Tag Archives: murder

Strangers on a Train Strangers on a Train 5 star

January 28th, 2011 by surlaroute

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This is perhaps the most elegantly designed of Hitchcock’s movies next to the much earlier Ring, the story here visualised from the outset (as that movie’s was by the boxing ring, the arm band, the wedding ring) by the “criss-cross” of the railroad tracks on which hero and villain fatefully meet. It’s an insanely simple set-up: a slightly unhinged character Bruno (played with exuberant relish by Robert Walker) suggests to tennis pro Guy (Farley Granger) that they, both having reasons to want someone out of their life (and who doesn’t?), swap murders, thereby providing an alibi for each other and committing the perfect crime. The good Guy clearly wants no part of it and assumes Bruno is joking; Bruno mistakes Guy’s reaction at their first meeting as a contract.

There’s the same sick thrill as Rope here about the “Let’s do a murder!” aspect, and I love it. As in Rope Granger plays the unwilling participant, though here of course even more unwilling. But along with this sense of near-glee, there’s also plenty of genuine creepiness. As Bruno stalks Guy’s “victim” at the fairground, one truly gets a sense of the girl’s absolute innocence and humanity, even as you laugh at Bruno’s cruel quirks – bursting the balloon of a little boy who gets in the way, for example. Even after the brutal crime, we’re given even more of a chill as Bruno calmly helps a blind man across the street – it has the same effect as, say, Hannibal Lector’s etiquette would have decades later. This is one of cinema’s most horribly dimensional bad guys.

Following Bruno’s enacting of his part of the “deal” he thinks was made, the movie begins to resemble another much earlier Hitchcock, Blackmail. There are further chilling appearances of Bruno observing Guy, waiting for him to reciprocate and murder too, in Washington, but most memorably at a tennis match, one of Hitchcock’s most brilliantly creepy shots, as in among the clichéd heads going side to side following the game, there is Bruno’s head, completely stationary, looking right at us/Guy. Robert Walker as Bruno actually reminds me a lot of the blackmailer in Blackmail, as a matter of fact, something about the overly confident way he holds himself, adding I suppose to the villainy… he truly sees nothing wrong in all of this.

There’s more lightheartedness too, however – that high society woman at a party talking delightedly about murder that I mentioned in my Shadow of a Doubt review is at last here … it’s like the whole movie is about that fine line where the deep-seated sympathy for certain criminals we all carry to an extent becomes itself something too dark – in Bruno, it’s terrifying, but in this old lady? Joyous. There’s Pat Hitchcock’s character too, who I just loved in all her precocious dead-pannery. She’s one of those characters who seems to be the only one who knows exactly what’s going on, only nobody will ever ask her, her insight all stemming again from a chilling exchange of looks between her and Bruno, who almost kills the aforementioned old lady when Pat’s glasses (similar to the ones worn by Guy’s “victim”) distract him. And there’s the wonderful little boy at the electrifying finale on the carousel, as the whole thing spins horrifyingly out of control, giggling like it’s the best ride he’s ever had. This movie’s juxtaposition between these extremes of terror and delight knows absolutely no bounds. I’ve actually fallen in love with it even more just writing about it months later.

Stage Fright Stage Fright 4 star

January 27th, 2011 by surlaroute

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“Everything seems a fine acting role when you’re stage-struck… A plot, interesting cast, even a costume…”

This was one of the very few later Hitchcock movies that I hadn’t yet seen until this procedural run-through of his filmography, and I really had no idea what to expect. The almost cheeky sense of the theatrical here is evident from the off, with a wonderful credits sequence featuring a safety curtain opening onto a wide shot of London.

The story (and this will be a spoiler, so be warned) is essentially a total fabrication with the narrator explaining in flashback what amounts to what I guess is Hitchcock’s largest mcguffin being as the flashback is a lie that dominates most of the movie’s runtime. I don’t mind saying that when this is revealed at the end of the movie, I was more than a little overawed… I really knew nothing of where the movie was going. Thinking back on it now, I already see that it’s really just a gimmick that will never have the same effect on me in future viewings… but nevertheless, it sure worked the first time.

