Werth: Good, Eefning.
Wise: Nice Hitchcock impersonation, Werth.
Werth: Thank you.
Wise: Especially the double-chin.
Werth: I'm not wearing a double—yes, thank you. I'm wearing this clearly fake double-chin in honor of BAM's The Hitchcock 9, starting tomorrow.
Wise. They will be showing nine restored Hitchcock silent films giving Hitch aficionados the chance to see some of the master's earliest work.
Werth: We've covered many Hitchcock films over the last couple of years, but one Hitchcock film I've always wanted to gab about is his 1963 feather-fest, The Birds.
Wise: I hope you weren't too chicken to do it before.
Werth: The Birds is a genuinely terrifying film that shows what would happen if Nature turned against her human oppressors and pecked out mankind's eyes.
But I don't think that's what The Birds is really about. The more I watch the film, the more I notice how the environmental angle comes up quite late in the film, and that a good part of the film is focusing on something else—sex.
Wise: Sounds like we need a double feature of The Birds and Killer Bees.
Werth: The entire first part of the film has nothing to do with crazed seagulls. Melanie Daniels (introducing Tippi Hedren) is a blonde, debutante phony. After pretending to be a salesgirl in a bird shop to flirt with g-gorgeous Mitch Brenner (60's heartthrob Rod Taylor), Daniels decides to pursue this virtual stranger to his seaside country home to give his daughter a couple of lovebirds.
As Daniels drives her expensive sportscar into the rustic town of Bodega Bay the townspeople gaze at her with distrust. This stranger isn't just a fur-clad city-girl in the country. She is a woman doing the unthinkable: she is chasing the man. Daniels' sexual aggressiveness is as garish as the two lovebirds in her car and Hitchcock slyly shoots the first part of the film to accentuate how unwelcome Daniels is. After sneaking into his house and dropping off the birds, causing Brenner to chase her, Daniels grins like a cat, sensing she has snagged her romantic prey.
It is at this moment that the first bird dives at her head, drawing blood. From this moment on Daniels is not only being attacked by Bodega Bay's birdlife, but also Brenner's stuffy mother (Jessica Tandy) and the citizenry who tell her she is "evil."
Wise:It doesn't pay to cross Miss Daisy.
Werth: But film analysis aside, Hitchcock is in top thriller form in The Birds. He uses his signature camera tricks of characters in the foreground, hallways that create a forced perspective, and an ingenious bird's eye view of the destruction of Bodega Bay care of Oscar-nommed special effects director Ub Iwerks.
He takes great delight in making the audience aware of the dangers that the film's characters are not aware of. You just want to shout at Tippi, "Get off that bench and run before those crows mess up your impeccable hair!!!"
And the sound design by Remmi Gassmann is eerie, achieving all its impact without a single note of orchestration. While it's never mentioned with the same gravitas as Vertigo or Psycho, The Birds is memorable because Hitchcock was exploring so much more than screaming kids being attacked by some peck-happy fowl.
Wise: Rope (1948) is another Hitchcock project where sex is the subtext. Inspired by thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, the film begins with the murder of golden boy David Kentley (Dick Hogan) by his former classmates Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) who are out to prove that their intellectual superiority allows them to commit the perfect crime. Before disposing of the body—and to add a grisly embellishment—they plan a party with the dead man's parents and fiancée as well as with their former prep school housemaster Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart).
Brandon has always idolized Rupert who taught the boys about Nietzsche's theories, and by committing the murder, Brandon hopes to intellectually surpass his mentor. The scheme only falls apart as Phillip gradually loses his nerve.
Werth: It's hard to sit on a trunk containing a corpse and not sweat a little.
Wise: The action unspools in real time, and Hitchcock used long takes carefully edited together to simulate a single continuous take, the camera moving among the actors and the set in a complicated ballet that allows the tension to build to an almost unbearable extreme. These extended shots also allow the actors space to explore their character's body language, moving in and out of the frame while still being present in the scene.
Rope was also Hitchcock's first color film, and he uses his palette carefully, confining himself mostly to muted grays in the beginning as Brandon and Phillip attempt to convince each other of their rationality, but descends into lurid neon flashes as the horror of their act comes to light.
Werth: I love how Stewart toys with his old students. It's almost as if he knows from the moment he walks into the room that there's something in that hope chest...
Wise: Although the focus of the film is on a single murder, it films much closer to a movie about a lovers' quarrel.
Brandon and Phillip stand uncomfortably close to one another and speak in a post-coital whisper, particularly in the moments just after they have committed the murder and dissect their feelings (Brandon is exhilarated while Phillip suffers from regret). Even the practicalities of their daily lives are peculiarly intertwined; Brandon treats Phillip as a sensitive genius, managing his career as a pianist and carefully tending to his emotional outbursts.
