Daily Archives: Friday, July 3, 2015

  • The Birds

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1963)

    David Thomson has described The Birds as Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘last unflawed film’.  It’s more like the first outing of the emperor’s new clothes, setting the trend which continued for the rest of Hitchcock’s post-Psycho career.  Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the screenplay by Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) takes an age to lay the ground for a competitive romance between Melanie Daniels, whose father owns a newspaper and who keeps getting a bad press in the social columns of rival publications, and a young San Francisco lawyer called Mitch Brenner.  Mitch goes home for weekends to the family home in Bodega Bay, seventy miles up the coast.  Once Melanie arrives there, the birds turn nasty and terrorise the Bodega Bay population over and over again, although panic takes some time to spread because the locals are remarkably uncommunicative about the attacks.  Gulls set about children at a birthday party but there’s no suggestion that any of the kids bothers to mention the incident to their parents afterwards – that evening and after another attack at their home, the Brenners, who hosted the party, struggle to convince a policeman that the birds are behaving unusually.  When, in one of the film’s strongest sequences, a farmer is found dead the following morning with his eyes pecked out, the police scepticism continues; so does the reticence of terrified children who are attacked leaving school later the same day.

    There’s no denying that The Birds includes features bizarre enough to be intriguing, for a while anyway.   The Brenner family comprises Mitch (Rod Taylor), apparently in his early thirties, his eleven-year-old sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) and their widowed mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy).  Rod Taylor was thirty-two when the film was made and Jessica Tandy fifty-three but, even though Tandy is greyed up, Lydia and Mitch seem much closer in age than Mitch and Cathy (Veronica Cartwright was thirteen at the time).   Lydia hasn’t got over her husband’s death four years previously and makes clear at one point that she thinks Mitch will never be the man his father was.  This seems debatable at least:  Mitch is professionally successful, shows nerve, resource and stamina when the birds attack, and, judging from his father’s portrait on the wall, is also much better-looking than the old man.  And Lydia is very possessive of him.  There’s a sexual undercurrent in their relationship – thanks to a combination of Taylor’s intelligent underplaying and Tandy’s gimlet-eyed intensity.   This makes sense within the scheme of the story but it’s more noticeable because of the lack of any connection between Mitch and Melanie, although I guess there are admirers of the film who will find something brilliant in that vacancy.

    Although she’d had small parts in a few films before, Tippi Hedren was a successful model when Hitchcock spotted her in the early 1960s and she’s more mannequin than actress, both in the way she looks and in the way Hitchcock uses her.  She’s a toneless, stilted performer, with none of the warmth that her daughter Melanie Griffith brings to the screen.   (Griffith wasn’t named after her mother’s famous character in The Birds – she was born in 1957.)  Hedren’s relationship with the director is the only relationship she has in The Birds with any life to it.   She gives nothing to the other actors but she evidently means something to Hitchcock.  When we saw The Lodger last month, the man introducing it noted as worrying the connection between Hitchcock’s predilection for cool blondes and the fact that the serial killer in The Lodger murders fair-haired girls.   This didn’t bother me watching the film or thinking about it afterwards but the treatment of Tippi Hedren in The Birds is something else.  Each time her perfectly coiffured blonde helmet is messed up by the birds it retains its composure a few screen moments later.  The pale green suit which Melanie wears throughout her time in Bodega Bay is crease- as well as bird-resistant.  (She really is a stranger in town:  when she first arrives she’s also wearing a fur coat although the locals are mostly dressed for summer).  Melanie occasionally loses her self-possession but she never loses possession of her handbag.  Whatever she’s required to do – moor a boat, climb a hill, sprint down the street – her high heels never get in the way of doing it.     Hitchcock seems to adore her but also to want to trash her.