There’s plenty more to enjoy here, however – it’s an unusual cast, I felt, for Hitchcock, with Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, and Alastair Sim in particular rather hamming it up for the cameras, something I personally loved in this instance. I liked the symmetrical use of that safety curtain seen at the beginning returning at the film’s climax. And just as I noticed Hitchcock’s superb continued use of POV shots in The Paradine Case, here I noticed he still made careful use of sound, my favourite instance being when a character walks into a building, the camera following him from behind and the door only being heard closing behind him/us. There’s humour too, of course with almost every minute Alastair Sim is on screen, but also in one of Hitchcock’s cameos, and perhaps my favourite moment in the movie as Richard Todd flees the scene of the crime and a policeman tries to break the window of his car only to have Todd point to an insert of a “safety glass” sticker. I may just be overenthusiastic because it’s so rare for me now to see a “new” (to me) Hitchcock (well – impossible now, I guess, unless they find The Mountain Eagle lol!) … but what else can I say? I enjoyed it.

Rope Rope 4 star

January 14th, 2011 by surlaroute

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This one has been unfortunate enough to have been rather reduced in my mind over the years thanks to its relatively simple reputation. It’s of course famous for being a movie seemingly without cuts, several long takes cleverly stitched together so as to appear (at least almost) entirely seamless. The story is so simple it fits neatly into a technically helpful 75-minute running time: two young men have murdered someone seemingly just for the thrill of it – they hide the body in a wooden chest and procede to have a dinner party in the same room.

Like so many of the Hitchcock movies I’ve watched these past few months, though I’d seen it before (in this case a number of times, I’m sure), I’ve never quite seen it like this. After absorbing myself so completely in his work from the silent, through the British, and his first attempts in American cinema, nothing quite prepares you for the glee with which his camera moves here. It genuinely feels as if the final piece of his style is falling into place. These aren’t just long takes – they’re great long takes, framing the action just as effectively as Hitchcock ever did (he would explain to François Truffaut that though there are few cuts, the film was effectively still “cut” before filming, with his same attitude to the size of the image to tell a story – case in point, the shot following the “action” as James Stewart’s character speculates on what happened before he arrived; or the simple shot of the wooden chest as the housekeeper goes about tidying – clearly on the verge of opening the thing – as the party guests discuss the whereabouts of the murdered person off-camera!).

It’s a thriller in every sense of the word: the proper sense, even. While a murdered body is never more than a few feet from the camera, we can’t help but join the murderers in their perverse delight at making their guests dine over its final resting place. So Hitchcock not only cements his visual style in this movie, he also perfects the balance between dark and light that would define practically everything that followed.

Murder! / Mary Murder! / Mary 3 star

October 1st, 2010 by surlaroute

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I was aware that some time after the splendid Blackmail Hitchcock was to take one more dip in the quality of his output before finally delivering the likes of The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps and moving out to Hollywood, so I was a little worried about the next few movies on his filmography. This, like Juno and the Paycock, however, is perfectly watchable, and at the least is closer to what we’d come to expect from the man.

Much of the action at the start here revolves around a jury at the trial of the woman suspected of the title’s murder. I enjoyed this in a “12 Angry Men” way, Hitchcock’s knack for drawing the characters out of a gathering showing in a big way. There are interesting uses of the theatre world much of the story occurs in, with people in costume being conversely in or out of character providing counterpoint to the proceedings. Hitchcock’s experimentation with sound continues here too with one of the first uses of voiceover, and there’s some quite startling gender and race stuff later on too. It’s all very interesting, but (I know I’ve said this a lot in these reviews so far) nothing close to his best. It’s perhaps notable also for being his only “whodunnit?”, a genre he’d later say he didn’t approve of.

Hitchcock also made a German version of this entitled “Mary” which is one of the most difficult of his works (aside from the lost ones) to find today, but like the silent version of Blackmail I felt compelled to seek it out, though I’ll only briefly review it on the same page as the original… The French critic introducing the original on the DVD I have seemed to think “Mary” was vastly different from Murder! and I’m sure I’d read the same elsewhere but I really didn’t see it. “Mary” really did strike me as mostly the exact same movie made with the actors speaking German and slightly more brisk in the editing department (it’s a few minutes shorter). Like all early Hitchcock “Mary” is worth seeing for curiosity’s sake (most people will think Hitchcock only “remade himself” once with the later Man Who Knew Too Much)… but don’t waste too much time tracking it down.

Blackmail [1929] Blackmail [1929] 4 star

September 30th, 2010 by surlaroute

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This is immediately noteworthy not just for being Hitchcock’s first talkie but also the first ever British talkie, though that’s not the only reason for my having such a tidy breakpoint between the last Hitchcock review and this one. I would’ve probably got to this sooner were it not for there being a scene (the “Knife!” scene, no less) from the silent version on the DVD I have (in the Early Hitchcock set). The scene is so equally effective the way Hitchcock did it silently that I simply had to track down a copy of the full silent version before going any further in watching and rewatching his work.

