Cinemonkey

Unforced Errors: Recent Hitchcock Books, No. 2

 

There are already over 200 or many more books on Alfred Hitchcock in English alone, maybe more, and multitudes more in other languages, including Guillermo del Toro’s hard-to-find Hitchcock (EDITORIAL ESPASA CALPE, S.A (2008). These books began appearing in the mid-1950s when Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer wrote the first full-length critical study. Ten years later came the first study in English, Robin Wood’s still masterly Hitchcock’s Films. By the time Hitchcock died in 1980, there was already a hefty shelf’s worth, and they continued to appear, but for some reason lately there has been an acceleration of books on the director. Four recent volumes chart the scope of books about him. One is a biography, the second a Hollywood memoir, then a long book essay considering the life and work, and finally a detailed critical study taking on specific elements of the films.

Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life (Nan A. Talese, 288 pages, $26.95, ISBN-13: 978- 0385537414) is a beginner’s guide to the director’s life and films. Ackroyd is a specialist in all things London and has written big books on the city and the river that runs through it and has published many biographies, of Dickens and others. There is no original research here, and no particularly gripping insights into how the films work, and this leads to a lot of revived opinions and unhelpful myths being perpetuated, among them the claim that Hitchcock assaulted Tippi Hedren on the sets of The Birds and Marnie.

In a similar book, the case is rehashed again, but at least from the horse’s mouths. Tippi Hedren’s Tippi: A Memoir (William Morrow, 288 pages, $15.99, ISBN-13: 978- 0062469038) is a dictated Hollywood autobiography that covers some of the same ground as the actress’s earlier book on lion conservation, along with remarks she made to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto and to Camille Paglia in her BFI book on The Birds, all about Hitchcock’s supposed sexual harassment of her during the making of two films. Her claims have achieved the status of fact, so much so that Richard Brody could write about it in the otherwise-famously-fact-checked New Yorker as true, and HBO even aired a TV movie on the topic. Spoto’s goal was to peek inside to the inner turmoil that drove Hitchcock, and Hedren’s then-claims folded perfectly with that aim. But the situation is much more complicated, and much less easy to determine, despite Miss Hedren’s comments. Patrick McGilligan has the most rational approach to the case in his more recent biography of Hitchcock and Tony Lee Moral has the most detail in Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie.

My take on the situation is that the actress was a prudish uptight person not equipped to deal with Hitchcock’s raciness, jokes, and sometimes coarseness of manner. Alma was the person who pointed out Hedren to Hitchcock in a TV commercial, and the negotiations to take on her as a contract player were not hampered by her inexperience, or her weird squeaky voice. Clearly the two had a falling out, but the foundation seems more to be about a contract dispute and her resentment of Hitchcock’s trying to shape her image, in the manner of the old studio days, rather then the possibility of a proposition, or his forcing himself on her in the back of a limo. She did complain to Marni’s screenwriter, and to one of her co-stars, but the tension was not necessarily sexual based, and could have been really just boss-employee issues. Hedren writes that Alma apologized to her about Hitchcock’s behavior, and Hedren supposedly demanded that she do something about it, but again, was Alma voicing awareness of a sexual obsession, or referring to the tensions that enveloped the second half of the Marnie shoot? Yes, Hitchcock called Hedren The Girl, but that was a convention of British cinema and its stereotypes, a shorthand. Yes, Hitchcock worked with some of the most beautiful women in the world, but he also knew sides of them never exposed to the public, and had to wade into show business’s less savory facets having to do with the financial economy of beauty and profit. There are numerous recordings of Hitchcock’s discussions with Hedren, available at the Academy library, and there he called her by her name. According to McGilligan, when Hitchcock wouldn’t let her attend an awards ceremony in Manhattan, she threw a fit and called him a fat bastard. The case has been given even more attention in light of the multitude of prominent men exposed as predators via the Me Too movement.

