Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

As a contemporary viewer familiar with war-time films of the forties, Shadow of a Doubt is a disturbing and relentlessly modern look at the corruption of small town American life. In an era when the movies all but had to portray only positive images of this country, Alfred Hitchcock was testing the limits of decency and morality as defined by Hollywood’s Production Code. Hitchcock takes the all-American family and introduces malice so true it consumes.

The horror is, of course, Uncle Charlie. He visits his sister and her family in Santa Rosa, California, and develops a strange relationship with his niece, Charlotte, affectionately referred to as Charlie in honor of her uncle. She soon suspects her Uncle Charlie of being the Merry Widow murderer and is plunged into turmoil over her family obligations and the vulgarity of his acts.

The director’s previous American films had had a distinctly English feel: gothic, elegant, mild-mannered, even Saboteur, the American remake of The 39 Steps. Hitchcock was keen on capturing the America he’d been seeing, and Thornton Wilder was hired to script the original story that was, by Hitchcock’s own admission, his first American film.

Hitchcock would often advise his actors on a technique he called negative acting, where an actor would be smiling at the beginning of a scene and then lose the smile after a dramatic blow, capturing the extremes of human emotion. He was working in archetypes, presenting clearly made movies to mainstream audiences. The structure of Shadow of a Doubt unfolds similarly. When we’re first introduced to the Newton family, it’s a kind of clichéd look at bucolic family life. Everybody is nice and genteel and pleasant to an almost cartoonish degree, or at least to a laughable one. This might appear dated when we, less as Americans and more as human begins, know that this isn’t the reality of daily life. But the light atmosphere Hitchcock cultivates in the film’s early scenes heightens the dark aspects of the story to follow, dark like the column of smoke snaking behind Uncle Charlie’s train.

Perhaps the most glaring detail of the film is the Young Charlie’s relationship with her uncle. Throughout, Hitchcock connects the two Charlies with similar visuals, setting up the recurring Hitchcockian theme of doubles. Young Charlie is always saying how alike they are... like twins! There is even a disturbing scene where Uncle Charlie gives to his niece a ring from one of his victims. While the thought is innocent enough I guess, the Uncle slips the ring onto her finger not unlike in a marriage ceremony. In the end, Young Charlie is forced into becoming like her Uncle because of her Uncle. I was always struck by Young Charlie’s line, “Don’t touch me, Uncle Charlie,” after she confronts him with her beliefs. This is the moment when Charlie has lost her innocence. She later threatens to kill her uncle if he doesn’t leave the family.

Originally it seems their relationship was to take an even edgier turn. In Hitchcock’s own story outline, dated May 11, 1942, he writes, “...her (Young Charlie) being attracted to him (Uncle Charlie) is going to possibly upset the humorous state of affairs between the Uncle and the family.” Is Hitchcock detailing their relationship as it exists in the finished film, or is this a direction the director would have liked to travel with his unconventional family drama? It reads to me like the latter, and while it is clear that Young Charlie has very confused feeling towards her Uncle, the family never is bothered by their friendship. Of course the extreme relations would never have been allowed to continue into a second draft of the screenplay back in 1942, but this idea gives us excellent insight into Hitchcock’s lifelong obsession with unusual sexual behavior.

(The outline for Shadow of a Doubt is published in Dan Auiler’s invaluable book, Hitchcock’s Notebooks, which gives a full understanding of Hitchcock’s working methods from conception to release. The book is a patchwork made up of materials covering Hitchcock’s entire career.)

The performances in the film are among the best in all of Hitchcock’s work. In a marked detour from his usual mother figures, Emma Newton (Young Charlie’s mother) is not just the sweet and doting martyr expected of the era. One gets the feeling she’s on the verge of a breakdown, and Patricia Collinge gives a complex and heartbreaking performance that perhaps went beyond the call of the script. Teresa Wright is perfect as Charlie. She expels the structure of the story exactly; acting naive by way of Shirley Temple in the beginning, then tortured and conflicted at the end. Though it is the showiest part, it should not be overlooked: Joseph Cotton as Uncle Charlie, for a 1940s movie killer, is unique. When I first saw the film and even now, I was surprised by how much Anthony Hopkins’ performance of Hannibal Lector mirrored Uncle Charlie, especially when Cotton gives the speech at the dinner table about “those silly wives.” His voice is emotionless and monotone, as if he’s slipping into his compulsion. It’s a remarkable portrayal not only for its time but now. It elicits a response from today’s audiences that maybe they were not expecting from such an old film.

