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I think the windmill from Foreign Correspondent might be one of my favorite setpieces in a Hitchcock movie.
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Jul 1, 2016 20:09
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Raxivace posted:I think the windmill from Foreign Correspondent might be one of my favorite setpieces in a Hitchcock movie. It's a good one, although the carousel from Strangers on a Train might be his best.
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Jul 1, 2016 21:52
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 Current Director: Alfred Hitchcock Films Completed: 44/56 Just Watched: The Farmer's Wife, Juno and the Paycock, The Skin Game Three big dull ones. I struggled to pay attention during all of these. While each has moments of brilliance none of them are particularly good, nor are any of them particularly close to Hitchcock's heart (at least according to Hitchcock/Truffaut). The Farmer's Wife marks the completion of another decade for me, the hit and mostly miss 1920's. A comedy based on a highly successful stage play, Hitchcock was tasked with turning a wordy, dialogue-heavy script into something cinematic. He took influence from Murnau's The Last Laugh to try and convey emotion visually and use limited intertitles, but ultimately it's a failure. An uninteresting plot about a widowed farmer trying to find a new wife with the help of his housemaid (guess who he ends up marrying). There's some pretty photography here and there, but it's mostly an attempt at making plain faces engaging and in that regard it falls apart. Also, this one is 130 minutes!!! Should have been a one-reeler. Juno and the Paycock is another stage adaptation, this time of a renown Sean O'Casey play. Hitchcock was a huge O'Casey fan and loved the play, but admitted he was unsure of how to properly adapt it for the screen. Set during the backdrop of the IRA and the Irish Civil War, Juno and the Paycock mostly takes place in a single tenement apartment and revolves around the dissolution of a family amid the political chaos. There's some assassinations, gunshots and betrayals that lend themselves to themes Hitchcock would later cement for himself, but the intrigue doesn't take. The Skin Game has more visual flourish, but an even weaker plot. Two rich families go to war with each other over disrespect and resentment. It gives way to a lame Romeo and Juliet story. In Hitchcock/Truffaut even Hitchcock waives it off as something of no interest to discuss. It opens with some particularly great outdoors shots, but as it wears on it wears you down. They say the medium is the message but in the case of these last two films the medium fails to convey the message. The public domain DVD set I'm watching has surprisingly clear picture, but the sound is muddied and the transfers unrefined. These early talkies were limited by the technology and the sound has not held well through whatever transfer process these copies went through. The British accents and lack of subtitles make them even harder to follow along on. Words go in one ear and out the other. As well, I'm not sure if this is a weird cropping issue or if the cinematographer dropped the ball because in both these films the tops of people's heads are constantly cut off by the top of the frame. Decapitated people holding unlistenable conversations is the gist of them.
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Jul 11, 2016 18:33
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Current Director: Alfred Hitchcock Films Completed: 46/56 Just Watched: The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn Down to the final ten. The Paradine Case is way underrated. I've seen Peck's performance referred to as "the worst" of Hitchcock's golden era. But what I love about it is seeing him play such a scuzzy lawyer. When he's outside the courtroom he seems noble at first, but becomes obsessed in a way not that far from Scotty in Vertigo. By the time he gets to the court he is as far from Atticus Finch as possible. He's brutal and mean, resorting to low blows and cheap tricks to manipulate witnesses. From a filmmaking angle these courtroom scenes are a repetition of the same and similar shots. But the script is sharp and Peck is fierce. By the end he is sweaty and disheveled. For some reason I always lumped this together with Under Capricorn in my mind but they've got barely anything in common beyond the typical Hitchcock themes of obsession and intrigue. It's a very weak film, outside of some good performance and beautiful photography. I love the old technicolor look. But the story and script are a dull melodrama with vaguely gothic tones that never seem to take full form (outside of that great shot when Ingrid Bergman is lying on the floor, with her head against the bed at the end).
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Jul 15, 2016 15:41
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Current Director: Alfred Hitchcock Films Completed: 49/56 Just Watched: Waltzes from Vienna, Murder!, Mary Holy poo poo. Waltzes from Vienna...is good. It's not great or anything, but it's surprisingly charming and mostly well-paced (it lags in the middle but picks up for the finale). Hitchcock called it the lowest ebb of his career, but it's actually very well shot, funny and uses music to great effect. Probably the single biggest surprise out of this entire venture. I put it off so long because I expect it to be dreadful. As well, Murder! is a solid Hitchcockian picture with some amazing photography when it counts. Uses the long table image 11 years before Citizen Kane, the reveal is a precursor to Psycho and the jury scene is immensely effective - an inverse 12 Angry Man done with mob mentality. Mary is the same film, but in German. It's shorter but with a clear boredom of having to film the same exact film twice to please the overseas markets.
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Jul 21, 2016 03:00
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Current Director: Alfred Hitchcock Films Completed: 53/56 Just Watched: Young and Innocent, Jamaica Inn, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Marnie Well, looks like this thread might be truly dead, but I have a strong desire to see all those titles crossed off and complete. Young and Innocent is in the vein of Hitchcock's "wrong man on the run stories," although unlike Saboteur or North by Northwest this is much more lowkey, avoiding landmarks for homeless shelters and birthday parties. It's closest blood relative in Hitchcock's filmography is probably Frenzy for that reason - in fact, both movies are about a murdered girl (strangled) washing up on the shore and a man teaming up with a young woman to escape wrongful conviction. It's a good one, solidly in the upper half of his body of work when ranked, although not near classic status. Jamaica Inn is a completely different kind of film. It's full of gorgeous camerawork and evocative art design but terrible dialogue. A lack of a score really hurts this one as it becomes too easy to lose interest in the proceedings, even when the camera swings in momentarily captivating movements. Charles Laughton plays something of a cartoon character and much of the acting is overripe. It's his first Daphne du Maurier adaptation, but Rebecca blows this out of the water. Mr. & Mrs. Smith I surprisingly loved. It's the best film of this batch and secretly a dark horse for a top tier Hitchcock film. In Hitchcock/Truffaut he sort of skips this one, simply telling Truffaut he didn't know how to relate to the characters. But they're such perfect Hitchcock protagonists. There's a pent up anger and sexual aggression that builds up throughout the film. Whereas many screwball comedies play the chemistry up with flirting and goofiness, this film gets that kind of passionate anger that comes with misanthropic couples who are truly right for each other even if they disturb everybody around them. Betrayals and deceit mark the themes here, making it more a part of the Hitchcock pantheon than it's description suggests. Finally, flash forward 20 years to Marnie. Surprisingly less of a thriller than I thought it would be, it's much closer to a film like Rebecca or Spellbound in its Freudian psychological probings. I think Tippi Hendren was somewhat miscast, I don't think she handles the darker elements of her character well, but Connery is excellent as a true psychotic pervert. He's someone who is just as sexually disturbed as Marnie, but he has enough self-control to function in society and keep that mask up. He's an abuser who recognizes a pathologically ill woman he can seize. She's a liar and a thief. It's a truly dysfunctional story that I could probe more into but I need to think about and break apart more.
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Aug 4, 2016 13:00
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Egbert Souse posted:Please add The Battle of San Pietro to your list. It's another of Huston's war documentaries and fantastic. Yeah, it's a hard one to find but I added it to the list. Thanks.  Director: John Huston Progress: 25/38 Just watched: The Bible: In The Beginning... Next up: In This Our Life The Bible: In The Beginning... A pretty big flop on its release and kind of understandable why. There is really nothing new here that hasn't been told a hundred times over. Considering Huston was an athiest, I am not sure what drew him to this project. Huston also took over after a nothing director was fired, so this project never really felt solid to begin with. Much like Lynch's Dune, this doesn't feel like a Huston movie it feels like a Dino De Laurentiis movie. George C. Scott is a good Abraham and seeing the joy in Huston's face as he plays Noah made the movie worth it. Must See: The Dead, Prizzi's Honor, Wise Blood, The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City, Moulin Rouge, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon, Let There Be Light, Reflections in a Golden Eye See: The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Misfits, The African Queen, The Asphalt Jungle, Key Largo, The Red Badge of Courage, Night of the Iguana, Freud, The Battle of San Pietro Don't Have To See: Annie, Victory, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Moby Dick, Beat the Devil, The MacKintosh Man, The Bible: In The Beginning... Seen:
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Aug 4, 2016 16:04
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Current Director: Alfred Hitchcock Films Completed: 55/56 Just Watched: Torn Curtain, Topaz Two Cold War spy thrillers, made as "realistic" takes on the James Bond series which featured it'd absurd supervillains and wacky gadgets. Both of these films are more grounded European dramas, derided over the years as mediocre entries in Hitchcock's filmography given he was coming off a string of masterpieces that lasted a decade and a half. But both Torn Curtain and Topaz are excellent films, perhaps too long in their own ways, but exciting and brilliantly scripted. Torn Curtain stars Paul Newman as a nuclear physicist and Julie Andrews as his research assistant and fiance. Hoping to crack a nuclear equation the Soviets have already secured, Newman secretly defects behind the iron curtain so he can trick the communists top scientist into sharing the math behind a lethal gamma project. Completely unaware, Andrews follows him onto the plane and is appalled to find out he is a traitor. Unable to break cover, Newman allows her to believe this for much of the story. What makes Torn Curtain a strong story is how quickly everything unravels. Hitchcock gets the plot hanging by threads as soon as possible, so one misstep or wrong word has the potential to kill the couple. One of the best scenes of course is at a farmstead where Newman goes to get information from friendly spies. He is followed by a Russian agent and confronted, forcing Newman and a woman at the homestead to kill him. However, they're quite inept at it - stabbing him, hitting him and eventually forcing his head into an oven in a struggle that lasts for several minutes. Hitchcock said he wanted to show how hard it can be to kill somebody. I think this scene went straight into Carpenter's They Live as the alley fight. It's messy but quite funny. I like Torn Curtain a lot because it has a similar sense to his globe trotting stories like The 39 Steps and Foreign Correspondent, but it's on a small scale. The action is contained, there's not big Mount Rushmore finale or plane crashes. He seems to deliberately eschew that type of storytelling in favor of making a bus trip one of his biggest suspense beats. In Topaz, which I actually like more, we have an even more stripped down spy story. Made in '69 but set in '62 on the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a French national becomes involved in a spy drama between America, the Soviet Union and Cuba - ultimately leading to the reveal of Soviet agents working within the French government. This story has it's action scenes, but it's much more of a quiet drama focused more on intrigue with moments of realistic brutality and terror. It's closer to the despair of John Le Carre's work than anything else in Hitchcock's filmography. The best parts of the film are set in Cuba, when the Frenchman works with a Juanita Castro-like figure whom he is having an affair with. The widow of a Cuban revolution hero, Juanita is able to avoid detecting while working with a high-ranking official. This sets into motion what is in my opinion one of Hitchcock's most successful suspense stories. It works because everything is so subdued and brought down to a human level. An overbearing Bernard Hermann score would not work here because what Hitchcock is doing is much more subtle and internal. He seems to nail the type of grief and struggle he was going for in Under Capricorn, but failed to deliver on before. By far the most suspenseful sequence is the theft of a briefcase in which a different French agent poses as a reporter to distract the Cuban official. He takes photos of the man, supposedly for Ebony magazine, while a betrayer slowly steals a briefcase full of secret documents. This is perhaps unsung as one of Hitchcock's most constructions, a mastery of film language that by this point in his life he could craft and cut in his sleep. I was expecting a dip in quality post-The Birds because I had heard how disappointed most people are in the end of his career, Frenzy being the exception and Marnie having it's fans. But up to this point they are all phenomenal in their own rights, they're just different than what he was ever doing before - Torn Curtain being the only one he maybe could have done 15 years prior. But the psychoanalytical probing and exploration of compulsion and fetish in Marnie is only possible from a man who was able to learn from telling stories like Rebecca, Spellbound and Vertigo. Topaz could only come as a cool down from decades of high tension thrillers. Frenzy is the type of brutal serial killer story he was never allowed to tell before. I'm very excited for Family Plot and I'm glad I've saved it for last, because the end of his career is maybe his most intriguing era - it's where everything comes together to reveal the lessons of a life lived in the cinema.
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Aug 7, 2016 14:17
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You've got one more Hitch left it looks like. As somebody that finished this journey themselves a few years ago, I want to say congratulations. 
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Aug 7, 2016 16:18
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Raxivace posted:You've got one more Hitch left it looks like. As somebody that finished this journey themselves a few years ago, I want to say congratulations. I've still got his TV episodes to watch cause I've never actually seen any of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I also have the PBS DVD of that Holocaust documentary footage he advised on (although did not technically direct) to watch once I wrap the feature filmography. So I'm glad to have hit a milestone but I've still got uncharted patches of his career left to experience before I've truly seen it all. I will say though, a lot of those early features are not worth the time and he's honestly not a director you need to take a total completest route with. I'll expand on this when I watch and review Family Plot and do my final roundup tonight (at work right now) but I think there's only a handful of pre-1934 films worth watching, while everything from Man Who Knew Too Much onward is what you want to see.
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Aug 7, 2016 17:28
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Current Director: Alfred Hitchcock Films Completed: 56/56 Just Watched: Family Plot I was talking with a friend recently about Frenzy and he said he thought if Hitchcock lived a little longer and kept making movies for a few more years he could have ended up in 42nd street trash theaters. Frenzy shows he was capable of sinking to disgusting depths to reach new levels of his psychoanalytic obsession with suspense, shock and human perversity. Family Plot is nothing like the grotesqueness of Frenzy, but it does have a strange sleaze to it. Maybe it's William Devane's grinning psychopath, or Barbara Harris' fraudulent psychic whose "communications" with the spirits alternate between hypersexual and demonic. Whatever it is, the camera and the actors move in a way that reminds me more of Deep Throat than of any other Hitchcock film. On one level Family Plot is about fakes. Harris is a fake psychic, Devane has a fake identity, Bruce Dern is a cab driver who calls himself "an actor" and he spends half the film pretending to be a lawyer. The original screenplay was titled "Deceit" and while it's a lame title it's a fitting descriptor of who these people are. I really like this one and I think it exemplifies that these late-era Hitchcock films are unfairly maligned for being different than his famous work. Family Plot contains little of his typical visual flourish and it lacks iconography, but it's a tight comedy-thriller that serves as a fine cap to a breathtaking career. --- As in my previous post, I can't quite say I've completed Hitchcock yet but I've reached a milestone. His body of work at its peaks is unimpeachable. He stretched the boundaries of cinema and in many ways defined that a truly great film is entertaining. Such a silly idea, but one he was attacked for by critics nearly his entire life. Rather he excelled at expressing drama through visual terms, a master of the camera who always knew exactly where the lens should go and how it should weave in and out of scenes. Because of how long it took me there's some I really need to rewatch, among these are Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, Rear Windows, Frenzy, The Lodger, Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Secret Agent, Notorious and Shadow of a Doubt. I think I can say safely that The Birds is my #1 - it's so enduring to me. Endlessly fascinating, multilayered and pure genius. It's also the mark of his shift away from his typical filmmaking style. It's his last iconic film we associate with him, but also a departure into the bizarre and supernatural. There are films of his I think are not worth seeing. Before 1934 I'd say the only essentials are The Lodger, Blackmail and Murder! If you're curious The Pleasure Garden, The Ring and Rich and Strange are also okay. Waltzes from Vienna is obviously not essential, but it's surprisingly good and from The Man Who Knew Too Much onward every film is worth seeing at least once and most multiple times. Although there's some weak entries - Spellbound, The Man Who Knew Too Much (56), Under Capricorn, Jamaica Inn and Aventure malgache are all disappointing. I also think a good number of his most underrated movies are actually excellent. Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Stage Fright, Topaz, Family Plot, The Paradine Case and I Confess are all overlooked gems. Here's a rough attempt to rank his filmography based on my Criticker ratings: Tier 10 (Masterworks): The Birds - 100 Vertigo - 99 Strangers on a Train - 95 Shadow of a Doubt - 92 Psycho - 91 North by Northwest - 90 Tier 9 (Excellent): Frenzy - 86 The Lady Vanishes - 85 Mr. & Mrs. Smith - 85 Lifeboat - 84 Rear Window - 84 The Wrong Man - 84 Tier 8 (Great): Rebecca - 83 The Trouble With Harry - 83 The 39 Steps - 83 Blackmail - 82 Foreign Correspondent - 82 Notorious - 82 Topaz - 81 Tier 7 (Very Good): Torn Curtain - 80 Dial M for Murder - 79 Family Plot - 79 Saboteur - 79 Stage Fright - 79 I Confess - 78 Marnie - 78 Sabotage - 78 Young and Innocent - 78 Tier 6 (Good): The Paradine Case - 77 The Lodger - 76 Rope - 76 Suspicion - 76 Waltzes from Vienna - 76 Tier 5 (Okay): The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - 75 Murder! - 75 Spellbound - 75 To Catch a Thief - 74 Tier 4 (Weak): Bon Voyage - 73 Secret Agent - 71 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) - 70 Tier 3 (Not Good): Mary - 69 The Pleasure Garden - 69 Jamaica Inn - 66 Under Capricorn - 65 Tier 2 (Bad): Aventure malgache - 64 The Farmer's Wife - 60 The Ring - 60 Downhill - 59 Champagne - 56 Number 17 - 56 Juno and the Paycock - 53 Tier 1 (Terrible): The Manxman - 49 Rich and Strange - 49 The Skin Game - 49 Elstree Calling - 47 Easy Virtue - 45 I had fun this past month finishing this off and there's a few more directors I'd like to go through, but I'll see if this thread bounces back rather than turn it into my personal row of posts. I'm not sure who I'll do next but I'd like to tackle at some point F.W. Murnau, Chantal Akerman, Frederick Wiseman and Roman Polanski. In the mean time, I've got a couple movie projects to get going on. Thanks for reading.
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Aug 11, 2016 00:46
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Congratulations!
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Aug 11, 2016 02:13
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While no one else has posted in this thread, I'd like to give it a go again. And to kick it up, I'm going to get as far away from Hitchcock aesthetically and politically as I can think. My next director is Chantal Akerman. In honor of the extraordinary films of hers I have already seen (Jeanne Dielman, Je Tu Il Elle, J'ai faim J'ai froid) and her tragic and untimely death I'd like to roll through her filmography. Thankfully Jeanne Dielman is an outlier in terms of length and rather she jumped around, completing shorts, features, segments and all sorts of experimental work. Despite her storytelling innovations she remains underrated and under seen. I've even known French film buffs who had never heard of her. It seems impossible to me, but I'm willing to pour through her filmography in order to better understand the depth of her skill. I'm including everything here, although I'm not sure what is and what isn't available. It may be impossible and at least one short, New York, New York bis is considered lost. Akerman contributed a lot to compilation films of shorts and in cases where the whole films can't be found I will watch the short if available. Many of these movies I've never heard of and have no idea of their availability in the US and some of these are one-off TV episodes or specials. I'm planning chronological order but I will skip and come back if need be. If anybody has sources for these films please let me know, it will be a challenge just finding the mid-period work.  Current Director: Chantal Akerman Films Completed: 1/44 Just Watched: Saute ma ville Akerman's first film, made when she was 18. A girl (Akerman) locks herself in her kitchen and begins to clean, but finds she is completely incompetent at it. Like Chytilova's Daisies by way of Jeanne Dielman. We see early on Akerman's disregard for housework and the demeaning and humiliating nature of it. The young girl is her own prisoner, using tape to blockade herself in a tiny kitchen until she can complete her work, humming to herself and making increasingly annoying noises. Eventually she kills herself, lighting flowers on fire and then turn the gas on the stove. She rests her head on the stove top until gas fills the room and explodes, killing her with a sound effect and a cut to black. Very quick paced and politically charged coming from a first-time teenage filmmaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx2RNzl-p3Q
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Aug 26, 2016 06:02
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Director: John Huston Progress: 25/38 Just watched: Under The Volcano Next up: In This Our Life Under The Volcano I got a free trial to FilmStruck (which I highly recommend) and saw that Under The Volcano was one of the films in the collection. I have never been a big Albert Finney fan but this performance was just amazing. I usually can't stand alcoholics in films, it just never seems to work - it either comes off too much or too little but he nailed it right on the head. Finney plays a retired British consul living in Mexico on the eve of WWII. He is basically intentionally drinking himself to death when his ex-wife shows back up. There are just some heartbreaking scenes in this film, one in particular where Finney's ex-wife and the man she cheated on him with try to get him to shower and shave. This is an uncomfortably intimate film about alcoholism, self-destruction, and forgiveness. Must See: The Dead, Prizzi's Honor, Wise Blood, The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City, Moulin Rouge, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon, Let There Be Light, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Under The Volcano See: The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Misfits, The African Queen, The Asphalt Jungle, Key Largo, The Red Badge of Courage, Night of the Iguana, Freud, The Battle of San Pietro Don't Have To See: Annie, Victory, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Moby Dick, Beat the Devil, The MacKintosh Man, The Bible: In The Beginning... Seen:
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Nov 16, 2016 22:39
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