Showing posts with label Spellbound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spellbound. Show all posts

Monday 30 January 2017

Whatever you mean by calling something ‘sexism’, take a look at Spellbound (1945)

Whatever you mean by ‘sexism’, take a look at what Spellbound (1945) shows us...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 January (last updated, 20 February)

Whatever you mean by calling something ‘sexism’,
take time to look at what Spellbound (1945) shows us
[watched last year at The Arts, and since on DVD release]...


Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane.

 The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind.

 Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear... and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul.





Not necessarily always put in the context of what happened when her affair with Roberto Rossellini was made public (which Stig Björkman’s documentary Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words (2015) does well¹ [shown in 2015 at The Arts (@CamPicturehouse), and also at Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (@camfilmfest)]), Ingrid Bergman’s remark, about her career (as well as strongly-held disapproving attitudes towards her life), that she went from being a saint to a whore and back again is often quoted.



Even if Kim Newman [interviewed on the Hitchcock series of DVD releases] thinks of Spellbound (1945), unlike Notorious (1946) (where Bergman plays opposite Cary Grant), as more David O. Selznick’s film than Hitchcock’s, both have plenty to observe on how women are regarded (and they were written by / credited to Ben Hecht) : the latter has Bergman (in the role of Alicia Huberman) as a woman who is ‘notorious’, because of 'who she is' and 'what she does' (whereas a man need not be). As if marrying a man to spy on him were not enough to demonstrate her loyalty to anti-Nazi causes, she needs to prove herself worth Devlin’s (Cary Grant’s) love and respect (despite what is unjust cynicism, rooted in jealousy, on his part) - whereas the former’s Dr. Constance Petersen is, as a female psychoanalyst, actually seen treated with... no more respect.



At Green Manors, which sounds very formal and proper, is where we initially see her putting up with the attentions of Dr. Fleurot (John Emery), one of her fellow analysts, and who even has the nerve to kiss her to see whether he can interest her in him : this action is, of course, partly exaggeration for effect, the effect being both to show that her colleagues are boors (as we later see, when she has spent the afternoon with the presumptive Dr Edwardes, and has to listen to their condescension and mocking), and that Constance, somehow (and contrary to what the world will later criticize in Bergman’s private life), has not hitherto experienced desire for a man [which even Dr. Petersen's peers 'jokingly' want to see as frigidity, and, after the fake Edwardes has disappeared, Fleurot calls her the human glacier, and the custodian of truth : shortly after which Murchison says that Fleurot's colleague and he are offending by their callousness, and 'retain the manners of medical students'].


 Hitchcock and Hecht both know that these are the public ways of the world then, that men think themselves so irresistible that they either scorn a woman for not choosing them, or force their advances on her by making her tolerate being kissed : in disguising this behaviour as the so-called battle of the sexes, neither is necessarily colluding with it, but it is in meeting the character of Constance’s psychoanalytic mentor, Dr. Alex Brülow, that the origins of her attitude towards her own sexuality become clear.


Centre shot, Dr. Alex Brülow (Michael Chekhov), casually waving a large paper-knife around...


Hearing Alex Brülow, played by Michael Chekhov, as a typical Germanic Jung-type figure², we may nonetheless realize, behind what he says, that he has always been sexually attracted to her³, but knows that he is so much older, and that her affections for him – as a teacher, and father figure – are different³ (though, as he sees it, she patronizingly thinks him incapable of seeing through her ruse of presenting JB and herself as on honeymoon, though they do not even have any suitcases, etc., etc.).



So, Alex tells her that he is glad that she is there to make his coffee the way that he likes [Cook me my coffee in the morning, and the house is yours, at which Constance, out of sight, grimaces], and he is keen to say things to the same effect that (as his friend Zannenbaum used to say) Women make the best psychoanalysts, until they fall in love - after that, they make the best patients, etc., etc., all of which is a clear indication that, all along, Constance has been behaving to please him, to be 'a good analyst'.

