Daily Archives: Monday, August 31, 2015

  • Strangers on a Train

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1951)

    Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel (Raymond Chandler and an uncredited Ben Hecht were among those involved in the adaptation, along with Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook), Strangers on a Train has a beautifully simple starting point for a crime thriller.  Two men meet on a train.  One, a tennis star, wants to get out of a bad marriage into a better one (trading a small town shrew for a senator’s daughter).  The other hates his father.  The second man suggests to the first that, in order to avoid suspicion, each commits the other’s murder.  As the wealthy, Oedipally-inclined Bruno Anthony, Robert Walker cuts a memorable figure – all the more memorable given that Walker died suddenly, at the age of thirty-two, less than two months after the film’s release.  His slim, trim Bruno wears his hat at a jaunty angle and his suit like a disguise.  The waspish petulance that Walker gives Bruno is both disquieting because it seems deeply absorbed and enjoyable because Walker’s readings are very witty.  He’s so entertaining that I found myself rooting completely for Bruno.   When he tries to retrieve a crucially important cigarette lighter from beneath the drain cover down which it’s fallen, I was very anxious for him to succeed.  Hitchcock cross-cuts between Bruno’s desperate subterranean probing and a tennis match at Forest Hills which Guy Haines, the man whose wife Bruno has murdered as a result of their meeting on the train (but who is nonetheless a good Guy), is trying to finish off in straight sets.  I wanted him detained on court for as long as possible.

    As Guy, Farley Granger has a hard-to-pin-down but definitely unpleasant quality.  This seems wrong in Guy’s inert, impacted scenes with the senator’s daughter Anne although at least it’s strong enough also to undermine them.  Granger’s presence complicates interestingly the homosexual undercurrents in the exchanges between Bruno and Guy.  In his introduction at BFI, Philip Kemp talked about this aspect of the story and mentioned that Granger is himself ‘gay or at least bisexual’.  This struck me as irrelevant when Kemp said it but, having seen the film, I’m not so sure.  While Bruno is suavely camp, Guy has a much less explicit homosexual quality in their conversations together.  It’s possible that this comes through because Granger isn’t a good enough actor to submerge this aspect of himself (at least if he knows that it’s part of the subtext of a picture).  Whatever the reason, you assume that Bruno is attracted to Guy and Granger radiates something that could allow Bruno to hope this is reciprocated.  The fact that it isn’t chimes with Bruno’s readiness to carry out his part of the killing bargain, wrongly assuming that Guy will be equally ready to oblige.   The fact that Guy, after his first encounter with Bruno, leaves behind in the carriage his cigarette lighter underlines the point.   Guy’s leaving it for Bruno to pick up implies, as Philip Kemp also suggested, his ambivalence about Bruno’s murderous proposition.  At another level, it could indicate that part of Guy would like to keep in touch with Bruno.

    The sequences culminating in Bruno’s murder of Miriam, Guy’s shallow wife, are terrific.   Screen crimes committed at a fairground nearly always seem to be – it must be the combination of the insistency of the tinny merry-go-round music and the crowds of other people around, distracted by the fun of the fair and unaware of the would-be killer in their midst.  The music, of course, always continues remorselessly after the deed is done:  Hitchcock uses the epitomising ‘The Band Played On’ here.   Anyway, this fairground murder is especially expert – and I preferred it to the climactic (more celebrated?) struggle between Bruno and Guy on an out-of-control carousel, partly because the later sequence is so extended and partly because Hitchcock’s jolly heartlessness gets to be a bit much when the madly spinning machine is threatening the lives of other, terrified people riding on it.  Miriam’s murder is a highlight too because of the quiet, ice-cold momentum built by Robert Walker as he pursues his prey and because of Laura Elliott, who plays Miriam.  (According to Wikipedia, Elliott became better known – on American TV, particularly in Bewitched – under the name Kasey Rogers.)   Miriam is no beauty – or at least she’s made to look no beauty, in her heavy spectacles.  It’s hard to believe that she and Guy were ever a happy couple but Elliott gives Miriam a sexual avidity that registers strongly because she looks so ordinary.   When Bruno keeps appearing at her side at the fairground, Miriam seems caught between nervousness and wanting more – Laura Elliott makes this uneasy lasciviousness very striking.

