(continuing from here.)
Stewart’s an emotional wreck in much of Hitchcock’s stuff. While Cary Grant maintains a kind of icy hauteur through the thick/thin of those thrillers, Stewart bubbles with barely-repressed confusion and turmoil. So–my wrongheaded snipe about melodramatics is completely, thoroughly wrong.
(I read an interesting little tidbit about Stewart yesterday in Jonathan Lethem’s collection, _The Disappointment Artist_–which I can’t recommend highly enough as a model of smart, personal criticism about art. He was noting how a biographer of Stewart had wondered how the “gentle†actor of early pictures turned, after his service in WWII, into the dark troubled soul of later pictures. And Stewart’s war record was, in part, sealed–protected as confidential. The biographer wondered if Stewart had been part of the Dresden bombing raid….)
There’s a project in here somewhere: Action films as male hysteria.
I don’t think Mike is thoroughly wrong. I think this discussion has found us all playing fast and loose with terminology and sounding a bit vague at time. Besides, there are always exceptions to whatever weak theories we’re playing around with.
For instance, Stewart played a murderer in one of the Thin Man films: After the Thin Man. Anyway, that was 1936 and he wasn’t gentle. Not a miscast, because I think Capra hadn’t yet made him what he is largely remembered as, pre-Hitch.
Yes, Stewart is perfect for Hitchcock. He’s what makes Vertigo so perfect. He’s also why Marnie doesn’t work–he wasn’t in it. Sean Connery is too sadistic, whereas Stewart mixes sadism with hysteria, helplessness, masochism. At times he is Madeleine, and Cary Grant would never be a woman except for laughs (as in The Major and the Minor). Or for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (whee!).
I have to disagree with John regarding Marnie. I think it may be Hitchock’s most sadistic movie,therefore requiring a presence like Connery’s in order to signal its break with the constraints of old Hollywood and its commitment to a weirdly theatrical and lurid sexuality. It prefigures the brutal and fairly explicit scene of rape/murder in Frenzy, a film in which Hitchcock foregoes hollywood entirely and relies on unrecognizable actors (to an American and global audience at least) and a wholly British location. Stewart was not suitable for Hitchock through the 1960s.
Perhaps the fault is in Hitchock becoming too sadistic late in his career, though I’d note in his favor that he pairs the brutality of the rape/murder scene in Frenzy with another scene in which after the serial killer makes his signature phrase “You’re my kind of girl,” indicating the onset of his attack, Hitchock refuses to show any of the rape/murder at all, instead pulling the camera back slowly from a closed door, down a long stairway and back into the street. I always found this particular camera movement devastating, as it simulatenously indicates the power of the camera visually and its complete inability to intervene morally. It shames the viewer. It reminds me of the similar moment in Shadow of a Doubt when young Charlie learns her uncle is the Merry Widow killer and she is isolated within the library by a spectacular crane shot, one of the crucial moments in which Hitchcock asserts the autonomy of the camera.
by the way, one of Stewart’s last interesting performances was in a movie called Fool’s Parade (1971)which indicated that he might successfully make the shift to the new tone of American cinema in the 1970s. I remember liking it quite a bit thought I haven’t seen it in years. Unfortunately he went the “Aiport 1977” route where golden-age actors were meant to lend class to bad spectacles (cf. Fred Astaire in The Towering Inferno). and in the bad remake of The Big Sleep he does get a bit of a chance to show the old glint of hysteria in the evil old rich bastard General Sternwood.
oh boy – I can’t let this one go:
How about his very womanly performance in Bringing Up Baby? Played for laughs, yes, but how many women does Cary Grant have to play before we re-examine that blanket statement? “He’s got my bone!” indeed.
Ummm…you’re right about Grant. Not only “Baby,” but “Arsenic and Old Lace”–where old women and Raymond Massey are more butch.
I guess we need to move away from blanket statements in general. Unless that’s a blanket statement.
Bringing up BRINGING UP BABY: yes, “played for laughs.” My point. He decided to turn gay all of a sudden.
Hawks is a man’s man ’til the end. All his men play women, and all his women act like men, thus eliminating women altogether.
