Hitchcock

Hitchcock 2012 U.S. (98 minutes) directed by Sacha Gervasi; written by John J. McLaughlin, based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Dembner Books, New York, 1990).

There must be countless ways a Hollywood movie about a larger-than-life character like legendary director Alfred Hitchcock making one of his classic films could go horribly wrong.

Director Sacha Gervasi and writer John J. McLaughlin’s Hitchcock manages to sidestep them all with flair and good taste, a dash of the legend’s mordant wit as well as his meticulous eye for detail and crisply edited storytelling manner.

Hitchcock provides an imaginative profile of Hitchcock’s marriage and professional partnership with his wife Alma Reville based on the period during which he was making Psycho, one of his most fully realized artistic masterpieces and his most financially successful film.

Psycho (1960) is the story of mother-haunted serial murderer Norman Bates. Bates’ activities come to light after he murders Marion Crane, who disappears after she steals $40,000 from one of her employer’s clients. Marion’s sister Lila Crane and Marion’s boyfriend Sam Loomis hire private detective Milton Arbogast to find her. Arbogast tracks Marion to Norman Bates’ motel where he also disappears. Lila and Sam pick up his trail from there.

The original story, by genre writer Robert Bloch, is based on the Plainfield, Wisconsin serial murderer Ed Gein (whose ‘spirit’ appears to Hitchcock in Gervasi’s movie, played by Michael Wincott). Gein apparently was the model also for the serial killer Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Hitchcock took this noirish horror genre story and shot it in uncompromising black and white; he made its aberrant sexuality titillating by making his audience complicit voyeurs. He put this revolutionary shocker together with Bernard Herrmann’s classic musical score in such a way that the worst horror and violence, most notably the famous ‘shower scene’ in which Bates’ ‘mother’ savagely stabs the naked Marion to death, takes place in the viewer’s imagination.  

The director personally financed the project when appalled Paramount studio head Barney Balaban refused, and then he fought with Geoffrey Shurlock, administrator of the Motion Picture Production Code, the Hollywood self-censorship board, to clear the finished film for release.

What a daunting challenge this biopic must have presented for an actor! Just being Alfred Hitchcock was a full-time job. Apart from his status as one of cinemas great auteurs, his larger than life-sized personality and all the shopworn anecdotes and pop psychoanalyzing, his instantly recognizable image and profile made this a hard-sell for us going in.

But we were pleasantly surprised. Unlike his campy Richard Nixon for Oliver Stone, Anthony Hopkins had us hooked once we got past quibbles that he does not resemble the Master and tuned into the story about a famous and successful artist hemmed in by advancing age and poor health and others’ professional expectations of him, and about his wife, a gifted and formidable behind-the-scenes presence. Pairing Hopkins's Alfred with Helen Mirren’s Alma was a stroke of inspiration.

Helen Mirren as Alma Reville and Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock editing Psycho in Hitchcock.

In addition to the making of Psycho, we see the portrait of a marriage of a couple who has been working together professionally since the mid-1920s. Gervasi and McLaughlin give Alma the full credit Hitchcock never failed to give her but that the public seldom saw. They also show the controlling Hitchcock’s jealous resentment of Alma working independently to help fictional screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) develop a marketable script.

One wonders how the ‘controlling Hitchcock’ himself would have made such a story convincing. How about hiring two senior stars of great ability and charisma and encouraging the second lead to steal the picture from the first?

Gervasi and McLaughlin frame their story within the format of the popular Alfred Hitchcock Hour television series which was current during the making of Psycho. These delicious, hour-long tales of the macabre opened by pairing a taste of the drama to follow with one of Hitchcock’s ironical comments and closed in a similarly amusing, irreverent vein. In this instance, at the end, a raven lands on Hitchcock’s shoulder foreshadowing his next project, The Birds.  

In a sense, what Gervasi and McLaughlin have accomplished is a kind of narrative jujitsu, by taking Rebello’s factual potboiler, Hitchcock-style, and practicing their company’s technical and artistic strengths to show Hitchcock and his company at work rather than to try to ‘give’ us Hitchcock. The rest of their casting is of the same order as the two leads.

In Psycho, Janet Leigh played Marion Crane, with Vera Miles as her sister Lila and John Gavin as Loomis. Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates.

Janet Leigh, inset, and Scarlett Johansson as Leigh playing Marion Crane in Hitchcock.

Scarlett Johansson makes a terrific Leigh and Jessica Biel makes as good a Miles because what we see is Hollywood professionals working as Hollywood professionals, rather than trying to be ‘personalities’ (e.g., Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor). James D’Arcy’s Tony Perkins looks and feels startlingly close to the original.

We also see Hitchcock’s team: his MCA (Music Corporation of America) agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlberg); Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette), his production assistant and gatekeeper; Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho (Ralph Macchio); assistant director Hilton Green (Kai Lennox), Saul Bass, Hitchcock’s graphic designer and storyboard artist (Wallace Langham), Bernard Herrmann (Paul Schackman), and film editor George Tomasini (Spencer Garrett), among many others.  

Not least can one imagine Hitchcock and Alma approving Gervasi’s production design and sets (Judy Becker, production designer; Robert Gould, set decorator; and art director Alexander Wei), camerawork (Jeff Cronenweth), and editing (Pamela Martin). The costumes (designed by Julie Weiss), particularly the women’s suits, outfits and lingerie are sublime.

We found this to be a fully satisfying and entertaining hour-and-a-half in the dark with strangers. 

Outrageous fortune

A complicated triangle: Martha Burns, Paul Gross and Stephen Ouimette in Slings & Arrows

Slings & Arrows 2003-6 Canada (three six-episode seasons) directed by Peter Wellington; created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney, with Tecca Crosby and Sean Reycraft.

This gem of a Canadian workplace comedy/drama television series set amid a fictional theater festival is about miracles.

Shakespeare’s words are the first miracle. The next comes when a motley and diverse collection of actors herded catlike together animate these words to enchant the easily distracted modern ear four centuries later.