    As usual in Hitchcock, there are some daft details.  Bruno isn’t cut out for anonymity:  his forename is embroidered – emblazoned – on his ties.  On another train journey, Guy has a conversation with an inebriated mathematician, returning home from giving a lecture; Guy thus has an alibi for the night of Miriam’s murder but Professor Collins (John Brown) is so far gone that he later fails to recognise Guy when the police ask him to do so.  Why doesn’t Guy at least point out that Collins told him he’d been giving a lecture on differential calculus or whatever, which would go some way at least to corroborating Guy’s story?   The film goes improbably far in reflecting that Grand Slam tennis in 1951 was still an amateur game:  Guy is seeded fifth at Forest Hills but whether he can practise depends on whether he can get a court!  And the very last, wrapping-things-up scenes are lame – as if Hitchcock were showing the audience how silly the whole thing has been, how silly we’ve been to get so caught up in it.

    These absurdities hardly matter, though, because the direction is supremely confident and, as seems to happen with all his best work, Hitchcock’s pleasure in his confidence is infectious.  His amused callousness is embodied here, in a highly appropriate piece of casting, by his daughter Patricia, who plays the senator’s younger daughter.  She revels in the details of murders she’s read about – but she also, and effectively, starts getting scared by Bruno.  Patricia Hitchcock is a broad actress but, as in her much smaller role in Psycho, she’s likeable and fun.  She and Leo G Carroll, as her drily exasperated father, compensate for the dullness together of Farley Granger and Ruth Roman, as the woman he supposedly loves.  Ruth Roman seems to take an age to change her expression, let alone express an emotion.  By contrast (and in keeping with the pattern of this film that it’s the morally unforgivable characters who are the most engaging), Marion Lorne is very funny as the woman Bruno definitely loves, his implacably doting mother.

    24 May 2010

     

  • Infamous

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Douglas McGrath (2006)

    Rachel Portman’s score is all over the place – it faithfully reflects the film’s lurches in mood.  There’s wry guitar music, suggesting a Woody Allen comedy; conventional scary music for the murders of the Clutter family; twinkly bits to accompany Truman Capote’s more reflective and sentimental moments.  Bennett Miller’s Capote, released the previous year, turned harshly judgmental:  Miller presents Capote’s use of real-life events (and of Perry Smith and Dick Hickok) in order to write In Cold Blood as causing the end of his literary career.  The irony is presented as a case of just desserts and the movie is reduced by this point of view (at least it is on a second viewing:  first time round, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliance as Capote obscures its limitations).  Although a more sympathetic treatment of Truman Capote is therefore welcome in theory, Infamous turns out weak and shallow:  perhaps Douglas McGrath has the wrong temperament for the material – he may be too good natured.   The early scenes, when Capote (Toby Jones) and Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock) visit Holcomb, Kansas, where the killings took place, and socialise over Christmas with Sheriff Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels) and his wife (Bethlyn Gerard) and friends, are sharply entertaining.  McGrath shows how Capote is exploiting these connections for the book he has in mind and enjoying being the centre of attention in a new social world – so that he’s not too homesick for New York.  You wonder how the writer-director will make a successful transition to the darker side of the story and he simply doesn’t.  At one point Capote says to Perry Smith, ‘You did a terrible thing’, but you feel that Douglas McGrath, like Smith, struggles to grasp the fact emotionally.  There are flashbacks to the murder of the Clutters but they are indifferently staged:  this is the first time (after seeing In Cold Blood, and Capote twice) that I’ve not been horrified by the reconstruction of these crimes.  The family is being executed by actors giving bad performances – Daniel Craig (Smith) and Lee Pace (Dick Hickok) – rather than by bad men.

