Good Evenings
THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK SIGNATURE COLLECTION
As mentioned before, Warner Home Entertainment has been treating film fans and students alike to a wealth of solid DVD sets lately: first the noir series, followed by the horror quartet, and then the rare Scorseses in a box. Now comes nine Hitchcock films in a box, seven of them new to DVD, all excellent transfers, and most of them augmented with helpful supplementary material. Watch one a night and you have more than a week of good evenings.
This package came at a good time in my development as a Hitchcock fan. I've liked his movies since I was a tyke. Almost everything that I have ever done that is film related was inspired directly or indirectly by Hitchcock, from the critics I read to the plots that go through my mind. But though I enjoy watching his masterpieces over and over again, I also find myself curious about his failures, and the Warner package has them in abundance. By failure I mean films that were either commercial disappointments or that Hitchcock himself felt were "off" and bad mouthed to interviewers such as Truffaut in his interview book (and what a scandal that thing is. Now that the original recordings are becoming more available people can see how different the book's transcription can be from what Hitchcock actually said — but that is a whole other column). As a Hitchcock hagiographer I resist even The Master's disparagement of some of his "texts," especially DIAL M FOR MURDER, one of his unheralded masterpieces that I watch probably once a year. And at this point mid-level or even failed Hitchcock films, dwelling in critical and audience obscurity, are more interesting to me than the classics, run over and over again on TMC and elsewhere. Watching the failures, if such they be, illuminates his successes.
Most of the films new to DVD in the Warner set (which also includes films he made for RKO and Walter Wanger) seem to be variations on, or unofficial sequels, to some of the grand masterpieces in the Hitchcock canon. SUSPICION is REBECCA lite; DIAL M FOR MURDER takes up in spirit where STRANGERS ON A TRAIN left off. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT has links with NOTORIOUS in its tale about the daughter of a traitor, and ends with a little bit of LIFEBOAT. STAGE FRIGHT seems like a "prequel" to Wilder's WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, and also reprises the "girl detective hitching up with the real detective" element from SHADOW OF A DOUBT. And some of the films are "failures" because Hitchcock was unable to follow through fully on his original intentions (Grant really killing his wife in SUSPICION; the priest executed for another man's crime in I CONFESS), though there is no guarantee that Hitchcock's versions would have been more successful commercially. Still, I found them more fun to watch than half the new movies I choose to watch and review in any given three-month time frame. And several of them were not bad at all.
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FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Taking them chronologically, the set starts off with a rush in the action FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (1940), featuring Joel McCrea as the journalist assigned to ferret out the big story, whatever it is, in pre-war Europe. He falls in love with the daughter (Laraine Day) of a peacenik (George Marshall) who turns out to be a — beguiling — traitor (though who he is legally betraying is something of a mystery), with George Sanders as a competing British reporter. In fact, Sanders becomes something of the real hero of the film, his pluck, sardonicism, and suavity unbesmirched by a manufactured love story, as is the film's official hero, McCrea.
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The cast may seem light, overall, but they work well together, and the story itself is the picaresque tale we are used to from the Hitchcock of THE 39 STEPS. And the film looks great, with production design by William Cameron Menzies. The script is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison (a close associate of Hitchcock's for many years), with contributions from Ben Hecht, James Hilton (of all people), and Robert Benchley who also has a small part. Hecht may be the reason the film is set in the world of newspapers, put it loosely in the tradition of screwball comedies or screwball influenced films that Pauline Kael so praised in her famous attack on CITIZEN KANE.
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MR. AND MRS. SMITH
Speaking of screwballs, this comedy (famously done as a favor to star Carole Lombard) is one of the "interesting failures" in the set. Released in 1941 not long before the gorgeous Lombard died in a plane crash, it starts out amusingly enough in traditional screwball style, but once the premise is established (that Mr. Smith is not legally married to his bride of some four years), the plot starts to go downhill. It ceases to be funny, plus the motivation of Mrs. Smith seems unclear. You're not sure what exactly she wants to gain by the charade, if charade it is, of wanting to now marry her now-ex husband's law partner. The film concludes in a snowbound getaway, a screwball enough setting, but strangely inconclusively, or unsatisfying. One of the reasons it may not work is that there is no real villain, and so nothing feels like it is at stake. On the surface the film is fine and looks nice, but it doesn't appear to have Hitchcock's darker edge and ability to ring real suspense out of normal situations.
