Tag Archives: alfred hitchcock

Bill Warren, the expert on 1950s SF films, says GORGO (1961) came about because director Eugene Lourie saw how his daughter cried when The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms died at the end of its film. Kids sided with the monsters; why not make a film that does that too.

The film has two salvage captains capture the title kaijin by accident and put it on exhibit in London (“Gorgo — named for the gorgon, a creature so terrifying everyone who beheld it was petrified!”). Turns out the 30-foot high reptilian is only a baby of its kind — and Mommy is coming to recover her little boy.

This is a fun film that has extra punch for me because a monster demolishing London landmarks hooks me better than demolishing Tokyo or New York. The monsters are actors in rubber suits, but as Warren says, this film shows how that can work. “I expect the fantastic from scientists these days.”

Our last date movie was my BluRay of NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1960) in which ad man Cary Grant goes from a callow ladies man who needis his secretary to remind him which gift he sent his girlfriend to putting his life on the line to lead Eva Marie Saint across Mt. Rushmore before James Mason kills her — and that after being framed for murder, attacked by a crop-duster and getting fatally shot in a South Dakota restaurant. A favorite of mine that TYG liked too. With Jessie Royce Landis as Grant’s mom and Martin Landau as Mason’s right arm. “You’re not really going to kill my son, are you?”

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Much as I disliked Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, its psychodrama did keep me watching. By contrast, TORN CURTAIN (1966) was close to a “talking lamp” (something to illuminate the room without paying it much attention); I had no qualms about leaving the film running while I went into the kitchen for a snack or a cup of tea.

Paul Newman plays a nuclear-weapons physicist who horrifies his fiancee (Julie Andrews) when he apparently defects to East Germany. She tags along over his protests, unaware he has a hidden agenda: if Newman can trick a German scientist into divulging some key technical intel, he’ll be able to perfect an anti-missile missile that will make nuclear attack obsolete (this dream was around long before Reagan’s Star Wars project).

This is not a good film at all. At a little over two hours it feels bloated; the plot is implausible (which admittedly wouldn’t bother me if I liked the film); and Newman’s performance feels very off for the role. North by Northwest it ain’t. “The committee would like you to describe the U.S. experiments with the missile known as Gamma Five.”

I caught half of LOVE PUNCH (2013) on my vacation but didn’t bring it up in the assumption I’d eventually stream the rest. Turns out I can’t summon up any enthusiasm, for the story of divorced couple Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan discovering the company Brosnan works for has been taken over and stripped for parts, making their retirement funds — all invested in company stock — worthless. Can they bring down the punk kid financier who’s responsible? Not horrible, but I have no urge to finish it. “I’d never ask you to do anything illegal, but is there any chance you could … stumble on it?”

GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE (2022) is much better, with an amazing performance by Thompson as a middle-aged schoolteacher who hires sex worker Leo (Darryl McCormack) and winds up talking about sex more than they spend doing it (“After my husband died, I swore I’d never fake another orgasm.”). This comes perilously close to the “hooker with a heart of gold” stereotype, but the script is good otherwise and the leads are excellent. Two Night Stand would be a good double bill for another couple who wind up putting verbal intercourse over physical. “Let’s start with the blow job and get the big one over with.”

#SFWApro. All rights to image remain with current holder.

My memory of watching Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS (1963) was a terrifying story where nature runs wild and humans are (of course) helpless — helpless! Rewatching, it turns out to be much smaller scale, birds turning belligerent in one small, coastal community, though one character does speak darkly of how disastrous it would be if all birds, everywhere, turned against us.

While the bird attacks are frightening, particularly when a swarm of birds shoots out of Mitch’s (Rod Taylor) chimney into the house, this is more a romance than a horror/suspense film. Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch have a meet cute in a bird store. She’s a half-reformed party girl whose father’s connections keep her out of trouble; he’s a lawyer who has nothing but disdain for someone so frivolous and irresponsible. Yep, they find each other the most obnoxious, annoying people they’ve ever met, so it’s obvious they want to get horizontal.

This fits the Hitchcock motif Hitchcock Romance discusses, that marriage is both the natural outcome of growing up and a means of getting there. Melanie’s trying to shed her irresponsible life; Mitch has left more than a few broken hearts in his wake, including his neighbor Annie (Suzanne Pleshette). Not that he’s a rake, but his mother (Jessica Tandy) doesn’t want to let go of him. The need to leave our parents and step out on our own is another Hitchcock theme (Psycho is an example of what happens when they don’t let go).

Unfortunately, the romance flops badly. Hedren was Hitchcock’s discovery, a blonde beauty in the mold of Grace Kelly in Rear Window. Kelly, however, had talent; Hedren shows none, nor any screen presence. Even if she did, things are very slow-paced for the first hour as Melanie hunts down Mitch in his rural home (he commutes to San Francisco for work) and ingratiates herself with his family. Maybe it would have worked with Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman but like I said, Hedren isn’t in their league. The shock of the bird attacks doesn’t make up for the tedium.  “He shot his wife in the head six times — even twice would be overdoing it.”

Hedren wasn’t any better as the star of MARNIE (1964), playing a serial embezzler who gets jobs long enough to rip her employer off, sends the money to her mother (Louise Fletcher), then moves on. Unfortunately, Mark (Sean Connery) spots the attractive blonde at work one day, then recognizes her when she starts a job with his own company. After establishing her guilt, he pressures her to marry him, then sets himself up as her therapist. Not only is she a thief, she freaks out at the thought of sex or intimacy, panics in thunderstorms and recoils from the color red; Mark is determined to heal her.

