Alfred Hitchcock | The 39 Steps / 1935

thanks for the memories

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bennett and Ian Hay (screenplay and dialogue, based on a novel by John Buchan), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The 39 Steps / 1935

 

As in so many of later Hitchcock films, his early masterwork of 1935, The 39 Steps, involves spies, mistaken identities, and recalcitrant beautiful women who, nonetheless, work with the hero to save the day. Loosely based on a 1915 spy thriller by John Buchan, this film is far more coherent than the original’s series of coincidences (by having the spy Anabella ask for a map of Scotland and circle the Scottish village of Alt-na-Shellach, for example, Hitchcock makes plausible the outrageous coincidence of the original tale, wherein Hannay accidentally stumbles into the ringleader spy’s Scotland mansion), even if, at times the series of events seem somewhat implausible. Perhaps the most inexplicable element of Charles Bennett’s and Ian Hay’s script is simply the fact that Hannay (Robert Donat), who becomes involved with Anabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) through a chance meeting at a music hall, continues throughout to pursue the foreign (presumably German) spy ring leader (Godfrey Tearle). Even if one can simply slough it off as necessary to prove Hannay’s innocence in murdering Anabella, it doesn’t quite explain why he moves in the very direction of capture rather than escape. But then Hitchcock’s figures are nearly always slightly altruistic and accidental heroes who spend most of the action running directly into the nets they proclaim they want nothing to do with: the societies, authorities, and sexual involvements in which they become entrapped.

 

    In nearly all of Hitchcock’s movies the local police, the military, and even government authorities are nearly inseparable, and often more dangerous in their inabilities to even see the evil surrounding them, than are the criminals and foreign agents whom they have been invested to protect us from. In The 39 Steps it is the so-called “good citizens” of the world that are more dangerous to Hannay—a Canadian outsider—than are the spies who are out to kill him. In this early film, Hitchcock teases us by taking his character into even more minefields by forcing him, again by complete accident, to participate in a political rally where, in trying to loudly explicate his situation, he becomes a kind of local political hero; and in an to attempt to prove to a deliciously frigid (and in this case, slightly scatter-brained) blonde, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll)—Hitchcock’s favorite kind of woman—that he is the innocent man on the lam. Unlike Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, who knows better than Cary Grant that he is an innocent caught up in a vast conspiracy, Pamela is as dense as the societal figures around her, successful in getting Hannay arrested at least two times before she finally learns the truth by overhearing a telephone conversation between the conspirators themselves. But even then, she slows down his pace by several hours and nearly leads him—once more—into capture by trusting the assurances of Scotland Yard.

    Although the 39 Steps to which the film refers is the name of the foreign agency which plans to steal secret documents about British airplanes, it might as well describe all the “steps,” the various moves, ploys, and declarations that Hannay has to take in order to prove his worthiness as a loyal companion to his would-be lover. Only after Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson) finally gets all his knowledge off his chest, so to speak, does she truly permit the faithful “foreigner” to hold her hand.

    Memory plays an important role in this film, as Hitchcock, somewhat clumsily, reiterates in an early scene, when after discovering a knife in Annabella’s back, several bits of conversation between Hannay and his mysterious night-time visitor a few moments after we have just heard them. It is Hannay’s intuitive memory—the bits of music he can’t get out of his head (an important motif in so many of Hitchcock films), the use of mysterious words such as “the 39 Steps,” and vague image of a man with a missing forefinger—that solves the dilemmas of the central characters and saves the country. But rote memory, on the other hand—the kind of knowledge Mr. Memory puts to work in his music hall routine—is dangerous and destructive, a thing likely to get into the wrong hands or simply be misused.

     History as collected in memory in The 39 Steps is a truly terrifying thing; while history as a force to move forward, is not only something positive, but necessary to regenerate the world. In 1935, when the English might already have perceived that the events of World War I had resulted in a series of new circumstances which would threaten their world, Hitchcock’s lesson in “memory” was not only revelatory, but was prophetic.    

      

Los Angeles, May 31, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).

Peter Weir | The Truman Show / 1998

the end of reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Niccol (screenplay), Peter Weir (director) The Truman Show / 1998

 

Andrew Niccol’s provocative script, which apparently went through 16 drafts before it was finally shot, has become, in the years since its 1998 premiere a kind of open mirror into which literary and film critics, sociologists, psychologists and numerous others have cast their images, often with quite distorted visions, regarding this work’s significance. Certainly the work, in its uncanny prophetic abilities to perceive the direction of television and other media toward live “reality” broadcasts, is startling. The film’s obvious links with and satire of utopian visions is equally fascinating for anyone, like myself, who has a literary bent—particularly, in this case, since many of the scenes were actually filmed in a kitsch-like picture postcard, newly-minted, “master-planned” community in Seaside, Florida; today, of course, there are such communities and Disneyfied shopping centers throughout the world; in my own neighborhood, the most popular shopping destination is the charming “old village” creation, “The Grove”. What is represented in the film, accordingly, as a retrograde absurdity in which the central character, Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) in entrapped, is now repeated throughout the nation and the world, flash-freezing, possibly, millions of individuals, even if only temporarily.

     As Joel and Ian Gold’s study, Suspicious Minds, details, moreover, numerous psychologically deluded individuals have developed what has been dubbed as “the Truman delusion,” believing that, like the film’s character, they have been entrapped in a world in which everyone else is involved in deluding them about the reality of the world in order to manipulate them for the purposes of entertainment or for other secretive and often coded goals. In short, what the figures of Truman’s world attempted to define as his delusion has actually become, in the real world, a delusion infecting others.    Finally, a movie in which the character is required to “read” subtle messages and codes in order to finally perceive that something is not right in paradise, and, a work in which that figure himself expresses many of his actions in coded messages scrawled upon a mirror with soap, encourages movie devotees to read in their own series of codes and secretive messages. The film, even if unintentionally, encourages those who believe in conspiracies.

 

    For those readers who have not seen the film, let me just begin by explaining that Truman Burbank, born an unwanted baby, was adopted while still in the womb by a television corporation, and has grown up and lived his life on a set of gargantuan proportions (embedded in a vast dome) in which he is the only unknowing figure surrounded by hundreds of paid actors who perform as his family friends as he daily goes about his life, broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Almost everyone on the planet watches the film which financially survives through the strategic placement of products in his home, on the street, and in other locations throughout the small island home where Truman resides.

     Although Truman’s world is portrayed, at first, as one in which everyone is so neighborly and friendly, a world which is quite literally centered around the individual—Truman—that it seems pointless to doubt one’s love and safety, it quickly becomes apparent that everything is too good (too sickeningly beautiful and cute) to be believed. Yet Truman has been trained from birth to believe in and respond to precisely the kitsch-like images, costumes, behavior, and values systems that surround him, so that it is nearly impossible for him to even comprehend a reality outside of the one he has known. Habitualized to be terrified of bodies of water (forcing him to remain in his island community) and frightened of dogs (which the TV producers use as guards to intimidate entrance to verboten areas), Truman is trapped in the fantasy paradise that ritualizes his reality. The major issue of the film, accordingly, centers upon how Truman might possibly begin to imagine another reality when he has had nothing but intimations of anything outside of his Seahaven paradise. For Truman all other realities are embodied in one word: Fiji; and he is determined that in that word he will find everything that is apparently forbidden him in his personal life, particularly the woman whom he truly loves, Sylvia (Natascha McElhone), an extra on the TV set who has accidentally gotten too close to Truman upon at least two occasions, and was hurried off the set and series.

