April 21: Notorious (1946 -- Alfred Hitchcock)

★★★★★

April 20: Spellbound (1945 -- Alfred Hitchcock)

★★★★
This film is a taunt, creative, mature step into film for Hitchcock, and I like it the best of the ones I’ve been watching lately.

One of its many pleasures is that Ben Hecht’s script is so tight. Rebecca seems to stagger about ¾ though before regaining its balance, but all the details here are neatly tied together so elements contribute naturally and consistently to the action. We hear early on that Constance is athletic, and the climax occurs with her skiing. Likewise, the early part of the film talks about her lack of humanity and passion in treating her patients, but her character grows through the film as her love for Dr. Edwards humanizes her approach to therapy. Even the detail about Dr. Murchison’s short vacation has important ramifications as Spellbound approaches its end, as does the oft-repeated observation about Edwards that he’s younger than many of the doctors thought he would be.

 In a 1945 film about psychoanalysis, a certain amount of exposition is inevitable, but the screenplay manages to work it into the script so the exposition functions while also providing viewers with important infomation. A man suffering from a guilt complex may be dangerous, explain several of the film’s doctors, and when we see Edwards walking around with a razor, that information heightens our tension. And the same information helps explain the actions of one of the particularly violent patients at Green Manors. The exposition here makes Spellbound a more suspenseful film while giving us information we need to follow the story.

 Spellbound also has a consistency of style that I like. In the first embrace between Constance and Edwards, we cut to an inner montage of doors sequentially opening, a flash to a psychological, symbolic language that we later hear Constance refer to when she talks about “doors opening.” That scene sets the stage for the film’s well-known Dali dream sequence, itself a set of psychological symbols. With both of these sequences in the film, as well as the important flashback to Edwards’ childhood, Spellbound’s diversions into the psychological don’t disrupt the film’s narrative at all. It’s all part of a nice, consistent tone.

 George Barnes is back as cinematographer here, too, and his touch gives Spellbound even more unity. He uses the same mood-evoking shadows here as in Rebecca and the same upward angle shots to disorient the viewer. Rooms are spacious and luminous or crowded with baroque detail as called for by the characters and mood. We look up the stairs as Edwards descends to us with the razor trailing a long shadow.

The music is a great compliment to the visuals here, too. Spellbound uses the ethereal theremin to great effect in creepy scenes like when Constance uses a fork to make an oval on the tablecloth and Edwards freaks out. We hear it in all the weird scenes – Edwards’ panic in the surgery room, his breakdown at Dr. Brulov’s as he’s walking around the bedroom carrying a razor while Constance sleeps. If I think of the theremin as part of B sci-fi, I also think of it as psychosis, and Spellbound is the film that established that link.

I thought back to Rebecca in several places here. It’s interesting that, again, most of the point of view is though the eyes of a woman. We mostly see and learn what she does, and much of the suspense here comes from what she doesn’t see or know. It’s a device that Hitchcock and Hecht use to good effect.

The humor here took me back to Rebecca and to The Lady Vanishes, too. I don’t always appreciate the humor that Hitchcock puts in his films, and I often find it distracting in this one. I can see that the colleague harassing Constance at Green Manors and the tourist doing the same thing in the hotel lobby are both showing Constance’s vulnerability, but I don’t respond to the way the harassment is portrayed. There’s something overstated and hammy in the humor here that almost excuses the behavior, and the chuckles deflate what could have added to the general threat in the film. Likewise, the broad humor of the ticket taker at the train station and the hotel detective mostly take me out of the film rather than increase my involvement in it. If memory serves, the humor in It Takes a Thief pretty much did that film in for me because it wouldn’t let me get involved in the film.

 Hitchcock can use humor effectively. He does a fine job satirizing social class in Rebecca with the arrogantly obnoxious Mrs. Van Hopper, and both Rebecca and The Lady Vanishes satirize a certain type of fleshy, robust, simple, good-humored British type. But for me, Hitchcock’s humor often dilutes the tension he has built in his film and takes me out of the movie. Since this move is so ubiquitous in Hitchcock, it’s clearly something he’s designed, perhaps a gesture at propriety to avoid evoking too much emotion. More’s the pity, in my opinion.