The thorn in their relationship comes with the arrival of Rupert who not only teases out the crime but also inspired it with his lofty talk of philosophy. Brandon has obviously harbored a long-standing fascination with his former housemaster that festered into the kind of one-upmanship usually reserved for past lovers. But it's this fascination twisted into obsession that finally unravels the crime.
Werth: So, Wise, with all this gabbing about color Hitchcock films, I hope our devoted readers check out some of his black and white fare.
Wise: And neither killer birds nor murderous aesthetes will keep them away from next week's Film Gab.
Werth: Hello, Wise.
Wise: Hello, Werth. Still basking in the glow of our weekend movie marathon?
Werth: Yes, and my cranberry sparkly cocktail.
Wise: It was great fun to watch the American Masters documentary On Cukor (2000) as well as one of his masterworks, The Philadelphia Story starring his frequent collaborator and longtime friend Katharine Hepburn. Based on the Broadway smash by Philip Barry, the film opens with one of the most recognizable (and funny) scenes in all of screwball comedy.
Hepburn plays Tracy Samantha Lord, an imperious socialite from the Philadelphia Main Line, who divorces her first husband, playboy C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant), and chooses self-made man George Kittredge (John Howard) as her next fiancé. The nuptuals attract the attention of the tabloid press and with the help of Dexter, reporter Macauly Conner (Jimmy Stewart) and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) finagle invitations under assumed names sparking a series of madcap adventures, revelations, and hijinks that eventually lead to happily ever after.
Werth: Don't forget the drunken shenanigans!
Wise: After rapidly ascending the Hollywood ladder in the mid-30's, Hepburn's star had been somewhat tarnished by a series of misfires and flops at the end of the decade, prompting theater owners to label her "box office poison." Hepburn retreated to the stage, found a hit in Barry's play, and with the help of then-sweetheart Howard Hughes, she purchased the film rights and brought the project back to MGM where she insisted that Cukor direct.
It turns out to have been a savvy decision because his guidance helped her forge a performance that embraced both her somewhat prickly image as well as her more tender, romantic side.
Werth: Not to mention directing Stewart to his only competitive Oscar win.
Wise: The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent. Grant deploys all his usual charms, although he mutes his performance with a tinge of sadness, marking him as a heel who has seen the error of his ways. Stewart also shows unsuspected facets of his personality, leavening his everyman quality with a romantic passion that makes him alluring to Tracy. Cukor's hand is everywhere evident in the finished film, coaxing greater nuance from his actors and allowing the camera to linger on their faces, bringing the film's drama and humor into greater focus.
Werth: I found it interesting that On Cukor neglected to mention the long relationship Cukor enjoyed with film queen Joan Crawford. Starting with his pinch-hitting direction of 1935's No More Ladies, Cukor would direct Crawford only four times, but his work with her on 1939's The Women helped catapault Crawford into a new phase of her career, and started a lifelong friendship.
Crawford credited Cukor with helping her give more depth to her roles, and the Cukor Effect is on full display in their 1941 collaboration, A Woman's Face. A re-make of a 1938 Swedish film that helped launched Ingrid Bergman's career, A Woman's Face begins in a Swedish courtroom where Anna Holm (Crawford) is on trial for murder.
Wise: Sounds like Mildred Pierce meets the Swedish Chef.
Werth: Witness testimonies kickstart the flashback where Anna meets spendy playboy Torsten Barring (Conrad Veidt) as he struggles to pay his check at her restaurant, a Hansel and Gretel-esque setting with Anna as the waiting witch. We also see a fantastic makeup job as shadows and Anna's turned head are undone and we discover that half of her face is horribly disfigured.
The scarring is repellant and made more dramatic by the fact that we can still see half of Crawford's legendary face—a constant reminder of the beauty that might have been. Shunned and mistreated all her life, Anna's soul is as disfigured as her face, so she makes a living as a blackmailer and falls in love with the no-good Torsten.
Wise: I guess absconding with sopranos to the basement of the Paris Opera House was out of the question.
Werth: During a blackmail touch gone wrong, Anna meets plastic surgeon Dr.Gustaf Segert (Melvyn Douglas) who decides to re-make Anna's face. Like a Pygmalion of the soul, Dr. Segert hopes that by restoring the beauty to Anna's face, he can restore the beauty to her conscience. But Anna is now torn between two men and herself. Crawford often played tough cookies who were bad because they'd been made that way. But in no other film is this theme given such graphic visual expression.
Anna is coarse, cold-blooded and, in one particular slapping scene, vicious. But we see the grisly reason why: Crawford's innate sense of "otherness" is given a physical reality, so when her face is returned to normal (if Crawford's unique features could ever be considered normal) Crawford gives a great performance struggling to undo the hard exterior she'd formed to protect herself and become a woman deserving of love.