    The only other “events” that might suggest the existence of other realities to Truman—the sudden fall from the skies of a spotlight (explained in the course of the day through a radio broadcast that suggests it came from a passing airplane); an odd radio interference wherein he hears what appears to be stage directions; the sudden appearance of his “dead” father (Brian Delate) who is quickly whisked away by authoritative beings; and his discovery of an elevator serving merely as a prop, behind which sits individuals snacking on “offstage” doughnuts—are, frankly, not really enough to explain his sudden “suspicions,” particularly given the fact that he has never needed to employ the system which in our society we outsiders need in order to survive by determining the difference between what’s true and false. Since everything Truman believes inherently is a lie, how might he possibly be expected to even imagine what “truth” might look like? And that is a question the film never explores.

     In other words, if we truly were forced to perceive reality the way Truman might see it, the suspicions which lead him to perceive the timed approaches of neighbors and passersby, that make him suddenly doubt the nearly always friendly intonations of his wife’s (Laura Linney) consumer-friendly voice would be absurd, signs of real delusion which the television characters accuse him of. How does one develop a system of suspicions in a world which automatically allays them as quickly as they arise?

    Of course, as some psychologists argue, it may be that suspicion is hard-wired into us as a protective structure, that our suspicion systems are in-born to us as a species. But the film, quite obviously, does not argue this or even hint of that possibility. Indeed, it argues for a series of values that are taught by the studio executives and actors, overseen by Christof (Ed Harris), and through learned Pavlov-like reactions imposed on the mind through traumatic events such as the storm at sea which supposedly “killed” Truman’s father. Indeed, the reason why Truman is so “watchable” to the millions who tune him in every night is that he is a true innocent, a gullible and likeable being unlike everyone in real world. In short, Truman is not a human like us, but is, metaphorically speaking, Christof’s baby, visually made clear through Christof’s stroking of the sleeping image of his “child.”

    The reason why we allow for Truman’s sudden suspicions has little to do with the character, I would suggest, and everything to do with us. We naturally suspect and, accordingly imagine that Truman should also gradually uncover the delusions imposed upon him. Like the television audience that The Truman Show portrays, we want Truman to discover the lie, to escape into our soiled world and become one of us instead of remaining the gullible innocent he has been bred to be.

    Truman’s suspicions seem reasonable because they accord with our own. Even the lying characters such as Marlon (Noah Emmerich), reiterate to their “friend,” Truman, our shared childhood imaginings, perhaps the earliest stirrings of our suspicion systems: our doubts about our parentage, our imaginings of association with worlds outside our own, and our individual relationships to faith-based hierarchies such as God. If Truman’s disbeliefs have no ground in which to grow, our own full-grown patches of doubt make the character’s occasional wonderments seem absolutely justified. And thus, associating with the stick-figure character with which we’ve been presented, we easily project our own selves into his situation. This, indeed, may be the reason why so many individuals have taken Truman’s delusions on as their own, and have brought them from their encounter with a Hollywood movie into real life.

    But while we cheer, along with the pretended television audience of this film, for Truman’s final ability to turn his back on his creation and, simultaneously, his creator Christof with his stock phrase “good afternoon, good evening, and good night,” it somehow doesn’t dawn on us that, having hit the photographic imitative wall of his world, Truman has come to the end of reality. The black door into which he “escapes,” is not “our world,” but a world in which reality can now have no meaning. And, in that respect, our world can now be only his fantasy world. Which, of course, is the truth of the situation, since Truman is not a real being in any event. When a character exits the book, so to speak, what he enters is not “reality,” but the end of everything, death itself.   

    Or, let us look at it another way, as did Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo in 1985: if a figure of film fantasy where to step down from the screen, chaos would ensue, not only affecting the “real” figures it encounters, but would threaten us as a species, possibly converting us into figures of fiction as well. In Allen’s movie, the hero of the fantasy returns to his film, and reality is restored to its proper position, while art regains its power—as Oscar Wilde would have had it.