The third miracle is the terrific series writing and richness of carefully selected detail which together, like good acting, make the careful thought, discernment, talent and hard work that went into the making seem arbitrary and incidental, that is, natural, as though of real life, and not just the cut and thrust of costumed capering.

In a sense, this is a workplace comedy that makes the most frivolous things serious and handles serious matters with a light, sure touch. Unlike most workplaces, the theater provides the broadest context because it involves men and women of all ages across the whole range of human experience.

At the same time, there is a Canadian thing going on: the word ‘sorry’ seems to be a national institution—or to stand for one.

As in Shakespeare’s dramas, the series includes a disparate collection of kings and queens, princesses and paupers, knights and knaves, rogues, fools, fairies, witches, and ghosts. The cast does as good a job in their roles as contemporary actors as the characters they play find voices for Shakespeare’s classic parts.

Alas! Poor Oliver. Paul Gross in Slings & Arrows: the answer is 'To be.' 

It is exciting to watch Shakespeare’s plays take shape from a director’s vision, and to hear the old words in dog-eared scripts find life anew as they have for hundreds of years.

The setting is the New Burbage Festival, a fictional annual theater festival in a small Ontario town, based loosely on the world-renowned Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

The series may be best characterized as a three-tiered wedding cake with three figures on top, ornately decorated with a profusion of subplots and moments.

The three cake tiers are the Shakespeare plays that lead each festival—and series—season: Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.

The figures on top are the story’s three principal roles which form a complicated triangle: Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), the festival’s brilliant and passionate artistic director; Ellen Fanshawe (Martha Burns), the polymorphously perverse main leading lady (as Titania, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Regan); and Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette), their former director and mentor, untimely done in by a truck bearing the slogan ‘Canada’s Best Hams.’

Oliver’s demise early in season one leads to Geoffrey succeeding him as artistic director. Geoffrey must direct Hamlet, the play in which seven years earlier under Oliver’s direction (and in which Ellen played Ophelia), provoked by Oliver’s manipulations, he had a nervous breakdown during a live production, which ended in a long spell of clinical institutionalization.

Chatty ghost Stephen Ouimette with Paul Gross in season one of Slings & Arrows

Like Hamlet, Geoffrey must master his indecision to act to oppose the ‘sea of troubles’ by which he is beset: a lead played by Jack Crew (Luke Kirby), an American action movie star whose agent sent him to the festival for stage seasoning, as capable of the role as he is intimidated by it; an appallingly bad Ophelia played with ‘Vietnam flashbacks’ by Claire Donner (Sabrina Grdevich); and most of all his ‘theatre father’ Oliver’s ever-present, kibitzing ghost. An inspired understudy played by Rachel McAdams and a chameleon turn out to be the silver lining.

Geoffrey also must contend throughout the series with the suits, particularly the festival’s musical-happy executive director Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney, one of the series writers). Anna Conroy (series creator and writer Susan Coyne), Richard’s straight-faced associate administrative director, strains a Canadian stiff upper lip to contain this antic hay.

Susan Coyne and Mark McKinney, writers and stars of Sling & Arrows

One of many lively subplots involves Richard and Holly Day (Jennifer Irwin), an effervescently over-the-top representative of the festival’s new American corporate sponsor from Houston—a classic Canadian take on the neighbors across Niagara Falls.

Season two features Henry Breedlove (Geraint Wyn Davies), a pompous, square-jawed veteran stage actor, as Macbeth, in a power struggle with Geoffrey as his director, complete with echoes of Sergio Leone theme music.

Alongside this battle royal runs Romeo and Juliet, directed by the flamboyantly condescending, beleathered Darren Nichols (Don McKellar) with exuberant affection for Germanic and special effects. Nichols is at pains to contain his Patrick (David Alpay) and Sarah (Joanne Kelly) whose Romeo and Juliet take on lives of their own and burst from the postmodern cages in which he purports disdainfully to mock them.

Joanne Kelly and David Alpay as Juliet and Romeo caged in Slings & Arrows

Watching Patrick and Sarah play Romeo and Juliet’s famous night together (II, ii) from the wings, Ellen, who once played Juliet to Geoffrey’s Romeo, tells Geoffrey that she hates the play.

‘You watch it and you feel miserable because you don’t have that kind of passion in your life. Nobody does. It’s a fantasy. It’s irresponsible,’ Ellen says.

‘You know what I think?’ Geoffrey replies. ‘I think it’s painfully accurate. Two idiots meet, they fall in love; they’re happy briefly; then all hell breaks loose. Happens all the time.’

Meanwhile in a contemporary theatre workshop, two more ‘idiots,’ playwright Lionel Train (Jonathan Crombie) and practical Anna, develop a mad passion.

Paul Gross, William Hutt and Sarah Polley rehearsing King Lear in Slings & Arrows

Season three features elderly stage legend Charles Kingman (the octogenarian Shakespearean actor William Hutt) as King Lear, relentlessly hectoring his Cordelia, Sophie Dunbar (actor, writer and film director Sarah Polley). The counterpoint to Hutt's spellbinding pièce de theatre is a fizzy contemporary Broadway-style musical East Hastings: the Musical that puts a bounce in Richard-the-suit’s middle-aged step.

The series makes delicious mincemeat of theater people, those who make theater no less than their audience and supporters. No sweat there. One of the reasons it works well is the sense that these writers and actors make fun of the theater people they know best: themselves and each other. The parody is entirely within scale. The cast play roles and tell stories larger than life; thus the drama and parody need be larger than life-sized.

We see actors living the same rambling, shambling passionate lives offstage as they play on it. The Shakespeare snippets are done convincingly well—or badly on purpose; the fragments of Hutt’s King Lear are astounding.

The great moments surprise and delight. One comes in the bar where the actors hang out, after the festival cancels King Lear. Cyril (Graham Harley) and Frank (Michael Polley, Sarah’s father), an older gay couple who play perennial roles ‘in the middle of the pack,’ try to console disappointed Sophie that the cancellation is not the end of the world.