Frankly, I’m not sure I grasped the point of D. A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock (University Of Chicago Press, 208 pages, $22.50, ISBN- 13: 978-0226374673), though it is interesting and even fun to read. Mr. Miller is a UC Berkeley grad school professor, and previously wrote a BFI Classics monograph on Fellini’s 8 1⁄2, and this new volume is a close look at Hitchcock’s meaningful “errors,” and while concentrating on only three films from roughly around the same time, Rope, Strangers on a Train, and The Wrong Man, makes a plug for what he calls the Too-Close Viewer. It’s a complicated and nuanced conceit, and flies in the face of authorial intention. For example Mr. Miller is more interested in the visual jokes that Hitchcock includes, and in continuity errors, and embedded representations of the director. Among the things he focuses on are the joke of Bruno Anthony in Train shown reading a book whose author photo is of Hitchcock himself because it is an anthology he edited. Its companion is a Dell Mapback anthology also edited by Hitchcock, barely seen in Bruno’s compartment. The author is also fascinated by the tilted candle shown in Rope, and the initials D and K revealed in a hat. In Wrong Man he is intrigued by doublings, the ghostly movement of props, and another cameo by Hitchcock sitting in the back row of courtroom. His free associations on these elements lead to some interesting and curious sideways glances at Hitchcock, and though the book could be accused of “reading too much” into what might be a mistake, the book still proves to be an example of just how richly Hitchcock’s films inspire reflection.

Enjoyable as Hidden Hitchcock proved to be, nevertheless I enjoyed the next book the most, probably because I didn’t have to twist my mind around a difficult concept. That next book is Michael Wood’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much in the Icons series (New Harvest, 144 pages, $20, ISBN-13: 978-0544456228), which already includes books on David Lynch, Poe, Lucian Freud, Hannah Arendt, Benazir Bhutto, Jesus (by Jay Parini), J.D. Salinger, Van Gogh, and St. Paul. Nice company to be in. Mr. Wood has written studies of Nabokov (with whom Hitchcock once wanted to work), and has a regular movie review column at the London Review of Books, and he has a learned but not academic style that is flexible and roving. On the surface a “conventional” film-by-film survey, which happens to be my favorite genre, Mr. Wood, like Mr. Miller, is strongest in his digressions. In fact, the whole book is like a digression, and merits not only reading, but re-reading. It joins a small cadre of recent books of speculation and free association that includes Peter Conrad’s The Hitchcock Murders, and the volumes by Murray Pomerance, all go-to volumes for insights.

 

 

 

 

Originally posted November 20, 2017 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Driving Out the Money C h a n g e r s (Danger Diabolique, film and monograph)

 

 

An interesting, foreshadowing moment occurs about an hour and 15 minutes into Danger: Diabolik, the Italian film from 1968 based on the popular comic book. The villain-hero Diabolik (John Phillip Law) has once again foiled his Javert-like nemesis, Inspector Ginko (Michel Piccoli) and as a consequence, the new “Minister of Finance” (the country where he is administrating isn’t exactly specified) has offered a million dollar reward for the capture of the thief. Almost immediately, there follows a montage of explosions as the plinths identifying various tax offices go up in smoke and fragments. This immediately puts the viewer in mind of Fight Club, which ends with a sweeping survey of the city as Club-members take down insurance buildings, banks, and other symbols of economic oppression that keep the male identity weak and docile. Danger: Diabolik anticipated this spirit of anti-corporate anarchy by about 30 years.

 

 

Granted, the virile Diabolik is acting in self-defense. The reward was about to hamper his criminal schemes. And his response works. The new Minister is fired, the country is presumably bankrupt, and the old, equally incompetent Minister (Terry-Thomas) is back in office.

 

 

As a comic strip character, the leather-cat-suited Diabolik was a throwback to Fantômas, the Parisian crime lord who terrorized the city in novels and then in silent serials directed by Louis Feuillade. As Leon Hunt clarifies in his new slim monograph about the film, Danger: Diabolik was at the forefront of various remakes and inspirations based on the spirit of Fantômas, including remakes of the original, several lines of adult Italian comic books borrowing both from Fantômas and Diabolik, other comic book inspired pop culture films such as Barbarella, and much more.

