OCTOBER CHILLS: DON'T LOOK NOW (1973)

I envy anyone who's yet to watch Don't Look Now.  Even as a film that's only gained acclaim over the years since its 1973 release, it's still an under-the-radar classic waiting to be discovered by many of the most voracious film fans, despite recently being declared the best British film of all time by Time Out London.  Directed by the great Nicholas Roeg, whose 1971 film Walkabout is in my personal top ten, Don't Look Now tells the story of Laura and John Baxter (winningly portrayed by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), a couple still processing the drowning death of their daughter, Christine (Sharon Williams).

Based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, whose other works had previously been adapted by Alfred Hitchcock for Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The Birds, Roeg's treatment of the supernatural, manifested as psychic visions experienced by John and the questionable predictions of a clairvoyant blind woman (Hilary Mason), is a brilliant ploy to distract from the film's central theme; at its core, Don't Look Now is about primal, insurmountable grief from which there is no chance of recovery.

From the magnificently brutal opening where we witness Christine's drowning to the wicked irony of the film's denouement, the whole of the film is spent observing how tragedy has altered John, Laura, and their connection to each other.  Roeg's patented intercutting of time and space constructs a present where, though physically in Venice, John's emotional and mental states are frozen in the moment when his daughter perished back in England.  But even the current timeline offers no respite, as John begins seeing what could be visions of his daughter and wife against the waterlogged vistas of this iconic Italian backdrop. 

Don't Look Now is a challenging and ambitious vision of what horror films can achieve if the locus of terror is placed internally within the characters.  Nothing against films where the threat comes from without, but Roeg's map of the unspeakable is more finely illustrated than those of even the most prolific and revered craftsmen (and women) of the genre.  If you've never seen Don't Look Now, it's time.  Everyone else, why not give it another go?  It's a damn fine film, more than worthy of another look.

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OCTOBER CHILLS: THE INNOCENTS (1961)

'Tis the season, so expect at least a few posts on The Rain Falls Down on Portlandtown during October to focus on horror (and/or just plain spooky) movies.  That being said, I wanted to start things off with a bang by highlighting a film from my personal top-ten.  Pauline Kael called Jack Clayton's 1961 gothic horror masterpiece The Innocents, "the best ghost movie I've ever seen."  Despite disagreeing with Kael on a few of her more controversial opinions (her vocal distaste for Hitchcock and Shoah being the most glaring examples), we're absolutely cine-buddies when it comes to the creepy atmospherics on offer in The Innocents.

One could certainly quibble with Pauline over the matter of whether or not Clayton's adaptation of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" is, in fact, a ghost story at all: Deborah Kerr's governess character, Miss Giddens, is arguably the most sinister thing going on in the film, given her determination to "love people and help them...even if they refuse my help...even if it hurts them sometimes."  Indeed, much of the pleasure of watching The Innocents boils down to the question of whether Miss Giddens supernatural encounters are real or imagined.

With two damaged, young children under her care, Kerr's unreliable sense of the objective steers the film towards a terrifying close, where no viewer can truly know whether the children (and Giddens) are being haunted by the spirits of their former governess and her lover or by Miss Giddens' stringently orthodox notions about morality and humanity's failure to rise to it.  As the college film professor who turned me on to The Innocents noted, there are strong clues present during the opening title sequence, just listen to the trembling prayer being offered up by Giddens.

In addition the central conundrum of the film, The Innocents sports crisply composed black and white compositions by the great English cinematographer Freddie Francis (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Elephant Man), biting dialogue script doctored by none other than Truman Capote, and two of the creepiest child actors (Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin) ever to have graced the silver screen.  All of which falls under the direction of Jack Clayton, whose later work on Something Wicked This Way Comes spooked an entire generation of Disney fans.

Out of the entire pack of older films that I'll be posting about this month in this "October Chills" series, The Innocents is by far the best of the bunch. 

Highly recommended viewing!

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HITCHCOCK: NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THE GENUINE ARTICLE

What happens when one of the most compelling figures in film history receives the ol' biopic treatment?  Well, there's no hard and fast rules guiding the results, but in the case of Hitchcock, the outcome is a decidedly toothless affair, something that no one bothered to tell director Sacha Gervasi (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) and his cast, who seem to believe that they're pulling back the veil on a Hollywood master when, in fact, the plodding and all-too cautious plotting of Hitchcock undermines any chance of viewers being hooked into what little scandal (seriously, Hitch ate and drank too much and he liked blondes, is that all you got?) the film offers up.

Anchoring the more gossipy aspects of the narrative, we're given a supposedly inside look into Hitch's (Anthony Hopkins) marriage to his wife Alma (Helen Mirren).  The film proposes that she inhabited a sizable role in sculpting his art, picking up at a moment when Alma is beginning to feel neglected leading to private strain within their relationship.  At the same time, Hitch is struggling to get Psycho made, bristling against studio execs and censors who won't finance or clear the production for release.

The problem is that neither of these plot arcs are particularly well orchestrated.  The romantic angle falls flat, as the characterization of Hitch and Alma's relationship is far too sketched out, and there's never a sense of danger in Alma's flirtations with writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston).  As for the making of Psycho, the weight of history; the glaring fact being that Psycho was completed and became a massive success, significantly reduces the pressure within Hitch's situation, since it's impossible to simply forget or set aside knowledge of the film's eventual triumph and sustained influence.