    McGrath’s screenplay is based on George Plimpton’s 1997 book Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.  Compared with Capote, Infamous includes much more coverage of Capote’s socialite circle in New York – McGrath stages a series of interviews with Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), Slim Keith (Hope Davis), Marella Agnelli (Isabella Rossellini), Gore Vidal (Michael Panes) and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich), as well as Harper Lee.  McGrath never really works out whether he wants this to be a faux-documentary about Capote or a drama about the creation of In Cold Blood; nor does he manage to get a consistent style of playing from Capote’s acquaintances.  Hope Davis has a good scene when Slim Keith has drunk too much but still doesn’t trust Truman enough to give too much away.  Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini are more or less wasted.  Juliet Stevenson’s desire to show off eclipses any kind of interpretation of Diana Vreeland.  Peter Bogdanovich is wooden.  Michael Panes’s appearance is mercifully fleeting.   After a while, the witnesses to Capote’s life become something to fall back on – when it’s easier for what happened to be described in this way rather than dramatised.  Back on death row, Perry Smith’s intelligence and vulnerability are served straight:  McGrath is disinclined to grapple with the fact that he murdered people – and doesn’t allow Capote to do so either.  Clifton Collins Jr was a rather colourless Smith in Capote but that almost made Capote’s fascination with him more intriguing.  Daniel Craig is dead wrong here – his acting is self-conscious and the character he creates merely hollow.  (Lee Pace is also weak as Dick Hickok – I wasn’t sure whether it was intentional that Austin Chittim, who plays the Clutter son, physically resembles Pace.)  The flashbacks to Smith’s childhood and youth are perfunctory.

    The quasi-sexual relationship between Capote and Perry Smith presented in Infamous is, as Douglas McGrath has acknowledged, his own invention.   This may be an easy way of realising Capote’s infatuation with Smith but it’s counterproductive in that it detracts from the mystery of the relationship.  The physical proximity, let alone physical intimacy, of the two men in Smith’s cell leaves nothing to the imagination:   Toby Jones says much more when prison bars are separating him from Perry.  Jones is often fascinating to watch – as, for example, when Capote stands in silhouette, listening intently while one of the Holcomb locals imparts information that is addressed entirely to Harper Lee.  At the very beginning of the film, Capote and Babe Paley are in a New York club where a singer (a cameo from Gwyneth Paltrow) is performing; halfway through the number (What Is This Thing Called Love?) she seems to lose concentration and suddenly to be on the verge of a breakdown.  Jones’s face and body express the room’s collectively holding its breath and giving a sigh of relief when Paltrow recovers and resumes.  The early part of Infamous makes you realise how carefully and expertly Bennett Miller and Philip Seymour Hoffman had to conceal the latter’s height.  Because he’s so short, Toby Jones can do things that Hoffman couldn’t – Jones has a real freedom of movement, is more exuberantly camp and androgynous (and also more extravagantly dressed).  He’s very good too at suggesting how Capote uses his persona – for effect or to get results – but perhaps the overall effect is a little too benign.  He makes Capote a gossip of a less malignant kind than Hoffman did.

    Infamous, photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, includes some impressive (if  not unexpected) shots of the flat Kansas countryside.  The colour seems to have drained out of the land – the effect of this is more striking because elsewhere the film often seems too brightly coloured.   This feels wrong no doubt partly because Richard Brooks’s movie of In Cold Blood is in black and white (and the narrative of the book is somehow monochrome too).   Sally and I had to check whether Capote was in black and white too:  it’s not but the palette is certainly much more muted.   There never seems to be any depth to the images in Infamous – all in all, the visual scheme increasingly reflects what’s wrong with Douglas McGrath’s approach.   Sandra Bullock gives an intelligent performance as Harper Lee – she’s by far the best interviewee and good in a scene in which Harper Lee stands up to Capote in an argument, even if the writing of the exchange is a bit obvious.   Bullock is convincingly ambivalent although, by the closing stages, she’s showing signs of strain at being so subdued.  (There’s also one reference too many to Harper Lee’s attempts to write a second novel.)  John Benjamin Hickey is convincing as Capote’s boyfriend Jack Dunphy and Jeff Daniels is excellent as Sheriff Dewey.

    23 February 2013

     

     

     

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