Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • Carrie (1976)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian De Palma (1976)

    Brian De Palma’s sensuous, lyrical approach to horror is evident from the start.  A group of high school girls have been playing netball and friendless Carrie White has again distinguished herself as hopeless at the game – as she is at everything else.  The girls go to shower and change; De Palma’s camera – rapt, languorous and voyeuristic – moves over their naked or nearly naked bodies.  The palely wobegone Carrie gets some relief from showering alone until blood from between her legs mingles with the running water and she is terrified by this, her first menstruation.  An horrific change of mood during a refreshing shower naturally recalls what happens in Bates Motel but De Palma’s rhythm is very different from Hitchcock’s.  Besides, the audience of Psycho shares Marion Crane’s paralysed terror whereas we can see that Carrie is not ‘bleeding to death’, even though she fears that she is, screaming and begging the other girls to help her.  What’s more startling here is that Carrie is so vehemently despised by her classmates that, instead of reassuring her, they pelt her with tampons and sanitary towels, before the games mistress Miss Collins arrives to intervene.  When Miss Collins explains to the school principal what’s happened, he expresses surprise at seventeen-year-old Carrie’s ignorance.  It turns out that her mother Catherine, a sexophobic religious maniac, has never told Carrie about menstruation but the viewer may share some of the principal’s puzzlement:  hasn’t Carrie seen evidence of periods – or, at least, heard them being discussed – among her classmates?

    This is just the first improbability of De Palma’s famous horror film that you have to overlook.  (I don’t know if the fault lies with Lawrence D Cohen’s screenplay or in the original Stephen King novel.)  Carrie White is transformed from a withdrawn no-hoper into the school prom queen; Chris Hargensen, the nastiest of the girls in her class (in a stiff competition), has been disciplined by Miss Collins so that she can’t herself attend the prom.  Chris, with her boyfriend Billy, plots revenge on Carrie to ruin her big moment as she basks in the glow of attention and applause at the prom.  Chris’s revenge is shocking but it’s nothing compared to what the telekinetic Carrie then unleashes on the gathering.  But how does Chris know that Carrie will be prom queen – who else does she involve in her plot to rig the vote?  Doesn’t the family of another of Carrie’s classmates, the morally ambiguous Sue Snell, think it odd that Sue’s boyfriend Tommy is taking Carrie to the prom instead, and that Sue doesn’t have a partner for the occasion?  And what happens to Carrie psychologically to enable her suddenly to stand up to her rabid, domineering mother and overrule – verbally rather than telekinetically – Catherine’s forbidding her daughter to attend the prom?

    Carrie’s telekinetic powers are in evidence from very early on so that it’s clear they’ll be used whenever necessary.  De Palma is less interested in suspense or surprise than in realising the dream-into-nightmare highlights of the material.  His approach to these highlights is operatic – not only in the sense that it’s intensely theatrical but also in his elaborating an event or detail after you’ve got its point.  This tends to diffuse – or defuse – the horror in Carrie, not least in the film’s final sequence, when the dead heroine’s hand reaches out to grasp that of Sue Snell, who has brought flowers to Carrie’s grave.  The terrifying embrace is then revealed to be part of Sue’s bad dream and De Palma keeps the camera on the girl and her mother:  Mrs Snell comforts her screaming daughter and the shot is held long enough for De Palma to help the viewer too recover from the shock of the hand thrusting up out of the earth.   (This is one of the few bits I remembered from seeing Carrie on its original release and it was still immediately startling, even though I knew it was coming.)