 

    Is it any wonder that if we might believe that Truman has escaped his Seahaven fantasy that we may fear that we too must not be completely real, that we might suddenly feel endangered by all others who control and moderate our lives? As the Golds well argued in their study, Suspicious Minds, sickness can truly be influenced by products of our culture. And in a world where so much of so-called art is described or defined as “real,” how is anyone to comprehend what we might describe as life? What is truth in a world of pretense? It just may be that, ultimately, our own realities will come to an end. If I cannot think (imagine), perhaps I do not exist.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015).

Keren Cytter | Terrorist of Love / 2016

diversionary tactics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tal Hefter, Yammi Wisler, and Naama Yuria (music and lyrics), Keren Cytter (director) Terrorist of Love / 2016 [3 minutes]

 

Video artist, filmmaker, dramatist, choreographer, and novelist Keren Cytter has long expressed interest in her work about issues of gender and sexual difference, although, as critics have made clear, her interests are so vast, it is difficult to pigeon-hole her art.

      But in several films, particularly in 2016, she seems to explore these concerns without fully making clear what her attitude is toward them, an aspect of the disorientation of the viewer she insists upon in all of her films.

    Strangely, however, Terrorist of Love is presented in the form of a genre that is most comprehensible, a music video which relies of the music and lyrics instead of the usual complex narrative, formal structures, and dialogical absurdity of Cytter’s works such as Object of the same year.

      Here, we’re talking about love and desire almost as straightforwardly as we can, a young singer, standing on a New York rooftop begins, with a stationery camera facing him, to sing about love. Even the director suggests that film appears as if “It’s going to be cute. It’s like, all Disney.”

      But the barking klezmer-like music, performer Peter Gramlich singing out, “Come, come, come, come go ahead, why, why, why, why, why, why can’t you catch me in?”

      Suddenly, we see him in his Justin Bieber T-shirt, the video having surrounded both sides of the frame with the waving colors of the LGBTQ community. His song, we suddenly realize, is a gay song about unrequited love, a desire for sexual copulation.

      Singing, “Search me, search me, search me,” he pulls off his T-shirt, pours out a coke, singing “glub, glub, glub, glub, glub, won’t you drink me?” The lyrics have suddenly fallen into another mad dimension, and he now pounds his belly, singing “do, do, do, do, come again.”

      Suddenly into the scene cartwheels a young woman in a short red dress, surely a temptress (Laura Hajek is the performer) performing in something closer to a rap style who argues that he is “like a bomb to a camel is a tourist of love.”

      The young man seems to call out in a sort of Tarzan call, suddenly moving in a choreographic manner of a sort of automaton, dancing in sync with the female interloper, just as a series of flowers

replaces the side banners that previously represented the LGTBQ flag. Cute cats and an image of crossed trumpets complete the complete banner of now heterosexual love, a kind a greeting card that truly repeats some of the Hallmark card representations of love, although we wonder whether or not the seeming Asian characters on his chest suggest something other.

       Little hearts appearing above their highly choregraphed hand movements, almost as if they were puppets, suggests our young gay man has suddenly found love that removes him from the terrorist list—in short into heteronormative behavior. The red-dressed temptress seems to have been successful in her quick conversion of the terrorist’s desires.

       It’s a rather terrifying possibility. But as the song ends, the young man again puts on his Justin Bieber shirt, as the temptress moves off in one direction and the boy in another. Their momentary bonding was apparently only as long as the song, hinting at perhaps the reality of many such a commercial musical video that represents worlds that never could or should have existed.

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).  

Pierre Étaix | Le Soupirant (The Suitor) / 1962

balancing himself in a world that has tilted in a wrong direction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Claude Carrière (screenplay), Pierre Étaix (director) Le Soupirant (The Suitor) / 1962

 

Pierre Étaix may be one of the most almost-forgotten geniuses of cinema history. For years, because of contested film rights and much-needed restoration of his cinematic history, Étaix was basically ignored, despite his continuation of the tradition of great filmmakers such as Buster Keaton and, more particularly, Jacques Tati, the latter of whom for which he worked as a sketch artist and assistant director before moving onto his own cinematic career.

