Capsule Reviews: A Perfect Getaway, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Marnie

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

David Twohy's A Perfect Getaway is a lean, juicy thriller with a twist so good that not even an hour's worth of teasing it saps its effect. "Nothing bad ever happens in Hawaii, right?" says one character during the film's placid opening, though even then his voice betrays doubt, and Twohy's sweeping panoramas of lush forests and beaches communicate remoteness and isolation as much as postcard-ready beauty. Steady long takes let the murmurs of a double murder on a neighboring island sink into the frame visually, casting shadows on its small but dynamic cast of newlyweds and lovers who come to fear for their safety. The actors do their part too, with Steve Zahn's nervously darting eyes suggesting first humorous discomfort, then mounting dread, and Milla Jovovich getting the best opportunity outside one of her husband's films to show off her enigmatic poker face reactions. Perhaps best of all is Timothy Olyphant, almost endearingly arrogant as a "man in full" (as his girlfriend calls him) When the other shoe drops, Twohy's stately, patient direction obviously shifts into a higher gear, but this only shows off other facets of his skill. A chase through the forest is subtly propelled further by comic-panel-like screenwipes that elide over a few steps to give the sequence even more momentum. The final showdown manages to consolidate even the characters' relationships into its tense payoff. (A sidenote: stick with the streamlined theatrical version over the director's cut, which adds most of its extra time to a key flashback, nice and nasty in the original version but overlong in extended form).

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

I don't have anything to add to the long-running critical discussion for Notorious, one of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved pictures, and one of the most thoroughly unpacked in narrative, thematic, and technical terms. But rewatching the film on its new Blu-Ray edition, I was struck by the film's subtlety, a word rarely thrown around when discussing Hitchcock, even by his admirers. Still, there's a delicateness to Notorious not normally seen in the master's work, visible not only in the nuanced performances submitted by the cast but also in the director's camerawork. Even the celebrated key scene, one of the definitive Hitchcock shots, is so playful and light that the tension it generates is even more effective because of its unexpectedness.

The plot itself is, like so many Hitchcock thrillers, at once needlessly convoluted and forcibly direct: Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the disgraced but blameless daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by the American government to help expose her father's cohorts hiding in Brazil. But the nature of her assignment casts a dark shadow over the proceedings from the start, adding shades of moral complexity that threaten to makes the Americans look as perverse and inhuman as the Nazis themselves. Further complicating this moral and political ambiguity is its primary framing around a romantic story, personifying each side prodding Alicia with a single, lustful man, both of whom, in separate but linked ways, nearly kill her with their love.

Capsule Reviews: Platinum Blonde, The Mad Monk, The Lodger

Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931)

Now this is more like it. Capra gets it all together with a rip-snorting good time with newspaper idealism, dialogue you just wanna tap with a spoon and peel, and sentimentality that works instead of hinders. Robert Williams is more flirty than Jean Harlow (hilariously playing the straight role as the starched, bossy heiress), and the gender-reversed Pygmalion structure makes for some great comedy with the Eliza in this case being a properly snappy, streetwise paper hack. Not to mention, his gender makes for more interesting resistance to change, as Capra shows how a man reacts to being the less prominent member of a pair and the one actively being molded. Granted, it also encourages the audience to cheer when he demands chauvinistic things like his rich wife taking his name, but this is still a fascinating inversion at times. Also a delight is Louise Closser Hale as the aristocratic matriarch with her affected voice and constant, faint-headed outrage at scandal that truly no one with anything to do cares about. My distrust of Capra has always been balanced by my true admiration for him when he clicks, and this is Capra firing on all cylinders. Grade: A

The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

A deliriously ludicrous comedy that has more fun with Eastern religion than an American genre film could ever hope to have with Christianity, The Mad Monk opens in a heaven where the head god has to deal with so many deities he doesn't recognize all of them and only gets odder from there. The Mad Monk tasks a prankster god with altering the life(s) paths of three archetypal individuals with only a trick fan for powers, leading to a whimsically ridiculous farce that To directs to a frenzy. Everything in this movie is funny; To even steps on an emotional death scene by having our Lo Han (played by Stephen Chow) burst into the wrong room (and an embarrassing bit of sexual play) as he hunts for his felled mark. With To's manic camera movement and cutting, inventively staged comic fight scenes and a climax that moves from a kaiju battle with a giant demon to a piss-take on pageantry with a heavenly promotion complete with tiara, The Mad Monk is a bewildering, side-hurting riot. Grade: B