Hitchcock ends up being less a disappointment than an unnecessary bit of nonsense.  It's entertaining enough, all of the actors (with the glaring exception of the poorly cast Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh) offering up serviceable performances.  Hopkins disappears the most into his role, although I found myself being hopelessly distracted at times by trying to figure out where the prosthetic chins ended and the real Anthony Hopkins began.  And maybe that's the best way to characterize the film, it works as a reasonable distraction while falling considerably short as a worthy substitute for the genuine article. 

Hitchcock opens at the Regal Fox Tower on Friday, December 7th.  More info available here.

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HITCH ON 35MM: CINEMA 21 KICKS OFF AN ANNUAL CELEBRATION OF THE MASTER OF SUSPENSE

While I was already patiently awaiting Universal Studios release of their massive Alfred Hitchcock blu-ray box set, an even better bit of Hitchcock related news hit my e-mail account last month.  Tom Ranieri and the top shelf crew at Portland's great Cinema 21 have done it again.  Following in the footsteps of their stellar noir series, they've cobbled together an amazing lineup of ol' Alf's finest films for what's being dubbed the first annual Hitchcock festival.  Best of all, the festival is entirely sourced from 35mm prints!

Now I've seen my fair share of classic films on the big screen , but what this festival has made me realize is that, 1) I've never seen my favorite Hitchcock film, The 39 Steps (or Vertigo, for that matter), projected on film before, and 2) with things progressing as they are, further and further towards an all-digital cinema future, this may be the last chance that most of us have to view these seminal, 20th century works on film.

Which is to say, you can expect to see me sitting in the balcony for as many of these films as I can possibly make it to during the series.  Sure, we'll always have the option to pop in the nice new digital transfers at home, but c'mon, these films deserve a little more respect.  Many props to Cinema 21 for giving 'em (and us) their proper due.  It's completely without hyperbole when I say that this is THE movie event in Portland this coming month.

BTW, if you're in the mood to get a lil' academic with your readings of these films, I can recommend no better text than the late, great film theorist Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films Revisited.  Magnificent stuff, I tell ya!

The Master of Suspense: The First Annual Hitchcock Festival begins at Cinema 21 on Friday, November 2nd.  More info available here.

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RUBY SPARKS: WRITING AWAY THE ROUGH EDGES

Sometimes the problem is you.  It's not always a comfortable realization to arrive at but it's an observation that drives Ruby Sparks, the latest work by directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).  The film peers into the life of Calvin (Paul Dano), a former wunderkind author whose single great novel still has him on the speaking circuit, labeled a genius by adoring fans and academics.  Fast forward about ten years and, other than a few short stories, Calvin's been unable to follow up on that initial success.  In fact, he's fallen into a long dry spell with no writing at all.  Adding insult to injury, his last girlfriend left him shortly after the death of his father.

Out of nowhere, Calvin begins dreaming of a mysterious and beautiful woman.  The vision triggers something in him, kicking him out of his rut and, after being pushed by his therapist (Elliott Gould), he begins to write about the woman of his dreams.  And then things get weird.  The girl, Ruby (Zoe Kazan, doing double duty here as screenwriter), appears in his apartment, seamlessly picking up the role that he's written for her; she's his girlfriend.  It's a bit of a shock at first (Calvin tells his brother that it's like Harvey, except "she's not an eight-foot rabbit").  Before long, though, he relaxes into the idea, quickly becoming comfortable living with and loving a woman who is essentially the product of a first draft.

Ruby's transformation from a simple fantasy into something far more complex--gasp, a real woman with actual emotional baggage--throws a wrench into Calvin's initial joy over her appearance.  But, since Calvin wrote Ruby into existence, he assumes (correctly) that he can change her behaviors via a few rewrites.  Whether or not he uses or abuses that power and what it says about his own ability to connect with others soon becomes the central conflict that haunts Ruby Sparks.  When we finally get the opportunity to meet Calvin's ex, her insight on their failed relationship, paired with Calvin's choices regarding Ruby, lay his flaws bare for us to see.

This impulse to tinker with the basic ingredients of others has been explored before in films like S1mOne, Stranger Than Fiction, and, even Vertigo.  Ruby Sparks is far better than those first two films but, of course, has nothing on Hitchcock's masterpiece (recently declared the best film of all-time by Sight & Sound).  Outside of such comparisons, it's a fine diversion with good performances all around, even if it often feels episodic and can't quite figure out how to effectively resolve the tension of its third act as it heads towards the still satisfying conclusion.

Ruby Sparks opens at the Regal Fox Tower on Friday, August 3rd.  More info available here.

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THE LADY VANISHES: HITCH RETURNS TO THE HOLLYWOOD

One of the best of Alfred Hitchcock's British suspense thrillers hits the big screen once more at the Hollywood Theatre this weekend.  From 1938, The Lady Vanishes is many a Hitch fan's favorite of his pre-Hollywood work (mine is The 39 Steps), featuring Margaret Lockwood (Night Train to Munich), Michael Redgrave (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) and, in the titular role, Dame May Whitty (Night Must Fall).

Some might argue, though, that the real star of the film is the train; its motions and movement drive the story forward throughout the picture.  Hitchcock certainly loved using rail travel as a device in his films, borrowing their kinetic energy and confined spaces for numerous films throughout his career.

In The Lady Vanishes, the tension is focused around what befell poor Miss Froy (Whitty), where she possibly could have vanished to, given the limited options aboard the train, and--again, due to the confined space--how the threat might extend to the leads of the film.

It's a cracking, suspense-driven voyage and it's only playing twice this weekend, so don't miss out!

Lady Vanishes plays at the Hollywood Theatre on March 24th & 25th at 2pm.  More info available here.


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