Wise: If only Faye Dunaway had been half as successful in removing her horrifyingly deformed mask.
Werth: Cukor was not usually known for thrillers, but the melodrama in A Woman's Face winds up going in that direction. Cukor made the unique decision not to include underscoring in some of the tensest scenes, letting the environmental sounds of a waterfall and jangling sleighbells give an eeriness to the proceedings.
It's not entirely successful, but A Woman's Face is clearly a warm-up for Cukor who three years later would make one of the best psychological thrillers of the Forties, Gaslight.
Wise: We'll have to watch that one on our next Cukor Festival.
Werth: I'll get the cocktails ready. Film Gabbers, what director-focused film festival would you like to gab about?
Wise: Howdy, Werth. Have a piece of cake!
Werth: Is it already birthday time again at Film Gab? No wonder I can't fit into my Z. Cavaricci jeans.
Wise: Quit your bellyaching and put on these tap shoes. It's Ann Miller's birthday.
Werth: Why didn't you say so in the first place? Make it a big piece of cake and I'll break out my dancing fan.
Wise: Just be sure to leave some room for soup.
Werth: All that's missing from that number is a giant saltine.
Wise: Miller's career really took off in the late 40's when she landed at MGM. Her tough girl style and gorgeous gams injected a jolt of electricity into the sumptuous musicals produced by Arthur Freed, but few films take as full advantage of her talents as On the Town (1949). The film follows three sailors on shore leave—Gene Kelly as Gabey, Frank Sinatra as Chip, and Jules Munshin as Ozzie—as they sing, dance and find sweethearts while exploring New York City.
Miller plays Claire, an anthropologist with a penchant for prehistoric man, who eventually falls for Ozzie, while Chips falls for Hildy (Betty Garrett) and Gabey falls for the elusive Miss Turnstiles, Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen). This was the first movie that Gene Kelly co-directed with Stanley Donen, and his signature, muscular style of dancing infuses the film with the kind of aggressive exuberance that was so much a part of his persona.
Werth: You say aggressive exuberance, I say unrelenting ham.
Wise: At Kelly's insistence, a fair amount of the film was shot on location in New York—most notably the American Museum of Natural History, Rockefeller Center, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge—instead of recreating those landmarks in the studio, and, surprisingly, the juxtaposition of the real and the manufactured works incredibly well.
Cinematographer Harold Rossen makes the city look like a picture postcard, transforming the streets and avenues into a fantasy landscape that blends seamlessly with the Hollywood sets.
Werth: The one downside of shooting on location was the crowd of screaming fans that showed-up wherever Sinatra appeared.
Wise: The screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green is full of zest and wit while highlighting each member of the leading sextet. Sinatra shares a duet with Betty Garrett that manages to be both funny and touching, and Kelly leads Vera-Ellen in one of the dream ballets that were rapidly becoming part of his movie signature.
But it's Ann Miller who steals scene after scene, not just with her top notch dancing skills, but with the incredible force of her personality as it bursts from the screen.
Werth: Before Miller was known for tap-dancing her way through scenery, she appeared in 1938's Best Picture Oscar-winner, You Can't Take It with You. Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning George S. Kaufman play of the same name, You Can't stars Jean Arthur as Alice Sycamore, a secretary who has a yen for her young boss, Tony Kirby (a pre-Mr. Smith James Stewart.) Their romance is running hot and heavy until Tony tries to introduce his upper-crust mother and father to Alice's bohemian family.
Wise: This is beginning to sound like the plot to a Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell flick.
Werth: Besides the fact that the Sycamore clan is a bunch of artistic, anarchist goofballs led by the folksy Grandpa Vanderhof (a usually seated Lionel Barrymore), their home is the last holdout on the block that Tony's dad (Edward Arnold) is attempting to buy out before demolishing it to make way for his new munitions plant.
This makes for an uncomfortable dinner, made even more uncomfortable by sister Essie's (Miller) clumsy attempts at ballet in the living room. According to her teacher, Kolenkhov, "Confidentially, it steenks."
Wise: I'm sure Ann Miller mostly smelled of Jean Naté and shoe polish.
Werth: Social stratum collide in a courtroom and love has to find a way to overcome the gap between the haves and the have-nots all while Essie twirls and falls on the carpet. The little man versus corporate greed story was one that director Frank Capra made his stock in trade.
He'd already won two Oscars for Best Director (It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and the Academy would add another one to his mantle for You Can't. Capra had a knack for kooky characters, like the denizens of the Sycamore home, and created supportive, tough communities on screen that resembled his ideal of America.
You Can't isn't as compelling as Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), or It's a Wonderful Life (1946), partly because it feels preachy in a way that those other films don't. But it's still a great example of the successful post-Depression/pre-WWII films that gave cinematic voice to the political struggle going on in America, all while audiences munched away on their popcorn.