The thing is, Hitchcock didn’t just adopt sound in his pictures willy-nilly, as easy as that might have been for him to do. Abandoning none of his learned knack for the visual, Hitchcock said much over the years of his approach to the sound component of his cinema. If he was going to have sound in his movies, it would have to contribute something and take nothing away. Just as I noted his limited use of title cards in his earlier silent work, using them only when the image didn’t say plenty, he only has his characters speak here when they have something to say.

Often the sound will even say the complete opposite of what we see, further showing how far ahead of the game Hitchcock was in his use of it. The rapist that initiates Anny Ondra’s troubles in the movie sings a perfectly jaunty song as he makes his advances. When the (still shocking now, let alone in the late Twenties) murder occurs, Hitchcock pulls the sound out entirely using silence, not sound, to enhance the suspense. And then there’s that much talked about knife scene when he simply crowns himself the master of sound, as a woman babbles on about her opinion of the murder, but the only discernible word in her dialogue is “knife” to the wild irritation of Ondra.

But as I say, the film works just as well without the sound. The story concerns Ondra’s character who finds herself subject to the blackmail of the title after someone witnesses her leaving the scene of a crime that had her murder a young artist in self-defense after he tried to rape her (this isn’t spoilers, it all happens in the first 20 minutes or so). Through all of this Hitchcock is simply brimming with visual ideas. A cunning early shot has the blackmailer see police enter his home through a tiny shaving mirror in the corner. A man is arrested and there’s a perfect dissolve from his mugshot to his fingerprint. As Ondra goes up to the rapist’s studio, we get a full cutaway view of them ascending the staircase. And as Ondra wanders the streets of London following the fateful scene, there’s all manner of tricks, including one of my faves as a neon sign advertising a cocktail shaker metamorphoses into a stabbing knife. But the best one was new to me on this viewing: an arresting visual where a the shadow of a window frame crosses Ondra’s neck like a noose as she rises, having just written a note of confession, that tells us all we need to know about her character’s genuine remorse. In the silent version of the famous “Knife!” scene, by the way, the jolting break in the scene comes, ironically, from the ringing of the shop’s doorbell. Hitchcock simply cuts to the bell ringing, and I swear you can practically hear it.

This was one of the first Hitchcock movies I saw at a time when I hadn’t seen that many old movies, let alone early talkies. It was an instant fave then and remains so now. It was fascinating to discover that the original silent version worked so well this time, though. Clearly the sound version is the one to watch, but the comparison is a fascinating one I recommend to anyone interested in this kind of thing. With a blonde central heroine and a climax at famous landmark (the British Museum), not to mention the downright dangerous framing of that blonde as a kind of anti-heroine, I feel this one is even more like the “first true Hitchcock” than The Lodger was. In any case, it’s a must see.

Shutter Island Shutter Island 3 star

July 1st, 2010 by surlaroute

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This movie is the cause of my complete blockage on the review front as I watched it about a month ago and simply refused to believe it left me so blah and with so little to say. I decided to wait until I was ready to give it a second chance. What can I say? I’m still left completely empty.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s stuff to like here. There’s so much, in fact, that this is almost the reason it frustrates me so to feel so underwhelmed by the whole. I want to love this movie. Scorsese does a Shining-like horror? I’m there! And the movie begins so wonderfully ominous, that stock music, the slightly-fake rear-projection on the boat reminding me as much of Hitchcock’s Vertigo as just a little of the opening of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that thrilled me so.

The first time I watched, I lost interest fast. I think I was gone before the very first concentration camp flashback. I did better the second time, holding on to the plot for a good hour before the same thing pretty much happened again. I think my problem with this movie is that it shouldn’t need so much effort to follow, and I realise that some people will take that as in indication of my general intelligence but I’m still saying it. It’s a B movie through and through and Scorsese seems to know it… so why is it nearly 2 and a half hours long and so convoluted when the best it has to offer by way of resolution is Ben Kingsley with a stick literally pointing at a board that shows all the main characters names are anagrams of each other? (oops… SPOILERS)

After much reading of other people’s various interpretations of the story, I think I finally understood the variety of things I was evidently supposed to feel about DiCaprio’s journey in the movie, but I’m afraid to say I simply felt none. The final flashback revealing what happened between him, his wife and his children hit me harder the second time, I will give it that… DiCaprio’s pain in this scene is hard to bear and it’s the one place in the movie where the madness is truly scary… but it comes in the midst of so much nonsense, all of it seeming to take itself far too seriously, that it still didn’t fully sit well with me. I was more frightened by the implications of the twist at the end of James Mangold’s Identity than anything here, I’m afraid. And I know it’s “missing the point” to say it, but truly, Scorsese can do so much better than this.