An unsuccessful element of the picture is the recurring image of the dancers’ waltz. It is shown after moments of great tension, almost the euphoric release of a satiated killer. The image can be seen as Hitchcock’s visual attempt at Uncle Charlie’s unstable mind, but I’m afraid the technique is just bewildering. It is not a dated element of the film; I can’t see it working in the 1940s either, but we’ve seen the director use this technique in his silent days. It feels like the weak cousin of the famous shot in The Lodger of the fade-away glass ceiling. Since Hitchcock could not dramatize the footsteps from the floor above in sound, he simply showed us the suspected villain walking over the heads of the innocent family below. The similar theme in Shadow of a Doubt never works as the director intended, and in fact feels like a copout. Instead of showing us the emotional resolution to very intense scenes (the finale on the train, for example) this shot quickly fades up, accompanied by the tune of the Merry Widow’s Waltz.

The Waltz was infused into the dramatic score by frequent Hitchcock composer Dimitri Tiomkin. The score itself is melodramatic and evasive, and indeed Hitchcock’s scores were the typical European sound the Golden Age is remembered for. It is an unsettling sound for this picture, one that distracts too much from the action onscreen without support. It wasn’t until the director teamed with Bernard Herrmann in the mid-fifties that the Hitchcock film found its music. Herrmann’s music would take on narrative dimensions that would have served well a film like Shadow of a Doubt, but taken on its own Tiomkin’s score is very good. He himself is an underappreciated composer from the era, and his score for Hitchcock’s I Confess is actually very good.

Ultimately, Shadow of a Doubt remains one of Hitchcock’s best movies because it is a clear example of the director’s sense of the world. From out of the censored studio era, it’s refreshing that an artist could commit to celluloid a personal, cynical voice. Nothing, it seems, is as it should be in a Hitchcock film, and I’m not talking about genre. While his films are certainly nail biters, I believe the reason Hitchcock was so great was because he understood the human condition and its flaws. Psycho is not a horror film. It’s a complex study of trapped souls. Nor is Shadow of a Doubt simply a suspense film. It’s a story of morality and of people trapped within themselves, almost certainly a parallel of the repressed social conditions. To call Alfred Hitchcock’s films shallow is to ignore the complexity that is bubbling beneath the surface of his facades.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Thornton Wilder
Stars: Joseph Cotton, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge

USA

In English

Runtime: 108 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036342/

Inspector Bellamy (2009, Bellamy)

There’s a lot going on in Inspector Bellamy. What could have been a simple mystery instead layers multiple story threads, each working separately the way real life does, and in unison, creating a psychological portrait not just of its lead character but of the world he inhabits.

Inspector Bellamy is curious; about the machinations of life, the reasons why. He is on vacation with his beautiful, youthful wife Françoise, but cannot get away from what we assume is his passion: crime. A mysterious man shows up with a confession—he has killed someone. We know from the opening credits that a car has crashed off a cliff, killing—deforming—the driver. Television reports tell us the deceased man was not who everyone thought it would be. Instead of the insurance salesman who owned the car, the victim is an unknown, and the insurance salesman has attempted to defraud his company and is now in hiding. The man who visits Bellamy is in fact the missing man, at first under the thin alias of Noël Gentil but really Emile Leullet. Who is the dead man then, and why does Inspector Bellamy indulge Leullet in his late night confessions? Does he want to single-handedly solve a popular mystery for fame? For justice? His own curiosity? The answer comes after the climax which is less anti-climatic when viewing the film as a straight-forward mystery, but the reason for Bellamy’s indulgence allows us to understand his entire career as an inspector.

The story threads of Inspector Bellamy are slow in revealing themselves, but the film is more rewarding for it. In comes Bellamy’s brother, Jacques, handsome, young, a loser and a drunk. Bellamy and Jacques have a tense relationship, and Françoise is the mediator between them. But the more The Inspector discovers about the Leullet case the more he is convinced his life mirrors it, that his wife is having an affair.

I admit at first I was lost. That is to say so many small things were happening in short bursts that I did not know what the true story was. For example, characters are introduced who seemingly have no narrative purpose (they will not advance the mystery—this includes the brother character); there are too many convenient personal connections between unlikely characters, etc. It is lucky the film was directed by the seasoned professional Claude Chabrol and stars Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu especially leads an extraordinary cast through a series of twisting scenes with (at first) no purpose and succeeds in making them interesting, so even when I was lost I was not frustrated. Tensions are hinted at, maybe only suggested, by Chabrol, and little by little these present themselves as more menacing and complicated to the extreme.

Chabrol is known mostly as the French Master of Suspense, a moniker that does as much a disservice to him as it did to Hitchcock. Both filmmakers used a popular genre to convey personal interests and demons. Here Chabrol is concerned with being old and overweight, married to a beauty and feeling insecure. There is more, some of which I’m sure exist in my own reading of the film, but anything beyond a superficial telling of the plot is harmful. Things are more fun to discover on your own. But understand the thriller plot is merely the starting point for a personal film filled with character and insight and commentary. The final scene in court where Leullet’s lawyer defends him with a song is a kind of mocking sting at the absurdity of the judicial system which often feels as if it’s working for those who know how to circumvent it rather than for justice.