The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

This thrilling silent, Hitchcock's fifth feature, while still a bit stiff in the narrative department, shows Hitchcock's rapidly developing talent as a director and his seemingly innate control of the camera and the Expressionistic techniques he observed in Germany. It's somewhat amusing that he still finds a way to be expository in a silent film, using multiple news stories to get across developments in the murder mystery. A 'wrong man' narrative involving murdered blondes, pained romances and the suggestion that a slit throat might always be just around the corner, this almost feels like a preemptive tribute to Hitchcock than an early work. This is a fun showcase for a man whom one can tell even here would deserve the title of "master" thrust upon him, from the use of a glass floor for Hitchcock to stick a camera under to a perfectly framed shot looking straight down a staircase as a man obscured by angle and his black clothes runs down the stairs with his sliding hand as the chief guide to his position. A real treat. Grade: A-

Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)

Today, many attribute the box office failure of Alfred Hitchcock's 1949 opus Under Capricorn to it not being a thriller. That, obviously, is true, but the stiff-upper-lipped love triangle is nevertheless mysterious. Set in colonial Australia, Under Capricorn moves through a world of ex-convicts, where people cut off any attempt to suss out the crimes that sent other people there, lest someone eventually come question them, too. And because the characters must sit in isolation of each other, gestures of concern and caring get interpreted as secretive, self-serving actions, while manipulative ones are dismissed as nurturing.

Though it opens with a series of largely static, talky takes, Under Capricorn rapidly establishes itself as not only a Hitchcock film but one of his most immediately identifiable. The long-take structure he used as an ingenious formal experiment in Rope is here subsumed into a florid melodrama, constantly emphasizes the freedom and restrictions of movement within the tucked-away, Gothic house where most of the action takes place and embodying the stiff mannerisms of the strict, willfully oblivious social codes that dictate behavior among the characters.

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

The theme of duality runs indirectly through many Hitchcock films, with the ironic alignment of two individuals in his wrong-man thrillers and the fetished quasi-double (who is really just one person period) in Vertigo. In films such as Strangers on a Train and Psycho, however, that theme has come more prominently to the fore, examined in moral terms in the former and ludicrously psychosexual in the latter. Shadow of a Doubt, Hitch's 1943 thriller widely considered his first masterpiece, is the director's purest exploration into this minor theme. Featuring matched action and edits, suggestive character unity and clashing moralities, Shadow of a Doubt is one of the director's more immediately guessable mysteries even as it is one of his most surprising pictures.

Hitchcock establishes his darker tone instantly, opening on shots of urban decay in Philadelphia. And when his camera makes its way to a neighborhood where kids innocently play ball in the streets, the camera suddenly moves in a series of dissolves and low-angle Dutch shots upward into the no. 13 building nearby, finally moving inside an apartment where Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten), going by an alias, lies on his bed with liquor and money casually placed on the bed table. Cotten looks like a vampire, an image strengthened when the landlady arrives and closes his blinds, the darkness cause the man to rise with a jolt. The woman acts like a chiding mother, lovingly cleaning up the place and speaking to him sweetly without picking up on the harshness of his answering tone or properly paying attention to the implications of his littered alcohol and cash. She notes that two men came by looking for him earlier, and when she leaves, Charlie downs his last bit of whiskey and flees. Hitchcock was the master of paranoia, and the speed with which he undermines any expectation gives Shadow an edge that clearly announces the second stage of his career.