    The essential theme of the story is a strong one.  A girl, isolated by her peer group because of her perceived difference (and consequent inferiority), uses another difference – an unsuspected and more powerful difference – to wreak havoc not just on those who’ve humiliated her but on the whole community, friend or foe.  But the lack of clarity around who is sympathetic and who is hostile towards Carrie works against clear distinction between just and unjust desserts for the victims of the mayhem that she eventually causes (although there’s the odd exception: the well-meaning Miss Collins suffers a particularly harsh fate).  De Palma’s preoccupation with the visual possibilities of Carrie’s revenge means that he never bothers to explain clearly how she is victimised – whether, in particular, accompanying Tommy to the prom makes her more or even less popular.  (Are all or only some of the prom queen votes that Carrie receives motivated by malice?)    When it comes to working through an image, though, De Palma, with the help of his DoP Mario Tosi, is meticulous.  Bloody details recur from that early menstrual scene in the shower onwards:  Catherine White knows her daughter’s pale pink ball dress will be red in due course; the hand clutching from the grave is bloodstained.  And the delicate score by Pino Donaggio is mostly very effective:  the only bits of music that don’t work so well are the jabbing chords that herald telekinetic action.  These so much echo the shower attack in Psycho that they repeatedly, if momentarily, stop Carrie in its tracks and turn it into an Hitchcock hommage (the name of the school – Bates High School – has a similar effect.)

    De Palma’s operatic tendency extends to Piper Laurie’s highly accomplished performance as the nutty mother.  She is immediately, flamboyantly bizarre.  Both the lighting and set decoration in Catherine’s home reflect her personality:  there’s no ordinariness here for the extraordinary events of the story to emerge or depart from.   (Piper Laurie’s portrait of Catherine comes, however, to what is, in every sense, a perfect climax.  When kitchen knives, launched by Carrie’s telekinesis, penetrate her body, the sex-hating Catherine, on the point of death, succumbs with sounds of orgasmic fulfilment.)   Other senior actors – Betty Buckley (the needy, verging-on-lesbian Miss Collins), Priscilla Pointer (Mrs Snell) and Sydney Lassick (an English teacher, and no less odd here than he had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the previous year) – are overemphatic but this quality adds to the unsettling atmosphere.  The younger actors are all strong.  Sissy Spacek, although in her mid-twenties, had already proved in Badlands (1973) an exceptional ability to convince easily as a teenager and she’s outstanding as Carrie – her Cinderella transformation is lovely.  William Katt, as Tommy, is also very effective in the prom sequences and, in the good boy-bad boy partnership, he’s superbly complemented by John Travolta as Billy.   The latter’s first scene, with Billy and Chris driving in his car and ‘Heatwave’ playing on the radio, provides the film with a large jolt of energy:  Travolta’s mixture of brutality and vulnerability is disorienting and the relationship of his volatile face with the camera is extraordinary.  The vividly transparent Nancy Allen (Chris) and the opaque Amy Irving (Sue) are a well-balanced combination too.

    5 August 2014

  • The Lodger:  A Story of the London Fog

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1927)

    One of the ‘Hitchcock 9’ being restored through the BFI project, and Hitchcock’s first thriller.  We saw it at the Barbican with Nitin Sawhney, who has written a score for the film, conducting the LSO and his own band.   The combination of the live music and the venerable movie was very enjoyable.  Sawhney’s score is obviously influenced by the Bernard Herrmann music for Psycho – and perhaps by other scores for Hitchcock films – but it has a real life of its own.  Humorous and dramatic, the score’s dynamism never tries to compete with what’s on screen:  it’s always supporting the images.  (The only things that don’t work are the vocalised bits, which are incongruously anachronistic; fortunately, they’re only occasional too.)  The Lodger itself is Hitchcock at his inventively entertaining best.   The plot of the film – with a screenplay by Eliot Stannard, adapted from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes – is simple enough.  A serial killer – ‘the Avenger’ – is on the loose in London; every Tuesday night, he murders another blonde-haired girl.  A middle-aged couple, the Buntings, have a lodger, a policeman called Joe.  He’s on the trail of the Avenger; he’s also in love with the couple’s blonde daughter, fashion model Daisy.  Shortly after the latest murder, a stranger arrives late at night at the Buntings’ front door, and asks if there’s a room to let.  (There is.)  When Mrs Bunting opens the door to him, the lower part of the man’s face is covered by a scarf – just like the face of the Avenger, according to a terrified woman witness who got a glimpse of him leaving the scene of his most recent crime.  While Daisy takes a shine to the handsome new tenant, Joe is increasingly suspicious of him (for personal as well as professional reasons, of course).  It doesn’t take long for Daisy’s parents to turn suspicious too.