‘Oh Sophie, love, don’t fret. You’ve got lots of talent, you’ll have loads of success and a very long career,’ said Cyril.

‘But… at the end of it all, you’ve got to have some spectacular cock-ups,’ Frank said.

‘Because then you’ll have stories,’ Cyril said.

‘And then, you’ve had a life… You’ve had a life,’ Frank said.

The show does indeed go on—and ends with a wedding.

Winging it

Ricky 2010 France (89 minutes) written and directed by François Ozon.

This movie adapts a dark modern fairy tale by Rose Tremain that adds a dimension to the concept of a child ‘taking off’ at the mall, losing its original edge in a fruitier cocktail.

Tremain’s story, Moth, set in an American trailer park, centers on the emotionally overtaxed, separated mother of two with a difficult infant who develops an unsettling physical feature, and the consequences of this development. It has a sharp, cruel ending, not unlike some of the Grimms’ tales.

Ozon and his writing collaborator Emmanuèle Bernheim refashioned and padded Tremain’s sparer original American Calvinist hardwood furniture, moving it to France and making it more Roman Catholic and rococo.

The movie generally follows the story’s plot lines, but the changes make the tale wobble. The main problem is that the central role of the mother as Ozon and Bernheim conceive her—the actress is just following a script and direction—makes for a squishy center, too wishy-washy as a character to hold the story together. In the short story, the mother has a brittle toughness that snaps, where in the movie she just flakes away.

The film is worth seeing nevertheless.

Ozon sets the table by opening his story with a scene from the middle, in which a social worker counsels an abandoned working mother at the end of her tether with a small child and difficult baby. His narrative then proceeds chronologically from the beginning, roughly a year earlier. It moves in episodes, covering a period of about two years in a loose sequence of scenes. An all-seeing camera is his narrator.

The working mother is Katie (Alexandra Lamy), a factory worker, who begins the story a single mother leading a quiet life in a French high-rise housing project with her seven-year-old daughter Lisa (Mélusine Mayance, the child Sarah in Sarah’s Key 2012).

One day at work Katie has sex in a restroom with a new coworker, Paco Sanchez (Sergi Lopez, the cruel stepfather in Pan’s Labyrinth)—a random sexual encounter that seems unlikely for a stressed-out mother on a smoke break at work. This liaison leads to a relationship in which Paco moves in with Katie and Lisa; he and Katie produce the Ricky of the title.

Daughter Lisa is responsible beyond her young years. Her ‘objections’ to her ‘new father’ feel more like adult misgivings about Katie’s judgment than any resentment at being ‘replaced’ in her mother’s affection. Lisa as though resigns herself to the fact: all right, now I have two of these monsters to deal with—Ab-Fab, French style.

Along comes Ricky (Arthur Peyret). Katie as though awakens and scales untold heights of protective mothering which result in driving Paco away. Ricky develops his ‘unsettling physical feature.’ Katie gives the thing a stab but clearly is out of her depth. Ricky provides Lisa, with her little pink fairy wings, tiara and wand, something decidedly more interesting to take care of than her doll.

The little family’s secret flies the coop in an inspired scene at a big box Hypermarché Cora at Christmas time. (In Tremain’s story, this scene takes place in a more prosaic Kroger’s grocery store in Knoxville, Tennessee.)

A media circus ensues; a hang-dog Paco returns with gently-used mixed motives; none of this lasts long. Ricky takes off; Paco stays.

Then Katie, possibly intending to drown herself (as does the mother in the short story), has a Bergmanesque medieval ‘vision’ at the lake—or else a kind of rococo Annunciation. She returns home renewed and inspired to start over, all wet and flakier than ever, to Paco, who-only-ever-wanted-things-to-work-out-all-right-after-all, and Lisa, concerned as before about Mom’s woolly judgment.

Life goes on. Paco assumes Katie’s parenting duties. Katie is pregnant again, this time with a thousand-mile gaze and a New Age smile awaiting the Second Coming. And the audience is left trying to iron all these wrinkles into continuous narrative pleats.

But Ozon’s version is worth seeing, especially the scene at the big box store and Katie’s lakeside vision. Ricky and his ‘special feature,’ and Lisa, are the film’s best made parts, along with the haunting original score composed, arranged and directed by Philippe Rombi, who also played the piano solos.

Tremain’s title, Moth, refers in part to Ricky’s attraction to light. Light also attracts Ozon’s Ricky, but as a real baby with a human face and personality he feels like a more evolved legendary creature than the fabulous figure of the story. Ozon’s Ricky is less a moth to light than a form of New Age Ikaros.

MP encourages readers to find Tremain’s short story in her 2005 collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson. In the remarkable title story, the longest of the dozen, the dying, senile Duchess of Windsor searches her colorful, passionate history unable to name ‘the pale little man’ that so often turns up in the background. 

In contrast to Ozon’s camera, the narrator of Tremain’s Moth is Annie, a friend and trailer park neighbor of Pete, the baby’s mother.

Annie is a middle-aged working class woman whom nothing particularly fazes. She speaks in flat folk tones that alternate between irony and self-deprecation about what she saw, as though to say, ‘Now you may not buy this, but I am here to tell you what I saw with my own two eyes.’

The children have the same names. Annie tells us that Pete supports the family by making appliqué items she sells at a craft venue through a ‘hippie’ with whom she has a ‘Platonic relationship.’ Chester, the father of both children, is a Joycean Cyclops, an abusive, overweight fireman ‘with a big appetite’ who leaves Pete for a woman half his age. He comes back in the midst of the media circus to cash in on the baby, and then disappears.

Tremain’s tale comes to a dark end. Pete’s sewing machine, the source of her livelihood, becomes the instrument of her destruction.

Annie does not ask questions while the story unfolds, so all we have is her word via Tremain’s able craft and our imaginations.

