Film review

  • North by Northwest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1959)

    I like this better than any other Hitchcock film I know, with the possible exception of The 39 Steps.  (There are resemblances between them:  the hero, accused of murder, on the run; the thread of suspicion that gives tension to the romance between the two leads; the international espionage context – although North by Northwest is specifically for the Cold War era.)  I think the two films are streets ahead of the Hitchcock works that are reckoned to be psychologically profound.  He may always have enjoyed ‘playing the audience like a piano’:  in the case of North by Northwest, the enjoyment is mutual and Hitchcock’s delight in the trompe l’oeil and manipulative possibilities of film infectious.  The thrills are preposterously entertaining.  Roger Thornhill’s hair-raising drunken drive – his first escape from his abductors – is an appetiser for the celebrated crop-dusting sequence (with its ingeniously gradual build-up) and the climactic scenes on Mount Rushmore (worth waiting for, even though the preparation for them is too obviously protracted).   Ernest Lehman’s screenplay is full of clever reversals and stylish, consistently witty dialogue.

    There’s an almost metaphorical dimension to the story – Thornhill and Eve Kendall trying to escape from the complicated plot, in which they’re caught up, into an unqualified love affair.  Hitchcock is naturally happy to detain them in the hectic machinery of the story for as long as possible but the final cuts from Mount Rushmore to the couple in the upper bunk of a train carriage, then to the train rapidly entering a tunnel, make for a laconically apt happy ending.  Layers of double-crossing and shifting loyalties are essential to the piece but Hitchcock and Lehman remove the layers without ever letting the audience relax or losing the process’s element of fun.  (Watching the film this time around further lowered my opinion of the recent Duplicity, where the games that Tony Gilroy was playing, and our awareness of them, had an entropic effect.)

    The opening credit sequence is auspicious.  The amusing Saul Bass titles appear at an angle on the side of a skyscraper and we’re introduced to one of Bernard Herrmann’s very best scores.  The music announces from the start that there’s going to be good humour as well as suspense.  Hitchcock appears as a man trying to catch a bus on a New York street – he arrives just too late (this moment seems to foreshadow a leitmotif of yellow cab queue-jumping-cum-hijacking in the film).  And North by Northwest is – again unusually for a Hitchcock picture – well acted just about all the way through:  James Mason and Martin Landau (an A-list spy and his disturbingly faithful henchman respectively) stand out among the supporting cast but Jessie Royce Landis (as Thornhill’s mother) and Leo G Carroll (as the éminence grise of the espionage fraternity) are fine too.  Eva Marie Saint, as Eve, works in a way that some other Hitchcock blondes don’t:  the plot’s construction makes it hard to get a handle on her character – helps to make her something approaching enigmatic.  The careful monotone she affects in the dining-car scene, on her first meeting with Thornhill, soon comes to make sense:  Eve has secrets.  When Roger surprises her with his safe return from the meeting with the crop-duster, Saint’s only partly successful concealment of the extent of her relief is genuinely affecting.

    Cary Grant is the quintessence of film star quality and, within a fairly narrow range of character, a consummate screen actor. As Thornhill, he’s superlative:  he looks right as a Madison Avenue advertising executive (North by Northwest was made on the cusp of 1960, the year in which the first series of Mad Men was set).  Grant is also the perfect man to play a character who has to keep thinking on the hoof – who makes us laugh and whom we root for at the same time.   He performs with a wonderful economy of physical and vocal expression.  He has an instinctive rapport with the camera that is never self-aware.  Travelling light and wearing the same suit throughout, he stays magically kempt.  Cary Grant is the incarnation of the spirit of North by Northwest – shallow but elating.  The director, the writer and the star are all aware of the shallowness of the material and understand what can be achieved with it through technical skill and exuberant wit.  They have the appetite and the talent to achieve it and they give the audience a marvellous time.

    19 June 2009

  • Remember the Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mitchell Leisen (1940)

    Preston Sturges’s script provides a fine premise for a romantic comedy.  Assistant DA John (Jack) Sargent (Fred MacMurray) has a 100% record in successfully prosecuting female defendants.  One early December, Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) is arrested for stealing a bracelet from a New York jewellery store and Jack’s boss (Paul Guilfoyle) assigns him the case.  Jack knows that juries tend to be lenient when Christmas is coming and fears an acquittal for Lee, even though she’s obviously guilty (and not for the first time).  Although her super-verbose defence attorney (Willard Robertson) has already delivered his speech to the jury, Jack succeeds, on a technicality, in getting the completion of the trial postponed until the New Year.  Hearing Lee complain to her lawyer that she’ll now have to spend Christmas in jail, Jack feels guilty and arranges for a bondsman known as Fat Mike (Tom Kennedy) to post bail.  To Jack’s consternation, Fat Mike then delivers Lee to Jack’s apartment – just as he’s about to set off for Indiana, to spend Christmas there with his folks.  It turns out that Lee is a Hoosier too and she has nowhere else to go in New York.  Jack offers her a lift to Indiana and to drop her off at her mother’s home, although Lee has been estranged from her for some time.  A succession of comic escapades on the long journey is interrupted when Lee is heartlessly cold-shouldered by her mother (Georgia Caine).  Jack brings Lee to stay at his mother’s home for the holiday instead.  By this point – roughly the halfway point of Remember the Night – Jack and Lee are starting to feel rather differently about each other.