The film gives me renewed interest in Chabrol’s past films. I’ll admit to not being a fan. I’ve enjoyed his recent work and think Inspector Bellamy is his best effort since 2000, but his past masterpieces, laid during the infancy of the French New Wave, have always bored me. He seemed to me a pale imitator of Hitchcock’s, someone whose work felt more like cheap but brisk 70s American television. I noticed with Inspector Bellamy how this film, more than his other recent works, mirrors his earlier output, particularly Les biches. The machinations of the plot seem to service the dysfunction underneath, and with this renewed interest I may pick up again on Chabrol’s early career.

There isn’t much more for me to say. The film is entertaining and surprisingly subtle. I don’t want to talk about how the various subplots merge into the ultimate story being told, and beyond that the film can stand on its own. Being Chabrol’s final film and first collaboration with Depardieu, this is a film that doesn’t need my recommendation to endorse it.

Inspector Bellamy (2009)

(a.k.a. Bellamy)

Director: Claude Chabrol

Writers: Claude Chabrol and Odile Barski

Stars: Gerard Depardieu, Clovis Cornillac and Jacques Gamblin

France

In French

Runtime: 110 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188983/

Swimming Pool (2003)

François Ozon channels Alfred Hitchcock in his psychological thriller Swimming Pool.  Where Hitchcock only hinted Ozon marches fearlessly ahead in this surprisingly effective, sexually dynamic mystery that is more conventional then it ought to be.  Actors Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier as a would-be mother / daughter team break through the convention with fascinating performances, bringing out the rich nuance in Ozon’s macabre screenplay.

Rampling plays Sarah Morton, acclaimed author of the Inspector Dorwell series.  Sarah retreats to her publisher’s summer home in France to find inspiration for a new, watershed project.  When at first she begins writing the next in her Dorwell series, her tranquil visit is interrupted by Julie, her publisher / lover’s daughter.  Julie is a punk: brash, keeps odd hours, and is inconsiderate of the reserved English author’s peace of mind.  Julie brings different men home and has loud sexual trysts which agitate and seemingly arouse and fascinate Sarah.  The film doesn’t become a murder mystery until ¾ into it, and that section of the film is its weakest, but the set-up to the fatal accident gives us two very opposing rivals, one sexually liberated and one who, in Julie’s words, only writes about dirty things and never does them.  The dirtiest of things, the act which soils most, is done by the less likely of the women.

Ozon is unafraid to show Ludivine Sagnier’s beautiful body.  It’s hard to accept this is the same girl who played the impish Catherine in Ozon’s 8 Women.  I admit I didn’t want to see her naked having adored her in Love Songs.  I’ve associated a certain innocence with her.  Here her breasts are everywhere, and she touches herself more explicitly than a lot of actresses would on screen.  Some of her boy toys’ rear ends are seen, too, and these guys are not really the kind you might want to see naked.  This is something that bothered me about Julie.  She is so beautiful and sexy that you’d think she could attract hotter guys, at least guys her age.  And she probably could, but as we slowly learn this girl must be starving for attention, more so than we might thing even at the film’s climax.  The only nudity that embarrassed me was Rampling’s full frontal shots.  I felt that, while what the character was doing was interesting, it did not grow organically from the script and that Ozon was abusing his actress.  Then I realized that Rampling starred in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter in 1974, and then I understood that she is a fearless performer.

Her relationship with Sagnier’s Julie is really interesting.  Sarah, we sense, is an empty woman.  Her life is lived in her writing.  The only man at home is her invalid father; her lover—her publisher, Julie’s father—keeps big secrets from her, and she doesn’t have children.  I never sensed that Sarah wanted kids, but the twists she takes in her relationship with Julie really allow them to bond as mother and daughter.  I don’t want to give it away, but trust me, they do bond.  It could be that Sarah’s interest in Julie is solely as subject matter for a new book seemingly inspired by the writer’s experiences with the young girl.  In that case Sarah gets too intimately involved in the messes of her characters, but then again it is often said a writer’s characters become like their children.  Sarah’s efforts to protect Julie can be seen as motherly.

