Tuesday, August 27, 2013

This Week In Tickets: 19 August 2013 - 25 August 2013

The HFA's Hitchcock series is a fantastic thing to have available when the mainsteram releases are disappointing or things you've already seen:

This Week in Tickets

Other than that, not a whole lot going on. The weekly preview at the Regent was the pretty-okay Papadopoulos & Sons, where having a co-presenter meant I wasn't there alone. I opted to check out Chennai Express at Fenway as opposed to Apple, and have to kind of admit that the trailer for Krrish 3 was my favorite part, right up there with "staring at Deepika Padukone". There's also the fun of giggling every time "Eros Entertainment" comes up as a production/distribution company in the previews and credits; does that mean something different over there?

Missing: Red 2. I was going to catch it at the Capitol on Monday, and had something planned out - get a much needed haircut across the street, maybe grab something to eat at the restaurant next door, and be there for the 8pm show. But, of course, the barber shop closes at 4pm on Mondays, and I really wasn't down for killing an hour and a half, already being kind of tired from Sunday's late-running Red Sox game. So, I guess I'll be catching that on video.

The weekend, meanwhile, was a bunch of writing and sitting out on the deck reading backlogged comics and such with the HFA in the evening:

Dial M for Murder

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

You know what's always a very pleasant surprise? John Williams in this movie. Oh, certainly, the above-the-line talent is very nice - Ray Milland is delightfully sneaky and reptilian; Grace Kelly is, of course, inhumanly beautiful and invests her character with something very winning that counteracts how one may judge her for either the adultery that drives much of the movie or her passivity later on (which, admittedly, I had an issue with my first time through); Robert Cummings is an American puppy dog of affection. But when Williams shows up on the scene, his Inspector Hubbard is all dry English resolve, somehow worthy of the audience's respect even as he's being led down the garden path by Tony Wendice.

And in some ways, that's a great illustration of what is great about Dial M. It never subverts expectations - the characters are all exactly what they seem to be from the start - but Hitchcock nudges the audience into feeling surprising things about them, whether it be respecting the cop who is seemingly being made a fool of of identifying with the cold-blooded murderer. All the stagy affectation, odd use of 3D (which isn't as busy in 2D as one might expect, though it has a lot of the same telltale look modern 3D films do), and the like falls away surprisingly well as a result.

EFC review from 2005

The 39 Steps

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

Sometime, I'm going to bite the bullet and see The 39 Steps on stage. I've passed up chances to do so in New York and London (including when it first opened On or Off Broadway with David Hyde Pierce) because I'm very uncertain about seeing it as a gimmicky comedy. The Hitchcock version, you see, is quite funny, but it's also legitimately thrilling and kind of romantic in an understated, charming way - so why make it just be one thing?

As I mention in the review, it may not quite be the source of all chase movies, but it's an early example of getting them right - refined enough to go down easy but just raw enough in places to jolt a bit. It's occasionally a bit sloppy - in particular, I always feel terrible for Mr. Memory in the end; he seems so nice that I wonder what the Steps have against him as leverage - but that's far more than balanced by all the times it's just about perfect.

EFC review from 2012

I Confess

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

Someday, I'm going to hear a really good explanation for why reporters will spend time in jail for not giving up their sources but priests don't. I suppose, in this case, "Quebec!" may be the explanation, but that's actually a question for another time. The important thing is that Hitchcock, his writers, and Montgomery Clift do an impressive job of taking this familiar moral dilemma and executing it in a way that doesn't make the priest in question look kind of ridiculous.

Plus, while "priest hears confession of murder but the rules of his religion mean he can't report it" is where the movie starts, it winds up being most interesting for where it winds up going. The past relationship between Clift's Father Michael and Anne Baxter's Mrs. Ruth Grandfort starts out as a red herring for the police, of course, but turns into a story that fascinates for what is unsaid - did her marriage push him toward the priesthood, or did the war torpedo their relationship, pushing her toward another? It's beautifully ambiguous. So, too, are the actions of the murderer; does he sink further out of mere self-preservation, or did he aim to frame one of the priests to start and have better luck than he could imagine?