 

Professor Hunt’s new Danger: Diabolik (Cultographies) (Walllower Books-Columbia University Press, 128 pages, $15, ISBN-13: 978-0231182812) is the latest in a series of single title monographs that cover what the French call film maudit, or disreputable movies, and what here we call trash, grindhouse garbage, and in general films that another book in the series could offer as a general title, Bad Taste (Jim Barratt’s volume on the Peter Jackson horror comedy). Other films covered in the Cultographies series include They Live (D. Harlan Wilson), Quadrophenia (Stephen Glynn), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Dean J. DeFino), Frankenstein (Seattle’s Robert Horton), Blade Runner (Matt Hills), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Ian Cooper),The Evil Dead (Kate Egan), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Glyn Davis), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock), Donnie Darko (Geoff King), This Is Spinal Tap (Ethan de Seife) and more recently, books on The Shining (Kevin J. Donnelly), Stranger Than Paradise (Jamie Sexton), I Spit on Your Grave (David Maguire defending what many consider the indefensible), Serenity (Frederick Blichert), The Holy Mountain (Alessandra Santos), Ms. 45 (Alexandra Heller- Nicholas), and Argento’s Deep Red (Alexia Kannas). As you can see, there is variety to that legion of titles that the mainstream culture deems, or used to consign to, garbage. Instead, this list is enough to inspire most film students into hysterics of ecstasy. Collect them all!

 

 

Leon Hunt was a contributor to the last physical issue of the influential Movie, a UK publication that focused on close readings of mostly Hollywood films, and whose last issue was No. 36 (recently the publication has been revived as a digital magazine out of the University of Warwick). Mr. Hunt’s contribution to that last issue was a late career survey of Vincent Price’s horror films, and he had fascinating, insightful things to say about tensions between the screen icon and his material and its directors, certain values found consistently among the roles, and the issue of campiness as embedded in self-mocking meta-horror.

 

Mr. Hunt might have gone on to write for Movie further, if the magazine hadn’t fallen into hiatus. On the other hand, he brought an historicism to his essay which matched that of C. G. Crisp, who wrote a book on Truffaut for the Movie series of now-sought-after out-of-print books. The more famous Movie contributors, such as the late Robin Wood and V. F. Perkins, embodied the spirit of close “textual” detail, mostly attending to mise-en-scene and editing (without foregoing story or actorial contributions, of course). Hunt and Crisp may not have fallen into that "pure" category, although their writings are rife with scrutiny of shots, gestures, and point of view. Hunt went on to become Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University and write or edit British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998), Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (2003), BFI TV Classics: The League of Gentlemen (2008), Cult British TV Comedy: From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville (2013), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (2008) and Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television. Crisp became Colin Crisp, who until his recent retirement was Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, and has published a series of excellent books on French cinema from the ‘30s through to the ‘60s, published mostly by Indiana University Press.

 

Danger: Diabolik, the book, is one of the best I’ve read so far in the series. Its 128 pages are packed with information, facts, figures, speculation, analysis, and cultural connections. Want to know why the name “Diabolik” has a “K” in it, and how the name is properly pronounced in Italian? Interested in subtle differences between international cuts of the film? Were you aware that there was a proposed earlier version of Diabolik, with Jean Sorel and at one point Catherine Deneuve? The text is a indeed like a “biography” of the film, tracing antecedents and then its influence. Professor Hunt summarizes the history of the comic book itself, created by two sisters already in publishing, Angela and Luciana Giussani, how the film works, the influence of James Bond on the movie, which ultimately was directed by Mario Bava in what was probably his biggest budget ever, and the aftermath, more specifically the cult that has grown around first the film, then Bava, perhaps even more important the cult around the film’s composer Ennio Morricone (in one of his most varied scores), and finally the comic book itself. Culture quotations include the inclusion of Danger: Diabolik in a Beastie Boys music video, the film’s place in the pantheon of parodies by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and in CQ, Roman Coppola’s homage to European pop cinema from the 1960s.

