TORN CURTAIN provides the template for the CASINO ROYALE stairwell fight in terms of brutality and sheer physical work to do away with the henchman. For its time it’s astoundingly violent and ugly.
I also have a soft spot for FAMILY PLOT, if only for its title and the entertaining small scale cons who act as ‘heroes’ here.
With TOPAZ I used to rate the book over the film - but haven’t read the book in over 30 years, nor anything else by Leon Uris. An interesting side note on the novel: it’s one of the works by English language writers to purport the Cold War belief that French politics and secret services were supposedly ridden by Russian moles and influencers - when the actual leaks in London and Washington were conveniently ignored or not yet uncovered. An aspect where, in hindsight, Fleming’s Casino Royale turned out eerily prophetic…
The film adaptation is visually a feast but lacks the plotting and the relatable hero. Stafford (I had to look him up) was probably cast for his type but remains strangely out of focus. I think Hitchcock didn’t really like professionals as his protagonists, it’s almost the same with Grant’s Devlin in NOTORIOUS. You just don’t care for the pros, you care for the amateurs. That’s why I’m sceptical about Hitchcock doing the first Bond film. I suppose it wouldn’t have worked the way Fleming imagined.
I got that a bit from Topaz ( a film I loved) as well, but, I suppose I was kind of prepped for it by North by Northwest, which does display the same attitude. Hitchcock was not a man to hide his opinions - his distaste for the whodunnit genre being one he was vocal about in interviews, and his films are pushing away hard whenever they even slightly approach it.
Thanks for the recommendations - any more, do make them.
I’ve seen Spellbound, but can’t really remember it, while I wasn’t overly impressed with Rope, but that’s mainly because James Stewart was necessarily sidelined in favour of the two leads, who I didn’t care for. Topaz and Foreign Correspondent I obviously need to see.
Vertigo is good, but a bit too psychological and understated for my tastes. I prefer something with more intrigue, like Rear Window. It’s often considered one of the best films ever, of course, so that shows what I know.
Hitch certainly preferred his amateurs, which I like too. Eric Ambler was the same with his novels.
I wonder why Hitch didn’t like whodunnits? They were prevalent at the time, of course, so perhaps it was their ubiquity.
Here in the UK, there’s a couple of great channels for old films - Talking Pictures and Sony Movies Classic. The latter of which are showing all of Dean Martin’s Matt Helm films, which I’ll take a gander at.
This, and he didn’t like the idea that it was often a 2 hour build up to a twist, so how well the film succeeded was based on how a 2 minute reveal at the end of the film worked.
Raymond Chandler was also not overly fond of some of the prevalent crime fiction, especially the classics. Letting a snake down a rope to kill an unloved wife, identifying a suspect by a unique coat button or solving crimes as a kind of eccentric sport was not Chandler’s idea of reality or entertainment.
I always find that critique strange, as the archetype for that kind of story is Sherlock Holmes. Yes, it’s really improbable, but that’s the point. The most famous quote by the character is about how very improbable these crimes are. Always struck me as being like watching a Star Trek film or series, and hating it because of all the space travel. I mean, it’s not like they hid that aspect from you.
Raymond Chandler, and Terry Pratchett who shared that opinion, I‘d kinda give a pass, as they actually did write stories that they would prefer, but at a certain point, you kind of have to take a look at yourself for going into it.
EDIT: I feel I should say, I’m watching Knives Out on Blu Ray right now, and just got to Blanc doing the reveal. I am talking about whodunnits on a James Bond forum, whilst watching James Bond do the classic whodunnit scene of a detective reveals all.
Horses for courses, if you picked up a Holmes or Whimsey mystery you most likely knew what you were in for. In Chandler’s day the genre only just built out its branches; the idea was also to tell stories closer to the lives of readers. Stories where murder didn’t happen in Victorian manors in the English countryside but in the smelly back alleys, where the weapon was a knife or a bottle and the killer not some ingenious mastermind but a simple nine-to-five guy slouching for a few bucks from the local capo. And often enough wearing a uniform in his other job.
Chandler and Hammet and Cain and David Goodis and a few others stripped the mystery of its artificial quality not so much to rebel against its arcane conventions but to show the people behind these conventions. Who are they, what do they do to others and themselves? How does it all fit into the reality of readers? And why is that reality so different from an ‘Unpleasantness at the Belona’?
The various directions the genre branched out since all have their particular qualities, it’s a matter of personal taste if one prefers Dalgliesh or Morse or Caffery or Pendergast, the works of Fred Vargas or Tana French, the classic Holmes or the equally classic Travis McGee. All employ their own version of ‘enhanced reality’ to tell a tale, none are documentaries. The only real measure for the reader is how much they entertain. Or not.