Star 80 Star 80 4 star

March 3rd, 2010 by surlaroute

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This has been on my “to watch” list for probably nearly a decade now, since I first came across Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Lenny, both of which instantly added him to my list of favourite directors despite his very short resume (in addition to these, there’s only Sweet Charity and Cabaret). It’s amazing in all that time of procrastinating that I never came across any plot info about the movie, and I’m glad… I came to this movie knowing very little about the real life story it’s based on – only that it had something to do with a Playboy model – and as such I got as much out of its shocking turns as it’s possible to get, so I recommend you do likewise and stop reading if you plan on seeing it any time soon, though I won’t get into too much detail (but don’t look at the tags).

This movie reminded me a lot of two other movies I’ve seen in the past couple of years: Lipstick (which shared actress Mariel Hemingway) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with a small (less rollercoaster-ish) dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. I wouldn’t say it’s quite as good as any of these, nor at least three of Fosse’s other works (I’ve not yet seen Sweet Charity, though I hear it’s a pretty straight 60s musical so I doubt it’ll wow me), it’s a particularly slow, procedural build to an electrifying finale that left me emotionally drained. It’s certainly worth a look if you’re into such raw Seventies/Early-80s grit.

The Lovely Bones The Lovely Bones 4 star

January 7th, 2010 by surlaroute

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I was surprised by the emotional path I took through this movie after hearing such a widespread lacklustre response to it elsewhere. I’d been looking forward to it for a long time, since it was announced perhaps, just the idea of Peter Jackson doing a) anything on a “smaller” scale than the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong and b) something that sounded so tonally like one of my favourites of his, Heavenly Creatures. I was slightly annoyed when Saoirse Ronan was cast in a role that sounded to me (though I hadn’t, and still haven’t, read the book it’s based on) perfect for Dakota Fanning – I don’t even know now if that was a real rumour or wishful thinking from me, lol – in any case, subsequent viewings of Atonement warmed me to her as an actress.

The story’s a simple one, kind of Ghost meets What Dreams May Come: a young girl is murdered and views the aftermath from an “in-between” place between earth and heaven, both her and her family unable to move on. Thoughts of revenge are entertained, the girl able to a point to “touch” the real world and send signals to her father in particular, a boy she fell in love with shortly before the incident, and a fellow schoolgirl who has a kind of sixth sense. The movie deals with grief, loss, and moving on quite beautifully as well as adding (I’m told it’s been added in the adaptation process, anyway) a suspenseful thread of the attempt to identify and bring to justice the killer, played quite frighteningly well by Stanley Tucci.

I gave the movie 4 stars at The Auteurs site immediately after the credits rolled but thought of it as a high 4; however the more I think about it, the higher I think that should have been, I feel I’ve been affected by the strange quantity of negative reviews when I can really see nothing wrong with the movie. There’s a turn the story takes at the end where I felt the ending was going to be crushingly unsatisfying, but even that is fixed (hard to explain without spoiling things). I would put the negativity down to it merely being a bad adaptation and that all these negative opinions are coming from fans of the book but it seems too widespread for that explanation… am I the only person who saw the movie but didn’t read the book?

Maybe it’s that people measure Peter Jackson’s work now with a larger scale. I’m certainly one who tends to compare a great artist’s work with what has come before and rate relatively, but one has to remember that in addition to Heavenly Creatures and The Two Towers, he also made King Kong and The Frighteners, both of which this far outweighs. Maybe it’s just that there have been so many great movies and “must-see” movies in the past year and this one drew the short straw. It goes into my favourites, anyway. Saoirse Ronan is phenomenally haunting in the lead, the visual effects used to portray the in-between a really pleasant surprise (it’s not really much “smaller” in these sections than we’re accustomed to from Jackson lol), and there are other notable supporting performances from the likes of Rose McIver (a Power Ranger, I’ve just read, making her all the more impressive here!) as the girl’s sister, a quite mesmerizing turn by Rachel Weisz as her mother. It is a beautifully haunting, sad, yet ultimately strangely uplifting movie that I look forward to seeing again, perhaps after reading the book. I really don’t understand the underwhelming response elsewhere.