 

 

 

Among the fascinating facets of the film are the moral contours of its hero-thief, the rich relationship between the mysterious Diabolik and his partner Eva Kant (Marisa Mell), and the aesthetic tennis game between producer Dino De Laurentiis, who was thinking big, and Bava, who was used to making magic out of slim budgets. The film’s visual scale is amazing given its limitations, though viewers today may laugh at the rear projection chase scenes. Hunt notes that the movie comes in three large parts, equivalent to three issues of the comic book rather than a a fully plotted out Poliziotteschi, which was a certain kind of Italian crime film that emerged shortly after DD and the “demise” of the giallos. The three parts, in fact, explore the anarchism behind Diabolik’s greed. In the movie, he is less interested in wealth than in tweaking the stuffed shirts chasing him, and in bringing down the civic hierarchies. Diabolik likes to put on a disguise and attend press conferences about himself, which he then turns into mockeries of the officials. He bravely feigns death at one point, only to reassert his superiority over the lumbering professionals hovering over him. His blowing up of the tax institutions and subsequent theft of the replacement gold ingot is motivated by a desire to make it all stop. He wants to bring down society – but really for his own seeming profit.

 

 

The first part of DD concentrates on a cash transfer heist, which establishes Diabolik’s wit and methods. The second part concerns the theft of a priceless necklace, which focuses on Diabolik’s relationship with Eva, whom he adores and pampers, and who in turn worships him. They are equals, and she has equal operative cunning. The third part expands the systems of transportation that the film exploits, in this case trains and ships, as Diabolik fetches the huge gold bounty he has contrived to send to the bottom of a lake. In the film’s dreamy anarchy, Ginko is impotent to stop him, until the very last sequence, but a breaking of the fourth wall indicates that Diabolik isn’t down and out yet, and that the producers may have assumed that the Diabolik series might attain James Bond level iterations. Well, there wasn’t a second Barbarella, either.

 

 

As in the anarchic parody of Fight Club, Danger: Diabolik explores, consciously or not, shades of masculinity, ranging from the potent lovemaking of D, to the just not quite good enough braininess of Ginko, the humorless lethality of the villains that harass Diabolik and Eva in part two, and the cluelessness of officialdom in toto. This celebration of all that is opposed to fatuousness, fibbing, and cultural vacuity in the end shows an at least indirect influence of Mad magazine, that hilarious, mass-culture-undermining seed-bed of the radical left and social protest of the ’60s.

Originally Posted February 27, 2018 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Hitchcock and the "Third Way" of Understanding Films

 

 

When the BBC released the results of its poll of an unknown number of international critics about their favorite American movies, Alfred Hitchcock made the list five times – for Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious ... and Marnie (at number 47). This placement sparked the usual groaning. Why Marnie and not Rear Window? Of all the directors represented on the list, Hitchcock was the most likely to have numerous masterpieces between his first American film in 1940, and the last “good ones” in the early 1960s. But Marnie has become a particularly vexatious point of debate among some film quackers over the years, especially since Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films, the first book in English on the director’s career, in which the late scholar dedicated a chapter to defending Marnie from dense critics. Since then, the debate hasn’t died down. Talk about notorious!

The BBC 100 has only re-ignited the controversy. Who were these writers who picked the film and how could it rise so high in the list? For some reason this information is difficult to track down, but then, I’m notoriously bad at Google searches. A synecdoche of the ire the film inspires is one blogger who alternates between year-round Oscar predictions, industry grievances, and proper cinematic sideburns disguised as diary entries. In a few error-filled columns, the blogger ran down Marnie and mocked those who came to its defense. On the other hand, critical luminaries such as Glenn Kenny and Dave Kehr have long been supporters of Marnie.

