Stressed-out Gab

Werth: Hey there, Wise.  What’s with all the scented candles?  

Wise: Hello, Werth.  It’s Stress Awareness Month and I’m trying to bring a little enlightenment and peace into my world.  Care for some chamomile tea?  

Werth: Only if it’s spiked with vodka. Look, is this a bad time for Film Gab?  Because we can do this after you give yourself an oat bran facial or whatever else you have planned.  

Wise: No, I’m prepared.  Talking to a Friend is one of the Ten Strategies for Stress Reduction.  

Werth: So is Talking about Movies where Characters are more Stressed than You are.

Wise: And I have the perfect stressed-out damsel with Bette Davis in one of her most camp-tastic roles: the tragic southern belle driven crazy by a secret from her past in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. 


Werth: I love a good ellipsis.

Wise: Planned as a follow-up to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? the movie originally re-teamed Davis with Joan Crawford until either illness or on-set rivalry forced Crawford to drop out of the picture.  A number of replacements were considered, including Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Vivien Leigh whose legendary response to the offer was: “I can just about stand to look at Joan Crawford at six in the morning on a southern plantation, but I couldn't possibly look at Bette Davis.”  Instead, Olivia de Havilland got the role of the poor cousin returning to the ancestral home of Davis’s Charlotte who has lived as a mad recluse ever since her married lover was discovered hacked to bits in the summer house.  

Werth: I hate when that happens.  

Wise: Charlotte has been shunned by the locals ever since the murder thirty years ago, and she gets no sympathy from her neighbors when the state serves her an eviction notice that orders the demolition of her plantation house to make way for a brand-new super highway.  Pinning her hopes on her cousin Miriam to save her home, Charlotte gradually realizes that her poor relation has grown into something more sinister.  With de Haviland’s Miriam on the scene, Charlotte begins having nightmarish visions, flashbacks to her lover’s dismembered corpse, but when she appeals to her cousin for help, the comfort that Miriam offers is cold indeed.  

Werth: And de Havilland definitely uses some of her goody-two-shoes routine from Gone With the Wind to chilling effect.
   

Wise: She really has some terrifying moments, especially when she’s dealing with Charlotte’s loyal maid, played with high Southern Gothic abandon by Agnes Moorehead who received her fourth Best Supporting Actress nomination for her efforts.  But she’s just part of a fantastic cast that includes Joseph Cotten, Victor Buono, George Kennedy, Bruce Dern, and an almost unrecognizable Mary Astor in her final film role as the bitter widow of Charlotte’s dead lover.   

Werth: Moonlight and magnolias mixed with an ax.

Wise: Living up to the myth of Scarlett O’Hara would make anyone anxious. 

 
Werth: Maybe that’s true, but there’s really nothing like the stress of being a woman of leisure in Edwardian England, and that’s why George Cukor’s 1944 thriller Gaslight really stresses me out.

Wise: Really?  I thought it would be the lack of electric lighting.  

Werth: Ingrid Bergman plays Paula Alquist, the blushing bride of handsome and romantic pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer.) They have returned from their honeymoon to live in her childhood home, nestled in a picturesque London square complete with crowing flower peddlers.

Wise: I feel the stress washing over me in waves.

Werth: Did I mention that as a child, Paula found her famous opera star aunt strangled to death in that same house, the murder never solved?

Wise: That could make being carried over the threshold a little creepy.

Werth: Soon poor Paula begins to forget and lose things, hear footsteps at night, and imagine that the gas lamps in her bedroom are dimming all because she is, as her husband so gently puts it,  “high-strung.”

Wise: I’ve heard about cures for high-strung Edwardian women...

Werth: The fun in this film comes from Cukor’s choice to let the audience in on what’s going on. Almost immediately he gives visual cues that the person behind Paula’s impending madness is none other than her loving husband. Playing against the French lover roles that made him famous, Boyer soon reveals that he is, what the French call, a douchebag. His refined sadism and controlling, condescending behavior falls only slightly short of the husband in The Burning Bed.

Wise: That sounds like an abandoned Calvin Klein fragrance. 

Werth: What really makes this thriller work is that even though we know who the villain is, Bergman’s Paula does not—and it is her superb performance as a woman struggling with self-doubt and the terror of encroaching madness that makes us climb the walls right along with her. In another actress’ hands we might say, “Hey, stupid. Look at the keylight shining on your husband’s evil, beady eyes,” but Bergman’s fragility and beauty makes audiences want to protect her—or at least to cheer her on when she decides to protect herself.  That year Bergman would beat no less than Claudette Colbert, Greer Garson, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis to win her first of three Oscars. It was a warm-up for her part as another endangered female in master stress-maker Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Notorious which premiered a few months later.

Wise: Talk about out of the fire and into the Nazi espionage ring.

 Werth: In Gaslight, Bergman is joined by steadily working (but not-at-all British) Joseph Cotten, dithering nosy neighbor Dame May Witty, and in a star-making turn, the very young Angela Lansbury as snide, tartlet maid, Nancy. Cukor is not generally remembered for his thrillers, but it was clearly a genre that he understood. He very skillfully melded his “women’s picture” style with the mystery genre, sculpting nerve-wracking close-ups of Bergman as she strained to maintain her sanity under those maddening, flickering gaslamps.

Wise: Whew!  I’m not sure if delving into these stress-filled movies made me feel better or worse.  Maybe we should put on some Enya and journal about our experiences.   