Wise: And on that note, I think I'll try to hunt down a video of Ann Miller with Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies.
Werth: You're welcome. Tune-in next week for more fancy footwork here at Film Gab.
Wise: Howdy, Werth.
Werth: Hello, Wise. You look exhausted. And what's with all the bags?
Wise: It was Fashion Week here in New York last week, and I've been inspired to live with a greater sense of style. So, I've been out shopping, trying to discover my very own je ne se quoi.
Werth: And what have you found?
Wise: That fashion is probably best left to the professionals and the teenage gazelles that inspire them. Still, it's nice to look good, and when I can't afford the latest from Lanvin, I like to return to one of the style icons of the Silver Screen: William Powell in The Thin Man.
Werth: You've sung the stylish praises of Nick and Nora Charles once before.
Wise: Which is part of the pleasure of MGM's greatest detective duo: there's always another sequel to enjoy. After the Thin Man (1936) begins a few days after the events of the first film as Nick (Powell) and Nora (the ever delightful Myrna Loy) alight from the train in their hometown of San Francisco, anxious to begin celebrating New Year's Eve.
But first they have to overcome two obstacles: the crowd of unruly uninvited guests already jammed into their home and a last-minute invitation to dinner from Nora's strident Aunt Katherine (Jessie Ralph). Once there, they discover that Nora's cousin Selma (Elissa Landi) is miserable because her two-timing husband has been missing for days. Even her childhood sweetheart David Graham (Jimmy Stewart) can't seem to cheer her up.
Werth: Maybe she should try jumping off a bridge and being saved by an angel.
Wise: Escaping Selma's tears (and Aunt Katherine's stultifying guests) Nick and Nora head to a nightclub where they find Selma's ne'er do well husband Robert (Alan Marshall) making time with a two-bit nightclub singer (Dorothy McNulty who later took the name Penny Singleton and provided the voice for Jane Jetson). Robert recently convinced David to pay him off for leaving Selma, and when he turns up with a bullet in his back, Selma is the number one suspect, and Nick and Nora begin to investigate.
Their search turns up an assortment of petty thieves, gangster lowlifes, stereotyped evil Asians, and a load of slapstick provided by Powell's tippling and their loyal dog Asta's not-so-loyal doggie wife.
Werth: That bitch.
Wise: As in the first film, the clues don't exactly lead up to the final revelation, but who really cares when the detectives are as charming as these?
Not exactly a matinee idol, Powell and his tailor managed to transform him into one of the most debonair figures in Hollywood history: handsome, elegant, and charming no matter how much hooch he's poured down his gullet. His trademark pencil mustache and swank double breasted suits with sharp lapels make him the epitome of style no matter the era. And Myrna Loy, who began her career as little more than a pretty face, livens her beauty with crack comic timing, making her the fantasy wife of millions of moviegoers. (She also gets to wear a jaw-dropping sequined gown that reveals plenty of décolletage and almost all of her back.) Their pairing makes the perfect fashion statement, whatever the season.
Werth: The fashion statement of Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine (1998) would be a tad more overstated than Mr. Powell's. Set in the wild era of 70's glam-rock and after, Goldmine follows reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) as he tries to find out whatever happened to his rock idol, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) ten years after his 1974 feathery, faked assassination. The film becomes a glittery trip down memory lane as Stuart interviews an old manager (Michael Feast) and Slade's sycophantic ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) about the time they spent with the ego-maniacal performer.
Wise: So, sort of a disco-era Citizen Kane, only this time Rosebud's a Moog synthesizer.
Werth: The timeline gets all jumbled as flashbacks collide and Stuart's own personal memories become intertwined with the saga of Brian Slade. The film's exploration of "otherness" and adoration is a mass of intense visual design, erotica, and fashion.
Sandy Powell's Oscar-nominated costumes bring the age back to vivid life with platform shoes and boots, boas, neckscarves, tight jeans, velvet jackets, and glitter adorning nearly every character, with the exception of when Ewan McGregor bares it all (and I mean all) on stage as the savage Curt Wild.
Wise: That's one rock show I'd pay to see.
Werth: Slade's show costumes are inspired constructions reminiscent of the creations from David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period. Bowie himself pulled his support of the film when he realized Haynes was basing it on unauthorized bios of Bowie, but the resemblances to infamous performers like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and even Kurt Cobain are unmistakeable.
Goldmine feels like an extended music video at times, but then, looking back, perhaps that's the best way to depict that era. Haynes' focus on fashion goes beyond simple replication and celebrates the sense of identity, sexuality, and freedom that clothing can bring. So even if I wouldn't be caught dead in sequin-studded tights with thigh-high purple platform boots and a Louis XIV velvet jacket—
Wise: You wouldn't?
Werth: Maybe for next week's Film Gab.
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