I have no idea what I just said.
Michael F. is, as usual, absolutely right. I’d like to revise my previous comment and say that MARNIE is a failure “commercially.” Which is true. What is also true is that it is one of my favorite Hitchcock films. Just ask Schantz (what happened to Schantz?). I usually teach it as a supplement to VERTIGO in order to raise the same issues that Michael raises (though I don’t do it as well he does).
“You stare and blare and say you care but you’re unfair,” Marnie says to Mark. A better statement about visual pleasure in narrative cinema, there are few.
great quotation from Marnie, John. I hadn’t remembered that. You’re right about Marnie’s commercial appeal–Stewart would have significantly softened the impact and perhaps made the film more accessible, though its aim would be radically different. Even now Marnie seems remarkably experimental and outrageous for a film by a major popular director. It seems to have much more in common with something like Blue Velvet than Notorious. How do the students take to it?
Michael, we don’t watch the entire thing. I have them watch VERTIGO, then we try to make our way through Laura Mulvey. Because MARNIE seems to work so well in this context (better, in some ways, than VERTIGO), I show them several clips. A good one is the scene where Marnie interviews for the job with Mark Rutland’s firm. Mark is clearly on to her, and he stands in the corner with a knowing, sadistic gaze. Another good scene is “you Freud, me Jane?” scene (where Marnie sings her little ditty).
It’s fun to show them Hitchcock’s own trailer to MARNIE, which not only introduces the characters and establishes the story (which helps the students), but does so in an extremely self-conscious way. Hitchcock is clearly in control (he swoops in on a crane, steps off, then narrates several of the key scenes in the film. It’s outrageous. When Hitch says something to effect of “Mark must ‘penetrate’ the mystery of Marnie,” he cuts to the shot where the tree crashes through the window in Mark’s office).
The trailer is available as a bonus feature on the DVD.
Those kinds of trailers are great, and I wish someone would try to do one of those now. Besides Hitchcock (the trailer for Psycho is funnny as hell, there is of course Welles’ trailer for Citizen Kane where he also sweeps in from the crane. (I sense that fat directors must love the freedom of flying on cranes).
I recently watched the Criterion edition of Welles’ last completed film ‘F for Fake’ and it came with a NINE(!) minute trailer, with Welles explaining the film. Iti ncluded a lot of footage shot after the film was completed – stuff with a tiger… Strange, and of course completely unhelpful in selling the film to an auidence.
Lynch and Scorsese could get away with appearing in their own trailers. And one would think they are both fond of those old trailers by Hitch and Welles. I’d also love to see someone like Wes Anderson or Soderbergh try their hand with the self-conscious trailer.
Soderbergh did try to sell “Schizopolis,” didn’t he? I think he was in the trailer–because he is either the first or second person on screen in the film, walking onto a stage and “setting up” the film… (and the film is a glorious hilarious mess).
Hey, we’re screwing with Arnab’s attempt to organize us yet again.
Back to hysteria: I recall–and still quote, on occasion–my favorite character (played by Bill Paxton) from James Cameron’s “Aliens” who basically shifts abruptly from macho future-Marine into the guy who whines repeatedly that “We’re all gonna fuckin’ die, man”…
Given how closely that film hews to the conventions of war flicks, what is the role of emotion in WWII flicks? (And let’s assume that the revisionism of “Private Ryan” would invite Tom Hanks onto the battlefield *precisely* so that he would tear up. But what about Fighting Seabees and Audie Murphy? I know nothing about that stuff.)
Or: I think you could make a case that the “stoic” Western protagonist–epitomized, for me, by Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in “The Searchers”–is as ‘tainted’ by irrational longing, grief, and fear as Hitchcock’s Stewart or any of the three heroes in “Shiri” (the flick that got this all started). Greil Marcus and Jonathan Lethem have written wonderful essays about Edwards/Wayne as this force of nature–seeming implacable, relentless, without any conscious reflection…. pure action. But as a “natural” force, he is as purely emotive as he is purely active. Maybe the “stoic” hero is a misreading; what we see is a non-rational actor, an agent of nothing but desire and emotion? (What I’ve always loved about “The Searchers”–what “Taxi Driver” for me simply reaffirms, rather than revising–is its utter lack of repression.)