I can’t say, though, that I understood the ending.  To be honest, I guessed—and it will be fairly obvious to those familiar with the devices of thriller plots—the twist ending well before the finale, but the way the story unfolds is both unexpected and predictable.  So what does that ending do to Sarah and Julie’s relationship?  I honestly don’t know.  I can make assumptions, or at least explain it to myself, but my explanations alter or destroy the great material of the film, the relationship between Julie and Sarah.  But a twist ending in a thriller is often a letdown.  If the material is excellent, the bad ending can be overlooked, at least by me.  While the ending is not bad, it leaves a lot of questions at too late a point in the experience.  But I didn’t mind, just like I didn’t mind the some of the convention in the later part of the picture.  It is old-fashioned fun but with a sexually explicit twist to murder mysteries.

I’m really starting to like François Ozon’s work.  I’ve seen 4 films, and the first, Under the Sand, was very boring.  It also starred Charlotte Rampling, but it’s the kind of arty flick where the subtly was so subtle that any subtext was altogether lacking.  The other three have been terrific.  Swimming Pool isn’t unique or original, but I was not bored.  There were a few moments where I was nervously inching towards the screen, and if a thriller can do that, it’s won.

Swimming Pool (2003)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Francois Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim

Stars: Charlotte Rampling, Charles Dance and Ludivine Sagnier

France / UK

In English and French

Runtime: 102 minutes

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324133/

8 Women (2002, 8 femmes)

Catherine Deneuve is a film icon.  She has worked with some of the best filmmakers of all time, past and present, and to see her alongside other great French actresses in 8 Women is a pleasure unto itself.  That the film is fun is an added bonus.

8 women are stranded at a snowed in mansion with a dead body in an upstairs bedroom.  The victim is Marcel, who we never see, Deneuve’s Gaby’s husband.  Their oldest daughter Suzon arrives home from college the day her father’s corpse is discovered.  She tries to piece together the last few hours of these very catty, very different women to solve the horrible murder of her father.  That the murderer might be someone she loves is a consolation of sorts.

There’s Mamy, her elderly grandma, played by Danielle Darrieux, an icon of French cinema going back to the 1930s (did I mention 8 Women was made in 2002?).  Mamy is wheelchair bound, and out of charity Marcel and Gaby had taken in her and Augustine, her unmarried, frumpish daughter, Gaby’s jealous sister.  Another French icon—Isabelle Huppert, muse to Claude Chabrol.  The sexy new maid, Louise, may have something to hide.  Emmanuelle Béart plays her.  Most innocent are Madame Chanel, the long time family cook and nanny to Suzon, and Catherine, Suzon’s kid sister.  Catherine is into mystery novels, something her Aunt Augustine doesn’t approve of.  She’s played by Ludiving Sagnier, a gifted young actress whose talents have been employed by Chabrol and Christophe Honoré.  This is an accomplished cast.

But wait—that’s only 7 women.  Marcel’s estranged sister Pierrette arrives looking for the brother she knows is dead.  Pierrette is played by the last of François Truffaut’s famous leading lady lovers, Fanny Ardant.  Perhaps because of Truffaut’s untimely death in 1984, Ardant never got the attention she deserved as an actress, but in Confidentially Yours, Truffaut’s final film, her work in that genre comedy stands up to Jeanne Moreau’s or Catherine Deneuve’s.  Deneuve was Truffaut’s lover in the late 70s, early 80s, and it is suggested that Truffaut had a breakdown when the actress left him.  Ardant was the one who restored his spirits, or so legend goes.  This gossip isn’t really relevant, but it’s in the spirit of 8 Women.  Director François Ozon must have understood the history he was bringing together by uniting Deneuve and Ardant on screen, especially in a dishy cat-fight of a picture.  This back story doesn’t interfere with the film.  But looking at the amazing cast that spans the whole history of French cinema—from poetic realism in the 30s to the 50s films of Max Ophuls, the New Wave and post-New Wave and beyond; 90’s cinema and today—I couldn’t help thinking of these facts.  8 Women is a fun film with style, brave, campy performances by its stars, and a great traditional mystery.  Getting lost in its actors is a complement.  A bad film with all these women would feel more gimmicky.

Gaby had kept her husband and his sister apart, or so she thought.  Nothing is what it seems in Ozon’s mystery musical.  That’s right, the film is a musical.  It’s kind of off-putting at first.  The opening shot, a wide pan along the grounds of the family mansion, looks intentionally phony.  The whole film looks like a 60s parody, down to the wigs and eye-popping color.  When Ludiving Sagnier sings the first number, in both her look and the choreography she reminded so much of Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.  That must have been intentional.  The song, “Daddy, Daddy” You Ain’t with It”, sounds exactly like a song we would’ve got from a live action Disney film of the time.  What’s odd about the music is how Ozon stages it in context to the film.  There are 8 songs, and each one is a solo by the actresses.  They come off more as monologues; they don’t advance the story at all.  One could make the case that they hold up the picture, but not I.  The songs give us information into the respective character.  For example, when Isabelle Huppert sings, we learn her neurotic tendencies that often hurt her sister are in part to spare Gaby’s feelings.  Deneuve’s own song is very odd, and it leads to her and Ardant making out on the floor of the grand hall.  I never expected to see something like this in a movie.  What can I say?  It’s fun to look at.

