All kinds of cats - because (amongst others) Max Reinhardt [@imaxreinhardt] is such a #LateJunction cool cat

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


31 January

Would you, @imaxreinhardt, rather be a cool cat, or a bad cat - how about a jaguar ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 31, 2018

Just shows how a pile-'em-high approach works, making whatever propellants and a supposedly angel-entrancing product (*female* angel-entrancing...) cost, saleable at a profit ?

Now imagine the same guy, approached by SS Sebastian (bedecked with arrows), and Peter plus his keys !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 31, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

A pretty amazing life, living out one's dream of working in Africa with animals... (work in progress)

This is a short review of Jane (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 January

This is a short review of Jane (2017)

For some reason, I thought that I was en route to @Saffronscreen for 8.00 to enliven my scant recall of a book about Marie and Pierre Curie (where they refined pitchblende by hand in a garret) :https://t.co/1C81ybgEGh

Jane (2017) will do just as well ! :) pic.twitter.com/4KuYtmxBDa

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2018

For once, no more Tweets in this review – as they actually lengthen the process – and even a vague attempt at a nod in @everyfilmneil's style of reviewing in the approach here...

* Disambiguated by IMDb (@IMDb) as Jane (II) (2017), the film is first and foremost about Jane Goodall's work (and life).

* A little in the way, say, that Iris (2015) treats of Iris Apfel* (though she is very much less likeable, quite apart from the question what she has to offer the world), Jane gives us Jane Goodall as a woman who made her way in the world - in her own words (however chosen - please see below), it is she who narrates her own path to the chimpanzees of Gombe (in Tanzania).

* There is much to value here, but, from the perspective of what a documentary that depends so heavily on archival material can and should do (i.e. given the standards of the work of the best of such film-makers*), there must be some caveats.

* Primarily, the film unnecessarily was allowed to show us so much of the rediscovered historical footage far ahead of our knowing how it came into existence [Jane's future husband, Hugo van Lawick, shot it]. As a result, because of questions of its quality, content and how it was even in being**, it ran in such a way that thoughts of gratuitously and highly posed reconstruction kept distractingly presenting themselves as to how it had come into being - which, of course and on one level, it is, but filmed with the patent fondness of a marital partner(-to-be).

* Yet, for those in the know about Jane Goodall (and maybe less bothered about how a film is made and / or a cinematic story told), this would not have been a problem... except that, particularly in the case of a documentary that goes back and, as the opening titles say, re-establishes someone's credentials (and also presents an idea of the sexist reporting that was used to undermine them), a documentary needs to stand on its own two feet, not what one is assumed to know ?

* Unfortunately, the use of high-speed animated note-books, survey-sheets and graphical presentation of data really does the significance of Goodall's work a disservice - by tokenistically demonstrating the volume of what was being done, but only really for no better reason than as a visual interlude - and so, contrary to the message, tending to appear to trivialize*** the research, with which the film (except as mediated by Jane's words, and so about her in relation to her studies) has no intention of engaging with at any real level / depth (despite The National Geographic name on the film).

* One should have guessed that, of The Rhymicisists (as these pages call practitioners in and of 'minimalism'), the irritatingly restless arpeggiation had to be that of Philip Glass - not his fault that, being too high in the mix, his score tended to drown the voice-over in the central part of Jane, but his, in not his best film-score, for sounding too often like Michael Nyman, writing indifferently, and not like himself on form. (Again, it did not help that one was on such high alert about what one was being shown that it affected how one received what was heard.)

* In various set-ups, seemingly contrived for the purposes of this film, Jane Goodall appeared and answered questions to camera. However, they did not seem to be the best questions, or, if these were the best answers so elicited, a different approach should have been taken.

* Some material (however selected – that could not be established, as each screen of the credits flicked by, but it was said to be from her writings) was read by [someone who sounded like]


[...]


End-notes :

* Or Mavis ! (2015), rather conventionally, of the career of Mavis Staples : just compare with Jeanie Finlay’s (@JeanieFinlay's) Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015), or Janis : Little Girl Blue (2015).

** In addition, other footage - as things such as picture-quality and style of filming indicated - originated from other sources.

*** Does it seem to send a patronizingly wrong message, i.e. 'Look, a woman doing all this !'


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

A thread about the films that start with The Matrix (1999)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 January

One good thing leads to another...