Ozon’s main challenge was that his silent, all-seeing narrator had to resolve the questions Annie did not ask in order to fabulize this fairy tale into pictures. The central conceit still requires an audience to suspend disbelief. But unlike a DreamWorks extravaganza, for instance, Ozon’s sophisticated technical wizardry brings off what is essentially a discreet domestic story.

Gangsters of love

Daisy Kenyon 1947 Twentieth Century Fox (99 minutes) produced and directed by Otto Preminger; cinematography, Leon Shamroy; set decoration by Thomas Little and Walter M. Scott; edited by Louis Loeffler; screenplay by David Hertz, based on the novel by Elizabeth Janeway.

This is a love triangle tale told as a detective story, with beautifully stylized mis-en-scène, camera work and lighting, a keen eye for detail, and a seasoning of social issues. 

These issues include extramarital sex, child abuse, and the psychological injuries of soldiers coming home from war. The movie also comments on the racist treatment of American-born and -raised Nisei Japanese, a number of whom served with distinction in Europe.

The plot is straightforward. Daniel O’Mara (Dana Andrews) is a bright, ambitious lawyer from a hardscrabble background who married into the family of prominent Manhattan attorneys and became a partner in the family firm.

His skills as a litigator and lobbyist carry the firm. He patronizes his law partner father-in-law—‘Sugarplum,’ ‘Dew Drop,’ or ‘Walking Dead’ Coverly (Nicholas Joy), the apparent lightweight heir to a legal legend father—as well as his neurotic Upper East Side society wife, Lucille (Ruth Warrick).

Played by the low-key Andrews, the star of Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic Laura and William Wyler’s Oscar-sweeping The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), O’Mara at first comes off as a confident, entitled alpha-type used to getting his way.

The O’Mara family dynamic is complex. O’Mara’s 13- and 11-year old daughters, Rosamund (Peggy Ann Garner) and Marie (Connie Marshall), call him ‘Dan’ rather than ‘Dad.’ They take their cues from him in gaming their emotionally insecure mother. Rosamund challenges her mother for Dan’s affection; Lucille takes out her frustration at being patronized by Dan and outplayed by the girls by physically abusing Marie.

Dana Andrews, Peggy Ann Garner, Conniie Marshall, Nicholas Joy and Ruth Warrick in Daisy Kenyon. 

Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is the ‘other woman.’ Kenyon, O’Mara’s long-time mistress, is a professional illustrator who lives and works in a dream Greenwich Village walkup apartment of yesteryear—the more dreamlike for being on a West 12th Street corner created on a Hollywood studio lot.

Despite their history, her feelings for O’Mara and everything he tells her, Kenyon knows that he will never divorce his wife and leave his comfortable circumstances to be with her. He has too good a set-up as things are.

Kenyon has been seeing Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), whom she met socially. Lapham, an Army master sergeant, is a Yankee hull designer from Cape Cod who joined the Army after his wife’s death in an automobile accident at the beginning of the war. He was affected by his war experience in Europe, wounded twice, and stayed in the service in Germany after the war, depressive and still not over his wife’s death.

Kenyon feels that she must get her life on track by breaking up finally with her charming, attractive lover who is never going to leave his wife and family to be with her, and making a relationship with a partner who will, such as the Christopher Marlowe-quoting, ‘nice but a little unstable’ Lapham.

She also appears to have a close relationship with Mary Angelus (Martha Stewart), a fashion model with whom she works. Angelus is lovely in black and white and gets a lot more screen time than usual bit-part characters. This has suggested to some critics that Preminger meant to intimate Kenyon’s ambiguous sexual orientation, at a time when the movie industry’s morals code put the topic strictly off limits.

(Preminger was among the first Hollywood directors to test the limits of industry self-censorship which had been rigorously enforced since 1934.)

Kenyon and the audience can see that Lapham has unresolved psychological problems—a ‘project’ for her. His directness and intensity appeal to her, not to mention Fonda’s distinctive open, earnest face. The actor conveys his character’s subtle turn of mind through a wry smile similar to that on the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Voltaire.

Lapham knows that he needs to come to terms with the loss of his wife and his war experiences and start his life over in a stable relationship with a partner.

O’Mara’s problem—and the main story line—is that his ideal life, which includes a perfect wife and family, a loving mistress, and successful, high-powered career, comes apart at the seams when each begins to tug him in a different direction and looks less than ‘perfect,’ ‘loving,’ and ‘successful.’

These characterizations hint at the outcome. The scenes develop in long takes which invite viewers in rather than telegraph pat judgments. The threat of violence lies just beneath the veneer of civility; at times, this civility has an edge. This gives the story dramatic tension and lends to the film noir atmosphere, but there are no guns or saps; nor are there clear good guys or bad guys. Preminger does not tip his hand as to how the story will end until the final moment.

By placing Crawford between these two strong, understated male leads, Preminger tones down the operatic, sometimes freakish affectations her performances take on with lesser lights and uses her iconic star quality to full effect: she is a thorough professional and a great subject to shoot. It is fun to watch these three actors work together.

Among the period and place details are O’Mara’s exchanges with overworked postwar New York cabbies in beat-up prewar cabs (no new civilian models were built during the war). The Nisei reference comes when O’Mara decides to represent pro bono a decorated Nisei soldier whose California farm was ‘legally stolen’ from him while his family was interned and he was serving in Italy.

Also, visit to a studio mock-up of Manhattan’s storied Stork Club includes cameos of radio star and gossip columnist Walter Winchell and New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons. Broadway boulevardier writer Damon Runyon and actor John Garfield are sitting at the bar in the background.

Speak to me of love

Who’s That Knocking at My Door 1968 U.S. (90 minutes) written and directed by Martin Scorsese, with Mardik Martin and Richard H. Coll; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker.

Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, is like a teaser to the body of his work that followed.

It has Scorsese’s mobile, inquisitive camera eye, his ingenuity for telling a story with pictures, his stylistic use of popular music, and his male Italian-American New York neighborhood characters. It also is a movie about movies, filled with references to and discussions of classic movies, scenes and actors.