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On the other hand, the cast is fun to watch. Robert Montgomery, with his doughy face and gaping smile, strikes the viewer as the true ancestor of Tom Hanks in his ability to flip from comedy to drama, and with his easeful acting ability winning over the resisting viewer. Lombard is a revelation (I amused myself by envisioning what movies she might have appeared in had she lived — the Myrna Loy role in BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, for example?). The making of on the disc points out that MR. AND MRS. SMITH may be the first American film to employ the word "pizza."
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SUSPICION
Next comes Hitchcock's sub REBECCA, a film famously compromised by the censors, or sheer script difficulties. All through SUSPICION (1941) you are assuming that Cary Grant is going to preparing to kill his wife. At the last minute (literally) you learn that it has all been misinterpretation. In a way it is the biggest trick that Hitchcock could have played on his viewers — did we want him to be a murderer? Apparently, we did. Or maybe we just wanted the film to be a tad more suspenseful.
SUSPICION borrows from REBECCA the lonely lady in a big house situation and anticipates the poison of NOTORIOUS, and has some interesting effects moments, but it is fairly clear what audience market he was aiming for, which precluding, apparently, the full exercise of his talents or ideas.
STAGE FRIGHT
Another interesting failure, STAGE FRIGHT (1950) begins excitingly and also explicitly plays tricks on the viewer in a daring burst of gamesmanship, but bogs down as it fails to make full and amusing use of its setting, the British theater, or the class system even found in the British theater, as Richard Todd, a RADA student, finds himself accused of killing the husband of his lover, the revue singer played by Marlene Dietrich. Jane Wyman is the student who loves him from afar, and Alistair Sim, in perhaps the film's best creation, is the eccentric father who helps his daughter without question.
Had Hitchcock made this film back in the 1930's at the height of his British career, it might have been much better. But today it feels undercooked and uninformed. Hitchcock was a great theatergoer but STAGE FRIGHT conveys none of that love. But as an act of elaborate misdirection it makes an interesting prelude to PSYCHO.
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) has been much reviewed and revived, and the big news for this set is that there is both two versions of the film plus an additional disc of supplements. It's the flagship disc in the set and probably the one that neophytes should watch and digest first. Seeing it again after a long absence I was stuck by just how gay Robert Walker's psychopath is presented.
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I CONFESS
If "the wrong man" is a title that might well be applied to most Hitchcock thrillers, I CONFESS (1953) is the one that should have been called THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. This is the only Hitchcock film in the batch that I hadn't seen before, and like the others it is fascinating in its failure. As pointed out on the supplements, the French esteem I CONFESS much higher than its American detractors (and even the director himself) because it fits into their conceptions of Hitchcock's notions of Catholicism, but those connections (or broodings, or sensitivity to contradictions) would have been more strongly enforced if Hitchcock had kept his original ending, in which the priest Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift, in one of his earlier roles) was executed for the crime actually committed by someone from whom he took the confession. Logan is himself compromised by a past pre-orders affair (or one night stand, really) with a former girlfriend who is now a married woman (Anne Baxter), and the case is the kind of sensational scandal that Preminger realized with such flair a few years later in ANATOMY OF A MURDER. Here it all seems kind of flat.
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There are other reasons than the changed ending for that, however. For one thing, the film is set in Montreal, which here seems like a really foreign country, one from a previous century (when Logan volunteers for the army it's more like he is going off to fight World War I). Baxter and Clift come from different schools of acting, she much more like Joan Fontaine in SUSPICION, while he is very passive, inward, interior. Also, you could argue that there is a gay subtext to the film; Clift is very gay in role with his priestly garb that look like dresses, and it is never really clearly explained why he dropped her and went into the priesthood. The film becomes incoherent because of all that it can't say or show.