The debate, or at least the resistance to Marnie as a film worthy of inclusion in an all-time best list exposes an interesting chasm within the critical community, to use the term loosely. Despite the blogger’s call for some kind of weird vigilante attack on Marnie lovers, which unfortunately the Internet is all too easily roused to do these days – for which see the lynch mob mentality over the second season of True Detective, – Marnie is unlikely to go away or its champions be suppressed. There is already one whole book on the making of the film, Marnie figures significantly in the so far hundreds of books on the director, and the latest issue of CineACTION!, the Canadian film journal that Robin Wood helped found 30 years ago, coincidentally features a cover story on Marnie.[1]

The conflict isn’t between “tradition of quality” types like the blogger who finds films such as Shane the pinnacle of Hollywood craft versus the egghead intellectuals with no sense of how an audience interacts with a film, though the conflict is probably in part that. It’s that there is a third way. Yes, some academics do “read too much” into a film particularly if they are drawing upon Freudianism and other bankrupted ideologies. But go back and read the Marnie chapter by Wood, if you have it. It’s a carefully reasoned look at the choices Hitchcock made, with an analysis that if not explaining away such “mistakes” as bad process shots, painted backdrops, and psychological inconsistencies, at least sees them in accord with the overall meaning or seeming ambition of the film’s psychological portrayal. The “third way,” however, is an interest in the director as a person behind a film. The tradition of quality blogger can like North by Northwest as a “well made film” that pleases the audience and was validated as good because people paid to see it [2] – essentially the vantage point of a producer or studio executive, a meddling busybody with snap judgments and easy dismissals, the Rex Reed school of thought. The academic is good at tracking meaning and similarities and progressions of a film though a director’s career as it interacts with the business, the public, and the earlier films, all valuable. The third way, however, asks for great sympathy for a director’s works, both as a whole and individually. So for example, a fan of Samuel Fuller or of Hitchcock and Marnie looks at the film not for its tradition of quality craft but for its expression of the director’s personality. The “sloppiness,” the extremes of quietude and loudness, the psychological flaws are interesting in themselves because they bespeak either passion (as in Fuller) or some kind of inner crisis we can never truly know, as possibly in the case of Hitchcock.[3]

It’s assumed that Hitchcock “identifies” with Mark Rutland, the Sean Connery character who takes an interest in the case of the mysterious, chilly secretary whom he identifies as the robber of one of his colleagues. Like other Hitchcock characters he “rescues” Marnie – although the ending of the film is ambiguous, even somewhat open ended, and anyway, there aren’t that many male rescuers in Hitchcock films outside of Grant in Notorious, women being usually in that position. What if in some strange way Hitchcock identified with Marnie? That Marnie and Marnie herself represent Hitchcock’s struggle with the terror of sex, and who, like Marnie, chose a life of “crime, making films that are usually about thieves, murderers, and spies? From a position such as this, one can “forgive” a director many a “mistake” or break from the prevailing definition of the well-made film, a definition that shifts from decade to decade or from new technology to new technology. The results are that Hitchcock’s movies, like Kubrick’s, often look better out of their time, than in them.

 

[1] It’s a reprint from the massive book A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.

 

[2] Hitchcock himself in interviews all too often took box office as validation over critical enthusiasm.

 

[3] By the way, until there is one other witness than Tippi Hedren to the alleged sexual harassment of which she charges him, I will remain dubious, as does Patrick McGilligan in his definitive bio of Hitchcock.

Originally posted at All Classical on 11 August 2015

Out of the Past: Glasgow Courier, 2 October 2017, Cult of Chucky

 

By D. K. HOLM

FOR THE COURIER

 

 

The major release this week at The Worx (700 ½ 1st Avenue North, 406-228-4474) is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, an entry that proves that dead franchises won't shut up, as this series becomes as loud and blurred as the Transformers movies.