    Thirty years later, Hitchcock made The Wrong Man and The Lodger is the first of several of his movies that had that theme:  the mysterious lodger[1] turns out not to be the Avenger.  In fact he’s on the trail of the killer, whose first victim was the lodger’s sister:  he promised his dying mother he would find the man who destroyed their happy family.   I was taken in and assumed through most of the film that the lodger was the murderer; when Joe and his colleagues arrest him but Daisy stays loyal, I thought the film was turning into something subversive, a feeling reinforced by the flashback to the lodger’s mother’s deathbed.  Here we see a dutiful son vowing to avenge the grievous wrong done to the family yet, I assumed, responsible for that wrong – killing his sister and deceiving his mother for evermore.   I found the revelation of the lodger’s innocence disappointing and the denouement anti-climactic at first – not least because the apprehending of the real Avenger happens off screen and is merely reported.  Yet this ending – with the lodger and Daisy set to live happy ever after, and jealous Joe written out of proceedings – means The Lodger is, in retrospect, a much stronger film about suspicion (and a much better film than Suspicion) than I’d realised for most of the time I was watching it.  Hitchcock also demonstrates how a public appetite for lurid crime can turn people into a mob of avengers:  the sequence in which a crowd turns on the lodger, although it’s a little protracted, is frightening.

    Getting the wrong end of the stick means that I may also have been looking at Ivor Novello, who plays the lodger, in the wrong way.  I loved Hitchcock’s scene-setting:  the flashing neon repeatedly announcing a theatre show called ‘Golden Curls’ (there’s a beautifully witty reprise of this at the end);  the pub regulars revelling in the latest Avenger killing, making a joke out of it at the same time as they’re scared (and enjoying that fear);  the news of the crime emerging word by word on a telegraph machine;  the production and selling of the Evening Standard with a report on the murder;  the vivid domestic routine at the Buntings’ home.    When Novello appears on the scene, the tempo slows and, for me, the drama didn’t increase.  He’s every inch a film star and not much of an actor – a complete contrast to the other principals whose busy theatricality I found appealing.   I wished – I still do wish – that Novello could have been more believably homicidal but seeing him out of context, as people watching the film inevitably do today, is very different from the way audiences originally saw him in The Lodger.  Novello was a well-established matinee idol by the mid-1920s.  The disbelief that he could be a murderer would have delivered an element of suspense at the time – now the disbelief seems to derive purely from his acting limitations.

    The situation is complicated by the fact that Malcolm Keen (Geoffrey Keen’s father), as policeman Joe, uses his beady eyes in a way that makes him seem a superficially more likely culprit than the lodger.   (Sally thought Keen gave a music hall performance and he’s certainly made up as if he’s going to deliver a stage routine – as Sally also said, he calls to mind Olivier’s Archie Rice.)   I enjoyed Keen’s performance even so – Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney as the Buntings and the very pretty June Tripp as Daisy are all excellent too.    The family live in a surprisingly large house (it’s not surprising they need to take in lodgers to pay for its upkeep).  You’re especially conscious of this when Mrs Bunting spends a sleepless night as the lodger comes and goes and his landlady frets beneath the Caligari­-like shadows of her vast bedroom.   The richly expressive lighting by Gaetano di Ventimiglia is seen to full advantage in this restoration and the film includes some splendidly showy Hitchcock touches:  the lodger’s feet pacing up and down his room and visible to Joe and the Buntings below in what has temporarily become a see-through ceiling; the eye-like windows at the back of a van carrying newspapers onto the London streets.

    21 July 2012

    [1]  He’s unnamed throughout the film but the cast list on Wikipedia calls him Jonathan Drew.

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