It's going to have to be back to 1999 and The Matrix (*all of the films* - not rubbishing any of them) ! pic.twitter.com/7xOryMERhh

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

The greatest film that I never proved to have a chance to watch in a cinema.

After The Matrix Revisited revisited, it'll be The Animatrix (2003)...

The animosity, generated by the malevolence of Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith), between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and him is tremendous.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

[...]

In The Matrix (1999), naturally enough, Neo lives in Room 101.

Where the principal action starts (with Trinity having been traced) and ends (Neo taking the call after he has run inside Agent Smith and exploded him) is Room 303 (Heart o' the City).

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 31, 2018

Meanwhile, there is Jimmy Brians's review, as posted on YouTube...

That Tweet's dedicated to Jimmy, @rydcook !

There's no clear view of The Oracle's door (would have to freeze-frame it). But she lives on the 11th floor - could it be Room 1111 ? !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 31, 2018

The Matrix (1999) is perfectly right :

With the potential for highly vivid dreams of those whose unusual experiences are prosaically diagnosed as such as schizo-affective disorder, massed in an array, the power would be immense !

So let's unite and sleep away all that hinders. pic.twitter.com/QYFo08I2vH

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 3, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Looks like we've got a war on our hands ~ William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 January

This is a response to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Wes Anderson simply directs us in such a way that he has no need to show us the territory of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) on a map for us to know that it is representational, rather than actual - whereas, in a film that is not without other relevance, it is unhelpfully obvious to any attempt to read The Dressmaker (2015) literally that what is shown has scant sense of being a real place* [though this, for some clear reasons, is also not Dogville (2003)].

If you thought that it was unlikely that a police department would have a badge in the shape of the state of Missouri, that is not the most implausible and / or unreal aspect of @3Billboards... pic.twitter.com/lqKUxN13HY

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

However, one believes that there are better grounds for abandoning any pretence that Kate Winslet (Tilly Dunnage), returning to her mother Molly (Judy Davis), is not just a revenge-romp (if one that is dusted down with touches of fairy tale and cod psychology). In Billboards, invoking such fictions as 'When they diverted the highway' causes one to think of Psycho (1960), rather - excellently entertaining though it is – than of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent : Travels in Small-Town America, but perhaps writer / director Martin McDonagh desires to operate on both levels ?

All this anger begets anger ~ Penelope (Samara Weaving)

If it were actually the premise of the film, it was pretty obvious from the title what the billboards would be doing. Even in terms of believing in the film and / or being asked to believe in what the film shows, likewise pinning too much (pun intended) on them cannot be done in literal terms** : people misquote what Hitchcock meant when talking about a MacGuffin, but, in that extended sense, the billboards certainly are one.

Or, rather, they patently are one, but McDonagh will have it that they are not one...

How 'How Three Billboards went from film fest darling to awards-season controversy' seems to miss the point, by talking about redemption, not about the world of the whole film... :https://t.co/qIji7AUUWb

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2018

Billboards that, moreover, are let out no sooner than they are found to exist, with no notion of what repair to them could be needed, and with the bill-posting itself mysteriously carried out well after nightfall ? Is any of this an invitation to believe it, outside of the film ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2018

So, having seen @3Billboards (2017), there's a sigh of relief, but forget the party-crowd, intent on laughing at anything that moves :

The humour is there, but not eliciting more than a snort, and the richness of it and the audacity are just not at the level of In Bruges (2008). pic.twitter.com/FVsWrczyxe

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 27, 2018

Some film-references :

* Calvary (2014)

* The Dressmaker (2015)

* The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)

As ever, Donald Clarke is well worth a read : 'Three Billboards’ is not suffering a backlash: some people just didn’t like it ~ https://t.co/sZfGzbTWLY

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

End-notes :

* According to Wikipedia®, the closest that we get with Billboards is Ebb, ‘an extinct town in St. Clair County, in the U. S. state of Missouri’.

** For example, as if although (and because) not rented out for the lengthy period of time found in the records of Ebbing Advertising Co. (and despite the obvious dilapidation [if one can have it, of something made of wood, not stone...] of the billboards themselves), the cogency of the installation is not going to need checking and repair before the resumption of an electrical supply. The conceit simply will not bear thinking of thus in those terms, if one had to imagine what would be an appropriate rental (rather than a figure and cash on the desk).


