightaway, is the fact that Hitchock is drawn to making the woman the criminal wrongdoer in all three films (whatever others may have done, it is her guilt and whether she can escape from it that is our point of attention): is Hitchcock giving us, deep down, what we want, or what he really wants (they may be the same thing)?

The contrast is with the Cary Grant figure, not just in NBNW, who is often enough a spy or a policeman (although, in the named film, he has to choose his allegiance, once he has worked out what is going on). I am just guessing, when I should really find out, that Hitchcock may have become influenced by, and even have experienced, the world of psychoanalysis that was so prevalent. Whether or not be believed in it, a film such as Marnie typifies the embodiment in Hollywood cinema of Freudian or sub-Freudian thinking and beliefs, for we are shown a young woman both shaped by her past and with recollections, which she cannot understand for herself, of what that past really means.

The scenes where Marnie ('Tippi' Hedren) relates to her mother (Diane Baker) - or, rather, doesn't relate to her mother, except on the most basic, human level - are almost too painful to watch: there is a torn, broken relationship, although the ties are there. The unfolding of the film tells us what really happened, why Marnie experiences what she does, and the forgetting that is usual in these films is here exposed by Sean Connery's dogged detrmination (as Mark Ruland) to find out the truth, because of the woman whom he loves. Revelation, redemption, renewal is almost the pattern.

In her book In Glorious Technicolor, Francine Stock considers, whether or not it was any more than cinematic convention, this prevalent presentation of one startling breakthrough in recollection or insight that will change everything (itself a sort of version of the American dream of anyone 'making it', and going from rags to riches, by suggesting that the transformation could be so strightforward and simple), which dominated this type of psychiatric or psychological film for a long time: the pattern, as she expounds it, is clearly there in Spellbound (1945), with, there, a male suspected of murder (Gregory Peck) and Ingrid Bergman as the psychiatrist who achieves the breakthrough.

Unlike the women in Blackmail, Vertigo, and Marnie, Peck's character is accused of wrongdoing, but is not ultimately guilty of it. Turning to the first of those, Anny Ondra (as Alice White) has left clues of what she did in self-defence, and they dog her for much of the film. When seemingly free of them, what Hitchcock clevely does is pull the rug from under us that there had been a common understanding, with her policeman boyfriend (John Longden), as to what was being covered up. It is too late, but what, maybe we wonder, will become of them, and what did he think that he was hushing up?


End-notes

* Not to be critical, but this was more of a season than a strand, and I do wonder whether there might be scope for bringing some of them back together so that those who, like I, wanted to see films that may never appear can see some new ones, some maybe not so new.


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The habit of collecting (4)

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28 April

Few - not even Bruno Bettelheim's adherents, acolytes, agents, and (they think) apostles - would doubt that the (core) impulse is something of the order of:


There's one that I haven't got!


Mrs President Marcos [I'm calling her that just to be flippant] knew that feeling well, but what did the possessor (as I cannot well speak for ownership) and person displaying this number-slave have at the forefront of his or her mind to have collected it?


GD15 SIX


Which one has to translate into GD IS SIX, as well as postulating that there must be many, many others in the series (in fact, as the whole aphabet isn't used, it must be 23 or 24 squared, some of which might mean more than others):


DD IS SIX (for Dating Direct*)

BB IS SIX (I need not explain that one, I fear)

GG IS SIX (good old Germaine**!)

BJ IS SIX (now that is rating something...)

CJ IS SIX (for those flagging already, just skip to the closing homily!)


All of which, though, assumes that the proposition talks about an age, anniversary, or score, whereas there could be something else going on...

x = 2

x x y = 6


y = ?



Back with the proposition GD IS SIX, could it, itself, be a known acronym, maybe for:

* Gross Diameter

* An open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers (according to www.boutell.com/gd/)

* Graeme Dixon

* The ethical URL shortener with no registration required (according to v.gd/)

* Grand Designs

* Great Dunmow

* Gérard Depardieu (or, to extend him to his full height, Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu)


The end is listless, I believe


But it must really be to do with the spirit of North by Northwest (1959), one of the craziest, but still best, Cary Grant films ever - we are being (or feel that we are being?) set this puzzle to work out, who - or what - 'GD' is, and what it means for it to be 'six', or '6'.

But maybe it's a metaphor for what we make of life, and could mean no more than the title of that Hitchcock film - a big confusion about nothing (where people get killed - or do they?).

Maybe God's Design for Richard Dawkins, maybe Dawkins' message to a God (whom he states is fictional) - God Deficiency is Six?



In closing


Personally - if I can be intimate and private for this closing moment - I don't go along with much of that


We will never know the answer, but that's because it's all wrapped up with


Cheltenham - GCHQ - MI6 - Whitehall - Harry Palmer - hush hush - need-to-know basis - Reggie Perrin and his brother-in-law Jimmy


Amen


Post-Amen (as at 6 May)

In fact, it was GL15 SIX, so please ignore suitable amounts of the above!



End-notes

* Or Deadline Dave...

** Would that be a kind of rating (a bit as for bowed Eric)?


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