(The name implies being constant, after all – just as it does in Chaucer, in The Clerk’s Tale – but Ingrid Bergman does, as in Chaucer, stretch our credulity by the extent to which she is prepared to trust Gregory Peck, despite all the signs – put in her and our way – that he may be dangerous, and not worthy of her trust. Even Murchison, in the closing scene with Constance, says Charming loyalty – one of your most attractive characteristics, Constance !)



John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), after Dr. Brülow has knocked him out with bromide

In essence, the sexism that Hecht and Hitchcock exploit most is that of Alex Brülow [we actually see Constance smile at the house detective at the hotel, who thinks that he knows ‘human nature’, and can read her as a librarian, or a schoolteacher, and is, later, irritated to have been deceived by his own prejudice as to who she was, and why she was there...] :

 Alex has more than ‘mixed motives’, at least³, for wanting to discourage Constance in believing in John Ballantyne, but is passing them off as disinterested doubts. He is supporting her, despite them [he bluntly says, of her, Look at you : Dr. Petersen, the promising psychoanalyst, is now - all of a sudden - a schoolgirl, in love with an actor - nothing else !], because he does not wish to alienate her (and really hopes, as indicated at the end of the film, that she will be proved wrong⁴ ?). Of course, none of it is, in any sense, plausible, but we enter into it as in a film, where Salvador Dalí has been a contributor to a dream world, and where the psychoanalytic process can be ‘hastened’, and can do its work just with one night’s sequence of dreams ?



Unwittingly, we hear these origins alluded to on the train to Gabriel Valley, after they have left Alex. When Constance Petersen says the following words to John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), he is distracted – as she eats – and becomes visibly more and more anxious, but she has faith in him, and so is not troubled : yet it is an insight, albeit underscored in this way by the man who sits opposite, into her nature, and how it has come to be, such that quite a short scene actually seems quite longer (and we then pass over how the night is spent, and they arrive the next day).


 I always loved very feminine clothes, but never quite dared to wear them.

 I’m going to, after this, I’m going to wear exactly the things that please me. And you.

 Even very, very funny hats.

 You know, the kind that make you look like you’re drunk.


Less plausible than any of the truncated dream-interpretation is that Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), knowing what he did to Dr. Edwardes and where he left John Ballantyne, leaves all of this to unfold before us – if we know the film, we see him make small touches that attempt to distance himself from Edwardes or what happened⁵, and yet they are not convincingly those of a man who must know that his best chance of surviving as head of Green Manors is by other than what he allows to happen, or does... ?


Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), ensuring that the note from 'JB' reaches Constance


 Essentially, Murchison leaves it to the improbability of what we see unfold - just as the film would have us credit Constance that she is, all along, doing the right thing - and that he hopes to elude being detected by maintaining a poker face⁵, as at The Twenty-One Club.






End-notes :

 ¹ Though Björkman unobligingly does not properly name Bergman's non-famous initial or third husbands [and, not unusually, IMDb (@IMDb) cannot say who they are either], which is not the least of his film's flaws...

² In this fairy tale of a film (we believe it, because we do not know any differently), where psychoanalysts all sleep / live on the premises, and naturally ‘go into theatre’ when one of the patients has injured someone.




 ³ Yet is there a hint that Alex may have drugged Constance, as he does JB, and have had sex with her in the room in which she used to stay, and which she says looks different to her, now that she is there with Ballantyne-to-be… ? [Seeing them off to bed, Alex ambiguously says Any husband of Constance's is a husband of mine, so to speak... Near the end of the film, Alex has reintroduced Constance to Green Manors, and the physical intimacy is there between them once more. And, right in the closing shot, he has to reiterate this comment, and relinquish Constance...]

(Constance talks as if she know what she is doing, in such a situation, that the couch is for her, and the bed for Ballantyne – which is what we see. But what sort of fairy-tale notion of being a doctor to the man with whom she is in love has her believe that doing this is some sort of useful norm for such a professionally unacceptable position ? [If, just if, Alfred Hitchcock had ever meant us to forget for a second that this was Ingrid Bergman on screen, would he have cast her – and not someone relatively anonymous (though she was one of producer David O. Selznick’s 'discoveries', and so casting was pretty much settled) – to be utterly convincing as this psychoanalyst, who actually breaks (as far as one can judge) all the professional rules in the book ? !

When Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting (1997) (and both appeared in it, the latter as ‘Chuckie’ Sullivan), can we any more just take at face value that Dr Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) really is literally to be taken to represent even some sort of maverick psychologist – any more than Constance can be a practising psychoanalyst of any age, who has never been in love before, but falls for John Ballantyne (first, in the mistaken guise of Dr Edwardes) within a matter of hours ?]


Seemingly, the film was marketed in Italy as io ti salverò ('I will save you')


⁴ Alex wakes JB (Gregory Peck) roughly, just after Constance has pleaded with Alex, getting very close, face to face, and he has said that he will pretend that what he is doing makes sense, if she makes him coffee - very reluctantly, Alex drops her hand, as she goes towards the kitchen : You don't like me, papa, JB says, soon after Alex has engaged him in conversation. [In the dream-analysis, where Constance again momentarily looks away, Alex enthusiastically says, to her, If you grew wings, you would be an angel !, just after telling her that JB is the patient, and that You are not his mama - you're an analyst!]

⁵ When Dr Edwardes' secretary arrives at Green Manors, Murchison declares that the imposter has certainly killed the real Dr Edwardes, and describes his trying to take Edwardes' place 'to pretend that his victim is still alive' in these terms : This sort of unrealistic act is typical of the short-sighted cunning that goes with paranoid behavior. (And yet Murchison makes sure that Constance sees JB's note, and that her responses to Fleurot's 'callousness' are not overlooked, as if willing her to follow JB where he has gone...)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 20 August 2016

Beginning, not with the birds and the bees, but the psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts…

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 August

 An article in The Guardian (@guardian) sets out to tell us something that its writer thought of serious import, about, despite the elapse of seven decades, the static representation of ‘female shrinks'…



Perhaps, in its tag-line, the description ‘female shrinks’ might just have left it ambiguous whether psychiatry per se is what was really meant here.



However, the words below the tag-line, which introduce the piece, and its opening words (both as quoted¹), plainly use the word ‘psychiatrist’ : yet Dr Constance Petersen, in the person of Ingrid Bergman², is repeatedly and consistently defined by reference to the professional term ‘psychoanalyst’.

 So, sadly, referring to 'psychiatry', in this article now, is not exactly interchangeable with talking about psychoanalysis – even if it might once have been in the mid-1940s, with a lesser emphasis on medication ? – and is probably almost on a similar level to calling an astrologer an astronomer (or vice versa)… ?


More to come, where we may actually review the film, or come onto the question whether films ever really represent – or set out to represent – psychiatric practice…








When Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting (1997) (and both appeared in, the latter as ‘Chuckie’ Sullivan), can we any more just take at face value that Dr Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) really is literally to be taken to represent even some sort of maverick psychologist ?


 Can we do so any more than view Dr Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) in Spellbound (1945) as really being a practising psychoanalyst of whatever age, who has never been in love before, but falls for John Ballantyne (then in the mistaken guise of Dr Edwardes) within a matter of hours ?




This piece may have ended abruptly, but see also Whatever you mean by calling something ‘sexism’, take a look at Spellbound (1945)
End-notes :

 ¹ Respectively, Seventy years separates the Hitchcock’s film with [sic - on both counts] the DC blockbuster, but the social attitudes towards women psychiatrists they exhibit have barely altered, and A sexless female psychiatrist, devoted to her work, encounters a fascinating mentally ill man. Suddenly, she is awakened to the joys of love and devotes herself to her patient, abandoning her profession in a sensual ecstasy of criminality. Women psychiatrists : they’re driven mad by love.

 ¹ If, just if, Alfred Hitchcock had ever meant us to forget for a second that this was Ingrid Bergman on screen, would he have cast her – and not someone relatively anonymous – to be utterly convincing as this psychoanalyst, who breaks (as far as one can judge, but somehow actually gets away with it) all the professional rules in the book ? !