This one mesmerized me when I caught it on TV as a tween but it doesn’t hold up. First off, there’s Hedren, still talentless; perhaps a director who was better with actors could have gotten a better performance, but Hitch wasn’t an actor’s director. Grace Kelly could have pulled it off; The Films of Sean Connery says Hitchcock tried and failed to woo Kelly out of retirement.

Second, as my friend Ross has often said, Connery’s behavior is just as strange, pressuring a woman into marriage, then obsessively trying to fix her even though she can’t even stand to touch him. Hitchcock Romance seems to conclude this reflects the Power of Love and that the many absurdities and unconvincing sets are Hitch’s way of signaling this isn’t a realistic movie (if so, it still doesn’t make it good). Another film book says the story reflects Hitch’s frustration at not being able to seduce Hedren, or that after she said no he lost all interest in the film. Either way, it’s quite forgettable. However it does have Diane Baker, Mariette Hartley and Alfred Napier giving good supporting performances. “That’s very interesting because the record shows you made your living from the touch of men.”

TEEN TITANS GO VS TEEN TITANS (2019) has the cast of the 2003-6 Teen Titans meet their counterparts from Teen Titans Go when both series’ Trigons merge (“I am Hexagon — no, not the shape!”), bringing the teams into a bemused encounter as they try to figure each other out (“They must be heroes, they’re so — tall!”). More fun than either of the Hitchcock films this week, with alt.versions including Funny Animal Titans, Baby Titans, an animated version of the live-action show and a brief cameo by the Wolfman/Perez team (though I didn’t spot the Silver Age team anywhere). Great fun, though I’m puzzled why the 2003 Robin is written to be as big a doofus as the Go! version. Weird Al Yankovic plays the Gentleman Ghost.“I like to think of you as a cool uncle … who’s not that cool.”

#SFWApro. Cover art by Nick Cardy; all rights to images remain with current holders.

(Re) watching Alfred Hitchcock’s films makes me appreciate why so many critics and Hitch himself saw NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) as a film that expresses the essence of Hitchcock movies. Yet it was the next film he made, PSYCHO (1960) that came to define him: he’d be Alfred Hitchcock, direct of Psycho from that moment forward.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) stars Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who through blind chance is mistaken for Kaplan, an American agent hunting enemy spy Vandamm (James Mason) and his right hand Leonard (Martin Landau). Vandamm mocks Thornhill’s denials, declaring that his performance makes the room a theater; this theatricality crops up over and over, for example when he later sneers American agents should get training from the Actor’s Studio.

The bad guys’ first attempt on Thornhill’s life fails, as does the second; however they unintentionally frame him as a murderer, forcing him to flee cops as well as crooks, traveling across country to track down Kaplan. Thornhill doesn’t know Kaplan doesn’t exist; it’s a non-existent man created by spymaster the Professor (Leo G. Carroll) to distract Vandamm from the real agent in his team. During his travels, Thornhill gets help from Eve (Eva Marie Saint), a beautiful woman who turns out to be Vandamm’s lover. Thornhill, having fallen for her, isn’t happy (“What makes a girl like you a girl like you?”), then he learns she’s the Professor’s agent on the inside. Unfortunately Leonard has figured that out too …

North by Northwest is a spectacular thriller with some great set pieces, from Grant being targeted by a crop-dusting plane to the climax on Mt. Rushmore. It carries over elements from multiple previous films including The Thirty-Nine Steps, Notorious and Saboteur. As The Hitchcock Romance says, it captures Hitch’s repeated theme that love and marriage is the happy ending for most of us. Thornhill starts out twice divorced and something of a ladies’ man (we see him dickering with his secretary about the right gift for one of his girlfriends), then he meets Eve and everything changes. Vandamm intends to kill her for betraying him; the Professor is willing to accept her death for the greater good. Thornhill loves her and he’s going to save her in spite of all of them. It’s a great film. “War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one.”

I would really love to have seen PSYCHO (1960) at least once not knowing what was coming but a friend told me the details in high school (I wouldn’t catch it until college). In the opening, Marion (Janet Leigh), frustrated that her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin) doesn’t have enough money to make a home for both of them, succumbs to a moment of temptation and drives off with $40,000 of her employer’s money. It’s a classic film noir set up that turns into an Old Dark House story when Marion ends up at the Bates Motel, where Norman (Anthony Bates) runs the largely unoccupied business and cares for his sour, bedridden mother. And then, of course, comes the infamous shower scene in which Mrs. Bates stabs Marion to death in the shower (future slasher films owe a lot to this and the later deaths). Can Sam and Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) figure out the truth?This film has a very strange structure, switching from genre to genre and protagonist to protagonist. It’s amazing visually and absorbing to watch even when I know what’s coming. That said, it’s a film that like Vertigo, I admire more than I enjoy. While in many ways it’s much more atypical of Hitch than North by Northwest, though Hitchcock Romance argues the film is a perfect example of Hitch’s tragic romances. When we catch up with Sam after the opening he’s writing to Marion to say that he’ll marry her, despite his poverty; if she’d only waited instead of acting, she’d have gotten her HEA. Like Vertigo and Rebecca, the past chokes the present. Sam’s struggling to pay off his father’s debts and support his ex-wife; Norman is dominated by his dead mother. It’s a remarkable achievement. “I’m not a fool and I’m not capable of being fooled.”

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders. For extra interest, check out the great title sequences for Psycho and North by Northwest by the great Saul Bass.