 

 

Also on hand is the incredibly stupid A Ghost Story whose content is as bland as its title. This is a film in which the ghosts actually are sheets with holes cut out, and it's the kind of highbrow horror film in which the camera is content to simply sit and stare, as a widow (a gaunt Mara sister) sits and eats a pie, or methodically drags a couch out to the side of the street for pickup. Fascinating! The only good thing about this dull enterprise is that being draped, the viewer doesn't have to actually see the dread sexual harasser Casey Affleck (he has settled several cases), though one can still hear that squeaky, rasping, mumbling "voice."

 

 

For the British Heritage freaks there is Churchill, in what seems like the latest of about 17 new Churchill-WWII-Dunkirk films. This one has Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson as Mr. and Mrs. C., and is a hagiographic knee-pad movie, with soaring music – or at least notes … movies don't feature actual melodies anymore – in which Churchill feels veddy veddy bad about all the lads he sent to die, and simple children revive his spirit with V-fingers, while those he berates continue to “love” him. In general the film pretends that the American military leadership were stupid until Churchill came along to sort them all out and save Operation Overlord, when in un-re-written history Churchill was blithe about sending men to die en masse, re: Gallipoli. The movie is bogged down by re-stating the same damn argument every five minutes, between Churchill and Eisenhower, then the King, his wife, Montgomery, Smuts, and on and on, always about his not wanting to send men to their doom. On the other hand, TV’s John Slattery is excellent as a combative Ike.

 

 

Finally, there is Cult of Chucky, the seventh Child’s Play film, and with an eighth poised for an appearance. I imagine that most viewers lost track of the series after the second or third, or at least the one with Jennifer Tilly. She’s back though as the lethal doll’s moll, and the killing ground is an antiseptic mental hospital where a young woman blamed for earlier killings is doing time. Naturally, Chucky shows up thanks to an insensitive shrink, and soon the monster bifurcates a few times to other collectibles dolls and human beings, creating the “cult.” Some of the “kills” are funny, in that paradox of gore films, and Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky has some dandy Bondian quips. Entertainingly grim as Cult is, one does wonder why we as a culture need films in which helpless women are preyed upon by unpunished evil. Clearly a great many men in this society want women but can't get them and so take it out on the gender with fantasies of mass slaughter. Happy times!

 

As usual, no word on what the Valley Cinemas (600 2nd Avenue South 406-228-9239) is showing, though the website http://polsontheatres.com/glasgow-mt/ will know at some point. The theater may hold over The Lego Ninjago Movie, and / or Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the busy, noisy sequel, or it might add anything from among a list that includes Tom Cruise in American Made, a funny, manic real life comedy, or the drama The Glass Castle. Coins will be flipped.

 

Next week I’ll celebrate the release of the Montana-set Certain Women on Criterion DVD.

 

 

 

Out of the Past: Mabul, at the 20th Portland Jewish Film Festival (2012)

 

 

Mabul, the lead off flm for the 20th Portland Jewish Film Festival, walks a fine line between soap opera and art house drama. Guy Nattiv’s film from 2011 is about a family in crisis and conflict. Yoni (Yoav Rotman) is bullied at school, sells homework to his peers, and is trying to grow faster and bigger physically with the help of bodybuilder formula drinks, and even deepens his voice so as to protect himself. He is also about to be “bar mitzvahed.” His dad Gidi (Tzachi Grad) is a pilot suspended from work for drunkenness. Gidi’s alienated wife Miri (Elkabetz) runs a daycare center, and is having an affair with one of her “dads.” In addition, Yoni develops something of a crush on the daughter of the rabbi training him for the upcoming ceremony.

Into this volatile mix returns Tomer (Michael Moshonov), the couple’s apparently autistic son, ejected from an institution going out of business, where he has been housed for 12 years, and which incarceration caused Miri to suffer a three-month nervous breakdown. Tomer is unresponsive; is fascinated by bugs and animals; and seems to be utterly unsocialized, living in a world of his own, but able to recite long passages from the Torah, especially from the story of Noah. Mabul means “The Flood,” and is an expansion of co-writer Noa Berman-Herzberg’s short film, and the “flood” that pours over the characters and consumes them is the secrets they all keep, which are unleashed when Tomer returns. The affair is revealed, which turns out to be also the cause for one student’s bullying; Yoni’s homework racket is exposed; and Gidi admits that despite leaving everyday for the air field, he has been unemployed for six months.