 Distracting humor aside, Spellbound moves along crisply and directly. It’s a fun experience of a clearly recognizable Hitchcock style.

April 19: Rebecca (1940 -- Alfred Hitchcock)

★★★★
What a difference in Hitchcock’s filmmaking two years made.  The Lady Vanishes (1938) has some Hitchcock flourishes but feels conventional; Rebecca (1940) has moved into the suspense, mood and psychology that are familiar to us Hitchcock fans.  It’s not a perfect film, but we certainly get one of the first iconic Hitchcock characters here -- the intense, demented Mrs. Danvers – and a taste of spooky atmosphere.

I’m impressed at how much of a women’s film this is, though I shouldn’t be given Daphne du Maurier's source novel.  Still, credit Hitchcock for creating a film that deals mostly with the heroine’s psychology and for mostly using her point of view to tell the story….and to create much of the suspense in the film.  We don’t know what’s going on in Maxim’s mind because our heroine doesn’t know, and Hitchcock uses this POV limitation to keep us ignorance of an important fact until the big reveal near the end.  Because of the POV, we also share the heroine’s vulnerability as she tries to assume control of Manderley, uncertain of exactly what to do and how to do it.  And we sense her burden of trying to compete with the apparently perfect first Mrs. de Winter.  All of these gender-specific pressures magnify her already-established insecurity and create suspense as we worry whether our fragile point-of-view is going to crack.

Like in The Lady Vanishes, there’s also an interest here in class and in the social differences between the US and Britain.  Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first American film, so you might expect some of that interest to find its way into the film.  The British here are mostly either snooty members of the upper-class or members of the servant class that want their employers to, in fact, be snooty upper-class.  There’s a good case to be made for saying that Mrs. Danvers’ central conflict is that she can’t deal with not having the security of a dominating better to serve; Danvers’ breakdown occurs because the class structure she depends on for her very identity is disrupted when the lower-class American becomes the mistress of Manderley.

The same disruption of class roles leads to the heroine’s near breakdown, too.  When Maxim meets the soon-to-be second Mrs. de Winter, the girl is a companion to a snooty, upper-class American woman, and there’s clearly a parallel between the situations of the heroine and Mrs. Danvers.  Both occupy socially subordinate roles as helpers to other upper-class women.  When the heroine breaks that social hierarchy by marrying Maxim, her former employer says the upstart will never succeed, Mrs. Danvers can’t bring herself to accept the substitute, and the heroine herself comes to believe she can’t function in her new social role.  And all of this turmoil comes about from the sincere, innocent love that the American has for her husband, an introduction of the American/British theme.

It isn’t just love that gets the heroine through her trials, though.  Our lead has a lot of good ole American spunk, and when she gets pushed too far, she shoves her sleeves up and gets to work.  She still makes a couple of stumbles, like the mistake at the costume party, but it’s American sincerity and determination that get her through her social crisis as Rebecca moves beyond her storyline to deal with more British upper-class perfidy. 

I find the film’s change in focus at that point its biggest flaw, though.  Rebecca focusses on the heroine’s struggle for ¾ the length of the film, and when it seems she’s finally dealt with her situation, the movie suddenly veers off into an investigation/courtroom detour before returning to the effects of the heroine’s achievement.  The detour describes both the downside (lover) and the upside (constable) of the British, but it’s a digression from the POV and conflict we’d been following.  Of course, when the film eventually returns to Manderley, it’s hard not to see some symbolism in the destruction of the manor house, which had been governed so much by the British mores.