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

The trouble about these Hollywood dames ~ Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) (work in progress)

A response (work in progress) to In a Lonely Place (1950) ~ Bogart and Grahame

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 January

On first viewing Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) (work in progress), as screened at Saffron Screen, on Monday 15 January 2018 at 8.00 p.m. (in the restored form from 1977)

Call it 'a noir masterpiece directed by Nicholas Ray' as @PeterBradshaw1 may, but In a Lonely Place (1950) had potential that, from the erratic driving of Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) onwards, is frittered away in too many directions - as driving away at absurd speeds embodies ? pic.twitter.com/JjnbEMax66

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2018

Multiply, despite a police Captain who [says that he] has a microphone that is set up to record interviews, the film treats contamination of evidence (or even whether the matter is relevant) as if it is no part of its remit, or within its purview. Whereas it is sufficiently clear that even an innocent person, suspected of a crime (let alone one with a sizeable dossier at police HQ), will not, for the moment, want to act in a way that openly calls into question the independence of someone who claims to be a witness. (No more so than the police themselves will want there to be such an opportunity for embellishment of the evidence and / or for another witness 'to be found' ?)

If Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1) is right that it falls to consider In a Lonely Place in the category of noir, then maybe such a flavour of the inauthentic that pervades everything is apt – or, contrariwise, maybe it is a reaction to a film that seems to aim at being plausible, but where so much remarkably does not succeed in giving that impression, that, as its saving grace, we invoke the concept of film noir ?

Though botched by RKO's first cutting Hitchcock's principal photography to 55 minutes (in which, since preview audiences couldn't cope with it, no vestige survived of Bristol's very own @carycomeshome as murderer), Grant and Fontaine manage uncertainty as Grahame / Bogart don't.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2018

Of course, that's Suspicion (1941), which thus ends up being a pair with Spellbound (1945), #UCFF argues : Lina McLaidlaw's (Joan Fontaine's) trust evaporates, whereas Dr. Constance* Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) robustly invests John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck)...

* Clue in her name. https://t.co/qU05P4CL6E

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2018

Attribute to Grahame’s character Laurel that she has seen it all before (with Mr Baker)*, or that Humphrey Bogart is a case, before the diagnosis existed (or before Taxi Driver (1976)), of post-traumatic stress disorder, but :

* Roger O. Thornhill (Cary again, with Hitchcock in North by NorthWest (1959)) is far more alarmed, though wildly drunk, by having been set behind the wheel of a car than Grahame as passenger – we see the vehicle objectively career, and also from the driver / passenger point of view - on one heck of a ride (we should either not have been shown that at all, or, if we are not intended to withdraw our belief, Grahame has not to react as if this is quite usual driving)

* As Adam Feinstein made a very case for, at Cambridge Film Festival 2016, Michael Curtiz did some unjustly neglected work with The Breaking Point (1950), and not just in Casablanca (1942) (with this film’s male lead and Bergman) :

Casablanca reviewed: 'a lively film, bulging with acting talent' - archive, 15 January 1943 https://t.co/IzdslO8Ynt

— Guardian Film (@guardianfilm) January 15, 2018

* This film just shows why Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011) was really so conventional (it felt as if, without acknowledging it, it was importing Peter Mullan from Ken Loach / Paul Laverty’s My Name is Joe (1998) ?)


All of which is calling out for some other film-references (assembling here, in alphabetical order) :

* The Artist (2011)

* Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017)

* Mulholland Drive [Dr.] (2001)

* […]


End-notes :

* But Laurel doesn’t seem to have the signs of having seen it all before even of Audrey Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) (even though, obviously, the oral sex in the gents is mightily toned down from what Truman Capote wrote – fancifully, although collected with three other stories in a slim volume, IMDb calls it ‘a novel’…)


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

We ? Who the hell are we to think that we're suddenly special ? (work in progress)!

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This accreting load of twaddle is Our mistaken notions, in twenty-first-century Western so-called society, that we are all individuals – rather than just another batch of conformists

A birthday ? A birthday - within days of mine (all mine) ?