The bombastic music doesn't help, trying to create an ominous mood over what is obviously nothing, a car pulling out, or a church being visited. Worst of all (yet still interesting) is a long, long flashback (it seems to take up 20 minutes of the movie) in which Baxter tells the story of her love affair, accompanied by silent visuals, and preceded by a long cat and mouse interrogation by Karl Malden (who is suppose to be French Canadian but barely tries to do an accent — by the way, the box for this film gets the relationships wrong: Malden is trying to fry the priest, not save him as the text suggests). Usually, every shot counts in a Hitchcock film, but here I CONFESS degenerates into "photographs of people talking," which is how Hitchcock derided most bad cinema — and usually Hitchcock could shoot conversations better than most people (as in the Balsam-Perkins scene in PSYCHO).
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DIAL M FOR MURDER
DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954) is one of my favorite Hitchcock films. I love its stage-boundedness, its intricate plot, and the way Ray Milland moves and talks, as a disappointed tennis pro plotting the murder of his unfaithful wife (Grace Kelly).
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In fact, I am so obsessed with the film that I have even come up with a sequel. It really burns me that Milland gets caught and is the "villain" of the piece, so it occurs to me that, since he didn't actually kill anyone, only plotted the murder, he might not be executed, in fact, could do perhaps only six years or so. While in the slammer he writes an apologia, like Oscar Wilde, that becomes a bestseller. When he gets out, lo and behold, he runs into his ex-wife and the spark of love is still there. The fact that Milland's book is much more popular than anything written by Kelly's lover, Robert Cummins, really irritates the mediocre novelist, and so he switches roles. Now he plots a murder of an intricacy that will put the blame on Milland and send him to jail to die.
But that's as far as I've gotten.
THE WRONG MAN
THE WRONG MAN (1956) is Hitchcock's foray into neo-realism, or at least the kind of noir film that mark Hellinger had been making, shot on the streets of the city. Like I CONFESS, it is shot on location, in fact in several of the real places that figure in this true story, based on an article that appeared in LIFE magazine about a musician falsely accused of robbery and the Kafkaesque legal quandary he sinks into.
It's Henry Fonda's only appearance in a Hitchcock film, and he is wonderful, but the film as a whole is depressing in a sub kitchen-sink manner, and also once again, it distorts the end, tacking on a rushed, cheerful end for the wife (Vera Miles) increasing driven mad by the legal entanglement.
Chronologically, the set finishes up on a happier note with the rousingly watchable NORTH BY NORTHWEST, which is the same disc that has been available from Warner since 2000.
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Each disc offers up a fantastic transfer, with adequate sound. But the extras were something of a problem for me. The family participated greatly in the creation of the extras and Patricia Hitchcock is an ever-present flame-keeper of her father's reputation. Thus there is not much in the various makings of, all directed by the industrious Laurent Bouzereau, of Hitchcock's dark side, of the black implications of some of these movies. They were all filmed at the same time, and the same talking heads keep popping up. Now, don't get me wrong, I like Peter Bogdanovich's films quite a bit. SAINT JACK is brilliant, THEY ALL LAUGHED is an under recognized masterpiece, and TEXASVILLE is one of the most moving sequels ever made, just to consider his later films. But I am sick unto death of his ubiquity in DVD supplements, planted there with his cravat and his tilted head and his vocal impressions of the directors he is talking about. He says the same things he has always been writing and saying about these guys and his only qualification for punditry is that he interviewed directors long ago and is a director himself. He's fine talking about his own films, but when talking about the masters he follows the industrial line. Meanwhile, TIME reviewer Richard Schickel is not a notable Hitchcock scholar. Again, he interviewed him once for an hour-long documentary, and had some other interactions with him, and that is about it. Meanwhile, there are other critics who have a real role in Hitchcock's standing: Andrew Sarris, whose review of PSYCHO took it seriously as a work of art at a time when most reviewers were mocking the director as a fat panderer, and Robin Wood, whose book on Hitchcock, the first in English, still rebounds as a significant critical text on any filmmaker. But to include these guys, or several others of the great Hitchcock specialists, is to evoke complex issues of Hitchcock's dark side, and that is verboten on these discs featuring movies by a director who specialized in making movies about the unmentionable.
