Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Double Take

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Johan Grimonprez (2009)

    All the archive material is absorbing per se – newsreel of political events during the Cold War, commercials for Folger’s instant coffee, clips from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series, or from American TV news bulletins or Hitchcock movies or interviews with Hitchcock.  The same goes for the bits of Bernard Herrmann’s scores on the soundtrack.  It takes time to get your bearings and during that time the collage of material is beguiling.  We watch the impressionist Mark Perry listening to and practising the voice of Hitchcock, which he’s going to supply throughout the film.  (This is a shrewd move because Perry’s vocal mimicry is not that good – you get used to it but he has a vaguely sneering tone which lacks the original’s sense of humour.  Thinking of the artifice that we saw in preparation at the start condones Perry’s limitations.)  The Hitchcock voice describes a meeting with an older version of himself, on the set of The Birds in 1962:  the doppelgänger is a time traveller, arrived for the 1962 encounter from 29 April 1980, the day Hitchcock died.   The credits acknowledge that this meeting of doubles across the years is inspired by a Jose Luis Borges anecdote (called ‘25 August 1983’).  The double is a well-known trope in Hitchcock and the great man announces early here on that ‘… if you meet your double, you should kill him, or he will kill you’:  excerpts from his television work supply further and entertaining evidence of this preoccupation.  We also see, rather too often, a man called Ron Burrage, who’s a professional Hitchcock lookalike (there’s a clip of Burrage appearing with the star of The Birds, Tippi Hedren, at an event celebrating the centenary of Hitchcock’s birth in 1999). Interspersed with all this are excerpts from the spat between Khrushchev and Nixon at the 1959 US National Exhibition in Moscow, followed by the standard seminal moments of the next few years – the 1960 TV debates between Nixon and Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs debacle, the returning hero Yuri Gagarin, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuba missiles crisis, Dallas and the grassy knoll.   The whole thing is also punctuated by those adverts – a succession of condescending American husbands scold their wives for crap coffee before Folger’s saves the day.

    The few reviews of Double Take that I’ve read are admiring but I didn’t much like this ‘docu-essay’, which seems to be a favoured way of categorising it.  The shape of the film becomes increasingly conventional and the selection of Cold War highlights increasingly predictable.  The ideas don’t come together in an interesting way:  by the closing stages, Johan Grimonprez seems to be straining merely to tie them up neatly.  We’re told that hardliners on both sides branded their leaders traitors when Kennedy and Khrushchev averted nuclear war in October 1962 – and that Brezhnev immediately began plotting to get rid of Khrushchev.  When the narrative announces that Khrushchev was eventually removed in October 1964 it seems meant to stress the inevitability of his departure although your natural reaction might be that Brezhnev took a fair time to achieve his objective.  The isn’t-that-spooky information that Hitchcock received an invitation to lunch at the White House in an envelope postmarked 21 November 1963 is naff.   The connection of Cold War tensions, the space race, malign aliens and the threat from the skies in The Birds seems far from original but what’s most irritating about Double Take is your sense that Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy, who wrote the script, know that perfectly well and might well be amused that anyone was square enough to take issue with it.

    This is a film for cinéastes who, unlike me, don’t find its contrivances eclipsed by the newsreel footage – who see the archive material as supplementary to a piece about Hitchcock.   (The Belgian Grimonprez also made a short about him in 2005 called Looking for Alfred.)   Jonathan Romney’s review in The Independent is a good illustration of this point of view[1].  The Nixon-Khrushchev exchange, because I’d not seen it at this length before, is the dramatic highlight of Double Take.  You can’t help feeling sympathy for Nixon, arguing carefully but looking uncomfortable (his anxious shadow movements seem almost to prefigure the things that hindered his impact in the following year’s debates with Kennedy).  In contrast, Khrushchev talks rubbish charismatically.  The suggestion made by the visitor from 1980 that a new art form devours its progenitor – so that TV eats movies – is something that Hitchcock seems wryly aware of anyway, when he talks of how people are saying he’s prostituting himself by making Alfred Hitchcock Presents.   (Hitchcock is amusing in clips like this although Grimonprez comes to rely on him too exclusively for amusement.)    His alter ego explains to the younger Hitchcock the unhappy fate of cinema in the years between 1962 and 1980.  That doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think those years were some of the best in Hollywood’s history.

    3 November 2010

    [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/double-take-johan-grimonprez-80-mins-12a-1935109.html

     

  • Doctor Dolittle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Fleischer (1967)

    It already had its place in film history as a vastly expensive flop and a particularly notorious example of how money could buy a Best Picture Oscar nomination.   I wanted to see it because of the key role that was consequently played by Doctor Dolittle in Mark Harris’s book Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood.   Since I read Harris’s great and gripping story of the road to the 1968 Academy Awards, I’ve kept seeing ‘Doctor Dolittle’ in television listings and getting briefly excited.  It had always turned out to be the Eddie Murphy version – until the last day of 2010.