The mystery in the film is old-fashioned fun.  There’s nothing original.  You have the self-appointed Poirot character, the nosy detective who forgets to cast a light into her own mysterious comings and goings, a wife who stands to gain an inheritance, jealous relatives and a sexy, dangerous sibling.  The hired help has run of the house so they’re suspect too.  The isolated mansion, guard dogs that don’t bark, a key to a locked door that is stolen, transference of guilt—everything that makes a great mystery work.  The musical is a bit odd in this context, but as a movie that loves movies, a movie lover with eat this up.  The style, the cast, the music, the genre mishmash, and the cinematic history and tribute that becomes 8 Women guarantees its admiration from people like me.  I will remain light on the story development.  In this kind of picture every twist is more fun to discover while watching.

In her office, Gaby has a portrait of herself from when she was young.  The painting is a breathtaking likeness of Deneuve.  Looking at those sharp cheekbones I was reminded of images of her from Belle de jour, the era where Deneuve was exceptionally beautiful.  I thought momentarily of the sadness of aging.  Deneuve has done so gracefully, and when she’s on the floor with Ardant, there is a moment when she looks EXACTLY like her younger self.

8 Women is Ozon’s most successful picture.  I’ve never thought too highly of him as a director, maybe because he is better known in the US than Honoré, my contemporary favorite.  His films are always either too stylized or boring.  I think the genre, the grandiosity of the material, and the cast allows Ozon to revel in his indulgences.  I saw the preview of his newest film, Potiche, also starring Catherine Deneuve.  I’m seeing it next week, but already I am pleased to see this same pictorial style at play in his newest film.

8 Women (2002)

(a.k.a. 8 femmes)

Director: Francois Ozon

Writers: Robert Thomas (play), Francois Ozon and Marina de Van

Stars: Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine Sagnier and Firmine Richard

France

In French

Runtime: 111 minutes

To purchase 8 Women, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/8-Women-Fanny-Ardant/dp/B00007J5VT/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1303015572&sr=1-1

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283832/

Rear Window (1954)

I noticed a great migration heading towards the theater.  As I took my seat I recognized a few people from the train.  Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo was playing before the feature, and there was a lot of talk about film and specifically about Hitchcock.  The lights came down and Rear Window started.  This is one of the most romantic experiences I’ve ever had at the movies.  We were all here to see the master’s work.

On the surface, Rear Window is a movie about someone looking outside of his window.  Jimmy Stewart plays Jeff, a photographer temporarily bound to a wheelchair.  He has a fabulous view of the apartments across the way and each window is, if you will, a movie screen.  Each screen is a different show.  His would-be girlfriend Lisa grows impatient as Jeff refuses to settle down, alluding to his “characters” for examples of why not to marry.  He soon comes to suspect that a man has done away with his wife.  He tries to convince everyone in his life, Lisa, his nurse Stella, and his friend, Detective Doyle, but Jeff is the only one with the knowledge of all the strange comings and goings of Mr. Thorwald across the way and the unexplainable disappearance of the man’s wife.  People simply refuse to believe that someone would commit murder in plain sight.

Hitchcock’s films are almost always art.  All are entertaining, but his skill elevates many of his pictures into another realm.  Rear Window’s central theme is looking, not just Jeff looking but we the audience watching the film are exposed to the way that the cinema looks objectively and subjectively into its own world.  Hitchcock’s editing style throughout his career was simple.  Using only three separate shots, the man could display, purely pictorially, the psychological process of his characters.  “The look” is an objective shot, a shot from no particular point of view.  This shot orients the audience, and is the image of the character looking, in this case Jeff looking out his window.  “The POV—what is seen” follows, and this shot is the character’s point of view.  With Hitchcock, these shots always align to the eyesight of the character in the previous shot.  A lesser director would take the POV from an objective angle but in the language of cinema this shot has to be subjective.  Hitch knows to put us into the perspective of his characters, making us implicit in the story.  “The reaction” is a follow-up on the first shot.  Having seen whatever, the character reacts.  It seems simple, almost preposterous, but this three shot technique encompasses what I refer to as the psychology of the cinema.  We know how characters see things, and their reactions tell the story.