The story is a simple boy-meets-girl formula. J.R., a young, working class Sicilian-American like the boys Scorsese grew up with in his neighborhood on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, meets The Girl, a bright, attractive, well-educated uptown girl, on the Staten Island Ferry. They have a brief relationship which their vast cultural differences probably doom from the start.

Harvey Keitel stars in his first feature role as The Boy, J.R. The Girl is Zina Bethune, a dancer and successful soap opera actress.

The story focuses most on the boys’ background. Scorsese knows this well, particularly the boys’ Manichean view of woman. The movie opens with images of The Holy Mother, from the ceramic Madonna on the bureau to J.R.’s mother (Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother) whom the camera watches prepare food for a family meal and feed five children. Yet the boys’ hangout—8th Ward Pleasure Club, Private—is replete with centerfold images of wanton sex goddesses. And the boys’ main topic of conversation is ‘broads’—female objects of their sexual fantasies whom they should never dream, much less dare, to marry.

The holy mother on the one hand—church doctrine makes clear that the divine conception was an entirely unerotic, automatic transaction undertaken to make God a man (as presumably were the boys’ own origins); and on the other, the pleasure-giving whore, with sisters and other off-limits relations sexless in the middle. This view clearly makes ‘dating’ and ‘petting’ fraught subjects.   

Coming out of a movie theater together just having seen Rio Bravo (1959), The Girl comments to J.R. on the character played by Angie Dickinson:

‘I really liked the girl in that picture.’

‘Well let me tell you something. The girl in that picture was a broad!’

‘What do you mean, abroad?’

‘A broad! You know, there are girls, and then there are broads.’

The scene cuts to J.R.s visually interpreted definition of ‘a broad,’ a fantasia of J.R. and four prostitutes (Anne Collette, Tsuai Yu-lan, Saskia Holleman and Marieka) having sex, cut-choreographed to Jim Morrison and the Doors’ The End.

The street scene resumes:

‘You know, a broad isn’t really a virgin, you know what I mean? You play around with them, you don’t marry a broad, you know what I mean?’

‘Come on, you don’t mean that?’

‘Oh I mean it. Sure I mean it.’

These words and attitudes, which bear a catechismal echo of fatherly advice, frame The Girl’s ‘secret,’ later told in shots and stills cut-choreographed to The Dubs’ doo wop Don't Ask Me (To Be Lonely) when revealed at the film’s dénouement.

The matter comes down to a consideration of the enchanting creature who, dressed in fantastic expectations, is just another being as mystified in her own way as any male could be. What makes Scorsese’s telling so striking is that while he is so entirely of the boys and their world, he shows us this girl, mystified in her own way, with Ingmar Bergman-like insight and sensitivity.

Bethune is one of the wonders of this remarkable picture. Scorsese said that Bergman’s films had influenced him as a student. Apart from her Nordic looks, Bethune would be an easy fit in a Bergman movie because she has a lively, intelligent, expressive face that also would have made her ideal in silent movies. It is easy to imagine falling in love with her. In this work, Scorsese gets great work out of her: he watches her very closely and his camera loves her.

The film, which began as Scorsese’s thesis, can feel like a patchwork because the finished work is a combination of at least four distinct shoots between 1964 and 1968. The soundtrack is the first clue: it ranges from early 1960s bubblegum doo wop and rhythm-and-blues to The Doors’ spooky The End, first released in 1967. The final title, which changed several times during the film’s long gestation period, derives from the song Who's That Knocking? by the New York-area rockabilly band The Genies. Another tipoff is that Keitel changes from the kid–looking character (aged 25) he appears to be in some scenes to the more knowing adult male (aged 29) in others. This serendipitous tic lends mystique to his character.

The film has an interesting backstory.

Scorsese’s first shoot was the party scene edited to Ray Barretto’s 1963 hit Latin song El Watusi. The highly stylized four-minute scene begins as a slow pan from left to right and turns into a slow motion dance, in which about a dozen young men in sharp suits horse around with pistols at a drinking party in an apartment. It looks and feels as though it were a test run for Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese is among the revelers.

The following February or March (1965), Scorsese shot his main boy-meets-girl story with J.R. and his friends Joey (Lennard Kuras) and Sally ‘Gaga’ (Michael Scala) but no girl. At this stage, The Girl, whom J.R.’s friends never meet, is an unseen presence, the reason for J.R.’s distracted attitude as the trio kill time horsing around in the ‘hood and take a side trip to rural Copake, New York, two hours north of the city in the Berkshires.

About two years later, Scorsese cast Bethune as The Girl, shot her scenes with Keitel, and edited these scenes into the existing work. This version exhibited at the Chicago film festival in November 1967 as I Call First.

Distributor Joseph Brenner subsequently bought the film on the condition that Scorsese add a ‘nudie scene’ to increase the film’s marketability. Scorsese was in Europe in the spring of 1968; he brought Keitel to Amsterdam where they shot the J.R. fantasy sequence, which out-[Jean-Luc] Godards Godard—as most of the rest of the film does anyway. It opened that fall in New York as Who’s That Knocking At My Door.

It is hard not to think this lovely-made, free flowing scene influenced the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (1980) in which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard has a drunken episode in a Saigon hotel room.

There is a lot more to discover, appreciate and enjoy in this movie. It is far from perfect, but it does many good things amazingly well and intimates the great things that followed it.

Additional music credits:

Jenny Take a Ride, covered by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels (opening scene)

I've Had It, The Bell Notes

Shotgun, Jr. Walker and the All Stars

Ain't That Just Like Me? The Searchers

The Plea, The Chantels

Plus ça change…

Heroes for Sale 1933 Warner Brothers/First National (71 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; screenplay by Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner; Howard Bretherton, editor; James Van Trees, cinematographer.

An injured veteran’s addiction to painkillers, smug and craven upper-income bracket swells, workers downsized to maximize corporate profits, homeless ex-servicemen, and heavy-handed government treatment of ‘undesirables’: all are part of this classic story which resonates today.

William A. Wellman directed this Warner studios epic which follows its hero from the trenches of the Western Front through the irrationally exuberant 1920s to the breadlines of the Great Depression in the first 100 days of the Roosevelt Administration.

Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), a soldier assigned to a ‘suicide mission,’ is left for dead on a rainy nighttime battlefield by his panicked platoon leader. This officer, Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott), is a wealthy acquaintance from Holmes’ home town. Taken to be the sole survivor of what turned out to be a successful mission due to Holmes’ unsung initiative, Winston becomes a decorated war hero.

But German soldiers found Holmes alive and he got medical treatment as a prisoner of war. His injuries lead to a dependency on painkillers which interfere with his readjustment to postwar civilian life, particularly his new employment back in his home town at the Winston family bank.

Holmes’ ‘disgrace’—his morphine addiction exposed—puts him in inpatient treatment, during which time his widowed mother died. ‘Cured and discharged’ after six months’ treatment but with nothing to go home to, Holmes makes a new start in Chicago.

The young man’s verve, imagination and charm get him back on track in a new home, with a girlfriend (Loretta Young) and salt-of-the-earth friends, and a job at an industrial laundry. He finds a purpose in life and the chance to make a difference. He convinces the laundry owner (Grant Mitchell) to install a labor-saving device which improves efficiency and the company’s bottom line, though on the condition that none lose their jobs. He marries and starts a family.

Richard Barthelmess, Robert Barrat, Loretta Young and Aline MacMahon in Heroes for Sale.

But everyone does not live happily ever after.

A national chain takes over the laundry. The new owners adopt the plant’s labor-saving innovations nationwide and lay off the redundant work force. Holmes’ efforts to help the workers lose him his job and his wife; he gets a five-year prison term for a crime he did not commit from a society jittery about ‘anarchists’ and political radicals. After his release from prison, the local police ‘Red Squad’ run him out of town among the army of homeless unemployed veterans.

This broad sweep of early twentieth century American history takes place in little more than an hours’ running time. The story spoke to the heart of audiences during the most severe period of the Great Depression, and has a folksy ‘Joe Hill’ ending.

Wellman slipped memorable devils in the works, such as Holmes’ drug dealer (Tammany Young) and the surly pair of snap-brimmed Red Squad officers (Robert Elliott and Charles C. Wilson). 

In the establishing scene before Holmes is forced to leave town, an eight-column RED RIOT WRECKS MACHINE SHOP headline splashes across the screen and the Red Squad grab several Italian-speaking men unrelated to Holmes’ story from their homes and off the street: mustaches were the old turbans.

The craven Winston and his sanctimonious bank president father (Berton Churchill) are less devils than weak characters in a low circle of hell.

Barthelmess’ Holmes leads the angels as a Tom Hanks-like character, with the lovely Loretta Young as his wife Ruth. Character actor Robert Barrat’s ‘Max’ Brinker is a stereotypical comically overbearing German immigrant who vents his disapproval with a clicking tongue—a ‘Red’ until his revolutionary invention makes him a white spats-wearing, cigar-smoking capitalist. 

The real treat is the wise-cracking Aline MacMahon as Mary Dennis who, with her old codger father, Pa Dennis (Charley Grapewin, Dorothy’s Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz and Grandpa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath), runs the Chicago diner with rooms upstairs where Holmes gets his second start—homely, lonely places that could be Edward Hopper subjects.

MacMahon has great comic timing. Her Mary takes to the appealing Holmes from the moment he first appears in her diner, but he sees in her only a reliable older friend. A short scene that flows like an eloquent pause says in a minute everything about Mary’s loneliness and disappointment beneath her salty, ironic surface.

Holmes gets a promotion and offers to take Mary and girlfriend Ruth to dinner; he won’t hear of Mary’s polite decline. Mary rushes excitedly into her adjoining room to change, and then opens the door to see the couple standing close together with their backs to her. She holds for a beat, silently closes the door, and shouts to Mary from behind the door that she won’t be ready in time. Then she turns to the camera for a long beat.

In general, the framing, editing and pace are as crisp and snappy as Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner’s script. Wellman did not have to search far for images of a country and people out of work. Many of his extras in the crowds and breadlines reportedly were the real thing, hired for the movie. And when it rains, it literally pours.

Though Wellman never shuffled through a breadline, he had been a combat flyer during the war who sustained serious injuries when he was shot down over France. (He also crashed a SPAD fighter aircraft while shooting his classic Wings in 1928, after he which never flew again.)

Heroes for Sale is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the motion picture industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so until directors like Otto Preminger started testing the limits in the late 1950s. There was plenty of sex of all kinds, substance abuse, left wing politics, and moral failings among the grand and good in the United States before the 1960s, just not at the movies and on television.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its Forbidden Hollywood Collection. Despite ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and political subject matter make for the more controversial parts.

            This DVD includes Wellman’s classic Wild Boys on the Road (1933), a socially conscious drama about economic hard times breaking up families, with teenagers riding the rails seeking work and adventure in the Depression-era United States.

Illustrated men

The Mark of Cain 2000 U.S./Russia (73 minutes) directed and co-produced by Alix Lambert; cinematography Anastasi Mikhailov.

This documentary works within the context of the barbaric conditions of the Russian prison system to tell the stories of two dozen men and women inmates who have illustrated their lives in tattoos.

The legend is that ‘traditional’ Russian criminal society, the so-called vóry v zakóne, or ‘thieves who follow the code’ (the literal cardboard rendering ‘thieves-in-law’ suggests in English the agency of a spouse’s family), has a hierarchical structure, and that its members’ lives and careers are memorialized in elaborate nakólki, or tattoos, which identify them like a resume, passport, or military badges, rank and insignia.

Their stories are bleak and intense; the illustrations are elaborate. The scariest-looking subjects often seem calm and philosophical; some of the friendlier ones give off a vibe that makes one feel it would be better not to meet them in a crowded, day-lit street, much less alone in a dark alley. Several camera-curious, genuinely frightening-looking characters drift occasionally through the background. Russian criminal society may be male-dominated, but women appear to hold their own throughout the ranks.

Prison rules prohibit tattooing, but the visual evidence indicates that officials do not strictly enforce them. The pain the procedure can cause lends to its mystique.

We see stars on pecs and knees (‘I don’t bow or kneel to authority’), torso-covering churches for which each cupola stands for a conviction, spiders on webs (thief, or drug addict), and heavily muscled, hooded executioners or Christs on the cross (‘I follow the thieves’ code’). Sailing ships indicate a ‘roving life.’ German and Nazi symbols display disdain for conventional social norms and authority, as with 1950s American bikers, not pro-Nazi or racist views.

During the Soviet period, prisoners facing death sentences sometimes tattooed images of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin over their hearts, chests and backs, on the theory that guards would not dare mar such sacrosanct images with bullets.

However, any ‘tradition’ of tattooing and what the images mean seem open to a variety of interpretations. Several subjects said there are serious consequences for not being able to ‘answer’ for one’s markings. But among younger inmates, tattooing would work more along the line of creating a criminal Facebook page. As in other things, the more display suggests the less actual play.

According to Colonel Anatoli Teryokhin of Perm Central Penitentiary, tattoos fell from fashion among an element in prison and in the military among whom certain symbols and images once held specific meanings. Like everything else in the New Russia, tattooing is not what it used to be.

One of the most interesting details Lambert records is not a ‘what’ but the ‘how.’

Aleksandr Borisov, a career criminal doing nine and a half years for robbery, was the tattoo artist-in-residence at Perm Central Penitentiary, a high-security facility where Lambert and her crew appear to have done most of their interviews.

Borisov improvised a rotary tattoo machine from a hand-held mechanical wind-up razor. His ‘needle’ is a five-inch (13 cm) section of metal guitar string with one sharp end, mounted on the razor housing. The blunt end attaches to a lug on the razor motor and the sharp end trains through a repurposed ballpoint pen tip fixed to the other end of housing. The razor motor agitates the needle quickly up and down.

For ink, Borisov used the finely sifted soot of burnt boot sole dissolved in urine—preferably a client’s own. ‘I use only soot,’ Borisov said. ‘It turns out darker, doesn’t fade over time, and everything comes out bright.’

Lambert could not have picked a better time to make this film. She shot it in the late 1990s. Her subjects disparage the post-Soviet, moneyed New Russia of Boris Yel’tsin, Russian president from 1991-1999. This phase ran roughly from the last geriatric gasp of the Soviet Union in the failed 1991 August Coup to the dawn of the age of Vladimir Putin, who became president in 2000.

The result is a living document of an important transitional period in the country’s history, as well as in the history of the penal system that came out of the 1917 Revolution, which former political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled extensively as the GULag Archipelago. (GULag is a Soviet-era acronym for Glávnoe Upravlyénie ispravítel’no-trudov‎ykh Lágerei, which means Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps.)

‘The GULag still exists,’ said Valerii Abramkin of the Center for Prison Reform and a former prisoner at the notorious Byélyi Lyébed’, or White Swan, Prison in Solikamsk in Perm Oblast’. ‘The GULag is not only a system of camps. It is an unscrupulous, abundant, and incredibly cruel “repression”.’

Lambert shot footage inside White Swan but did not interview any then-current inmates. The prison was set up and run on Soviet state security founder Felix Dzerzhinsky’s principle that ‘prisoners could be made to eradicate each other all by themselves,’ said former inmate Slava Yermanov. The institution’s original task was to ‘break’ clergymen. Since the Khrushchev era thaw, the Interior Ministry has used it to ‘soften’ the hardest vory and ‘to solve unsolved crimes,’ Abramkin said.

Abramkin and Yermanov described the most notorious and effective method that White Swan authorities employ, called press-kámera, or ‘cell press.’ They place an inmate they want to break in a crowded cell with other inmates—‘crocodiles in a hole.’ The result is a free-for-all in which the other inmates may do as they like with him, which usually turns the hardest case into an ‘amoeba,’ Abramkin said.

Lambert tells an incredible tale. It is hard to imagine any Russian government before Yel’tsin’s, and certainly not Putin’s afterward, allowing a foreigner, especially a curious American woman, such open access to so unvarnished an aspect of Russian life.  

What's the meta?

Zen 2011 U.K. BBC Masterpiece Theatre (three 90-minute episodes: Vendetta, Cabal, and Ratking). Directed by John Alexander (Vendetta), Christopher Menaul (Cabal), and Jon Jones (Ratking); screenplays by Simon Burke, based on Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen mystery novels.

The ‘meta’ here is doughty middle class Brits playing the Edward Gibbon-flavored noble and ignoble Romans they learned about reading classical authors, in a miniseries of modern-day police thrillers set in Rome. 

Aurelio Zen (Rufus Sewell)—his surname is Venetian, he reminds people, not a New Age confection—is a homicide detective and a ‘good cop,’ the son of a policeman killed in the line of duty when he was seven years old. He is separated from his wife and lives with his mother (the former pop singer Catherine Spaak). Not to worry, though: Zen’s love interest is a new secretary at work, Tania Moretti (Caterina Murino), whom everyone in the section would like to bed.

Zen is the center of the action because he is recognized as a straight shooter in a world in which most self-respecting people give every appearance of operating as players with something up his sleeve or down her cleavage. Picture Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the midst of I, Claudius or the BBC/HBO series Rome, in finely tailored Italian suits.

It works like a charm, and Sewell is ideal in the role.

Each episode involves a murder that quickly involves political implications in which a certain ministry (presumably the interior ministry, because it exercises control over police personnel and the agency budget) takes a special interest.