In other cases, Hitchcock and other directors would spell this out, but perhaps its fitting that in this cross between a procedural and a crime drama, the motives are unknowable but the characters and story are still fascinating.

Jamaica Inn

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

One of the things about seeing stuff at the HFA that can be both a positive or a negative at times is that you'll get a lot of context before seeing the movie, whether you want it or not. I guess I'm about to add to that, so skip ahead a couple paragraphs if you just want to know who does well and who does poorly.

Anyway, this movie is known for a number of things - it's Hitchcock's last British film before leaving for Hollywood, his first adaptation of a Daphne De Maurier story, and one of his very few period pieces (he didn't like them much), as well as the product of a contentious collaboration with star Charles Laughton - but one thing I don't particularly recall being mentioned in the introduction is what a strong heroine Maureen O'Hara's Mary is. It seems relatively rare for the female lead in any sort of adventure movie, particularly one made in the 1930s, to feature a woman who is such a self-starter, but Mary initially rescues the hero just because she sees it needs doing, and later saves the day without the job being assigned to her. Why? Sheer awesomeness.

It's not entirely the female newcomer's movie, of course - Charles Laughton is some kind of something in this, playing his Sir Humphrey Pengallan as both the fop and the villain and somehow making both ends of the character work. It's a downright deranged performance, almost incomprehensible at times, and yet it never tilts the mood into full-on parody. Leslie Banks is playing it just as big as the guy who gets his hands dirty, an almost-hilarious brute of a man. Against those two, Marie Ney is shrunken as his wife Patience almost by default, and while pales compared tot he vitality that O'Hara gives to her niece, it's an apt piece of the movie.

In a lot of ways, this doesn't really feel like Hitchcock, for several good reasons. It's a fun little adventure, though, especially since it's a lot loopier than the typical oh-so-serious gothic it first appears to be.

Young and Innocent

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Alfred Hitchcock, 35mm)

A 1937 movie Alfred Hitchcock made in the UK seems like an odd thing to connect to movies and comics from contemporary Japan, but Young and Innocent approached something a couple Japanese flicks I saw at Fantasia in a separate direction, in that it's kind of strange how specifically, regimentedly transitional the life of a present-day American teenager is. It's fairly common for Japanese pop culture to show high-school students living on their own, while I have a hard time imagining their American contemporaries doing the same thing, while I had a bit of trouble pinning down the age of this movie's main character because she's introduced in a way that suggests adulthood even though she's probably younger.

It creates an interesting, unusual effect - where we usually see the protagonist mature over the course of the movie, Erica Burgoyne seems to get younger. We're first introduced to her as thoroughly capable, perhaps more so in certain areas than the police, but as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that if accused killer Robert Tisdall isn't her first crush, he's right up there, and as she comes to trust him more, her cynicism actually seems to fall away. She doesn't actually become more foolish, but it's an odd thing to see things progress that way.

It works, in part, because Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney do have quite pleasant chemistry, and even as Hitchcock and the rest are emphasizing her, well, youth and innocence more as the film goes on, they're not pushing him in the other direction. Perhaps he's realizing the same thing as the audience, that Erica is in many ways still a child, and that he opts not to exploit that is what keeps things smooth.

There's a lot of other fun stuff in there as well - Edward Rigby is kind of fun as the homeless guy who joins their party, for instance. There's a child's birthday party that might have become a lot more tense in another Hitchcock film, and a nifty tracking shot to reveal the true villain in the end - nifty enough, really, to make the audience ignore the blackface, which is very much of the "wait, what? you're weird, 1937!" variety.


Papadopoulos & Sons
Chennai Express
Dial M for Murder
The 39 Steps
I Confess
Jamaica Inn & Young and Innocent

No comments: