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Late-'50s classic double-feature
Oct. 19th, 2008 11:47 amSo I was a busy boy yesterday. Took care of correspondence, updated various databases, and mailed a few copies of the Corflu progress report in the morning. Amazing how much time just dealing with correspondence can take, but the feedback on the PR has been great. Then I spent two hours weeding the traffic circle in the afternoon. Feeling a righteous soreness and fatigue after that, I snuggled into my cinematic coccoon and watched a couple of films from 1958.
Third time was sort of a charm for Hitchcock's Vertigo. I first saw it in the theater in 1984 when the Jimmy Stewart Hitchcocks were re-released after a period in legal limbo. I joined the crowd at the Neptune in laughing at it. I saw it again on TV a few years after that, and I still found it pretty silly. I couldn't buy Jimmy Stewart, for chrissake, as a sweaty pervert, and the ending just seemed laughable again. But last night I finally began to warm to it. Hitchcock's movies are always a little cold to me anyway, and I still can't say that Vertigo engages me in any personal way. It's fascinating as a construct, an artifice, an almost mechanical dream. Perhaps I understand the doppelgänger better than I used to, and this is definitely a doppelgänger film. However, for all its personal touches, it's still very much a Hollywood construct, and the ending in particular feels like a contrived Production Code payback for the sins of the woman. One of the things I hadn't really clued into before was her culpability in the crime that -- tellingly -- drives the movie but is never seen directly. Another problem I've probably had with the movie is how unpleasant Stewart's character is, and how unpleasant the attitude toward women is. At least in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief (my two favorite Hitchcocks), Grace Kelly is allowed some spunk. The woman with the amorphous identity in Vertigo is a puppet through and through. However, I've always loved Bernard Hermann's score, and I finally realized last night how much it owes to Debussy, which opened the movie up for me: it is oceanic, transformative, a vision of the abyss. For me, the Hollywood surface interferes with my appreciation of the depths, but perhaps now I can see past the surface better. The ending begins to make more sense as the expression of something primitive and fearful, something irrational, absurd, unsettling. It's another dream of sex and death and fate.
After that I dug into the new set from Universal of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. In contrast to Vertigo, Touch of Evil has been one of my very favorite movies from the first time I saw it on TV. The new DVD includes three versions of the movie: the original theatrical release, a longer preview version that was discovered in the '70s, and the even longer "restored" version that Walter Murch put together based on Welles' famous 58 page memo, written in reaction to the cuts the studio made after they took the film away from Welles in post-production. That's the only version I've seen in the theater, on my birthday in 1998. Last night I watched the theatrical release, which I don't think I'd seen before. The only noticeable difference to my eyes was that it cut the sequence where Janet Leigh is driven out to the motel, absurdly pursued by Uncle Joe Grandi.
This is a sleazy, lurid movie -- a cheap, '50s paperback exploitation novel of a movie. But the script is rock solid and tightly structured, even as important details are thrown off in the margins or in overlapping dialog. It takes several viewings to piece it all together. Hell, this viewing was the first time I realized that the girl whose Mexican boyfriend is accused of the murder is the murder victim's daughter. Duh, I know, but ... The thing that has always appealed to me the most about Touch of Evil is the arresting, engrossing visual brio of it all. The camera is almost always moving, the image always off-kilter and askew, Russell Metty's camera always finding new angles to surprise and tease us with. The eye is always distracted. Another thing I noticed last night was how many shots feature crumpled newspaper sheets blowing through the frame like so much tumbleweed, which is both visually lovely and a sign of how trashy the town is. How tawdry everything looks, how exciting. The stench of corruption, sweet as maryjane. Mancini's raucous, rocking, bump-and-grind score. "I'm always thinking of her, drunk or sober. What else is there to think about, except my job, my dirty job?"
Third time was sort of a charm for Hitchcock's Vertigo. I first saw it in the theater in 1984 when the Jimmy Stewart Hitchcocks were re-released after a period in legal limbo. I joined the crowd at the Neptune in laughing at it. I saw it again on TV a few years after that, and I still found it pretty silly. I couldn't buy Jimmy Stewart, for chrissake, as a sweaty pervert, and the ending just seemed laughable again. But last night I finally began to warm to it. Hitchcock's movies are always a little cold to me anyway, and I still can't say that Vertigo engages me in any personal way. It's fascinating as a construct, an artifice, an almost mechanical dream. Perhaps I understand the doppelgänger better than I used to, and this is definitely a doppelgänger film. However, for all its personal touches, it's still very much a Hollywood construct, and the ending in particular feels like a contrived Production Code payback for the sins of the woman. One of the things I hadn't really clued into before was her culpability in the crime that -- tellingly -- drives the movie but is never seen directly. Another problem I've probably had with the movie is how unpleasant Stewart's character is, and how unpleasant the attitude toward women is. At least in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief (my two favorite Hitchcocks), Grace Kelly is allowed some spunk. The woman with the amorphous identity in Vertigo is a puppet through and through. However, I've always loved Bernard Hermann's score, and I finally realized last night how much it owes to Debussy, which opened the movie up for me: it is oceanic, transformative, a vision of the abyss. For me, the Hollywood surface interferes with my appreciation of the depths, but perhaps now I can see past the surface better. The ending begins to make more sense as the expression of something primitive and fearful, something irrational, absurd, unsettling. It's another dream of sex and death and fate.
After that I dug into the new set from Universal of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. In contrast to Vertigo, Touch of Evil has been one of my very favorite movies from the first time I saw it on TV. The new DVD includes three versions of the movie: the original theatrical release, a longer preview version that was discovered in the '70s, and the even longer "restored" version that Walter Murch put together based on Welles' famous 58 page memo, written in reaction to the cuts the studio made after they took the film away from Welles in post-production. That's the only version I've seen in the theater, on my birthday in 1998. Last night I watched the theatrical release, which I don't think I'd seen before. The only noticeable difference to my eyes was that it cut the sequence where Janet Leigh is driven out to the motel, absurdly pursued by Uncle Joe Grandi.
This is a sleazy, lurid movie -- a cheap, '50s paperback exploitation novel of a movie. But the script is rock solid and tightly structured, even as important details are thrown off in the margins or in overlapping dialog. It takes several viewings to piece it all together. Hell, this viewing was the first time I realized that the girl whose Mexican boyfriend is accused of the murder is the murder victim's daughter. Duh, I know, but ... The thing that has always appealed to me the most about Touch of Evil is the arresting, engrossing visual brio of it all. The camera is almost always moving, the image always off-kilter and askew, Russell Metty's camera always finding new angles to surprise and tease us with. The eye is always distracted. Another thing I noticed last night was how many shots feature crumpled newspaper sheets blowing through the frame like so much tumbleweed, which is both visually lovely and a sign of how trashy the town is. How tawdry everything looks, how exciting. The stench of corruption, sweet as maryjane. Mancini's raucous, rocking, bump-and-grind score. "I'm always thinking of her, drunk or sober. What else is there to think about, except my job, my dirty job?"