As much as the plot and characters, George Barnes’ cinematography plays a role in making Rebecca the unique work it is.  Barnes creates the vast, open rooms of Manderley, and he photographs the ample smoke that contributes so much to the space and mystery in the film.  Close-ups evoke intimacy or tension, depending on who is in the frame, and looming shadows with low-angle cameras add an emotional dimension to the dialogue and situation.  Sound and editing often reinforce the visuals, too, as when the Mrs. Danvers tries to get the heroine to jump from a window and the camera suddenly cuts several times from a frame of the two women to the heroine’s subjective POV staring down at the ground from the windown.  Likewise when editing and sound add to the menace in the images of the waves during the storm.

Rebecca is a great advance in Hitchcock’s film language.  The movie has some of the same elements as his earlier work, but it refines these elements, adds to them, and combines them in such a way that we begin to see the emergence here of what we can recognize as the signature of a Hitchcock film.

April 6: The Jungle Book (1942 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I think this is the best type of movie you can find from Zoltan Korda: mildly entertaining with some visual interest and lacking in overt (and, ironically, adopted) xenophobia.  The British colonial burden is happily missing The Jungle Book, and we’re left with a framed story of Mowgli and his dealings with treasure hunters; nice humans; and Shere Khan, the tiger.  It’s a children’s story about growing up, dealing with the enemy and finding your own place in the world.  In Technicolor.

I remain surprised at Korda’s ability to conflate exotica for its visual interest – his vision is almost postmodern.  The pink-tinged jungle here holds tigers, panthers, deer, snakes, wolves and elephants, and villagers prepare a human sacrifice in front of a statue of Buddha before exploring a local ruin replete with faces from Angkor Wat.  The emphasis here is on the curiously exotic, and Korda assembles things that look good on screen in order to engage and entertain, and as long as viewers don’t look too hard for character depth or complex plot, they’ll enjoy the pagent that this film is.

But Korda's is not a contemporary sensibility, and I’ve seen as much of his work as I want to see for now.  The Hitchcock and Powell & Pressberger  of his era were able to provide us with films of insight and longevity, but Korda’s work feels dated, stale and even, at times, racist.  This and two of the other Korda films I watched are the boxed Eclipse set called Sabu!  I think the films in the set are well-chosen for the series as none of them would warrant a separate release and Criterion treatment.  

April 5: The Drum (1938 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★★

The Drum is finally a Korda film that I can enjoy without having to constantly wince at the ideology.  There are still many objectionable ideological elements, for sure: the British offering to “protect” Tokot (history is clear what that meant), the good Indian ruler being an immature juvenile who needs paternalist (British) guidance, and the competent Moslems being sneaky and dangerous. 

All that aside, I was interested in the setting, the Pakistan/Afgan border area that is even today unsettled.  Complete with militants, though in the case of this film, not totally fundamentalists.  And you have to like the Technicolor here, too, with the occasional nice vista and riveting reds.  While The Drum doesn’t have the most original story, the plot is at least moderately engaging, and it leads to an action climax that pays off.  Again, though, I’d have to say that Korda is in the Michael Bay action camp because it’s hard to follow exactly what the characters are doing and where everyone is in relation to each other when the shooting starts. 

I saw this film because it’s in the Sabu Eclipse set, and the young actor had grown by the time he did this role.  In The Drum, he’s playing a character who is outside something the actor would have experienced in daily life, and he acts here rather than doing things for the camera he might have done in his off-camera life.  He’s a little stilted, but he still has clear charisma here that adds a little energy to a movie that can creak in places.

Zoltán Korda isn’t going on my list of directors to seek out, but at least The Drum didn’t leave me aggravated, as some other Korda films have.