Hitchcock was not the great innovator of this technique.  It was apparently set forth by the Russian film theorist and director Lev Kuleshov.  As described by Hitchcock, you take a shot of a man looking, then cut to a shot of a baby.  Now cut to a shot of the man smiling.  What is he?  He’s a kind hearted figure.  Now, take the middle piece of film out and replace it with a shot of a woman in a bikini—keep the same shots of the man.  Now what is he?  A pervert.  Kuleshov went darker, suggesting the image of a dead baby, still with the man looking and smiling.  He now becomes a sadist.  This idea is unique to cinema.  No other art form can encompass the human thought process so clearly and artfully.  It is proof that movies can be art.  This technique is why Rear Window remains one of Hitchcock’s most important films.  It is the clearest, most definable example of his artistic technique.

The director is almost cheating because the set-up of Rear Window—Jeff confined to a wheelchair looking out his rear window—leaves little directorial options for a master filmmaker.  Even when bricks between window panes block our view, we use our imagination to fill in the gaps.  A less talented director would have used an omniscient point of view.  Throughout the film, it is Kuleshov's technique that builds suspense and generates so much of our understanding of these characters.

Hitchcock breaks his own editing rules several times throughout the picture.  Some breaks are logical to create suspense.  Jeff beings suspecting Thornwald at night, and he keeps watch as long as he can but falls asleep around 6am.  We are now given a piece of info unknown to the main character: Thornwald leaves his apartment with, for all intents and purposes, his wife.  When later Jeff accuses Thornwald of murder we somewhat doubt him.  The next time Hitchcock takes us out of sync is after a neighbor’s dog is murdered.  By now Jeff, Lisa, and Jeff’s nurse Stella believe Thornwald has done something wrong.  While everyone is paying attention to the dog’s owner’s impassioned speech about neighborly relations, Hitchcock shows us Thornwald in his darkened apartment coldly, almost erotically, enjoying a cigarette.  It’s arguable if Jeff saw this or not.  I don’t think he did because the last we saw of Jeff he was looking at the grieving woman.  Hitchcock makes numerous curious decisions in this scene.  We see the characters of the various apartments from angles not possible in Jeff’s.  We see close-ups, high and low angle shots, perspectives previously unavailable to us.  I was jarred.  Having become accustomed to the rhythm of editing in Rear Window, I was taken aback by these unusual images.  I don’t know why Hitchcock chose this.  If I had to guess he needed different kinds of shots to carry over the neighbor’s dialogue.  But we even see Jeff and Lisa inside his apartment from a viewpoint across the way.  Their shots had all been objective, and this particular shot felt like someone was looking into them.  We can forgive Hitchcock who is like the Shakespeare of cinema.  His reasons need not be known to us; they are studied and revered.

I realize I’m not critiquing the film.  When talking Hitchcock I have a tendency to speak more formally, often in the third person, and discuss his technique more as a scholar.  I have a long relationship with Hitchcock.  Even before graduating college I had seen all of his movies several times each, and even took a class called Hitchcock and American Experience, examining Hitchcock’s view of American life via his films.  I’ve written extensively about him, and now find it difficult, being so familiar, to give an honest reaction to how I feel about a particular Hitchcock picture.  I find myself, like many movie snobs, praising even bad Hitchcock films, though there are only a few.  Most of his silent films are unbearably slow and horribly conceived, being adapted from talky stage plays.  To Catch a Thief is boring and incomprehensible (though I should watch it again before being so definitive), and regarding Rear Window, I’ve always preferred Hitchcock’s previous film, Dial M for Murder.  Both are cinematically and atmospherically confined in a stage-like way and feature terrific roles for Grace Kelly.  Truth be told I’ve not cared as much for Rear Window as I did seeing a 35mm print with an audience.  Perhaps it was the romantic movie experience, or the energy of an audience watching a taut suspense film filled with humor that allowed me to loosen up.  Regardless I saw a perfect movie.

With each successive viewing I’ve noticed faults towards the middle of the picture.  I always felt the scenes with Detective Doyle were distracting and stopped the movie dead.  Today I realized Hitchcock’s and screenwriter John Michael Hayes’ reason for a detective character.  The story is allowed to continue with ease.  With his character known to the audience, Jeff doesn’t constantly need to be calling the cops to explain the plot.  We get it once and the detective becomes a witness to many things, and adds a bit of humor and puts, by his doubts, Jeff and Lisa closer together.

In fact, the real story of Rear Window is not whether or not Thornwald killed his wife but if Lisa and Jeff will marry.  I really focused on this romantic tug-of-war more so than on any of my previous viewings.  Jimmy Stewart and Kelly are fantastic, but Hitchcock always got terrific performances, and Stewart did his best work for Hitch.  So did Kelly, and she was Hitchcock’s definitive leading lady, though I prefer Ingrid Bergman and Kim Novak.  Their relationship is unique among classic Hollywood films because there is real bickering and disappointment in their conversations.  They get mad and react realistically.  Whenever Lisa makes a move, like bringing a warm dinner from New York’s popular 21 restaurant, Jeff bitterly comments that everything is too perfect.  A rugged photographer, Jeff can’t be tied to a classy fashionista.  Lisa, for her part, can only prove Jeff right by her disgust at the thoughts of not bathing and eating raw foods.  It is their interest in Thornwald (Jeff’s being genuine, Lisa’s possibly encouraged for Jeff’s affections) that begins to change the tone of their relationship.  When Lisa returns to Jeff after breaking into the Thornwalds’ apartment, he gives her such a serine look of love; it is one of the most effective images of love in movie history.  The more adventurous Lisa is, the more Jeff is allocated the dominated figure in the relationship.

It’s interesting to note that each of the windows Jeff watches concerns a different stage of marriage.  Let’s begin with two lone figures, the frustrated Composer and the lonely Miss Lonelyhearts.  They represent Jeff and Lisa respectively.  The Newlyweds represent the impulse for many to marry, at least during the 1950s: the sex!  The Newlyweds draw the shades and make love for several days.  This is the euphoric stage of marriage.  The couple that sleeps outside on the terrace to escape the heat has come to a physical and emotional impasse.  The Thornwalds despise each other.  Obviously.  These two stages are blurred, but concern the disillusionment of the idea of marriage and the resentment that follows begin trapped by your spouse.  It’s quite sadistic of Hitchcock to paint perhaps the grimmest picture of marriage in film history.  The next “phase” as seen from outside Jeff’s window is murder.

Logically not all marriages end in murder, but not all marriages end happily ever after.  While Miss Lonelyhearts and the Composer find each other and love, the Newlyweds now fight over money.

In the end Jeff and Lisa come to a compromise.  They are together, and Lisa is reading up on the Himalayas, a sign she is becoming more adventurous.  But not quite; as Jeff sleeps Lisa picks up her trusty fashion magazine.  This relationship is doomed.

P.S. Thelma Ritter cannot be over praised.  She always brought something to the films she co-starred in.  In Rear Window she isn’t relegated to comic relief, though she is funny.  Ritter’s persona had always been a street wise woman with a sharp tongue and honest insight.  Her character Stella offers all this.  Ritter always gives an easy performance.  Even in lesser films like The Mating Season, in which she stars, she is excellent.  Under Hitchcock’s hands she is allowed to be great in a great film, and though often not talked about in connection to Rear Window she adds to it something extra and steals every scene.

Rear Window (1954)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: John Michael Hayes

Stars: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Wendell Corey

USA

In English

Runtime: 112 minutes

To purchase Rear Window on DVD, visit Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Window-Universal-Legacy-James-Stewart/dp/B001CC7PPI/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302237980&sr=1-2

If you want the best DVD collection of Hitchcock films, get Universal's 14 film Masterpiece Collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Masterpiece-Collection/dp/B000A1INJE/ref=sr_1_9?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1302237980&sr=1-9

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047396/

Cold Weather (2010)

Cris Lankenau has a funny way of walking.  He seems to be dragging his body, his floppy arms falling where they may, and he is uncomfortable and unsure with every step.  His character Doug in Aaron Katz’s newest masterpiece Cold Weather is perfect casting.  Lankenau has made only two feature films.  His previous film was Katz’s Quiet City, a beautiful and quirky love story between strangers.  Cold Weather is a beautiful story of friends and the mumblings of everyday life.

Doug is a college dropout now living with his sister, Gail.  He studied forensic science but has taken a job at an ice factory.  He makes best friends with Carlos, a part-time DJ and Trekkie and fellow factory worker.  Doug wants to be like Sherlock Holmes, and when his ex-girlfriend Rachel mysteriously goes missing, Doug and everybody he knows turns amateur sleuth.  Part of what is so great about Cold Weather is that the director is able to take these aimless figures and infuse their lives with so much meaning.  Doug is a loser.  Let’s face it.  His parents seem quietly disappointed in him; Doug knows it but remains steadfast in all his uncertain decisions.   But never once is he pathetic.  He’s absolutely loveable.  He is so focused and quirky and real that he is immediately enduring.  Some might be put off with Lankenau, though both times I saw the film there was plenty of laughter so this might be an incorrect guess.  Lankenau appears so mawkish and wimpy.  He is incredibly soft spoken and not a typical leading man.  He’s not even an everyman like Jimmy Stewart.  Cris Lankenau is this generation’s cinematic hero—awkward good looks, even temperament, an all around decent guy who never gets upset.  Perhaps he is the embodiment of mumblecore.