Ach, when I carelessly bought myself that Birthday Experience from Virgin, why, oh, why did those words about 'exclusivity' and 'have yourself what no one else's special enough to get' sway me so, officer ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2018

My piece in this week's @NewYorker on our obsession with self-optimization, and the good souls who are trying to help us resist it: https://t.co/DNJMhrvee5

— Alexandra Schwartz (@Alex_Lily) January 8, 2018

"Societies endure only when they are devoted to future generations, and they collapse like the Roman Empire when the pleasures and fancies of the living usurp the inheritance of those unborn" A Political Philosophy

— Roger Scruton Quotes (@Scruton_Quotes) January 1, 2018

Seriously ? Make friends, in case they mah need to testify on your behalf !

It's precisely the individualistic notion of 'What's in it for me ?' that we must reject.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2018

This was Toby Young in 2012 writing in the Spectator about mainstreaming in schools. pic.twitter.com/nGgg7QsWh5

— Mhairi Hunter (@MhairiHunter) January 1, 2018

Pure pandering to the fad of disaffection, which believes that no one, other than the person making the point, has a point that is worth any more than being sniped at and ridiculed. https://t.co/1a89XVyM71

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Some comments on Molly’s Game (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 January

Some comments on Molly’s Game (2017) (watched at The Light Cinema, Cambridge, on Wednesday 10 January 2018)

Most likely since - in adapting Molly Bloom's original book for cinema - the screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin) is also directing his first film, he often doesn't seem to temper himself his script :

The prime asset of film is visual, yet he uses it too little, not to narrate, but show.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2018

As usual, all being compiled into some sort of #UCFF response, located at :https://t.co/8epwdEwM4O pic.twitter.com/UXz0ZEu7gp

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2018

In @Mollys_Game (2017), is the scene with Molly Bloom’s (Jessica Chastain's) father (Kevin Costner), after the dangerous escapade of ice-skating in Central Park, meant to be fantasy ?

At any rate, it plays like a version of Good Will Hunting (1997) - unrelatedly and on speed ! pic.twitter.com/0wjzZ0Dte7

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2018

When not supposedly being both therapist and self-critical father, Larry Bloom is otherwise shown as a beastly father, ignoring his wife’s pleas for Molly, and invoking the word weak as an alleged synonym for tired : perfectly psychologically reasonable, then, that both Player X (Michael Cera) and, before him, Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong), prove dangerously attractive as the types of character who like to crush others (even if it can also be personally costly to know them).


[...]


Post-script :

In @tnyshouts: "Sometimes I can see Jessica (Chastain) calmly and silently counting to ten and trying not to roll her eyes, as she waits for the mostly male imbeciles nearby to catch up." https://t.co/HToGGw0F57 pic.twitter.com/bEn2uZx8kR

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 30, 2018

Delightfully seductive though it is to make inferences about a film-star from his or her roles (not knowing the ones that were turned down, or the ones wanted, but not secured), a generalization about the parts played needs to fit... Stretching to fit them in doesn't help. -> https://t.co/oRlJhdN7Kq

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 30, 2018

As long as she has a career, Molly does what she does very well, but keeps having to be told that *she* funds her operation by uncalled-in debts, etc., and is shown crashed, and narrated to be depressed and abusing substances to stay awake for long times, not sipping white wine ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 30, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Two laundromats near Staines, formerly Middlesex (in production)

Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 January

Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Meanwhile, and unrelatedly, cinemas have been abbreviating @3Billboards in their film-listings for reasons for space, on the one hand, but, on the other, filled their wall-space with banners - in which what look like huge storage-heaters, or flat-screen t.v.s, menacingly advance. pic.twitter.com/V79XY8vPcW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 20, 2018

It is almost cunning that we are reminded that it is the writer and director of In Bruges (2008), and not - for some reason - of Seven Psychopaths (2012)

One is trying not to think of the films that had punctuation in the title and one regretted watching, @3Billboards, but an overly stage-like mis-en-scène and central performance spring to mind... :https://t.co/Bk2rxe67ay pic.twitter.com/rff4taK1iF

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2018

Apart from which, In Bruges (2008) was sheer brilliance, and yet next... ?https://t.co/qDtIEfrVeQ pic.twitter.com/9Pt0XtU9AM

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Three Tweets about Bound (1996) [by The Wachowskis]

Three Tweets about Bound (1996) [by The Wachowskis]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 January

Three Tweets about Bound (1996) [by The Wachowskis]

Finally watched The Wachowskis' Bound (1996) :

Oh ! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive !

Marmion ~ Sir Walter Scott pic.twitter.com/zv9TmUwDAw

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2018

At first, thought Joe Pantoliano (Caesar) mis-cast, but he grew on one, and he went from deceived to mad to cunning to a mistaken belief in psychology ! pic.twitter.com/KqFIsllJvF

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2018

This seems the best of the trailers :https://t.co/Fu5RwXfpOA

Or just watch the film !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Three Tweets about Alexander Korda's The Four Feathers (1939) (and some images)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 January

Three Tweets about Alexander Korda's The Four Feathers (1939) (and some images)

In Alexander Korda's The Four Feathers (1939), Miklós Rózsa works so subtly that - unless deliberately diverting one's attention to it - one would be hard pressed to say how much of it is scored. pic.twitter.com/cJNQovCT7X

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2018

Despite the most curiously clipped British accents of John Clements (Harry Faversham), John Durrance (Ralph Richardson) and, especially, Ethne Burroughs (Jane Duprez), a welcome consideration of valour, when, in our times, we inconsistently are asked to call people 'brave'. pic.twitter.com/Kd18MnSYcW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2018

Assuredly, also, the most lengthily drawn-out joke that involves a pineapple, and maybe John Laurie's casting here as The Khalifa gave rise, in the Dad’s Army t.v. series, to his co-actor Clive Dunn (Lance-Corporal Jones) having an obsession with the Fuzzy Wuzzies, and bayonets ? https://t.co/AGz3dSGWNr

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Film hype decoded : A Dictionary of Tweets

Film hype decoded : A Dictionary of Tweets (#FilmHypeDecoded)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 January

Film hype decoded : A Dictionary of Tweets (#FilmHypeDecoded)

Inspired by the extraordinary true story

'Inspired by the extraordinary true story' - but do we think that :

* A fifteen-minute documentary would have served the story no worse than the film made ?

* Overemphasis on story can often subjugate how much more remarkable people's character and their development can be ? pic.twitter.com/if21tv7YV5

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Some thoughts on being reacquainted with Suspicion (1941)

Some thoughts on being reacquainted with Suspicion (1941)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 January (Tweets added to the third end-note, 25 August)

Some thoughts on being reacquainted with Suspicion (1941)

However, as hinted at in @FaberBooks' Hitchock on Hitchcock [part of their series on film directors : https://t.co/AsBeKcvD6N], and - to whom thanks - explicated by hitchcockmaster, this was *not* the original conception : https://t.co/tJKyMF0fRV pic.twitter.com/AybVsHBNqX

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2018

Ingrid Bergman (Dr. Constance Petersen) and Gregory Peck (John Ballantyne), then joined by Michael Chekhov (Dr. Michael Brülov) for more dream-work, in Spellbound (1945)¹

Although it results that, in Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll - briefly in Suspicion, too), 'the inmates have taken over the asylum', Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) almost unwaveringly believes in John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), despite Dr. Michael Brulow (Michael Chekhov). https://t.co/Di1EmfGjBV

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2018

Leo G. Carroll (Dr. Murchison) - joined by Ingrid Bergman (Dr. Constance Petersen) here in a link to the near-dénouement

The surges in Franz Waxman's score² for Suspicion (1941) go from emotional peaks, as when Lina overhears herself effectively described (by her mother, within) as dull and so impulsively kisses Johnnie, to ones - reverting to form ? - of terror, at what he might have done, or be³.

We scarcely see the exterior design of Lina and Johnnie's matrimonial property, when they return from honeymoon⁴, but we soon become acquainted with the fact that what we must assume is some sort of large cupola, at all sorts of times of day, has the shadow of its struts cast onto the living area and stairs.

Just as those surges, as part of Hitchcock's vision, help overwhelm with terror what is reasonable in us, too, likewise, more and more – without our doing much more than taking it for granted – does it turn from a benign compass to an imperious clock to an alarming web... ? :

Maybe, in this famous scene, we credit it - if we think of its plausible origins at all - as cast by the full moon, but, then, with all that it traditionally implies about sanity (Johnnie's ? Lina's ?)...

End-notes :

¹ Seemingly titled, in Italy, io ti salverò ('I will save you') :

² Waxman, under the category 'Music (Music score for a dramatic picture)', was nominated for an Academy Award (in 1942).