    A bit like both Keaton and Tati, Étaix, whom critic Dave Kehr describes as “a small man, with a spherical head and large, liquid eyes,” and like his predecessors is a kind of acrobatic being, balancing himself constantly against a world that has tilted in a wrong direction.

     Yet not one of this trio of comic greats is a true clown in the sense of Fellini’s notions or even that of the frantic American Jerry Lewis, who Étaix attempted to make a movie with, Day the Clown Died (apparently now lost). Rather, Keaton, Tati, and Étaix always maintain a certain dignity despite indignity of the situations in which they become involved.

     As Kehr points out, Keaton, Tati, and Étaix, unlike Lewis or even the Marx brothers before him, were never non-conformists nor were they innocents. Indeed, they desperately attempted to maintain a conservative equilibrium in a society which simply did not know how to incorporate their personal eccentricities. Or, perhaps even that is a wrong word. They were not intentionally eccentric, but simply incapable of behaving as the conservative, often wealthy society in which they lived, demanded.

     The young man of Étaix’s suitor is simply tuned out as we might say today, with earplugs in his ears—not in this case so that he might tune in to the newest YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or other computer devices—simply so that he might be able to study his intellectual interests of astronomy.

      His imperious mother (Denise Perrone), however, determines that it is now the time that he should be married, as if he were some overaged maiden, and prods the father (Claude Massot) to lecture him on the subject.

      Fortunately, the tuned-out son hears little of his father’s discussion of the subject except for the last few words that he must now marry, and obediently attempts to follow up. He asks the families’ Swedish au pair, Ilka (Karin Vesely), in his first actual line of dialogue in what basically, for Étaix’s character, a silent movie, if she will marry him. Ilka, as lovely as she is and as longingly she might look in his direction, does not yet have the skill to completely comprehend French, and answers in her native language, representing yet another kind of “tuning out” —and another kind of “difference” that cannot quite be bridged.

 

       To find a proper mate, our hero goes to all the wrong places. Seeing an attractive woman on the street, carrying groceries, he mistakenly offers help, grabbing up the packages, which actually belong to an elderly woman with whom he is left. 

     His attempts to imitate the suave men who seduce women in restaurants and bars is an utter disaster. He can never, fortunately, be the cads he might wish to imitate, who these women seem to prefer to the natural innocent (and yes, I use that word advisedly, since this figure would desire to be nothing like a foolish innocent) that he actually is. He attempts to light cigarettes for women with the art of Humphrey Bogart to no avail; he slips into banquettes where women have been temporarily abandoned by their would-be lovers, only to have the males return to their conquests. He is trying to learn all the tricks of male dominance far too late in his life.

      When he finally meets a woman, abandoned by her male companion, who seems receptive to his gaze, she turns out to me a drunken lout, joyful for his financial appreciation, but unable even to return to her own house.

       She chases him into the would-be arms of performer Stella, with whom, after a backstage encounter, he imagines a relationship, posting dozens of pictures of her on his walls, even bringing a larger-than-life cut-out of her into his bedroom. He has become the teenage boy with a crush that he before never had the opportunity of being.

       His parents are righteously aghast. And we realize that this suitor is no longer up to the task. Meanwhile, the beautiful Swedish Ilka has been working hard to learn her French, finally is able to respond positively to his request. She is the perfect match.

       The great screenwriter, who worked with Buñuel and so many others, Jean-Claude Carrière, wrote this comedic romp, the premier of Étaix’s brilliant, if somehow forgotten, career. Fortunately, Criterion films again came to the rescue, and we now can see the works of a master comedian we otherwise might almost have lost.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Georges Franju | Judex / 1963

characters of many faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Champreux and Francis Lacassin (screenplay), Georges Franju (director) Judex / 1963

 

Georges Franju’s 1963 film, Judex, is one of those films that critics might be immediately puzzled about how to describe to viewers who have never seen it. Despite Franju’s often very original filmmaking, this work is based on a 1916 French film by the great serial cinema-creator, Louis Feuillade (several of whose shorter films I have previously reviewed), in which the same character and some of the same events enchanted the early 20th-century film-goers.