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday 29 November 2015

Less like themselves, more like they want to be

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 November
This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)


It is almost as though The Dressmaker has been pinned to fit around this one fact : Sunset Blvd. (1950) premiered in Australia, on 25 August 1950.




For want of a better word, the film is set in Dungatar, in 1951, but nothing in the flash of music, the gestures, the stance, remotely desires more than to draw our attention to the fact that there is unfinished business in this implausible, symbolic place – symbolic, because its very set-up is pat in the way that that of films such as High Noon (1952) always was, so that there can be nothing behind its implausibility, if not symbolism. (Here, the paraphernalia of the wild west, and all the stock sights and spectacles of the age’s saloon-bars, have been rolled into one figure.)

Symbolism, but not of any subtle or interesting kind, because it wants to revisit an earlier time of colourless grey, bit by irritatingly nagging bit. As if picking the skin of forgetfulness off an obliging old tangerine, and miraculously penetrating to – although with no means to do so beyond being back there – what had been misremembered, misunderstood, misrepresented. At best, Kate Winslet, in the person of Myrtle Dunnage (‘Tilly’), says to her mother (‘Mad’ Molly, played by Judy Davis) : I need you to remember me, mum, so I can remember.




That, too, is just a gesture in the direction of a symbolic level for the rehabilitation and restitution of Tilly’s mother (and, a few times, Molly duly disbelieves why her daughter is there). By contrast, in the best of Ibsen, this notion of what really happened can be revelatory, electrifying, and rarely for good, and many a time Hitchcock made true film capital through showing us something on screen that, although it was not the mind’s obfuscations in dream, desire or trauma, mimicked them (e.g. Spellbound (1945), Vertigo (1958), and Marnie (1964) :

Here it is just entertainment, with an audience of would-be psychic explorers, but in titters at Hugo Weaving’s again wearing women’s clothes : he did so devastatingly as Nurse Noakes in Cloud Atlas (2012), and without either exploiting or mocking, as this role does, those who share this interest. The likely audience for The Dressmaker will be unlikely to gravitate towards Dogville (2003), or to do so to their taste, whereas those who missed it and have only witnessed the work of Lars von Trier in more recent works of excess such as Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac Vol. I (2013) and Vol. II (2013), can seek a worthier film there.


This is a film that never tries to do what Dogville does, but really feels like [it wants to be] Wes Anderson, but without Wes, and which is definitely written in a way that wishes that it could be even bad Wodehouse, but which just never will be : it desires to have older people ‘behave badly’, but does so in that stock way that Ronald Harwood uses for Billy Connolly’s character, when he adapts his stage-play as Quartet (2012), rather than is done more inventively, for Judi Dench, in Philomena (2013).

Whatever Rosalie Ham’s novel may be, it seems newly published (in paperback, but there is evidence of an audio-book on CD from 2003...), and does not appear in hardback until April next year.
Some reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) :

 Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1), for The Guardian, gave it one star, and closes his review by saying Surely Winslet can find better roles than this.

For Little White Lies (@LWLies, where they score things differently), the marks are not much kinder, and the review by David Jenkins (@DaveyJenkins) is headed 'This lop-sided couture western staggers on long past what should've been a short, sharp run time'.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday 27 January 2014

How lost is this Academy-Award-winning film ?

This is a review of The Lost Weekend (1945)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

 27 January (watched on DVD)
This is a review of The Lost Weekend (1945)

 Probably, more of us will be familiar with the humane portrait of drinking, gluttonous and bawdy Sir John Falstaff than with the soberly (pun intended) unremitting world of Don Birnam in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945). Yet it won Academy Awards for Ray Milland (as Birnam, who is almost never off the screen), Wilder as director and co-writer (with Charles Brackett), and as best picture (as well as nominations for Miklós Rózsa's towering score (Rózsa only lost the award because of winning it himself for that of Spellbound (1945)), and for editing and cinematography).