The Wrong Man

Alfred Hitchcock always was a cruel and calculating director. Even his most affecting pictures --Vertigo, Notorious -- have the disturbing undercurrent of sneering manipulation and condescension that served as identifiable a trademark of the director's work as his innovative camera work and the (possibly deliberate) lack of believability of effects. But The Wrong Man is cynical even by his standards, which would put it in the running of the most downbeat American film ever made. Perhaps that is because, as Hitchcock himself tells us at the start, walking in a barely lit studio stage in total silhouette -- a precursor to the film's aesthetic structure -- "This is a true story, every word of it. And yet it contains elements that are stranger than any of the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers that I've made before."

Now, that's not entirely true (Rope was based on the story of Leopold and Loeb), but the clear implication of Hitchcock's statement, at least in retrospect of the film's events, is that real life is far more malicious and abusive than he could ever be. Just compare it to Rope: Rope existed to fuel Hitchcock's aesthetic ambitions. Not just the director's first film in Technicolor, Rope is primarily remembered today for its long-take structure, the division of a 80-minute feature into just 10 cuts. Hitch approaches The Wrong Man from the opposite direction: in black-and-white, this case of mistaken identity -- a common theme, of course, in the director's oeuvre -- with such distance and workmanlike staging that one might reasonably suspect, at first, that he'd been fired during production and replaced by a hired gun.

One can see the difference between The Wrong Man and Hitchcock's usual whirlwind thrillers from the beginning, as the opening credits play over the banal image of a ritzy club, an unmoving shot of patrons dining on overpriced, under-portioned food and sipping on outrageously expensive drinks. Once the credits end, the camera moves to show the house band playing the light lounge music that fills this place. The bass player of this soul-crushing band, the kind of outfit that exists only as high-class elevator music, is Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a.k.a. Manny. Hitchcock does not push in on Manny as he packs up his bass and leaves, nor when he returns home to find his wife unable to sleep. Only after we hear of her impacted wisdom teeth and the need for Manny to take out a loan on her insurance policy to cover surgery does Hitchcock significantly move the camera within a shot, zooming in on the lovebirds as they set aside their money issues and recount how lucky they are to have each other.

It's one of the few changing shots in the entire movie, especially of the first act, which proceeds at a deliberately leaden pace. Hardly anything of interest happens as Manny breaks up a minor quibble between his two young sons, promises his mother that he'll visit his sick father and engages in other quotidian activities. Hitchcock ingeniously withholds the plot until just before Manny himself figures out what's about to happen to him: he heads to the insurance office to check his wife's policy and see how much they can borrow, and Hitchcock cuts to a closeup of the teller spotting Manny and reacting with inaudible terror.

Suddenly, the movie shifts gears, as the teller urgently but calmly makes her way to her co-workers and begins whispering that Manny looks like "that man" who robbed them twice. Hitchcock's previous emotional and spatial distance from Manny allows him to suddenly play up the suspense the teller feels when Manny reaches into his coat pocket and produces...the sheet of paper containing his wife's insurance policy. Some of the other workers come close to screaming, and one briefly faints, but the teller manages to keep her cool long enough to give Manny the price he came for and send him on his way.

The speed continues to firmly escalate from here, as authorities apprehend Manny and tell him that he fits a description, though they save the full accusation for later. To test the validity of the office workers' claims, the detectives take Manny to various stores also held up by the robber and have him pace back and forth and return to the car while the owners talk with the cops. Manny doesn't understand what's going on, he wants to call his wife just to let her know that he'll be late, but the detectives keep taking him around town. At the precinct, they ask him to write down a copy of a note the robber passed to the insurance teller during his heist, and the notes contain a rough similarity. So, the detective tells Manny and lets him write another one, and in his nervousness he misspells a word. The same word, in fact, that the robber misspelled. Oh, Manny.

Now, Hitch's pacing makes sense. The Wrong Man started out so slowly, yet Manny finds himself all but convicted with alarming speed. "The innocent have nothing to fear," as more than one cop assures Manny, but that is ludicrous. What could be more terrifying than facing a prison sentence for a crime you didn't commit? (Note that, today, cops often use a suspect's anxiety to exonerate him; it's the guilty who resign themselves to their capture.) Hitchcock uses Manny's plight, and the deep, sudden impact the world makes upon him when it collapses onto his shoulders, to show how insane the system is. A trial almost seems an afterthought when the police chief attempts to strongarm Manny into confessing based on the evidence that look so damning on paper -- handwriting samples, multiple witnesses -- yet the audience can clearly see how such "proof" isn't so solid. The handwriting "gotcha" is outrageous in its uselessness, and the witnesses who most vociferously claim that Manny is the robber are so terrified of him that they can barely look at him; clearly, they can only see the rough details in the same panic that allows them to emphatically assure authorities that they've got the right man.