April 4: Elephant Boy (1937 -- Robert Flaherty and Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I should concentrate on the child actor Sabu here, but it’s Robert Flaherty’s contribution to this film that I respond to.  I enjoyed the ethnographic elements here far more than the hackneyed dramatic elements and the Kipling storyline.  Many of the images from Elephant Boy are lush, black-and-white picturesques of an India that’s hard to find now: ornate temples framed in vegetation and compressed to fill the frame by a long focal length lens, lines of elephants walking over an old bridge, small towns whose streets teem with life, a beautiful water tank.  These parts of the film look like an artistic anthropology film.  And Elephant Boy pauses for animal shots like those of the baby elephant playing in the river, shots that recall the animals of other Flaherty projects and other non-narrative details like the horn summoning the drivers or nighttime storytelling lit by campfires in this film.  These are the sorts of ethnographic documentation details that give me a frisson--the same little thrill I got many times in Flaherty’s Man of Aran and the more famous Nanook of the North--when I recognize a cultural truth in this fictional work.

In this breakout role, Sabu plays a dynamic child, and there’s clearly a bond between boy and animal as he scampers over his pachyderm, both using the animal and caring for him.  Elephant Boy shows the closeness of that relationship the way we’d be more familiar seeing the relationship of a boy and his dog or his horse.  And I think I read somewhere that Sabu didn’t speak English and was just making the sounds he was taught to make when he spoke.  If that’s so, his performance here is doubly amazing because the bulk of his speaking is quite easy to follow.  As child actors of the era go—and I’m thinking of Shirley Temple here—Sabu manages more authenticity than most.

I enjoyed this film.  Some of the restored b/w images are spellbinding, and the little jewels of ethnographic truth in this Flaherty project give unexpected sparkles when the Kipling story starts to get dull.

March 31: The Four Feathers (1939 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★

I guess it’s obvious that a film's content affects the way we enjoy it, and though I try to look through aspects I find personally objectionable, sometimes I just can’t.  I’ll never like Birth of a Nation, its technical breakthroughs notwithstanding, and I can’t embrace Rome, Open City because of the way Rossellini conflates homosexuality with fascism and sexual perversion.  And I don’t respond to The Four Feathers the way I want to either because I so dislike the imperialist ideology at the center of this 1939 British film.

Some argue that Four Feathers is mostly about honor and duty, but in 19th century England, that was another way of saying imperialism.  Whether fighting the Turks in the Crimea or the Sudanese in Africa, a man of honor would prove himself on the field of conquest somewhere in the Empire and, duty done, he would reap the social rewards in British society.  This is the lesson of the child who likes poetry in Four Feathers as he learns to embrace the Empire and outdo his doubting comrades by braving the natives and their harsh climate.  In fact, everyone is brave, and everyone acts honorably in Four Feathers.  Among the colonialists, at least.  I doubt the dialog given to the targets of British imperialism here would fill two pages of script because we never see them do anything except menace the Brits and serve as the agency for the white man to prove his courage and honor.  The locals, apparently, have nothing that the audience might sympathize with.

The one part of this film I can have affection for, though, is the visuals.  There's more than a little taste of David Roberts' orientalism in the cinematography here, and I also enjoy the path I can imagine between Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia.  Less than a quarter of a century after Omdurman, David Lean’s desert adventurer has become complex, conflicted and flawed; the local people have identities and personal concerns; and 1.37:1 has become 2.20:1.  Korda clearly sees the open beauty of the desert, but Lean’s aspect ratio and F.A. Young’s cinematography are able to turn this desert in vast expanses of color and motion that Korda tries to capture but can’t.  Both also use a camera on a truck to track battle lines hurtling toward each other, though Lean’s later film takes advantage of 25 years of developing that technique and has smoother, more successful shots.  Both films have bone breaking treks without water and the hot visuals to intensify the risk.  As an outsized fan of Lawrence of Arabia, I enjoyed seeing a desert epic that predates that film by nearly a quarter century.  Four Feathers is a measure of the refinement of cinematic technique and sensibility that Lawrence represents.

My takeaway from Four Feathers is that content can matter.  This film has beautiful Technicolor and lavish sets, but that feels like attractive make-up on something very ugly.  Powell and Pressberger’s 1943 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp manage to address many of the same issues as Korda does here, but their story manages to avoid the overt, grating imperialist assumptions that inform Four Feathers.