as I rode the auto train, I took the opportunity to catch up on some films in preparation for my Hitchcock course. Two of the films I'm likely to screen in class, films I had not seen in ages, perhaps since my wife and I were dating. I thought it would be appropriate to start my ride by watching The Lady Vanishes, since after all the bulk of it is on a train! I followed this with Rope, and early this morning, I watched a film I'd never seen before: Torn Curtain. An interesting mix: one from his late British period, one from his mid-American period, and one from his post-masterpiece period. (Torn Curtain followed Marnie, which at the time was seen as the beginning of the end for Hitchcock, though some critical assessment claims it's actually the final masterpiece.)
Watching the British film, what struck me this time round was its droll British humour. Much of this is centered around the two Englishmen Caldicott and Charter and their efforts to get information about a major cricket test match (and their desperate hopes to return to Manchester in time for the final day), but the central plot concerning a missing governess also has its share. Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave offer a British version of romantic comedy even amid the increasing danger of the spy plot, the realization that pretty much every non-Anglo on the train is out to "get" them for knowing too much. The film also presents us with a protagonist who has trouble convincing others of the reality of her perceptions -- think James Stewart in Rear Window. The limited options for women are commented upon: Lockwood's character is planning to get married mainly for money reasons, but we are led to understand that her rejection of her intended at the end of the film for Redgrave's character is the "better" choice; she finally takes the advice of the girlfriends who saw her off on the train at the beginning of the film, one of whom is played by Googie Withers, whom I have an incredible star-crush on.
It's pretty obvious, isn't it, that Charter and Caldicott are gay? The censors of course would not have permitted explicit acknowledgment, but film makers often managed to sneak in gay subtexts, usually in the context of either humor or criminality.
And speaking of gay criminals, or as Robin Wood called them, murderous gays...
Rope is famous for its being an experiment: the legend about the film is that Hitchcock attempted to film in continuous takes, only stopping every ten minutes to change the film in the camera. This technically is not true -- some takes are shorter than ten minutes -- but the basic premise of the legend is correct. Hitchcock does not engage in classical editing of shot-counter-shot. Rather, the action unfolds before his camera, and when characters move to different parts of the apartment, the camera (usually) follows. That the two central characters, Brandon and Phillip, are more than just roommates, is almost a given in contemporary criticism; watching John Dall's response to the strangling of his "friend," and the description of the exhilaration he felt when "his body went limp," it's impossible to ignore that interpretation. The case is also supposed to be based on the Leopold and Loeb case, thus making the homosexual subtext part of the background chatter about the film. Once again, we also get a link between homosexuality and fascism: Brandon and Phillip kill their friend as a testament to their Nietzschean belief that superior intellectual beings rise above the ordinary laws for ordinary people. Though Brandon condemns the Nazis for being small-minded butchers, the lack of humanity of his perspective clearly echoes the atrocities that postwar America was still coming to terms with. (The equation of homosexuality and fascism can be found in more recent cinema, too; Oliver Stone's JFK is probably the most outrageous such equation.)
It boggles my mind that Hitchcock, who perceived actors as no different from other stage props, would work with Method actor Paul Newman -- after the trouble he had with Montgomery Clift in I Confess. (Of course, Clift was a homosexual, and numerous Hitchcock biographers have considered the director's "issues" with gay actors.) Be that as it may, the story of an American scientist's defection into East Germany make the film a relic of the Cold War, and only mildly interesting at that. While the romantic relationship between Newman's scientist and Julie Andrews' fiance/assistant echoes earlier spy dramas like Notorious and North by Northwest (both starring Cary Grant), there's clearly no spark between Andrews and Newman; the revelation that Newman's character is in fact pretending to defect in order to obtain information from an East German physicist cleverly shown at a distance where we can't hear him explain to her what he's doing, is ruined by the melodramatic/romantic score that shows Andrews' relief at learning the truth. Their escape from East Berlin is dragged on way too long. While there are some good tense moments on a fake-official city bus, by the time we get the final twist that allows them to escape, the audience has lost much interest. The famous scene where Newman's "watcher" Gromek is killed in a farmhouse, silently so that the cab driver who brought Gromek to the farm cannot hear what's going in, fares adequately when compared to other Hitchcock murders, but there's still over an hour of film to go after that scene! This might have been a more compelling film if it had been cut short by about twenty minutes.
Anyway, time to go watch a few more films...
No comments:
Post a Comment