That's what makes the casting of Peter Fonda so perfect. Who better to play a mistaken man than the most innately American of actors; he could be any one of us, or at least us as we like to see ourselves. That makes him both inspiring and fearsome, a dual nature enhanced by Fonda's own lumbering, awkward frame, which conveys both vulnerability and intimidation. A decade before Sergio Leone completely turned Fonda's All-American persona against himself (and the country he represented) in Once Upon a Time in the West, Hitchcock used the actor for a less openly confrontational but more pernicious subversion of Fonda's charm.

Hitchcock was, of course, a Brit, which makes the hint of class warfare given to the character seem all the more intentional. Fonda's Manny, a lower middle class schlub who receives meager payments to perform for the gaudy rich in town, draws immediate suspicion because of his occupation. The system values money so much that even the cops, a notoriously underpaid group, see Manny's occupation as sufficient motive for becoming a robber. The poor have been raised with such self-resentment for their social status that they look down upon those on the same rung of the ladder. Seeking to defend himself, Manny must turn to Frank O'Connor, an attorney who believes in his client but sheepishly admits that he does not usually handle criminal cases and will likely be no match for a trained criminal prosecutor; but where else can Manny turn?The stress of the investigation appears to jog Rose so violently that she suddenly sees with terrifying clarity just how infallibly the odds are stacked against them. This revelation sends Rose into a deep depression, and soon she believes that everything happening to Manny is just a way for the powers that be to get to her, and so she not only feels guilty for "bringing" this pressure on Manny but fears for her life as well.

However, compared to the Expressionistic portraits Hitch drew of many of his psychologically addled characters, Rose's madness never progresses outside her desperate eyes, as anything bigger would be a release. That's the last thing the director wants to give us; even Bernard Herrmann, that vibrant and thrilling composer so perfectly suited for Hitchcock's merciless roller coaster rides, turns in a subdued score for The Wrong Man. The film is filled with images of bars, separating the insurance teller from the clients, the endless partitions in the jail where Manny could wind up for many years, bars that emphasize how hollow the place is even as it makes prison into a cramped nightmare. Nearly every scene features so much use of shadow that one begins to wonder if the film was originally in color until the unremitting blackness in each scene drew all the other colors into its consuming maw. Only in a few choice moments -- a spiraling camera movement as Manny swoons in his jail cell from the fear, a pair of match cuts that gives the illusion that the camera zoomed in through the cell door's peephole and back out again -- does the director use any of the camera trickery for which he is renowned. But the film's most memorable shot simply involves a perfectly photographed moment, when an impassioned Rose hits Manny and cracks a mirror. Hitch then cuts to an image of Manny's face, broken along the line of the cracked looking glass as if splitting the innocent man from the guilty look-alike while overlapping the two to make them one person. Bergman would take this idea to its zenith with Persona, but this much simpler take is no less jarring and contemplative. This bleakness, a sense of evil that seeps into the frame even without the director's usual bag of emotional sucker-punches, imparts not necessarily the world as it truly is -- even the hardest cynic would have difficulty accepting this vision as truth -- but Hitchcock's view of it. By coldly, flatly showing us what he felt, he could use his next film, Vertigo, to visualize how he felt it.