    Sturges’s move into directing is thought to have been triggered by increasing frustration with how his screenplays were handled by other directors.  Remember the Night includes the odd sequence that suggests distortion of the writer’s intentions.  After the Sargent family and their guest have returned from a New Year barn dance, Jack’s mother (Beulah Bondi) comes to Lee’s room.  Mrs Sargent is kindly and hospitable but she knows from Jack who Lee really is and fears that her son has fallen in love with a recidivist thief.  She explains to Lee how hard Jack has worked to get a legal career, how important it is that his efforts shouldn’t now be spoiled.  Although this exchange is well played by Beulah Bondi and Barbara Stanwyck, who makes clear that Lee’s got the painful message, Mitchell Leisen seems anxious to muffle the hard, possessive aspects of the mother’s doing what she’s sure is the right thing.  The scene might have been directed by Mrs Sargent.  At other times, though, Leisen may have been too respectful of Sturges’s script.  The opening courtroom section is much too long because of how much Lee’s attorney, Francis X O’Leary, has to say in his summing up.  The joke that he’s a long-winded ham actor doesn’t play:  O’Leary’s routine on screen is as boringly unfunny as it is to the exasperated trial judge (Charles Waldron).

    Fortunately, there’s plenty of good dialogue elsewhere in the script; and it’s tempting, in view of Sturges’s work as a writer-director, to try and spot obscured subversive elements in Remember the Night.  But the film is less unconventional than you might hope from the basic scenario.  When the New York court reconvenes in early January, Jack’s feelings for Lee eclipse professional considerations and he tries to throw the trial.  Realising what he’s doing, Lee’s impelled – her love for him trumping her immediate self-interest – to plead guilty.  The final scene is in a prison cell:  Jack is ready to marry Lee on the spot; she insists that he take time to reflect, while she’s inside, on whether he really wants to do that.  The film ends in a passionate I-will-wait-for-you embrace not too different from many others that you’ve seen.  Except for the above-mentioned scene between Lee and Mrs Sargent, you don’t sense tension between the writing and direction elsewhere in the Indiana episode.   The details of domestic routine and pecking order – involving Jack’s mother, his maiden aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson) and genial hayseed cousin Willie (Sterling Holloway) – are witty and well-observed but the emphasis is firmly on celebrating rather than satirising a Midwest family Christmas.  This gives rise to some touching as well as amusing moments.  Cousin Willie is, for the most part, an obvious cartoon hick:  it comes as a surprise when Sterling Holloway reveals a pleasant singing voice (and as a relief from Willie’s comedy yodelling).  Aunt Emma helps Lee into an outfit for the New Year dance – it’s the wedding dress that Emma never ended up wearing.  The idea is obvious but Elizabeth Patterson’s understated playing makes the scene affecting.

    Barbara Stanwyck conveys beautifully Lee’s incredulity at what she’s experiencing at Mrs Sargent’s:  Lee is enjoying an unthinkably happy Christmas yet remains always slightly outside the family circle.  Stanwyck’s face as Lee watches Jack open his presents is especially expressive – Lee Leander has travelled a long way, emotionally as well as geographically, from the brittle, cynical wisecracker we saw in New York.  There’s a point, during the journey to Indiana, at which Jack reminds Lee of her circumstances and she admits that she’d temporarily put them out of her mind.  It’s a strength of Barbara Stanwyck’s performance that, in fact, you feel she never does quite forget.  It’s a weakness of Remember the Night that amnesia appears to affect Mitchell Leisen and Fred MacMurray.  (The film’s title is a puzzle unless it refers to the darkness of the underlying situation.)  It’s interesting to see Stanwyck and MacMurray together a few years before their famous pairing in Double Indemnity.  MacMurray’s performance in the later film, as a man stupefied by Stanwyck’s femme fatale, works well but his acting limitations are only too apparent in Remember the Night.  There’s little distinction between the intellectually agile, verging-on-cocky young lawyer, and the less accomplished, embarrassable, romantic young man.  MacMurray is pleasant enough in the on-the-road and Indiana scenes but, as the story builds to its climax, he gives you no sense of collision and conflict between the two sides of Jack Sargent.

    10 February 2016

     

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