What's here is OK. Foreign Correspondent contains the 33 minute "Personal History: Foreign Hitchcock," with Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, Bogdanovich, and Richard Schickel
as the talking heads, and the disc also features the original theatrical trailer. MR. AND MRS. SMITH's supplements include "Mr. Hitchcock Meets the Smiths" once again with Bogdanovich and Schickel, but it is short, at 16 minutes, and they do say interesting things (plus the theatrical trailer). SUSPICION offers the 22-minute "Before the Fact: Suspicious Hitchcock," once again with from Hitchcock O'Connell and Bogdanovich, and the theatrical trailer. STAGE FRIGHT give us "Hitchcock and STAGE FRIGHT" with the usual suspects, and the original theatrical trailer.
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STRANGERS ON A TRAIN gets a major overhaul across a two-disc special edition. It features both the so-called Final Release and the Preview version (there are some minor differences between them, the most significant being the last scene) and an audio track "hosted" by Bouzereau, consisting of excerpts from edited interviews. Among them is Patricia Highsmith biographer Andrew Wilson, screenwriters Whitfield Cook and Joseph Stefano (PSYCHO), and, for some reason, JAWS participants Joe Alves and Peter Benchley. There are also excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich's taped interviews with Hitchcock, Bogdanovich apparently being as annoying then as he is now, asking dull questions he knows the answers too so he can interrupt his betters. Disc Two consists of "STRANGERS ON A TRAIN: A Hitchcock Classic," a half hour retrospective making of, "The Hitchcocks on Hitch," in which Patricia and her three granddaughters talk family, "The Victim's P.O.V.," an interview with Kasey Rogers who, as Laura Elliott, played the victim in the film, "An Appreciation by M. Night Shyamalan," a useless if enthusiastic video interview, and "Alfred Hitchcock's Historical Meeting," a short silent bit of newsreel footage of the director meeting some bewigged figures near a train, and finally the original theatrical trailer. When I was a kid I came across a picture in PEOPLE or AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER or somewhere of Hitchcock with his granddaughter, an absolutely stunning blonde. Like Truffaut said he wanted to do, I instantly wanted to marry her, so as to inveigle my way into the Hitchcock world. I am pleased once again after all these years to see the object of my 10-second crush.
I CONFESS carries on with the 20 minute "Hitchcock's Confession: A Look at I Confess" with the same crowd (although we do learn that the actress who plays the killer's wife in the film was married to caricaturist Al Hirschfield), plus brief newsreel footage of the Canadian premiere, and the original theatrical trailer. Dial 'M' for Murder has the lengthy "Hitchcock and DIAL M," with comments from Bogdanovich and M. Night Shyamalan, plus "3D: A Brief History," and the theatrical trailer. THE WRONG MAN offers "Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and THE WRONG MAN" with Schickel and art director Paul Sylbert, among others, plus the original theatrical trailer.
Each film comes in a keep-case bearing the film's poster on the cover; individually, each film goes for $19.97 (except for the two-platter STRANGERS, which retails for $26.99); the whole box goes for $99.92, and hits the streets Tuesday, September 7.
Drawing a Blank
ROUNDERS
We've all known someone, or know people who've known someone, who paid his way through college by gambling at poker. There are two such card sharps that I've heard of here in my hometown. And that's the situation that seems to have inspired ROUNDERS (1998), directed by John Dahl (RED ROCK WEST, THE LAST SEDUCTION) from a script credited to Brian Koppelman and David Levien.
Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) is a law student trying to break the poker addiction. In a situation mimicking MEAN STREETS, he has a reckless friend, Lester 'Worm' Murphy (Edward Norton), and together they run up a huge debt. The film comes down to a card game in which McDermott faces off against "Teddy KGB" (John Malkovich) in an all or nothing situation.
ROUNDERS is famous for a couple of things, not necessarily good. Miramax managed to get co-star Gretchen Mol on the cover of VANITY FAIR even though she hadn't been in that many movies, few had heard of her, and she didn't have all that big a part. It was around that cover that readers began to find themselves a little disillusioned with that magazine's movie pimping. It is also famous for heralding a rather sad decline of director Dahl, who started out strong, but whose each successive film, released after lengthier breaks, is more forgettable. The film is also woefully miscast. Norton is trying to pull a DeNiro, but is going against type here, and Damon is a little stolid and passionless as a gambler. The doe-eyed Famke Janssen is also wasted. This actress impresses with her committed to doing small, quasi-independent films, but she should be doing leads, not bit parts.
This is an improved reissue of an earlier DVD, in line with Miramax's recent practices, now enhanced for widescreen TVs. It sports two audio commentary tracks, one by director Dahl, Norton, Levien, and Koppleman, the second by poker champions Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Chris Moneymaker, and Chris Ferguson. There's also a short "making-of," along with "Professional Poker" featuring Norton and Damon talking about their poker experiences, and "Championship Poker Tips," which is what it sounds like. The disc comes in a keep-case, retails for $19.95, and hit the street Tuesday, September 7.
I Like This Film
JERSEY GIRL
Or at least the second half. I guess if I had an issue with the released version of the boss's JERSEY GIRL it's that, as it stands now, it starts too early. In this edition, we don't really need to see the death of the wife (Jennifer Lopez, in what amounts to a cameo), though in a longer, director's cut their relationship would obviously be more meaningful.
On the other hand, writer-directed Smith also needed to establish that the film's hero, Ollie Trinke (Ben Affleck) — the names in this film are a bit of a problem, too — was run out of New York and off his publicist post. Or did he? Maybe leaving all of that back story unseen would allow more time for the (admittedly sit-comy) relationship between Ollie and his daughter Gertie (Raquel Castro) on the one hand and his blue collar father (George Carlin) on the other.
The rest of the film, in case you didn't know, concerns Ollie's growing relationship with college student and video store clerk Maya (Liv Tyler), his chance to get back in the game over in New York City, and his commitment to helping his daughter stage scenes from Stephen Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD at school, in a climax that, probably unintentionally, came across as a cliche after so many other films concluded with similar set pieces. Still for those seeing the movie without bias the second half is very funny and warm.
On the commentary tracks for JERSEY GIRL, Smith says that a longer, director's cut version of the film is in the works, so judging this film by a standard other than how the second half lives up to its own intentions is fruitless. I look forward to that longer version.
I hope Miramax is, too, because this disc acts like it's the definitive edition. The transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) and the sound (DD 5.1) are great, and there is an abundance of supplements.
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There are two commentary tracks, the first with Kevin Smith and Ben Affleck, a highly informative and frank chat — it is a must listen. The second is an amusing and unpredictable conference with Smith, producer Scott Mosier, and Jason Mewes. There is also a lengthy (27-minute) video interview, "From MALLRATS to JERSEY GIRL: Kevin Smith and Ben Affleck Talk Shop," in which the pair give a general background to their relationship, "Roadside Attractions with Kevin Smith," some selections from among Smith's regular feature on THE TONIGHT SHOW, including a visit to the JERSEY GIRL set, "Behind the Scenes of JERSEY GIRL," a conventional 17-minute making of, and finally some text interviews with Smith, Affleck, Tyler, Castro, Carlin, Mosier, Matt Damon, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, production designer Robert Holtzman, and costume designer Juliet Polcsa, all of which originally ran as RENAISSANCE MAN columns at MoviePoopShoot. The disc comes in a keep-case, retails for $19.95, and hit the street Tuesday, September 7.
NEXT TIME: VIDEODROME, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, several STAR TREKs, and more!
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