    The first act of avian violence is by a single gull who divebombs Melanie as she rows back across the bay from the Brenners’ place, after leaving two caged lovebirds there (the birthday present that Mitch wanted to buy his kid sister when he and Melanie first ran into each other in San Francisco).   She puts a finger to her head and sees the blood on it.  The wound looks nasty – the blood runs down her temple then stops abruptly: it’s too soon for her perfect outfit to be sullied.  An hour or so of screen time later, Melanie ventures alone into an upstairs room at the Brenners’ and the birds mount a mass attack – this time her hairdo and twopiece take a real hammering.  Hitchcock has decided that Melanie has been immaculate long enough; what’s more, he appears to think that keeping her intact for most of the film is a good reason for giving this climactic assault everything he’s got.  Although Tippi Hedren is irritatingly smug at the start of The Birds – enough for you to feel she deserves to be taught a lesson – I felt sorry for her by the end.  The combination of Hitchcock’s treatment and her limitations as an actress makes her ridiculous.  Melanie is severely traumatised by the birds’ last attack and Hedren acting severely traumatised has to be seen to be disbelieved.  The wounds on Melanie’s face are symmetrically arranged.  Lydia wraps a bandage round the top of her head and Melanie’s fringe flops over it.  I think we’re meant to think that Lydia is genuinely sympathetic by now but it’s almost as if her deep-seated resentment of the woman who might take her son away impels Lydia to make Melanie, in her hour of need, look daft.

    The birds’ behaviour in the Du Maurier story is (I understand) unexplained and it’s not difficult to find references online to Hitchcock’s repeating this mystery.  It’s true there’s no comical Psycho-style final explanation of what’s been going on but the birds’ attacks start immediately after Melanie has deposited the lovebirds.  Although the film’s final shot is ambiguous (are the birds that watch Melanie, Mitch, Lydia and Cathy drive away from Bodega Bay  towards San Francisco sated or just waiting to do something even worse?), there’s some sense of escape for the principals, who are taking the lovebirds away with them.  The implication is that Melanie’s light-hearted, flirty sparring with Mitch – the lovebirds are a piece of sexual oneupmanship on her part – is a fatal error.  She doesn’t know what she’s letting herself in for.  This sophisticated socialite hasn’t a clue about the dark depths and power of desire and jealousy – particularly, one assumes, female desire and jealousy.   (Not only is Lydia pathologically possessive of Mitch; the local schoolteacher Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) also carries a torch for him.)  Hitchcock taps into the ambivalent feelings that perhaps most people have about birds – their look and sound may be delightful in the open air but are frightening in the confined spaces where they don’t belong.  He also exploits how differently we feel about birds in a cage and birds elsewhere indoors.  One of the scary things about a bird trapped inside a house is that the creature itself is scared; the flapping of its wings expresses its own fear as it increases ours.  When a swarm of sparrows comes down the chimney at the Brenner home, the moment is frightening because the birds seem impelled by a force outside themselves but the birds in The Birds which attack people by apparent malice aforethought are less and less terrifying.  This is partly because the special effects by Ub Iwerks become familiar and partly because Hitchcock isn’t able to sustain the inventiveness of the early attacks.  By the time the film was into the home straight the birds were having the same effect on me that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park eventually had.  I wanted them to go away not because they were alarming but because they’d become boring.

    The script is so full of holes that you have to give it the benefit of the doubt for some time.   Is the Bodega Bay inhabitants’ reluctance to transmit information about the birds’ attacks meant to say something about an innate human tendency to refuse to accept terrifying truths?  Is it because Melanie is in denial of the situation that she continues to drive around the place with the roof of her car off?   Eventually you have to conclude that Evan Hunter’s writing is just slapdash and that Hitchcock, who’s evidently interested only in working towards highlights, couldn’t care less about that.  Melanie says to Mitch, as they leave a scene of fiery carnage outside a diner, that they can now go and collect Cathy from Annie’s home (the teacher lives on the school premises).  You think this is odd because the last you saw of Cathy she was running away from the school, trying to help one of her friends get from there back home.  When Melanie and Mitch arrive at the school they find Annie’s dead body and see a terrified Cathy inside.  They comfort her and she blurts out an explanation of how she came back to Annie’s even though Melanie and Mitch were already expecting her to find her there.  In retrospect, the title sequence for The Birds is revealing and makes for an interesting comparison with Psycho.  In the earlier film (The Birds’ immediate predecessor in Hitchcock’s filmography), the design and editing of the titles and Bernard Herrmann’s score are disturbing and disorienting but they in no way tell you what’s in store.  Here there’s a lot of birds in silhouette on the screen and a welter of nasty shrieking on the soundtrack.