I found Chandler’s opinion on that a little bit snobby. The Golden Age dealt with all sorts of human emotions and frailties - jealously, greed, love, obsession etc. They just had a different way of presenting it, front-loading it with an investigation, leaving what happened first to last. I think a murder which occurred spontaneously is less involving and easier to solve than one which is premeditated.
From what I’ve read of him, Chandler was more interested in character, atmosphere and prose than story, hence his oft-repeated assertion that, when stuck, he just had somebody walk into the room holding a gun. It’s surprising how much academics favour him when he was even willing to admit that himself.
Nowadays, many people prefer reality over the artificial constraints of a classical detective story. Of course, as said up-thread, much of it is no more real than what it is trying to replace.
I find that with Bond films too. For all the supposed realism of the Craig era, much of it is just as preposterous as the Moore one. The difference, again, is how it’s presented. Put a lot of sweat, violence and brooding intensity in, with no jokes, and it will seem more real than an alligator submersible. Case in point: Mission Impossible: Fallout - good film, but that bathroom fight would’ve been very short if made realistic.
The same could be said for soaps - specifically the British, kitchen-sink type like EastEnders. It may look like real life, but it’s just as fake and improbable as a brightly-lit, studio audience sitcom.
Chandler was coming from the pulp industry where writers were paid by wordcount. The atmosphere he injected, a character wading trough the shade of an awning like through a pool of cool water, was every bit for atmosphere as it was to add to his paycheque. The pulps didn’t care for ingenious plotting, they just cared what sold. And sell did only what captured the readers.
Chandler painted pictures of a society in stark contrast - and it resonated with readers because it struck a note that’s been missing previously. Ross Macdonald travelled further in the same direction, made his books increasingly more portrayals of dysfunctional relationships in a dysfunctional society - but they are far less known or rated than Chandler’s simply because they no longer broke into new territories. Which doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyable reads, they just did their thing in their time.
Psycho is certainly a victim of its own success. It doesn’t help that Janet Leigh is forgotten now, and her early onscreen death therefore lacks the punch it would’ve had at the time. I was saying this recently to a friend who didn’t know who she was, and that it’s like Scarlett Johansson or Megan Stone getting killed off in the first act.
STAGE FRIGHT–one of AH’s Warner Bros. films (my favorite period before he signs with Lew Wasserman, goes to Paramount to make REAR WINDOW, and starts his television work). AH felt that having a flashback lie was detrimental to the film, but it is important to remember that Hitchcock at heart was an experimental filmmaker who couched his experiments in Hollywood films. SF may be the least of his Warner Bros. films, but still good fun. (Note: though both ROPE and UNDER CAPRICORN were produced by Transatlantic Pictures, they were released by Warner Bros, and I include them as part of that output).
I CONFESS–peak Hitchcock for me–incredible mise en scene–and Montgomery Clift was never photographed more lovingly. It is interesting to note that having broken free of Selznick and able to make the films he wanted, AH chose to adapt three works he had long been acquainted with “Rope”; “Under Capricorn”;’ and “Nos deux consciences” (the basis of I CONFESS). Throw in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE WRONG MAN (Godard is fantastic on it), and the Warner Bros. years are a cinematic treasure trove.
TOPAZ: a twin to TORN CURTAIN. In TORN CURTAIN, the hero Michael Armstrong (echoes of Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy) proves an inept spy (and a less than knowledgeable scientist to boot). In each instance of danger, it is a woman who comes to his rescue and saves the situation. TOPAZ takes things a step further with a spy who gets his colleagues killed. Whereas TORN CURTAIN was AH’s study in natural light, TOPAZ lets color run riot. Marred by not having AH’s intended ending, the longer blu-ray version we now have is more than adequate, and a final tart/cynical goodbye to the spy genre.
FAMILY PLOT: a television movie raised to the art of the sublime, FP’s editing reaches the subliminal with its minimalist effects. Godard said AH was the filmmaker of couples, and he goes out with a movie about two of his most interesting. The one scene the movie’s two couples share (with one couple being unaware of the other’s presence) is an Old Master at his relaxed best).
FRENZY: AH’s reworking of PSYCHO–his camera’s retreat down a staircase, refusing to witness yet another death is eloquent in its disavowal. Unfortunately, PSYCHO became the template people followed, but in FRENZY the killings hurt as never before.
And a film no one has mentioned which for me is as perfect as a film can be: NOTORIOUS–a movie about a man learning to feel and express his emotions openly, deftly ornamented with champagne, Nazis, and uranium for viewers who enjoy a spy plot as a divertissement from the main narrative.
He said he wanted to make suspense films not mystery films.
FRENZY is a very powerful film, with a great central performance and an echoing of older Hitchcock ideals of the framed innocent, except in this time, the beginning of the 70s, innocence is damned. It’s a very bleak and and quite brilliant film. Check it out if you haven’t!.
Fascinating write-ups, guys, thank you. I’ll have to dive deeper into Hitch’s work. I’ve been a viewer of his since I was about eleven (I’m 31 now), so I don’t know why I’ve been taking my time.