This despair, so much more troubling when presented sans sleight of hand, builds to one of the most cynical endings in cinematic history. That the police capture the true robber and acquit Manny matters little, as Hitch places the final scene in the sanitarium where Rose is being treated. At last, Manny has some good news to tell his wife, but she's too far gone, registering her husband's acquittal with catatonic flatness. Of course, Hitchcock never gave Manny the triumphant day in court to prove his innocence: the bassist only gets off when a juror mocks the proceedings and a detective comes by to tell Manny that they caught the real perpetrator. Rose didn't see this happen, but she stresses how what would have been a climactic victory is but a small reversal in the pain heaped upon the family. It is a scathing, brutal denouement, made somehow worse by the textual epilogue that explains Rose's eventual recovery and the family's rebuilding. As with the acquittal, such a happy occurrence is, for Hitchcock at least, but a small reprieve, the eye of the storm of life. Perhaps that's why The Wrong Man remains relatively unseen among the mainstream then and now: most of Hitch's films were just as bleak, but, in retrospect, maybe his inability to dance around it with his cinematic lies was his way of doing us a favor.

Vertigo

It is perhaps fitting that Alfred Hitchcock, a director who avoided genuine psychological probing in his films* -- though "genuine" is not a word one can easily use with Hitch regarding his storytelling methods -- made with his most anti-Freudian feature a film that revealed the most about himself. Vertigo is a story of obsession -- a point made further visible by Brian De Palma loosely reworking it and helpfully titling his work Obsession. Its lead character suffers from a crippling phobia, itself an obsessive fear, and he finds himself consumed in a disturbing fixation on, naturally, a woman. And, as Scottie (James Stewart) asphyxiates in a paranoid, depressive miasma, the obsessions of his cruel overlord bleed into the film via this proxy.

Unlike Hitchcock's other features, Vertigo does not seek to grip its audience by the throat, or at least not in the same way as the others. Like Notorious, the director's most elegant (and yet most merciless and cold) picture, Vertigo concerns itself not with the shocking reveal but in the way that a character (or characters) places his or head in a noose and tightens the rope. The twist of Vertigo is one of the more devilishly clever in the movies, yet Hitchcock plays his cards with a good third left to spare. The American Film Institute listed Vertigo as the greatest mystery film ever made, which is but one example of the many glaring proofs of the AFI's cluelessness: Hitchcock's greatest work is not about the mystery of a woman's shocking death but of how that death affects the man who loved her.

Hired by an old acquaintance to trail his potentially possessed wife, Scottie first meets Madeleine (Kim Novak) without meeting her at all. He trails her as she walks about as if in a trance, seemingly confirming her husband Gavin's (Tom Helmore) fears. Yet her disconcerting aloofness is as much an effect of the physical distance Scottie keeps from the woman and the emotional separation between her and the camera. Hitchcock uses this distance to effectively place Novak on a pedestal: with her platinum blond locks and inhumanly stiff carriage, she becomes the definitive depiction of the Hitchcockian ice queen, as well as a caricature of one. In the soft lighting of the outdoor scenes, Madeleine looks like an angel, but the director infuses this ethereal quality with an ephemeral one, as if she could fade at any second and we'd barely notice. Before she even has the chance to speak some lines, we've seen Madeleine to be both alluring and repellent, captivating in the unavailability that her removal from the protagonist and audience suggests and off-putting for the same reason.

Scottie falls for this vision of her -- he certainly cannot be said to be genuinely in love with the actual person -- and, when he saves Madeleine from an attempted suicide by the Golden Gate Bridge, the moment feels triumphant not solely because Scottie saves her life but because it marks their first true interaction. No wonder, then, that the moment is as much a physical consummation as any love act, a notion stressed by the next scene, which shows Madeleine waking up nude in Scottie's bed, as he had to remove the unconscious woman's damp, cold clothes. The two grow close, until Madeleine's increasing worry over her mental instability drive her to climb to the top of a bell tower of a local mission to commit suicide. Scottie, still rendered powerless by his acrophobia, can only collapse helplessly as he hears a scream and peers out a window to see a body strike a roof.

The incident only compounds Scottie's issues, sending him into a tailspin of depression and sorrow. Just as he watched one of his peers die at the start of the film as he hung from an eave, unable to help, he could not compel himself up the tower's stairs. An attorney pressures Scottie's guilt, overemphasizing the detective's "weakness" until he practically accuses the wracked man of impotence. Scottie is so torn up over the experience that, when he spots a woman who looks remarkably like Madeleine, we automatically wonder if he isn't hallucinating. Following the woman to her apartment, Scottie barges up to her room to awkwardly ask Judy (also Novak) on a date. Initially taken aback by this desperate man, Judy's hostility fades into a look of pity, and she agrees.