³ In 'Murder - With English on it' [originally published in The New York Times Magazine (3 March 1957 ; 17, 42)], Hitchcock chooses to say In Suspicion, the story of a wife who suspects her husband of being a homicidal maniac, I had to make [my emphasis] the suspicion ultimately [my emphasis] a figment of her imagination. The consensus was [my emphasis] that audiences would not want to be told in the last few frames of film that as popular a personality as Cary Grant was a murderer, doomed to exposure. (The article is collected as part of Faber & Faber's film series on directors, in Hitchcock on Hitchcock (London, 1995), pp. 133-137.)

However, although the article does not cite this reference, hitchcockmaster finds ample evidence that, after principal shooting, Hitchcock found that the film had been cut down to 55 minutes, out of the fear mentioned (which arose from preview screenings at RKO, and after changes of personnel made by the studio, that lost Hitchcock the support of the two men most closely involved with the film). The article also shows that few people liked the ending of the film, as duly completed in post-production and released.

Yet naming no source for making this assertion about the film, versus the material in such web-sites as :https://t.co/tJKyMF0fRVhttps://t.co/C5CkMlrDQh

* By Jenny Curtis. Michael Friedman Publishing Group, Inc. (MetroBooks), New York, 1998. pic.twitter.com/Vb6CSRZaYs

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 25, 2018

As faces aren't symmetrical*, it brings out a Craigian quality to Cary Grant (even in the already not very likeable guise of Johnnie Aysgarth).

* We may also forget that we most often see ourselves in reflected form ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 23, 2021

In full, the caption in Cary Grant : A Life in Pictures reads :

Grant accepted the role of John Aynsgar on the condition that the part be softened from that of a murderer to one who only appears to be a murderer. The ambiguous nature of Aynsgar presented a unique challenge to Grant. He was required to appear both guilty and innocent at all times. The air of mystery he'd brought to earlier roles served him well in Suspicion. He was both playful and menacing, often within the same scene, and made these mood shifts so smoothly that no one really noticed he was doing some of his best work. Based on the novel Before the Fact, the film's name was changed to Suspicion so that the audience wouldn't know whether or not Grant's character was a killer until the last scene. Hitchcock wrote and filmed two separate endings to the film, hoping to do it his way with Aynsgar as his killer and his wife the willing victim. But early preview audiences preferred the soft ending, in which Joan Fontaine's character is so paranoid that she only imagines her husband is trying to kill her.


⁴ Our best chance to see this hallway, and how especially it is lit from above, comes from at 28 : 43 (in the colour version), whereas, when Lina comes in from riding and meets ‘Beaky’ (Nigel Bruce) for the first time (at 38 : 30), the property appears to have a perfectly flat façade (which gives little away what is supposed to be behind it).

One reviewer (quoted by hitchcockmaster³) somewhat disapproved of the use of the image cast by the putative cupola, calling it, in The Times, an effective, if a little crude, use of shadow (4 December 1941).

Post-script : Since the above was written, this still has been found, which appears to show the exterior (from an angle) :

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Two Tweets about Oklahoma ! (1955)

This started with two Tweets about Oklahoma ! (1955)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 December

This started with two Tweets about Oklahoma ! (1955)

After the Cinemascope version of Oklahoma ! (1955) [from the two-disc collector's edition, but without using the sing-along sub-titles], finding that James Dean (and Paul Newman) tried out for the part of Curly (Gordon MacRae), and that - in 1906 - Oklahoma was but a Territory. pic.twitter.com/Kv9jElDkpt

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 29, 2017

I thought I may pass out from boredom while watching this @BFI for the first time last weekend... apart from Gloria Grahame’s appearances. No interval.

— michelle (@best2vilmabanky) December 30, 2017

Very wise - these films were not made with the intention of seeing them through without a break !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

https://t.co/TKD0TFcMeE

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

A crude stereotype of opera-goers by custom is if not being jolted awake by an act's final cadence, then living for the well-known arias :

Can we any more imagine now how an audience reacted to a film released in 1955 (with a seemingly obligatory scene of ladies in lingerie ) ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

To an extent, I also made my own entertainment with the film, spotting what had been shot on a sound-stage, and also following the movement of the camera and how the shots were put together...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

The dream-sequence in Oklahoma ! (1955) - sure some inspiration to Woody Allen with Deconstructing Harry (1997), and Larry (Billy Crystal), presiding over the infernal regions... pic.twitter.com/ae2HCg0okq

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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