    23 August 2012

  • The Virgin Spring

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jungfrukällan

    Ingmar Bergman  (1960)

    After it was over I went straight from NFT2 to the BFI bookshop and bought the DVD:  there was too much to take in on a single viewing.  It’s taken me months to do even this note, in which I know I can’t ‘say just what I mean’.  Here is what Ingmar Bergman, several years later, had to say about the film:

    ‘Now I want to make it quite plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration.  It’s touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa. …  I think its motivations are all bogus.  … I admit it contains a couple of passages with immense acceleration and vitality, and it has some sort of cinematic appeal.  The idea of making something out of the old folk song ‘Herr Töres döttrar i Vänge’ was a sound one.  But then the jiggery-pokery began – the spiritual jiggery-pokery.  …  I wanted to make a blackly brutal medieval ballad in the simple form of a folk song.  But while talking it all over with the authoress, Ulla Isaksson, I began psychologizing.  That was the first mistake, the introduction of a therapeutic idea:  that the building of their church would heal these people.  Obviously it was therapeutic; but artistically it was utterly uninteresting.  And then, the introduction of a totally unanalyzed idea of God.  The mixture of the real active depiction of violence, which has a certain artistic potency, with all the other shady stuff – today I find it all dreadfully triste.  … But when I’d finished making The Virgin Spring I thought I’d made one of my best films. …’

    It’s hard to argue with Bergman – to the extent that only he can say whether the film he made fulfilled his ambitions for it.   But I think he was right first time.  His reasons for being so hard on himself in judging The Virgin Spring could include how long he’d known and been taken with the folk song on which the story is based, which he came across in his student days.  If an artist feels impelled to realise a personally important experience (including the experience of someone’s else work), in order to make his audience feel what the original made him feel, the eventual results can easily disappoint him, emotionally and intellectually, especially if the project has been incubating for a long time.   If the adaptation of the source material reshapes it so that the compulsive grip of the original is lost, a sense of failure is inevitable.  In 1961, Bergman had written his own screenplays for a decade or more, apart from the few pieces that he directed for Swedish television in the 1950s.  The only exception in his work for cinema was Brink of Life (1958), written by Ulla Isaksson.  The success of that film seems to have inspired this second collaboration with Isaksson yet Bergman, so accustomed to writing his scripts, must have felt less in charge than usual – and this was a screenplay he’d wanted to create for some time.  Besides, Isaksson was a practising Christian. There are major differences too between the events in the film and the story told in the ballad.   In the latter, Herr Töre’s three daughters are all slain by herdsmen.  In the film, Töre’s biological daughter, the beautiful, Christian, virginal Karin, is raped and murdered on her journey taking candles to a church; her pregnant foster sister Ingeri witnesses the event and returns home safely and eventually remorsefully.

    The Virgin Spring shares many of the qualities of The Seventh Seal.  The images make the story exemplary and mythic – yet the characters, although they have archetypal substance, are also humanly convincing, and the means by which Bergman and his actors animate and incarnate their spiritual conditions and struggles are extraordinary.  Bergman recreates a medieval world in which religious belief is natural and the apprehension of good and evil very real to the people we’re watching – yet they still can’t make sense of what happens.  Töre himself kills the herdsmen who raped and murdered Karin.  When he and his wife, with the help of Ingeri, discover Karin’s body in the forest, Töre addresses God:  ‘You see this.  You allow this.  I don’t understand.  Yet I ask forgiveness … ‘.  He resolves, to atone for what he’s done (but also, you feel, to try to impose a sense of moral order on the place), to build a church on the site of his daughter’s murder.  As he and his wife lift Karin’s head, a spring begins to flow and they wash the dirt from Karin’s face with water from the spring (in which Ingeri also washes herself).  This is no doubt the culmination of the ‘spiritual jiggery-pokery’ that troubled Bergman.  His concerns would be justified if the spontaneous spring provided a straightforward, religiously hopeful ending – but it actually deepens the incomprehensibility of what’s gone before.   Töre’s killing of the three herdsmen – although you sympathise strongly with his desire for vengeance – is almost as troubling as Karin’s death.  Not only is one the trio a young boy; one of the men, initially bestial, seems to develop a conscience.  (The effect of his doing so is alchemical, uncanny.)