    If you drew up a list of essential ingredients for a successful family musical in the 1960s, you might include:  well-defined and engaging characters; comedy and romance; decent songs, well sung and choreographed; amazing or at least appealing visual effects.  Doctor Dolittle – based on books by Hugh Lofting, which were reckoned in their day to be classics of children’s literature (but which I never read) – fails on all counts.   Leslie Bricusse, who ended up with the credit for the screenplay as well as for writing the music and lyrics, was nothing if not conscientious:  you can hear in several tunes an anxious attempt to repeat the success of a recent screen hit (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music) or hit performance (although the genuinely jolly, Oscar-winning ‘Talk to the Animals’ is actually rather undermined by the fragmenting effect of Rex Harrison’s speak-singing).  Herbert Ross had a long and successful career as a choreographer and director but his work here wasn’t part of it:  the dance routines are lost in the elephantine picture’s relentless lack of rhythm.  Most sequences in Doctor Dolittle look to be executed as if getting them in the can was the extent of the film-makers’ ambition.  You can understand why Richard Fleischer was under pressure to show the huge expense of the production and that’s often all he appears to be doing.  There are pointless long shots of tiny figures in a landscape or aerial shots of crowd scenes that might be expected to preface or conclude a scene but which are shoved into the middle of numbers.  The two-headed llama, the Pushmi-Pullyu, would have been fine in a provincial rep pantomime of the time but it’s ludicrous as a pièce de résistance in a Hollywood blockbuster.  The eventual appearance of the Great Pink Sea Snail, which the doctor and his team go sailing the high seas in search of, is breathtakingly anti-climactic.

    The romantic strand is bewildering.   The doctor’s sidekick Matthew Mugg carries a torch for the beautiful Emma Fairfax but Matthew’s a humble Oirish working man and Emma, niece of the blustering, bullying General Bellowes (Peter Bull), is posh so you have to wonder if they can end up together (Doctor Dolittle is set in an English village called Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, in 1845).  Emma is antipathetic towards Dolittle in a way that must be the prelude to falling for him but there’s a thirty-year age difference between the actors playing the pair.  By the closing stages, simple Matthew seems simply to have forgotten he was keen on Emma.  She parts from the doctor – not sure she’ll ever see him again – but while Emma is tearful Dolittle seems pretty indifferent.  The film ends with the news that they’ll be reunited back in Puddleby but we don’t see the reunion (perhaps just as well).  The hook of the material – the Noah’s ark of animals ranging from domestic to exotic – is, to an extent, foolproof, but only to an extent.  Dolittle’s conversations in animal language are unimaginative, to say the least, and the voicing of his parrot Polynesia (by Ginny Tyler) is pathetic.  Thanks to the clumsy, let’s-just-get-through-this desperation that suffuses Doctor Dolittle, the animals often look as if they’re being wheeled on and off just to have their presence recorded, although the chimp Cheeta does arguably the best acting in the film.

    The humans are depressingly charmless and Rex Harrison isn’t the worst of them.  I was looking forward to loathing him all over again but his playing is so relatively accomplished and unstrained in this company that Harrison is occasionally a relief:  even when he’s reprising Professor Higgins, he’s inoffensive.  The downside of his effortlessness is that he fails to animate Dolittle’s eccentricity.  Anthony Newley is a performer who, when he’s not centre stage (and his histrionics on screen are scaled for the back row of the upper circle), might not be there at all:  playing unobtrusively interesting is out of his range.  As Matthew, Newley sings abominably (with the trademark blaring whine on the long notes).  But at least he can do a character – even if, most of the time, he overdoes it:  after two and a half hours, I didn’t understand what Samantha Eggar and William Dix were supposed to be playing.   Dix, who was never heard of again, is stunningly unappealing as a young lad called Tommy Stubbins.  He’s maybe meant to be a sparky village urchin but his diction is that of a comedy toff (he pronounces ‘boat’ as ‘bait’ etc).   Eggar, whose brief flirtation with the big time ended with this film, makes Emma snotty and dissatisfied even when she’s meant to be falling in love with Dolittle:  it’s a baffling (and very stiff) performance.  As Willie Shakespeare, the super-cultivated leader of the ‘savages’ on Sea-Star Island, Geoffrey Holder looks understandably uncomfortable.

    The only person I enjoyed watching or listening to was Richard Attenborough, in a brief appearance as the bluntly mercenary circus owner Albert Blossom.  When Blossom claps eyes on the Pushmi-Pullyu, he sings ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It’ with mounting, rapacious glee.  The look of the creature hardly justifies the routine but Attenborough gives a vivid demonstration of what a first-class character actor can do with very little material (even if it’s obviously not him doing the dancing at the end of the number).   The commercial exploitation of the Pushmi-Pullyu brings (more) censorious words from Emma and there’s the odd moment in the film – Dolittle’s criticism of fox-hunting is another – that makes the whole enterprise seems momentarily less obsolete  than the film otherwise appears.   The expensive box-office failure of Doctor Dolittle is widely regarded as sounding the death knell for big, popular musicals although it’s worth remembering that, just a year later, Oliver! made a lot of money and won six Oscars, including Best Picture – and presumably without Columbia resorting to the kind of bribery that 20th Century Fox tried with Dolittle.

    1 January 2011

     

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