The unnamed Minister (Eduardo Guerchini, played by Anthony Higgins, according to imdb.com), through his aide, Amadeo Colonna (Ben Miles, in a Robert Vaughn-like role), summons Zen to the ministry to receive his missions impossible. Colonna closely monitors Zen’s progress as each case proceeds. Due to the extremely ‘sensitive’ nature of his assignments, not to mention the often questionable legality of obtaining the desired result, Zen, sensibly wary of his associates, generally works alone, intuitively, through his street contacts, informants and former cops.

The episodes, based on Michael Dibden’s complexly plotted novels, move quickly and efficiently. A farrago of sexy circumstantial information involving money, sex, politics, and celebrity gets chopped in a blender, as in Raymond Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep. Little is what it seems to be. The solutions come out in the wash. 

Vendetta—a business executive and two prostitutes are slain at his Abruzzi villa; his business partner who fled the scene is the prime suspect. The partner confesses, but there are too many loose ends and prying eyes to make the case go away quietly. Another man wrongly convicted of murder, released from prison with a terminal illness, seeks to even scores with those whom he holds responsible for his conviction, including Zen.

Cabal—the gay black sheep of an aristocratic Roman family takes a nosedive off a bridge. Is it suicide or murder? If murder, was the motive personal or a move to prevent exposure of an Opus Dei-like cabal of the well-connected? An ambitious female prosecutor senses old-boy blood in the water. Zen’s office romance with Moretti blooms as he works this case, but her estranged husband is opposing the divorce she seeks.

Ratking—an enormously wealthy industrialist and political contributor with a playboy son and an unstable daughter married to an ambitious parvenu, is kidnapped and held for five million Euro ransom. His lawyer is murdered and the ransom stolen en route to the kidnappers, who demand another five million Euros. Meanwhile, Zen must deal with a new chief who is a stickler for the book and resents his ‘special relationship’ with the Minister.

There are many moving parts to each story, lovely details and great camera shots, and good individual performances from a variety of British character actors within an entirely Italian milieu, from Miles’ Colonna to Stanley Townsend as Zen’s dyspeptic chief Moscati.  

The haunting series theme music helps to set the atmosphere of threat veiled behind the bright surfaces of this famously beautiful city, giving the work the feel of a throwback to crime and espionage stories of cold war era television.

Midnight Mary

Midnight Mary 1933 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (74 minutes) directed by William A. Wellman; story by Anita Loos, screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola; cinematographer, James Van Trees; editor, William S. Gray.

This beautifully cut and polished William Wellman gem is a romance set in the late dusk of the pre-censorship, pre-noir era and wrapped in a courtroom drama.

The protagonist Mary Martin (Loretta Young) shared a chronic problem with a lot of the American film audience in 1933—not to mention 2012: she was young, single, out of work and could not find a job.

Mary tells her life story in flashbacks, reminiscing in a clerk’s office adjacent to the courtroom where she awaits a jury verdict in her ‘sensational’ murder trial. Her eye first catches the year she was born—1910—on the back of a volume of court proceedings on a shelf in the clerk’s office; she moves apace through the key events.

She is a ‘good gal’ at heart, though she has a knack for turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It did not take her long to fall in with the wrong crowd, even the wrong Mr. Darcy—Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez), a dapper thug, and his gang—not exactly Jane Austen’s paragon Fitzwilliam Darcy.

On the other hand, Mary gets great mileage out of being a strikingly beautiful wrongster, especially after she turns the head of Thomas Mannering Jr., Esq. (Franchot Tone), son of a judge and scion of a wealthy family with a Park Avenue address.

Ricardo Cortez, Loretta Young and Franchot Tone in Midnight Mary

The writing is crisp and sharp. The studio lighting, editing and montage are reason enough to see this gem. An early sequence follows Mary wearing holes in her shoes and runs in her stockings as she pounds pavement looking for work. At the end of the day, advertising signs in lights speak to her disheartenment in a manner similar to details in Bruce McCall’s covers for The New Yorker magazine:

A sign advertising ‘Coco Facial Soup’ becomes ‘No Jobs To-Day’; a sign for ‘Tires: More Miles’ becomes a rotating ‘No Help Wanted’; the sign for the Riverside Drive subway station reads ‘No Jobs; No Help Wanted’; and the ‘Capitol’ and ‘Joan Crawford’ of a picture palace marquee flash ‘No Jobs’ and ‘No Jobs To-Day.’ The superimposition of this collection of images in a single frame crowns her disappointment and frustration.

Cortez was an Austrian expatriate who changed his name and modeled his look on the classic Latin lover popular in films of that time. He played the first film Sam Spade in Warner Brothers’ 1931 Dangerous Female, a well done but not well known adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp detective novel The Maltese Falcon, directed by Roy Del Ruth. (John Huston made his classic version with Humphrey Bogart for Warner Brothers in 1941.)

Incidentally, the great character actress and comic Una Merkel, who plays Mary’s lifelong friend Bunny in Midnight Mary, was Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perine in Del Ruth’s Dangerous Female.

Several references in this movie to William Randolph Hearst publications movie relate to recondite details of newspaper history. When we first see Mary at the defendant’s table in court during her murder trial, her eyes appear above a copy of Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan magazine she is reading as the District Attorney (Frank Conroy) gives his closing argument.

At the end of the movie, a series of New York Journal headlines and subheads brings the story arc to a clean, three-point landing. The New York Journal was the newspaper Hearst brought out in 1896 to take on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World by emulating and amplifying Pulitzer’s ‘yellow journalism.’

Midnight Mary is among the early Hollywood talkies released before the industry began to enforce its self-imposed ‘Production Code’—censorship guidelines on sexual and moral content—in 1934, and continued to do so for nearly three decades.

Turner Classic Movies reissued this movie among several sets of so-called ‘pre-code’ films on DVD as its ‘Forbidden Hollywood Collection.’ Despite the ‘blue movie’ cover art, the moral, social, and in some instances political subject matter make for the raciest parts.