 

     Yet, Franju makes this film—suggested to him by Feuillade’s grandson, Jacques Champreux, who also as a collaborator on the script—with many completely contrary movies from the original. Franju has long wanted to remake Feuillade’s Fantômas, for which he could not get permission. No matter, Franju took matters into his own hands, focusing on his own beautiful black-and-white images, which he’d already established in his 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face, while, as he had also done in that film, basically ignoring the acting talents of his characters.

     Franju loved the inter-connectedness of all his films, while embracing film history in general. In this case, he hired Édith Scob, who played the terribly scarred and frightened daughter in that earlier film to play the villain’s daughter Jacqueline; as the hero he chose the handsome American actor, Channing Pollack to be Judex, but dressed him up throughout much of the film as an elderly bearded man, Vallieres, serving as secretary to the film’s villain, banker, Favraux; the building-climbing cat-like woman, also nanny to Jacqueline’s child (Francine Bergé), is eerily similar to another Feuillade villain, Irma Vep in his Les Vampires; and Franju even manages to bring in Fantômas as reading matter for the bumbling but gentle detective Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau).

      Indeed, it appears that the director spent more time on his cinematography and numerous film associations than on finding actors who could fully express his characters’ psychology and motivations. Entire portions of the original were jettisoned, making, at times, for inexplicable behavior and acts. Why, for instance is Vallieres so determined to out the evil-doings of his employer, and why has he waited so long to accomplish what we gradually perceive is revenge? Why does the same rather staid and boring Vallieres suddenly become a kind of bird-loving magician, returning to life a seemingly dead dove before conjuring up an entire flock of the same birds, and how does he poison Favraux without the man drinking a sip of the poisoned wine he has offered? These and dozens of other questions throw the viewer into a sense of utter confusion, which, evidently, is what Franju sought.              Any excitement in this film lies within its sudden and utter transformations: Vallieres becoming the matinée idol-like figure (the producers noted his facial resemblance to Rudolph Valentino), Favraux, a dead corpse, suddenly returning to life, and the formerly demur nanny becoming a knife-packing cat before transforming herself again into a nun right out of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The previously passive Jacqueline, after her father’s apparent death, even becomes noble, denying her inheritance to help pay back those whom her father has defrauded. In his story-telling capacities (he begins the tale of Alice in Wonderland) to Jacqueline’s daughter, Cocantin becomes a better teacher than her nanny, Diana, might ever have been.

 

   With each of these shifts, moreover, Franju’s film also sheds its genre, taking on various movie types: a revenge drama, a spooky murder mystery, a devious film about kidnapping, with its almost comic intertitles, a silent movie with spoken dialogue, and, finally, in its absolute devotion to birds, a kind of tribute to Hitchcock’s movie of the same year, The Birds. As The New York Times justifiably commented at the time of Judex’s US release: “It is hard to tell whether Georges Franju, who made it, wants us to laugh at it or take it seriously."

     Given my basically contrarian nature, I’d argue that the film is both a loving and almost comical tribute to the absurd Feuillade original while also being a kind of serious exploration of the very tropes of filmmaking that for so long dominated French cinema. One must remember that Franju, as co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française film archive, knew film history intimately, and in this film was not only exploring some of its various manifestations but putting himself and his films into that context. If to many viewers of Judex the work might seem more like pastiche than a coherent movie, I agree with them, but simply ask them to enjoy the circus of nods to popular film history. This may be a kind of silly movie at times, but it is also an extremely intelligent one which ought to be taken utterly seriously. The film is clearly not one of his greatest, but if seen from the right perspective is so fascinating that it cannot be forgotten.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).