    Perhaps it’s easier to believe in the reality of this medieval world when you’re hearing voices in a language you don’t understand.  If the actors were speaking English, it would increase the risk of their readings sounding ‘modern’.  Yet even subtitles offer some scope for jarring anachronism and there isn’t any.  None of this could, in any case, undermine the vivid physical reality that Bergman creates through his observation of the routines of Töre‘s household, the sight of them eating and drinking, the sound of their snoring.  The visual scheme of the film, photographed by Sven Nykvist, is as powerful as it’s simple:  the story begins on a golden morning, moves to a black night and ends in the light of the following day.  We watch Töre and his wife dress at the start of the first day and disrobe at its end and reflect on what’s happened in the interim, and that Karin won’t be taking off the clothes we saw her put on before she set out for the church.  (This is in our minds even before the terrible moment when the herdsmen, who’ve sought refuge in Töre’s house unaware that it was Karin’s home, offer to sell their victim’s clothes to her mother.)   As she goes through the wood, Karin crosses a bridge, which takes her life from light into darkness.  The creatures in the forest – a raven, a toad, the bridge-keeper whom Ingeri encounters and flees from – are fundamentally menacing.  As Karin goes forward, everything seems to be tending towards corruption, physical and spiritual.  I think it’s the tension between the moral clarity this structure and these images suggest and the moral incomprehensibility of what happens within the film that largely accounts for The Virgin Spring‘s power.

    The relationships between the characters are richly complex.  Töre’s wife Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) often looks to be a querulous, miserable woman yet she’s transformed in her indulgence towards her daughter.  Her quiet weeping when she realises that Karin is dead is very moving.  At the same time, you sense in Birgitta Valberg’s fine characterisation Mareta’s envy of her husband’s greater closeness to their daughter – because of which Mareta may envy both Töre and Karin.   When he and Karin are together, Töre isn’t just a strongly paternal figure; he’s physically easy and expressive with her in a way that he isn’t with his wife.  As Karin, Birgitta Pettersson has a beautiful sustained boldness the aspects of which include both the adored, spoiled child and the intrepid girl undaunted by the journey through the woods to the church.  Max von Sydow is magnificent as Töre:  as in The Seventh Seal, he’s completely convincing both as an heroic icon and as a thoughtful, troubled man.  The way Bergman photographs Von Sydow makes him dimensionally protean:  he can resemble a figure cut from a medieval tapestry, or a carving, or be flesh and bone.  There is a sequence in The Virgin Spring when Töre, after he’s learned of Karin’s death but before he takes his revenge on her killers, brings a birch tree down with his bare hands (he then cuts branches from it to scourge himself with).   The image of the man and the tree bending together in the wind is astonishing – this moment is a perfect example of Von Sydow’s ability to embody a symbol and an individual at the same time.  He’s marvellous in a different way in his interactions with the women – for example, in Töre’s witty remoteness from wife at breakfast and unworried sleepiness as they go to bed that evening.

    Every person in The Virgin Spring is remarkable:   Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), whose dark hair, as much as her paganism (she worships Odin), indicates her separateness from the blond-haired family of Töre;  the malignant bridge keeper (Axel Langus); the eccentric beggar-philosopher (Allan Edwall), who evinces a deep understanding and melancholy; the elderly woman servant Frida (Gudrun Brost), scolding other people whenever she’s not praising God; the herdsmen (Axel Duberg, Töre Isedal, and the boy Ove Porath).  These three loom up to the camera and seem to move forward in the forest with incredible swiftness (is this one of the bits of ‘immense acceleration’ Bergman consoled him with?)  Their assault on Karin is the most extraordinary rape scene I have seen:  it seems both intensely realistic and to convey the essence of the act of rape.  If I was looking to find fault with the film, I would struggle – perhaps it’s not quite clear how ‘accidental’ the herdsmen’s arrival at Töre’s home is since (I thought) Karin mentioned, on first meeting them, who she was and where she came from.   Otherwise, I’m happy to leave adverse criticism of The Virgin Spring to Ingmar Bergman.

    18 June 2010