Here, Hitch flips the tables on us. Scottie leaves to return in an hour to take Judy to dinner, but the camera stays with Judy, who takes out some stationery to write Scottie a letter. In it, she reveals that she actually is Madeleine, or the Madeleine that Scottie met. Gavin hired her to pose as Madeleine so he could kill his actual wife, banking on Scottie bearing witness to her "suicide," knowing that the ex-detective could not drag himself to the top of the tower to stop him.

It is needlessly convoluted, yet by placing the reveal with a final act still to come, Hitchcock avoids entangling the ending with a complicated twist. He also shifts the film's focus: the first two acts contained the usual mysterious whisperings one expects from a thriller -- the odd, alienating placement of Novak in the frame, Madeleine running into a hotel, where the clerk insists that no woman came inside. Yet, with the mystery solved, Hitchcock turns to chart Scottie in his relationship with Judy, which he attempts to model after the one he never had with Madeleine. The utter opposite of a mystery, Vertigo becomes an exercise in dramatic irony, as the audience can only sit and watch a man destroy himself in his blindness.

Thus, obsession floods the film, though it had seeped in at the edges of the frame elsewhere. Take Scottie's best friend, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), an artist who serves at first to stand on the line between "gay bohemian San Fransisco" and the more button-down people like Scottie but becomes something more. Her love for Scottie is blatant, and we see her increasingly desperate attempts to win over her friend as she spots his growing love for Madeleine. She even goes so far as to paint herself in the fashion of the Carlotta Valdes portrait that informs Madeleine's style, but she overplays her hand and drives him away for it. Even Madeleine/Judy has a bit of a fixation on Scottie; she acquiesces to her lover's insane demands as he fashions Judy back into Madeleine, all because she loves him, and if he won't love her for her, then she'll change.

But they cannot compare to Scottie. With numerous retrospectives now commemorating David Lynch's bizzaro network series Twin Peaks -- itself filled with Vertigo references -- it's incredibly easy to see the parallels between Stewart's character and Leland Palmer. Both are tortured characters so maddened by grief that one cannot immediately discern whether their actions are meant to inspire pity or laughter. Scottie takes Judy to boutiques to buy her the dresses that "Madeleine" wore, and the tailors are so impressed that "the gentleman certainly knows what he wants" that they do not note the look of agony on Judy's face. She finally agrees to wear the dress for Scottie, who does not even acknowledge the act because he's thinking about how she needs to dye her hair. "Sympathy" isn't the right word to describe Hitchcock's treatment of Scottie -- it's too filled with irony for that -- but Vertigo is one of the director's few films for which the term might conceivably filter through the audience's minds.

Naturally, Hitch does most of the emotions through the camera so as to transfer them more easily onto the audience. Those distanced shots of Madeleine establish the entire character without a line of dialogue, so that when she finally speaks after her plunge into the Bay, it is remarkable not that she has been in the film so long without exchanging words with Scottie but that she is already tangible and identifiable by that moment. The dolly zooms are justly famous, capturing the nausea and panic of the vertigo and foisting Scottie's disoriented paralysis onto us. There are, of course, the usual signs of the director's mischievous side, such as the moment where Scottie and Madeleine share their first kiss, standing on a craggy beach as a wave crashes into a rock just as their lips touch, spraying into the air in a white foam that only an idiot couldn't read sexually.

The way that Hitchcock molds and refashions Novak allows him to carry his sexual hangup to its apex, starting with his distanced, cautious approach at the start that gives way to his stand-in heartlessly crafting a human being into an object to be creepily worshipped. At times, the director appears to be almost apologetic for his lusts; like Fellini, Hitchcock was faithfully married -- to his assistant director and editor Alma Reville, who deserves more credit for her contributions to her husband's films -- but he could not contain his sexual fantasies on-screen. Through his male protagonists, Hitchcock lived out his fetishes, and with Scottie he presents a character hobbled by his idée fixe that he cannot see the woman (either one) who loves him dearly and just wants him to feel the same way. More than any of his other features, Vertigo has the power to break your heart, one of the more devastating moments occurring when Judy breaks down and asks Scottie, "Couldn't you like me, just me the way I am?"