 

 

Mabul is a well-done domestic drama with no evident political overtones and few religious elements, and at times beautiful photography. It is well acted by the entire cast, and with its seaside setting is so anonymous that the story could take place anywhere from Jane Campion’s Australia to Fellini’s Italy. Some viewers may come away thinking that the traumas are piled on the poor characters; others may find little difference between the soap opera elements and upbeat ending of Mabul and a typical Lifetime Channel TV movie. Mabul may be a mixed bag, but the film has a consistent tone and a sense of emotional maturity and realism.

Mabul plays at the Northwest Film Center at 7 PM, Sunday, April 15, 2012.

Good News for Sirk Studies

Here is some good news concerning the Tag Gallagher essay on Sirk I mentioned a few days ago. It is "reprinted,” as it were, at Senses of Cinema, the Australia-based website that is the notable equivalent of Cahiers du cinema. The article comes with numerous luscious frame captures, and some new info in a footnote. Mr. Gallagher has also thoroughly updated his John Ford book as an e-book, now called John Ford: Himself and HIs Movies, with a multitude of new illustrations, and film-by-film analyses. The author has also revised and updated his Rossellini book in a third edition.

 

 

Meanwhile, I should also mention Charles Barr’s book Hitchcock: Lost and Found, written with Alain Kerzoncuf (University of Kentucky), which surveys an aspect of Hitchcock work that hasn’t previously received much attention. Of special interest is Hitchcock’s years with the director Graham Cutts from the silent era, in which the authors provide photographic evidence of his influence on Cutts or the films, especially an early foreshadowing of an effect in Marnie. But the book also looks at films he produced or is credited with writing but not directing, as well as edited documentaries and war effort dramas, and even a filmed introduction that he sent to a British film society that was showing Psycho and several other of his films.

That leads in turn to The Lost Hitchcocks, by John William Law (an e-book from Aplomb Publishing). This is a chronicle of projects that Hitchcock might have made or completed, from Titanic in the ‘40s to The Short Night in the ’70s, among many others. Mr. Law previously published Hitchcock: The Icon Years, about Hitchcock’s films after Psycho.

 

 

Another name I’d like to add to the Third Wave of film writers I like is Leon Hunt. He first came to my attention in the last physical issue of Movie, with a massive account of Vincent Price, taking him seriously. Since then he has written an enjoyable monograph on Danger: Diabolik for the Cultographies series, Kung Fu Cult Masters, Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (as one of the editors), and British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation, which I am currently reading (among about 50 other books, from I. F. Stone to Thomas Middleton). Professor Hunt is senior lecturer in film and TV studies at Brunel University.

Two More for the Third Wave

 

Another couple of names to add to the list of Third Wave cinema writers list from a couple of days ago are Peter Stanfield and Tag Gallagher.

 

 

Peter Stanfield is a professor at the University of Kent and author of several books, including The Cool and the Crazy: Fifties Pop Cinema with chapters on Korean War movies, juvenile delinquent pix, offbeat music films, hot rod tales, and others. He has also published 'Unamerican’ Hollywood, about the films of the Blacklist era, a book on Hollywood westerns of the ‘30s, Maximum Movies-Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson, and the recent Hoodlum Movies, about the motorcycle gang cycle of exploitation thrillers. I knew the name but the first thing I’ve read is an essay in Steve Neale’s anthology Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, from 2002. “‘Film Noir Like You’ve Never Seen’: Jim Thompson Adaptations and Cycles of Neo-Noir” focuses on the peculiar occurrence of a bunch of Thompson films that appeared almost all at once in the 1990s. That same cycle inspired my book on Film Soleil, but as usual my title does not appear in the bibliography. Nevertheless, Mr. Stanfield has done thorough research and traces the background that led to the Thompson resurgence, before addressing the “meaning” of them and the similar companion neo-noirs, or films soleils, subsequently released. This is an authoritative essay and demands attention. Now I have to read all of Peter Stanfield’s books.