Shane is no Ethan Edwards, but he too seems guided by deep-seated emotional ties: in his case, familial and paternal.
Maybe Eastwood in the Leone or No-Name Man westerns is stoic. But he’s literally *dead* in one of them, or is it two?, so he seems more inhuman than composed and repressed.
Perhaps de-composed.
Watching Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead with Jeff I couldn’t help but think about this thread.
It’s NOT a good film; I do not understand the critical love it’s received, as I found it mostly underwritten and overwrought. Competently structured with a nice temporal gamesmanship (‘though Jeff found that aggravating too), and these great actors who occasionally get a scene where the moment and the methods of their “deep” performances come together. But more often it’s heavy-handed to the point of inert. Avoid.
But I post here because the film was so invested in tough guys or weak guys trying to be tough, and all the men seem to wander about at the edge of a deep crying jag. (More than one gets to have a crying jag. In fact, I think all three male leads get a crying jag.) And the film seems deeply anxious about such feminized masculine behavior, so it creates one ridiculous flaunting gay-signified drug dealer and a slew of women who are bitchy, stupid, and (poor Marisa Tomei, he says virtuously) very often naked.
I probably wouldn’t have hated this as much if it hadn’t been so thoroughly appreciated by so many critics. Bah humbug.
Bah humbug indeed. This is a film where the spectre of method acting eats away at your soul (show this one to your kid, Chris). What’s worse is you you can feel how satisfied everyone up on the screen feels about digging deep and “doing the work.” Finney has a “barbecue” monologue that just screams “actors at work, do not disturb.” How the hell Nick Nolte didn’t find himself on this set is a mystery (you just know he was lurking around the edges to sniff the fumes). Hoffman (and Lumet) pay homage to a scene in Citizen Kane that out Orson’s Orson. Do not with your hand saw the air too much, my friends. DO NOT! P L E A S E !!!
I’m not sure why to post this here, except it was a fine dry antidote to Before the Devil: John Dahl’s You Kill Me was a fine surprise, a funny, well-crafted, semi-suspenseful character study of a hitman grappling with his alcoholism, the end of his dinosaur-like mob-family’s reign in Buffalo, and a potential relationship. I saw the ads for this and saw “wacky”–and avoided it. The film hews, however, far closer to the tone of Elmore Leonard, often very funny without much trying, and a humor that for the most part comes out of understated writing, pitch-perfect timing and editing, and three great performances: Ben Kingsley, who early on as the killer Frank at his first AA meeting made me laugh with the barest twitch in a reaction shot; the fabulous Tea Leoni, who takes the love interest role and makes it truly interesting, and; the reliably eccentric Bill Pullman in a fine, small, sleazy role as a real-estate agent watching over Frank. A little too long, but Kris and I both really enjoyed this.
Dahl can direct; the film’s tightly composed and edited, often casually lovely (as it wanders into dingy Buffalo bars or out onto the Golden Gate Bridge). And it’s easy to forget–given some of the mediocre suspense stuff he’s been saddled with–how good he can be with actors. Leoni’s always been kind of an actor of tremendous potential who never fell into a project, after the great Flirting With Disaster, worth a damn. She’s effortlessly in control here — like Katherine Hepburn with a keener sense of self-deprecating irony.
why does it still depress me when women feature in men’s films as love interests? i want company for my depression on this blog but i ain’t gonna get it…
Well,
1. Invite friends! I invite mine, but they won’t join. Either of them.
2. Are men the love interest in women’s films? It’d be interesting to tease out the generic expectations for both. Or… actually, maybe it wouldn’t.
I think you’d like this.
It depresses me but mostly because I’ve read all the theory and at this stage in the game it just seems so cliche. Can’t our best screenwriters come up with something more interesting and challenging (or at least exciting variants on generic conventions) without necessarily getting all artsy-indie or, more problematic, alienating mainstream audiences altogether. That’s why I’m so fond of Michael Clayton; Tilda Swinton transformed her character into something nearly unrecognizable and deeply satisfying.
gio is a woman? i thought she was italian.