Yet Vertigo is more than simply an expulsion of the director's lasciviousness, just as 8½ did more than detail Fellini's hangups. As Chris Marker observed, it is a film about memory and subjectivity. When Scottie follows Madeleine into the gallery where the painting of Carlotta Valdes hangs, Hitchcock cuts between POV eyeline matches of Scottie linking the hairstyle of Carlotta and the identical one Madeleine sports, or the bouquets of flowers that lie beside them both. With Gavin and Judy selling Scottie on the idea of "Madeleine" being possessed by the painting's subject, the dead woman becomes identified with Madeleine, so that when Midge paints herself in Carlotta's place, it signifies her attempt to insert herself into Scottie's narrow perception via his vision of Madeleine and what forms her. Hitchcock litters the film with parallels, between such images, as well as larger elements such as Scottie's bouts of vertigo in crucial moments, two of which play out as flip sides of the same event. With these parallels, Hitchcock gives his characters second chances to fix their mistakes, under the belief that they can rewrite their histories by recreating them and altering the outcome. That's what so unsettles Madeleine about the giant redwood tree that stands and the hewed one that displays important dates through its rings: everything else in Vertigo can be manipulated, but these trees are constant, reminders of a history that cannot be undone or wished away.

And so, Vertigo ends with Scottie, who has deduced the truth about Judy, forcing her to the top of the mission's bell tower in his final attempt to confront his failure and to rewrite his memory. His grief now replaced with pain and feelings of betrayal over learning of Gavin's scheme, Scottie barely pauses to consider his phobia. "Did he train you?" spits the poor man, a scream of rage choked by disbelief, "Did he rehearse you?" His anger propels him to the top of the tower, where Judy offers one last plea, breaking through the crack in Scottie's obsessive feelings for her and finally making him realize what she'd sacrificed for him. Just as it appears as if the two will change their history after all, the shadowed shape of an approaching nun frightens Judy into falling to her death. After spending most of the film confined in rooms, Scottie runs to the edge of the window and looks down to see his love. After Scottie's first accident, Midge made an off-hand comment that the doctor told her that only another shock could jolt Scottie out of his acrophobia, and here he stands at the end, having overcome his fear. As if he could not stand to make a film that flirted so dangerously with emotion, Hitchcock saves this most heartless irony for last, a bitter, tragic iteration of the closing epiphany of A Clockwork Orange: "I was cured, alright."




*Even that infamously turgid scene at the end of Psycho is offset by its chilling final shot, one last gut punch for the audience to undermine the clinical dryness of its preceding sequence.

Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock is the most important, innovative director of all time and only select geniuses like Billy Wilder can make films as lastingly fresh as his. I got a chance to see one of his great masterpieces (he has at least 4 or 5) on the silver screen, and I jumped at the chance. After watching Psycho like one is supposed to view a film, I have an all-new appreciation for arguably his most well known work.

Coming off the heels of the epic spy thriller North by Northwest, Hitchcock gave his film crew a break and brought aboard the people who shot his TV show, secured a minor budget, and set about making a taut piece of shock horror to balance out his usual thrillers. Based in part on the story of the infamous killer Ed Gein, Psycho must have messed with the heads of audiences back when it premiered. It's overt sexual overtones, both between Marion and Sam and Norman's obsession with Marion, challenged even Hitchcock's envelope-pushing antics, while the legendary shower scene is more graphic than anything else you'll see from that time period.

Psycho takes Hitchcock's trademark style of audience manipulation and pushes it to the limit, weaving so many twists and turns that you could never anticipate where the story is leading- indeed, even after multiple viewings it loses none of its wonder- yet it is never loses track of its own logic, never folds in on itself to the point of confusion. It starts off as a simple theft. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a secretary at a real estate agency, receives $40,000 to put in a safety deposit box from an ostentatious client. Seeing a way to get her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin) out of debt and free from crippling alimony payments, Marion promptly takes the money and runs, stopping only when rain prevents her from driving. She pulls into a rundown motel run by a kindly but nervous man named Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and checks in under a fake name.