 

 

 

Tag Gallagher has written two superb biographical-critical studies, on John Ford, and on Roberto Rossellini, as well as a series of highly informative video essays on visual style for a string of Criterion Collection DVDs. I was reminded of him just today while flipping through a random issue of Film Comment, from November-December 1998, 20 years ago. The cover feature is Mr. Gallagher’s essay on Douglas Sirk, "White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk," (I think ... the graphic design of the first page is confusing). It’s a piece in which he tries to save Sirk from his “champions,” in a sort of Orwellian manner. They get him wrong. And Mr. Gallagher is here to set them straight. The crux is that Sirk’s champions define Sirk as an ironist who is subverting the melodrama. But Mr. Gallagher both remembers seeing the movies of the ‘50s at the time and being both aware of the elements of the stories that undercut the world of the Eisenhower years, and also being moved by the uplifting endings, which he asserts that Sirk “meant.” Two films on which he concentrates are Summer Storm and A Scandal in Paris, both starring his close friend George Sanders. Mr. Gallagher also isolates a running theme in the films, the role of savior who intervenes in another’s life, surprisingly taken from Sirk’s own experiences, and usually played by Rock Hudson. He finds thematic and autobiographical material in a pair of little regarded Sirk films, All I Desire and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. This is a definitive essay on Sirk, a must-read, and should be widely anthologized.

More Movie magazine writers and Murray Pomerance

 

For followers of the Movie-verse, Charles Barr has a new book. Titled The Call of the Heart: John M. Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama, it is co-edited by Bruce Babington (John Libbey Publishing, 250 pages, ISBN 9.7808.6196736.0). The book is enthusiastically reviewed by David Cairns in the current January-February issue of Sight and Sound. Incidentally, a double issue bodes ill. Has the magazine gone bi-monthly?

Also, Murray Pomerance has no less than two new books coming early in the new year. An academic sociologist associated with Ryerson in Canada, Professor Pomerance has made movies a major area of contemplation, and is one of the best of the “Third Wave” of movie scholars after the Movie years. Others include Robert Ray, Jon Lewis, Thomas Doherty, Gaylyn Studlar, Deborah Thomas, James Naremore, Ed Gallafent, Susan Smith, among so many others.

 

 

Professor Pomerance’s two new books includes Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory, due out on 31 December, 2018 (Edinburgh University Press, 192 pages, ISBN 9.78147.442868.2), and covers such films and favorite filmmakers as Vertigo, Antonioni’s The Passenger and Blow-Up, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper (perhaps an analysis of Kristin Stewart?), and Call Me By Your Name.

 

Following fast behind in early January is A Dream of Hitchcock (State University of New York Press, 274 pages, ISBN-13: 978.1.4384.7207.2), with thoughts on Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and Family Plot.

He’s a prolific writer and editor. From Edinburgh University Press alone he also has books on Cukor, Hamlet in Hollywood, and the two-volume actor anthology Close-Ups. And coming shortly is an anthology on Michael Curtiz, which might go along nicely with Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, Alan K. Rode’s recent biography of the director from the Press of the University of Kentucky (I’m currently about a third into Mr. Rode’s book).

For a survey of his many titles, one can look at his Wikipedia page or the Ryerson profile. What you don’t want to view if you like Professor Pomerance's written work is his Yelp-like reviews at Rate My Professor https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=33825

https://ryerson.academia.edu/MurrayPomerance

 

Robin Wood on the Horror Film

Well, I've finished reading the new anthology of Robin Wood's writings on the horror film and will be posting a review shortly. I will say now that it is a pleasure to have all the writings in one place. Eventually I will add the book and the new citations in it to the bibliography.