Werth: You do the Orinoco Flow. I’ll think of themes for next week’s Film Gab.

 

There’s No Business Like Snow Business

Werth: Hi there, Wise.

Wise: Hello, Werth.  

Werth: I was just sitting here thinking about all this lovely snow we’ve been getting.  

Wise: I know.  It’s turned New York into a winter wonderland. 

Werth: Or a wonderslush depending on your street corner. I was worried about you.  I knew you had gone to the farm for the weekend, but didn’t know if you could make it back.  

Wise: Luckily, I left just before the snow started, otherwise I would have been stuck out there until the mule team came by on the sledge.  

Werth: I do hope John Proctor and Goody Smith brought their snowblower.

Wise: As it was, I got to watch the start of the storm from the train.  It was really beautiful to see the landscape gradually fill up with snow.  It reminded me of how great it is when movies use snow in interesting ways.  

Werth: Like in Scarface? 

Wise: Actually I was thinking about  Murder on The Orient Express.  Based on the mystery novel by Agatha Christie, it’s a classic turn on the locked room formula.  All the characters are trapped on a snowbound train, a murder is committed in the middle of the night, and Christie favorite Hercule Poirot must solve the mystery. 

Werth: That darned Belgian.

Wise: It’s also a classic of 70’s cinema with the cast packed with Hollywood luminaries from all over the map.  Albert Finney plays Poirot, Richard Widmark is the paranoid American businessman who winds up dead, Sean Connery is delightfully blustery, and Ingrid Bergman plays against type as a stuttering milquetoast.  

Werth: That train is jam-packed with stars! 

Wise: But that’s not even half the cast.  Lauren Bacall is in it and so are John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins, Michael York, and Jacqueline Bisset.  It even has Dame Wendy Hiller who is not only one of my favorite actresses but also originated the role of Eliza Doolittle in the film version of Geroge Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion long before Audrey Hepburn lip synced her way through My Fair Lady.  Every performance is delightfully juicy, filled with scenery chewing moments as well as some real tenderness.  It’s also a satisfying mystery.  

Werth: It must be hard to create story action when everyone’s stuck on a train.  

Wise: Director Sidney Lumet makes some interesting choices in the ways he shot the film.  During the interrogation scenes, the camera lingers on the characters’ faces, allowing the audience to speculate on their guilt or innocence.  There are also a number of flashbacks, and Lumet gives those a nightmarish quality, suggesting the furious anger of the murderer. 

Some of the most memorable shots, however, are exteriors of the train in the snow.  Lumet uses the train’s progress to telegraph the progress of the investigation: we see it stuck in a snowbank when the mystery is at its murkiest, and then, as soon as Poirot reveals the solution, the train emerges from the ice.  

Werth: So did the butler do it?  

Wise: I have to admit, the ending is not such a surprise, especially given the calibre of the actors present, but the conclusion makes a particularly satisfying end. What’s your favorite snowbound classic? 

Werth: Amazingly enough, my favorite snowy movie is a mystery as well—1996’s Fargo.

Wise: Ooh! That IS snowy.

Werth: From its opening shot of a small bird followed by a car emerging from a raging snowstorm, Fargo uses the heavy snow of a Middle-North winter to do more than just tell us they’re in Minnesota. The snow becomes an active participant in the film’s design. Fargo is what you might call a Film Blanc.

Wise: Is that a Belgian candy? 

Werth: It’s like the photo negative of the Film Noir. Film Noir uses the stylized lack of light to create a distinct look. Shadows cut across the faces of femmes fatales and mugs with guns, hiding their motives and highlighting their dark intentions. In Fargo, instead of shadow, we have blinding, white snow. The bodies of the victims don’t lie in half-light, but contrast bloodily with the pure snow. 

The criminals aren’t dark masterminds like Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon or Kirk Douglas in Out of the Past. They are snowy morons blinking in the light reflected by snowdrifts. Jerry Lundergaard’s temper tantrum with an ice-scraper is acted out in a snow-covered, empty parking lot as if on a white canvas for all to see. The darkness (and the idiocy) of these characters has nowhere to hide.

Wise:  I think what’s interesting about Fargo is how it seems so comfortable being a dark thriller, and a comedy at the same time.

Werth: I remember seeing the trailer in the theaters and when we heard, “From the makers of Raising Arizona,” and the two hookers with their sing-song accents started head-bobbing, we were certain Fargo was going to be a laugh riot. But it’s not—not really. The Cohen Brothers film what is essentially a murder mystery with all the requisite blood, violence and tension, but they tell the story with characters that are so quirkily ordinary, it becomes comic. William H. Macy’s Oscar®-nominated performance as Jerry Lundergaard is so expertly pathetic you almost feel sorry for him—even if he is having his own wife kidnapped. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare as the kidnappers are like a filthy, dysfunctional vaudeville act. 

And Frances McDormand, as the pregnant, homespun Columbo who tracks down the kidnappers, goes from the blandest of conversations with her husband about duck paintings for a stamp competition to walking through a body-filled crime scene where she nails every detail of the murder. Her performance is funny, brave and touching and it won her a much-deserved Oscar®.

Wise: Uh yeah?

Werth: Is that your attempt at a Minnesota accent?

Wise: Uh yeah?

Werth: And on that comically thrilling note, I’m going to go outside and try to find a snowbound trains full of old movie stars.

Wise: Would you settle for a subway car full of old hobos?

Werth: As long as one of them is Belgian.

Wise: Tune in next week for a piping hot serving of Film Gab!