"The Takeway" on NPR is listing agencies and ways to help.
On to my diversion.
There's an interesting piece in NEWSWEEK about Psycho, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this month. It claims that Hitchcock movies hold up well and especially Psycho and North by Northwest. Yet when Van Sant redid it a few years back, it was a dud.
These films are fresher than movies from ten years ago despite the changes in fashion and such.
Why do his movies hold up well? Do certain genre movies hold up better than others? NEWSWEEK cited comedies as dating fast. But I still laugh at IT'S A GIFT, HIS GIRL FRIDAY and BRINGING UP BABY. It's often the romantic dramas that seem to fade. I doubt that anyone would sit enthralled by A SUMMER PLACE, PORTRAIT IN BLACK or PEYTON PLACE now.
I'm introducing too many ideas here but does Hitchcock hold up well for you--and if so why?
32 comments:
I didn't hear the full news until this morning about Haiti. Man sounds horrible. I'm glad there is some help on the way.
Hitch was an artist. Most films are made by journeymen.Especially since the 70's when pseudo relaism reared t's grubby head. Hitch- like Welles, Godard, Roeg and Hawkes- had/ have 'a voice.'
This is why TV rarely stands up. Production line stuff. Written by researches and directed by MTV rejects.
My wife and I have gotten tired of wading through the New Releases at Blockbuster, so we started going through the American Film Institute's Top-100 movies and we love them. Many of them happen to be Hitchcock. I'm not entirely sure why the hold up so well, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that it's because he was interested more in filiming good stories than trendy hooks (e.g. today's special effects).
Yes, the stories were great until the last few. But is there anything more beautiful than the way he shot Rear Window. His vision of how a movie should look really worked well in certain films. The Birds is another one where every frame is perfect for me. Some may find his method static but not me.
I think it's the timelessness of fear that helps Hitchcock too, aside from his movies just being really good.
I agree with Fleur--there's a timeless quality to Hitchcock's best work. You'll notice that his attempts to be topical--Cold War movies like "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz"--very rarely rate much of a mention, but when the secret agent stuff is basically the "MacGuffin" and there's much more emphasis on personal relationships ("North by Northwest," "The 39 Steps," "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), the movies are much more popular.
Also, I find that Hitchcock has an amazing ability to let us watch his movies on more than one level, so that even after repeated viewings (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER), we still feel sorry for Norman Bates, being saddled with such a harpy of a mother, or we want Scottie to finally end up with Madeline/Judy.
But I always feel sorry for the brunettes in Hitchcock's movies (Suzanne Pleshette in "The Birds," Barbara Bel Geddes in "Vertigo," and Diane Baker[?] in "Marnie," etc.) because they're never going to get the man they love. Has any other director ever punished his brunettes so cruelly?
A good observation, Deb. You need to be very sure you have something important to say to mess with that kind of thing. And I don't think he did. He was an artist but not a philosopher or cultural critic.
Yes, the brunettes took it on the chin. I wonder what color hair his mother had.
Hitchcock had the influence to pick his source material and the eye for filming a screenplay of it. He intended to confuse, confound and scare you, in some way, in each film. Vertigo is probably my favorite, and it holds up well. Though the cars and clothes may not be 21 Century, the story could be today, and that's true of many of his films (Rear Window, Rope, Dial M for Murder). These are filmed with a creativity that holds up too, Hitchcock was a master of lighting, film angels, all of the cinematography elements. Also consider the dialogue. There are few wasted words in these films.
He punished his blondes onset.
Van Sant, being an idiot, decided what was important was Joseph Stefano's script (rather than the Robert Bloch novel it was largely out of, or what Hitchcock and company did with it), and he didn't, despite claims to the contrary, replicate the original film shot for shot, but instead brought his own fiddles and an inferior cast, with the exception of William Macy doing a better job than Martin Balsam as Arobogast, though his big sequence is messed over by a Van Santism...as he falls, he halluciantes multicolored sheep in a similarly retinted pasture. Juliane Moore was simply wasted. Van Sant's arrogance toward the source material was about as great as de Bont's toward THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and THE HAUNTING, despite Van Sant's supposed admiration.
Hitchcock was all about craft and terror, and that sort of thing doesn't change very much--as Deb notes, his attempts at topicality never worked very well...I find that I don't much care for his more romantic films these days, they seem slow and forced (he was an angry man). I liked the concept of THE BIRDS (after, Du Maurier's novelet is pretty good), but never was too impressed by the execution (the bad special effects work detracts, and there's just something about everything that "Evan Hunter" touched that struck me as consistently false, too...whether it's a McBain, Marsten, film, prose, etc.)...but the composition of the non-sfx shots was indeed good.
Paul Brazill--you compare the worst of television to the best of film, not exactly the best way to make a measured judgement. Researchers and MTV aspirants, successful and not, are all over film.
Haiti is indeed not a fortunate land.
And, btw, I CONFESS and several of his other earlier films are as trivial fizzles as TORN CURTAIN or FAMILY PLOT.
David Thomson explores this whole issue in his new book, THE MOMENT OF PSYCHO. Art is timeless and mere film-making becomes dated fast. You're right about comedy having a short shelf-life. The references become obscure and un-funny. And, viewers are bored by the dating patterns of previous generations.
Todd- I wouldn't know a measured judgment if it sat on my face. And wriggled.riume
Depends on what the comedy's about, as with all other things, and what level of craft is brought to it. HIS GIRL FRIDAY, that title and all, is still the best adaptation of THE FRONT PAGE on film, and the worst jokey reference in it kisses LaGuardia's ass...but not so much because it's dated, but because it kisses up to The Little Flower.
