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Showing posts with label Alfred Hitchcock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfred Hitchcock. Show all posts
A three-day hospital stay is a great time for a good book. Luckily, a close friend lent me Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to read.
Strangers was a hit 1951 Hitchcock film, mostly faithful to the novel, and not missing out on the gay subtext of the relationship between Guy (the gorgeous Farley Granger) and Bruno (Robert Walker). Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay.
The author, from Fort Worth, Texas, was alcoholic, unpleasant to most people due to her misanthropic attitude, a lesbian and an existentialist. This didn't exactly endear her to the entertainment industries at the time though she was a very talented writer and recognized as such later in life.
Highsmith also wrote The Talented Mr Ripley and The Price of Salt, the latter being the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Carol.
As for Strangers on a Train, there's a distinct brilliance to the plotting which can best be enjoyed, perhaps, on the printed page. The plot involves two young and handsome men who meet on a train and eventually plan a mutual murder scheme. Of course, drama and complications ensue.
I think, based on reading the novel, that Walker was not the best choice to play Bruno, though he was a wonderful actor. He just doesn't resemble the character described in the book.
Italy! Home of fashion, architecture and design... and the giallo films that are the inception of the modern horror film.
Giallo translates as yellow or, possibly, jaundiced in English. These films incorporate all of the categories of Italian fashion with blood, violence, and sometimes a little bit of sex.
Indeed, it can be argued that Alfred Hitchcock was the daddy of modern horror films when he made Psycho and The Birds back in the '60s, inspiring imitations and even remakes. But it was Dario Argento who pushed the envelope while acknowledging his debt to Hitch.
Born in Rome, Argento started as a film critic there, then started work with Sergio Leone before directing his own terror tales. My three favorites: Suspiria (1977), Phenomena ('85) and Opera ('87).
My lover at the time, Marty, and I saw Suspiria at the movies on its initial release. Marty pointed out how classic film star Joan Bennett looked drunk throughout -- and only knew when to stop when bumping into the fashionable furniture. Alida Valli's also in this film about a coven of witches running a ballet school. Jessica Harper headlines as our damsel in distress.
Phenomena stars a very young Jennifer Connelly who attends a creepy Swiss boarding school. Her psychic ability to communicate with insects comes in handy. Donald Pleasance co-stars. Very frightening climax.
And Opera is chilling but recommended for strong-at-heart horror fans.
All three are available now on dvd with plenty of extras. Warning: These films may give you nightmares.
Here's something for your Halloween parties and it's just... well, crazy! Dj Zyrko took Bernard Herrmann's theme music for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, along with a famous sound bite and turned it into a Halloween-appropriate dancefloor anthem. Halloween Countdown continues. Only one more week to go!
In his fat suit, prosthetics and make-up (the latter oddly received an Oscar nomination earlier this year), Anthony Hopkins doesn't so much resemble (or even sound like) Alfred Hitchcock as he does Sidney Greenstreet. It's as if his character is in the wrong biopic!
Hitchcock, recently released in a Blu-Ray/DVD + digital-copy combo pack, is the new Mommie Dearest. It elaborately does its subject a vast injustice by uncritically borrowing from a book (Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho) meant, like Mommie Dearest, to exploit, negatively conjecture about and demean.
The target audience for this flick would largely have to be fans of the Hitchcock classic, Psycho. It certainly is of interest as to how this film -- cinematically iconic in so many ways -- came to be made and what a gamble it was for Hitch and his wife to make it happen.
As Alma Hitchcock, Helen Mirren seems much too glam in the part. The great woman behind her man certainly has a basis in fact. But, as The New York Times put it: "[the movie] takes extravagant liberties with the dead." This includes the backstreet affair Alma has with an ambitious screenwriter nicely portrayed by Danny Huston.
Surreal images and interactions of Ed Gein (the serial killer who inspired the 1959 novel, Psycho, written by Robert Bloch) and The Birds are added in this cinematic mix, but seem to boggle the film down more than lift it up. The effort often has the feel of a bad HBO movie. Rich in talent but poorly scripted and directed (Sacha Gervasi).
So iconic are Psycho and its cast that good performances by Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles seem alienated from the well-known women they're portraying. Toni Collette, however, is deliciously officious in the role of Hitch's unsung secretary, Peggy, and James D'Arcy makes an excellent Anthony Perkins.
Ironically, Ed Gein -- the 1950s serial killer -- inspired not only Psycho, but Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs. Starring Anthony Hopkins in his Oscar winning role as cannibal Hannibal Lechter, Silence is an unfortunate reference for Hitchcock as it's one to a better film, a better performance by Hopkins, and far better scripting and directing.
This part of Bernard Herrmann's score is sooo famous and sooo imitated, duplicated & otherwise ripped off since, how could I not post it? Music, largely strings, that sounds like a knife cutting through air. Ingenious! And a new, atonal film language musically.
"Mother.... What is the phrase? She isn't quite herself today," says Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. It's not until you've seen the ending that you're in on the macabre joke.
Perhaps the most famous theme music for a horror film ever recorded, the score for "Psycho" is by the brilliant Bernard Herrmann. (An all-Herrmann-scored film festival started at New York's Film Forum, on Houston St, October 21 and continues through November 3.) Mr Herrmann created the memorable music for a variety of films including Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Jason & the Argonauts, Cape Fear and tv's Twilight Zone.
It wouldn't be Halloween without this famed theme music that has become shorthand for the weird and frightening. So, Happy Halloween, all; and here's hoping that you're yourselves today.