Sir John is a comic character (although Orson Welles introduces or emphasizes light and shade in his Chimes at Midnight (1965)), Birnam is more complex, and we see his complexity in detail first when the duet with chorus Libiamo ne' lieti calici in a performance of La Traviata starts to get to him, but he is driven to the humorous situation of having to wait for the owner of a leopard-skin coat (Jane Wyman as Helen St. James), because their cloakroom tickets have become confused. As Sir John might, to get some sack from Mistress Quickly, he knows how to turn on the charm, having gracelessly thrown her umbrella at her feet when asked for it, but is torn between the bottle of rye whiskey in his pocket and her kind invitation to a cocktail party, until the former gets smashed (and it remains unclear whether she buys his alibi of having wanted to take it to a sick friend).

Helen's faith in Don, and why it lasts as long as it does (as does that of his curiously named brother Wick), almost certainly has to be a given, for it is not fleshed out, nor is some of the recent past. For some, there may be clues as to whether the New York setting is contemporary, but, if it is, one wonders how Wick and Don avoided the draft. In all honesty, though, Wick's job, how he manages to support Don and him, and where they are supposed to be headed for a long weekend are peripheral (as long as one realizes that 'the cider' talked of there is just apple juice, because US usage calls our cider 'hard cider'). The title, too, can remain ambiguous, whether meaning the weekend that Don does not participate in, his being lost, or how he 'loses' it - perhaps, even, that it is lost as seen from the future that the ending promises.

 Don has tried to outsmart Wick at the outset, and, at the end, he tries to conceal his intentions from Helen, but both times his desire is thwarted by chance, that of, respectively, where Wick's tossed cigarette ends up, and the view afforded Helen in the mirror. In the middle part of the film (when he is on his own, with only Nat's professional company (brought to us by Howard Da Silva) to serve him), a reciprocal arrangement between pawnbrokers to close for Yom Kippur has him walking exhaustedly for blocks, checked off by the lamp-post road-markers, before finding out that there is a pattern.

In a way, It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is a mini re-run of the sort of degradation, despair and delinquency that Don is led into at the bottom until he meets a man calling himself Bim (Frank Faylen), and hears a few truths that, whatever has happened to Don before, he has been hiding from himself : Bim has seen it all before, is matter of fact, and dismisses Don's future, and that strikes home as clearly as if he had suddenly pictured himself in the downward path of Hogarth's 'Gin Lane'.

 According to Wikipedia, Wilder had worked with Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity (1944), which had sent Chandler back to drink, and Wilder had chosen to make the film to hold the mirror up to Chandler. In the film, at any rate, Bim holds a mirror up to Don, a message that eventually leads him to the film's two possible endings.

Wilder and Milland pull no punches in showing a man who will beg, demand and even steal for drink, with only the touches of charm to lighten him that seem to have kept his brother and girlfriend loyal to him. But the magic that they work, ably assisted by Rózsa's soundtrack, is to keep us loyal to him, because we have heard about how early success with writing, then over-confidence, then setbacks and the lure of a drink to steady the nerves have reeled him in : he knows all this, because he tells it to Nat as a story in the bar, but that does not help him know it in a way that offers a way out of it.

 Then, and since, countless experts and other writers have given accounts of how to beat an addiction such as to alcohol (or gambling or smoking), and maybe they would have different views about what would work for Don to do it, but there is no denying that the image that we have of a man in thrall to whiskey is compelling, frightening and vividly alive, and the film merits its place in the US National Film Registry as an uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism, and to be described by The Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

 Shortly after, and in the film adaptation with Albert Finney in 1984, we have Malcolm Lowry's uncompromising story of a man with a deeper debt to alcohol than Don, but, for this film, it ends as it does, with a share of ambivalence (seemingly more evident in Charles R. Jackson's original novel), and much relief. It must be open to put other meanings on the cravings that drive Don, and where they have come from, but one can also just take the film as it comes.


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 25 September 2013

Drowning the piglets

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 September

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

* Contains spoilers *


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.




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