Hitchcock holds up but not all of them. It is time that the world stops salivating over Veritgo. I find that film tedious and dumb. North by Northwest suffers from his fear of location shooting which is odd because one of the most successful sequences of his career is the cornfield plane chase that was shot (mostly) on location. That Mt. Rushmore ending is pure backlot cheese though.
Love him as I do I am always amazed at how Hitchcock gets so much credit despite being a fairly one note director. When he branched out of his usual suspense/thriller box he tended to fail. Not that he did it that often.
Better to do what you do well, though, than to try to be all things at once. I do love the guys who could like Welman, Hawks, Alan Parker, Robert Wise.
Some of those Hitchcock films though, you know the ones, will forever be classics. They're just too good to fade away.
My favorite thing in Rear Window is that opening shot that, in one sweeping establishing shot, gives you so much story information without a word that it is like reading the first three chapters of a book. When it fades out and the "real" movie begins you know everything you need to know and in no time flat. Genius!
And that not because it's kissing up to Fiorello LaGuardia, but because it's kissing up at all.
However much fun another sort of kissing up might be for, say, Paul...
Perhaps the preferences of many for films from Hitchcock's (and his contemporaries') era has much to do with age of the commentators. Those who " came of age" during or shortly after the "golden age" of Hollywood have (aesthetic) tastes and interests that are not often compatible with the kinds of products contemporary film makers are offering to a contemporary audience. In other words, to say it more succinctly, film preferences are largely a generational issue. Older people prefer older films, and younger people prefer younger (newer) films. Well, it is just a theory. What do you think?
Most Hitchcock holds up well. PSYCHO does, as does REAR WINDOW. I sat through the last half of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH a few weeks ago, and many of the plot contrivances were laugh out loud bad.
Dunno, RT I'm 47. I saw Taxi driver at the cinema when it came out -and was very impressed - but was more impressed by the re release of Rear Window in the 80's.
My father and I would be counterexamples of your suggestion, RT, which might be largely but by no means consistently correct. My father is fond of noting that "[x] was a pretty good [film, book, tv series, etc.] for its time" with the implication that he prefers the newer stuff...while I tend to be chonologically eclectic...I suspect neither of us is alone in our generations, either...
And just how did he punish the blonded. No, don't tell me. The Van Sant movie was so boring, I couldn't believe that material and the shooting script could be sullied.
I want to read that book. I read a Hitchcock bio a few years back and he was an odd duck to say the least. I love the idea in REAR WINDOW, that he has Grace Kelly in the room with him and seldom notices her except to do his bidding. Yes, he was a technical master-that's probably why he was bored by the time shooting began-or so I read. People must seeing something in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH--more than Que Sera Sera. I think it's been filmed three times.
Hey, Paul, my offering is just a whimsical theory from someone old enough to have seen Psycho in its first release in movie theaters (while on vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey, to be precise). My theory probably has more to do with personal projection (i.e., the reasons for my preferences) rather than any empirically supported evidence from other commentators.
RT-I like them all, especially at the theater.
Hitchcock filmed TOO MUCH twice. Then there was THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE, not an immortal comedy by any means, but I enjoyed it. (There is an Iranian film that has its title rendered into English that way...TOO MUCH, that is.)
I thought it was twice but I swore I saw a minute of a movie that seemed to have the same plot recently. Not one of the Hitchcock ones.
Well Hollywood is always ready to Sincerely Flatter that way...
I just watched The 39 Steps, shot in the 30's with the great Robert Donat. It held up.
And I challenge anyone to find another actress who lit up the screen the way Grace Kelly did in Rear Window.
Goddam, she was beautiful.
I have to agree with Eric. VERTIGO is a movie whose time has come and gone. I know that the revisionists are currently drooling over MARNIE, which bombed at the box office, but like VERTIGO, it's too full of self-conscious tricks. Besides, it just looks so sixties!
DIAL M FOR MURDER? Ah, that's another story. Literally. And a far better one that either VERTIGO or MARNIE. A crackerjack tale well told. Ditto THE BIRDS, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and of course PSYCHO.
REAR WINDOW? Okay, I guess. ROPE? Too confined by its own gimmicks. NORTH BY NORTHWEST? I just can't feel any suspense at all when Cary Grant is in a movie. It's all manufactured. Sorry. All of Hitchcock's 1940s movies? Too Hollywood. His 1930s movies? Too creaky. And yes, I include the treasured 39 STEPS in that category.
What I'm trying to say, I guess, is (and I'm sure I'll be branded a heretic) that, with a precious few exceptions, Hitchcock movies have not, on the whole, held up over the years. They were all right for their times, but most of them don't cut it today.
Ethereal. Why she gave it up is beyond me.
For me they do and maybe some of it is that I am transported back to my childhood. Marnie never worked for me, nor the last four or five. But The Trouble with Harry and the ones mentioned here were terrific.
Vertigo. great. Marnie. A beut. Uneven but better than a toybox full of Space Wars or Matrix that's for sure. It's strange that few of the films of the 70's stand up so well and I'm sure very little since then. Wayne's World maybe? Saving Private Ryan? Dead Poets Society? Predator? Notting Hill? the horror, the horror ...
When I started university I took a couple of film classes but dropped them quickly when I realized I was out of step - I never understood the love for Hitchcock. Some of the movies were okay, but they never really did anything for me.
Now, His Girl Friday is fantastic and I'd take five minutes with Rosalind Russell over five hours with Grace Kelly anyday. So again, I'm out of step.
I think the focus of the purpose of making the films is different today therefore they aren't (for the most part but there are exceptions) timeless classics. Today, movies are focused on making the biggest buck. Some indy films are probably the closest thing now to trying to tell an artistic story.
And a remake of Psycho? Is a copy of the Mona Lisa better than the Mona Lisa?
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