The only ones I’ve seen which I didn’t very much care for were Shadow of a Doubt (though I can’t remember why), The Trouble With Harry (because I thought there were too many characters without one to focus on, and the tone is obviously more playful than usual), Rope, Strangers On a Train (I know it was the way Highsmith wrote it, but I rather wished the protagonist had accepted the perfect-murder scheme instead of having a pesky conscious!). Ones I enjoyed, but aren’t favourtes are Spellbound, Suspicion, Rebecca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, while Too Catch a Thief was, I thought, a disappointment, considering we had Cary Grant into the bargain.
Notorious, though, is perfect! As are so many of his films. North By Northwest has had a big influence on me as an aspiring writer of period thrillers. It’s my second favourite film ever - though as my number 1 favourite is Octopussy, this might not mean much!
I saw a film tonight which had Hitchcock written all over it and probably should be more famous than it is - 1960’s Midnight Lace with Doris Day and Rex Harrison, in which Day keeps getting mysterious phone calls from someone promising to kill her by the end of the month. Also featuring John Williams, Anthony Dawson and almost-Bond John Gavin, who had all worked with Hitch, of course. In fact, John Williams is basically playing the same character.
TTWH is much more indebted to television than his earlier films–it is the first of his tv movies made for the cinema. Bill Krohn notes that Hitchcock was interested in television as a medium, and Lew Wasserman made the deal that brought Hitchcock into the homes of millions of Americans which made AH even more of a known and successful brand (and very wealthy).
Also, with REAR WINDOW, Hitchcock begins his collaborations with John Michael Hayes, a writer for radio programs who brought a new sensibility to AH’s work. When L.B. Jeffries looks out of his rear window, the apartment building across the way is akin to a stack of television sets all showing different movies. As for THE WRONG MAN: I have always said it is the best episode of Playhouse 90 that Sidney Lumet never got around to directing.
What I refer to as the hinge film is DIAL M FOR MURDER where AH starts the shift from a filmic mise en scene to a television one. DIAL M started out as a television show on the BBC, then became a stage hit, and then became a movie. Alexander Korda bought the film rights for $2,800 and was going to produce the film himself with Guy Hamilton directing, but then sold the right to Warner Bros. for $75,000.
In the novel, Guy does kill Bruno’s father though he is wracked by guilt and eventually confesses. SoaT is a companion piece to ROPE with both movies being about gay couples–ROPE the more obviously so of the two. If you watch SoaT again, think of Bruno as an unrequited lover and Guy as a man who wants to trade in a mediocre beard (Miriam) for a more high-class one (Anne).
Also, Hitchcock changed Bruno from an ugly alcoholic into a Hitchcockian dandy, and had Whitfield Cook (who did the original treatment) bring a homoerotic element to the story. AH also set part of the movie in Washington which was going through the height of the Pink Scare when the movie was made. Once again Hitchcock made a movie which on the narrative surface is a thriller, while the sub-narratives relate tales of queer romance; social and political surveillance; and the clandestine life. SoaT is not perfect in the way NOTORIOUS is, but in other ways it is even richer with allusions and meanings which criss cross throughout the movie and in one’s mind afterwards.
After seeing Rope on DVD, I saw the DVD extra which was an interview with the screenwriter. He seemed obsessed with the gay theme and kept making every question about it.
AH himself told screenwriter Arthur Laurents that the film was about “it” meaning homosexuality. AH also took care to have the two leads played by gay men (one of whom was having an affair with Laurents). In his memoir, Laurents tells how Hitchcock–while never talking about homosexuality–kept trying to push the film as far as possible in depicting a gay couple. Even Hitchcock’s use of the long take helps here–John Dall and Farley Granger are often in the frame together, and they have a naturalness next to each other that gay men have around other men. Look at the scene where they are fixing the candles, or a later one where Brandon is arguing with Rupert (I think) and Phillip suddenly materializes at his side like a supportive spouse. Whenever straight actors play gay men, they always lack this comfortability element–and for a good reason: it is something you cannot act.
Hitchcock–genius that he was–knew this, and so adopted a completely new visual style (he had always proclaimed the superiority of montage which allowed him to control his audiences’ reactions) in order to force his audiences to confront something that montage would have helped them to deny–the queer couple (which was also emerging in society at the time via the return of gay soldiers after WWII.
These men were not returning to the small towns and farms they hailed from, but remaining in the cities where they mustered out–New York and San Francisco mostly, but also Chicago to a lesser degree. Hitchcock’s depiction of Brandon and Phillip in a well-appointed Manhattan penthouse is not that far from documentary fact (I am working on a book about ROPE and been in communication with queer historians who are amazed at the degree of AH’s accuracy). But Hitchcock was always more aware of and sensitive to social realities than he he gets credit for: the master of suspense was also the master of cultural commentary.