Every character in this film is as real as the person sitting next to you on the train and this is a terrific ensemble cast.  Raúl Castillo as Carlos has some great interplay with Lankenau’s character.  Carols isn’t a mindless worker shucking ice.  He’s a DJ who develops an interest in Sherlock Holmes.  A Latino character in the movies wouldn’t normally be a Star Trek fan, but Carlos can name every member of the show’s space crew and the respective actors.  He gushes as he admits that he got a signed 8x10 glossy at a convention.  It was absolutely charming to see his performance.  He disappears about ¾ into the picture unfortunately and I would have liked more of his character.  Gail, Doug’s sister, is terrific, and in fact this sibling relationship is the best thing about the movie.  They are not adversaries.  These are aging 20-somethings who understand that life is what you make of it.  They have conversations that do not advance the plot.  We get hints of history but the film never stops dead in its tracks so brother and sister can recall hackneyed stories of the past.  Trieste Kelly Dunn is brilliant as Gail.  She and Lankenau are superb together.

Above all Doug and Gail interact.  We see them on the roof splattering grapes on the ground below.  Doug pulls Gail out of work to watch the whales by bribing her with sandwiches.  They hang out together, play cards with Carols and Rachel, go dancing.  I hate to use this phrase again but they are real.  The mumblecore movement is built partially on improvisational dialogue that exists to show existence or experience between its characters.  Very little of the dialogue advances the story.  For example, when Doug and Gail are on a stakeout, he asks her a very personal question.  Does she have friends?  Since they’ve been living together he has never seen her hang out with anyone.  The film could have survived without this exchange.  It goes nowhere, and yet it is captivating.  A lesser film would have curtailed the static stakeout and picked up with the next bit of action, but Cold Weather is less concerned with telling a plot.  Katz knows enough to let his characters carry the picture without focus and he’s talented enough to make it interesting always.

He’s also something of a visual master.  As with his previous films and sort of against the mumblecore style, Katz knows how to compose shots to suggest inner emotion with the man-made landscape of Portland, Oregon.  Similar to John Ford’s westerns, Katz uses setting suns and telephone wires to aid his storytelling.  He gets some heart-wrenching imagery that really supports his character’s personalities and place in life.  He’s also not afraid to hold shots.  Early on there’s a scene of Doug and Gail eating sandwiches on the beach.  Nothing happens here; it’s a long shot, they’re in the foreground, the water behind them.  A gull circles around, and I was consciously thinking, ‘how great to be able to contemplate on what I am seeing.’  The purpose of art is to engage its audience, and to see an American film made in 2010 that gives its audience time to think is very promising.  Movies like this are proof that the cinema is not dead.

The music is terrific.  Composer Keegan DeWitt deserves an Academy Award nomination for his fun and brilliantly used music.  Film music needs to service the images more than it needs to be listenable.  While the music is fantastic on its own, it really creates a sweet and quirky mood that ties this material together.  There is not a fault with the picture.  The acting is terrific, so is the direction, and the story is rightly focused on its characters rather than the mystery that turns out to be not that big a deal.

That’s what’s so surprising about Cold Weather.  I keep forgetting about the mystery.  Even when Doug and Carlos search Rachel’s abandoned hotel room, the film is focused on the interplay of its characters.  Perhaps this is the case with every thriller, but in Cold Weather everything is natural and nothing artificial.  I said the mystery is not that big a deal and it really may not be.  Doug figures out his clues and is able to help his ex-girlfriend, but these scenes again are about the experience of being these people.  I don’t want to turn potential viewers off.  That the mystery is less important is why the film works so well.  There is suspense in the film, and the odd characters who conduct themselves as Holmes bring a twist to the material that only heightens the tension of some of the “chases”.  I actually cared about these characters, but never once did I expect them to get killed for their efforts.  In normal thrillers death is always a possibility, but Cold Weather knows that murder is an uncommon occurrence.  For every person that is killed, millions more go on living.  I was concerned that Doug would be caught snooping and be forced to give up his adventure.

I keep suggesting Cold Weather is a small film about character but the more I think of it, the film is aiming high.  Instead of artifice, Aaron Katz and his wonderful actors are more concerned with naturalism, and that they succeed makes it one of the more memorable independent films in recent years.  These characters may as well be our best friends, we know them so intimately.  The film gives us moments in their lives, moments a bad movie would dismiss because they lack vitriol and violence.  I sat through every scene in this film with a large grin across my face!  Great movies make me happy, and I was delirious at Cold Weather.

Cold Weather (2010)

Director: Aaron Katz

Writer: Aaron Katz

Stars: Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn and Raul Castillo

USA

In English

Runtime: 96 minutes

Cold Weather is currently playing in select theaters across the US.  It is currently available On Demand from Comcast and other service providers under "IFC In Theaters". The film should be released on DVD by IFC in the near future.

IMDB link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1497874/