Norman makes sandwiches for Marion, and as they converse over dinner it becomes increasingly obvious that we are no longer watching a film about theft or money. Marion, having heard Norman's row with his mother, gently suggests putting her in a home or a mental hospital so he could sell this profitless motel and move away. He at first angrily refuses this suggestion, retreating into the darkness of his mind as his own face sinks into shadows. Then he softens, and is even touched by Marion's kindness, which in turn cause Marion to rethink her actions and return the money. Then Hitchcock brings it back to darkness when Marion forgets her alias and uses her real name and mentions she's going "back to Phoenix"after saying she was from Los Angeles. Bates catches the slip, but the brief flash across his face of realization and his double-checking of the register after she leaves seals her fate. He found a woman who defied his mother's position that all women are evil, and she turned out to be a liar like "all the rest."

In what may be the ultimate film surprise, more than any film-ending twist or macguffin, is that Hitchcock murders his starlet and turns Norman into the protagonist. Consider when he must dispose of Marion's body by pushing her car (with her body in it) into a nearby tar pit. After it sinks halfway, the car suddenly stops, suspended in plain sight. The audience tenses with Norman, until whatever bubble of air was keeping the car afloat bursts and finally sinks, and we feel a certain relief with Norman. When a private detective looking for Marion and, later, Sam and Marion's sister arrive to try to sort out what happened, the tension comes not from these people trying to figure it out while under the watch of Norman and his mother, but from Norman trying to keep it all from unraveling. When the finale comes and the truth of Norman's mother is revealed, he is almost pitiable.

If the movie has a weak spot, it is in the psychiatrist's overlong speechat the end where he explains Norman's insanity. It starts off chilling and shocking, then keeps going until it's repetitive, anti-climactic, and almost unintentionally funny. Hitchcoc pulls it out of a tailspin when he cuts to Norman's closeup and the inner monologue of his "mother half," but think how much more effective it would have been if Hitch had cut to him right after "Norman Bates no longer exists. He only half-existed to begin with."

The most exciting thing about the film is how inept everyone is. Consider how jumpy Marion is when a cop finds her sleeping in her car. How skittish Norman is when people come snooping around looking for her. How Sam lacks any subtlety at all when he tries to sneak some information out of Bates. No one picks up a gun and magically knows how to use it, and Norman does not suddenly become a master criminal after disposing of Marion. Hitchcock's previous film, North By Northwest, created suspense by pitting a normal man against professionals, but here the borderline incompetence of nearly everyone on screen lets the audience identify with these characters, making the twists all the more shocking.

Hitchcock was never an actor's director; hell, he often didn't even place much value in the scripts. But Anthony Perkins is the great exception; sure, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, James Stewart, and the like were excellent, but none of them put in a performance that is remembered for the sheer acting of it. Everyone knows Rear Window and Vertigo, but not everyone would know the lead character's names. Mention the name Norman Bates, and everyone in the room is going to know exactly what you're talking about. Perkins' performance is quite possibly the most identifiable aspect of Hitchcock's entire canon; Psycho is at least his third best film, but 9 out of ten times you say his name people will start hacking the air with a fist and making screeching violin noises. And while we're on the subject of the soundtrack, Bernard Hermann's score must surely rank as one of the all-time greats, and it's the first score that is inseparable from the film, synonymous with its very name. Such an event wouldn't happen again until Ennio Morricone's immortal score for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (and, later, Jaws).

Psycho is the first of the slasher flicks, and it is still the best. It flies in the face of the current torture-porn mentality, which seems to believe that the more blood thrown against the screen the scarier the film. But consider how tense Hitchcock makes it with merely a splash of blood, in black and white no less. By the film's end it's such a white-knuckler that the momentum-killing denouement is almost forgivable because it flattens the heart rate. Most directors would kill to make a film this good, and it's not even his best.