A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

d. Charles Chaplin / UK / 108 mins.


Charles Chaplin's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong, provided him with many of firsts. Some of them are positive: his first film in color, his first film in anamorphic widescreen, his first film starring celebrities other than himself (Marlon Brando and Sofia Loren). Others aren't so great: this is his first film since 1923's A Woman in Paris in which he did not star, and much like that film 44 years earlier, A Countess from Hong Kong is rather abysmal.

Brando stars as Ogden Mears, a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps and the son of the world's wealthiest oilman who many expect will become the next secretary of State but who instead becomes the next ambassador to Saudi Arabia. On his last night in Hong Kong, he meets a lovely Russian countess named Natascha (Sophia Loren), and when he wakes the next morning with a wicked hangover, he discovers that she's become a stowaway in his plush cabin aboard a regal ocean liner. She has no passport or identification and seeks only to escape Hong Kong for a better life in America. Brando, playing a stodgy diplomat, wants her out of his life, but gives in and agrees to help her reach the land of the free.

Did I mention this is a comedy? If I haven't, then certainly you must forgive me because this is also Chaplin's first since A Woman in Paris that isn't funny — which is bad news for Countess because the latter was an actual drama. A Countess from Hong Kong genuinely tries for a few laughs, following in the footsteps of romantic comedies before; early in the film most of the humor is meant to come from the chaotic scrambling of Ogden and Natascha as they try to keep her hidden from the other members of the diplomatic corps and the press. But the audience can only sustain so many "there's-a-knock-on-the-door-quick-hide-in-the-bathroom" moments before it becomes overbearingly tedious.

Part of the problem here is that A Countess from Hong Kong originated in a recycled script Chaplin had from the 1930s with Paulette Goddard meant to star as the stowaway countess. Its sensibilities are decidedly of that time, when slapstick and slight banter might have carried the day, and very little of it feels updated in any way. Chaplin could do humor that was both cerebral and silly, but in this film he abandoned almost all aspects of thinking. Before it grows sweeter and more romantic in its second half, we're treated to a pedestrian gag about seasickness where Brando, Loren, and Sydney Chaplin all vomit out the portholes. (Chaplin has a cameo in the scene as a nauseated steward.) Of all of Chaplin's later films, this one is the most problematic in basic storytelling and comedy. The best thing I can say about it is that I was able to watch Sophia Loren for a while — not exactly a stellar endorsement of a film, but when you're adrift this far out, you search the screen for whatever will give you the slightest thrill.

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A King in New York (1957)

d. Charles Chaplin / UK / 105 mins.


A King in New York is the film where Charles Chaplin gets to hose down HUAC — literally. When his character, the disposed ruler of an unnamed European country, is called before the House Un-American Activities Committee near the end of the film on the false accusation that he is a communist, he has become tangled a hose that turns on and gives the red-baiting mongers a douse of pressurized water. It is a thrilling moment, particularly when one knows Chaplin suffered his own disposal in America due to alleged communist sympathies, but it would be unfair to pronounce A King in New York has a revenge film, or even one whose overall mission is the delivery of political satire. This film is forlorn, yes, and humanist too (as they all are). In many ways it's merely a film fueled by the act of stepping back and observing the postwar world gone amok — the loud and bursting sounds of rock n' roll, a generation of cheap exploitation films, the abundance of television and advertising, plastic surgery, the squandered possibilities of atomic power, and investigations into allegiances.

In the great Chaplin tradition of inverting reality for his own needs, his first film made after he wasn't allowed back into America involves a foreign character going to America. King Shahdov (Chaplin) flees his country after a revolution and ends up in the United States, his treasury swindled and his wife in Paris. He is broke and looking for capital, which he sees as a large potential in the safe and peaceful use of atomic energy. But while he waits for the bureaucracy, he bides his time in American society, scenes in which Chaplin pokes fun at commercialism. Seated next to a rock band at dinner, he jitters and shakes from the noise; at a movie theater, he sees a trailer for an exploitation film called "Man or Woman?," in which a man as a woman's voice and vice versa. Most of these are substantially weak, but there is something eerily prophetic and witty in a scene where he is invited to a grand dinner and coaxed into performing Hamlet's soliloquy to entertain the other guests. Although broke, Shahdov has resisted offers to use his fame in commercials, but the dinner is a covert trick to have him appear unknowingly on live television. (His dining partner occasionally turns toward a hidden camera to deliver commercial messages.)

But commercialism is a rather broad topic, and while the first half of A King in New York is relatively humorous and a moment like the dining party is relatively sharp, it lacks a central focus to help all the pieces come together. Once the second half arrives, Chaplin selects politics as his singular cohesive theme, but now at the sake of sharpness. To connect Shahdov to HUAC, Chaplin uses a boys' boarding school. As the king tours the facility, he meets an exuberant young man, the son of left-wing activists (and Chaplin's actual son, Michael) who argues politics with the king. Shahdov develops a soft-spot for the little spunky radical, who he later sees wandering the winter streets of the city, and he takes him in to warm him while trying to get him back to his parents. But when the parents are called before HUAC, Shahdov is guilty by association and pulled in as well. Although Chaplin could have a fine ear for satire, the political edge here is nowhere near as sharp as The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, or Modern Times. Never one to prance around subtly, the young leftist becomes an exceedingly transparent surrogate for Chaplin's own views. The choice of making the child the moral epicenter is interesting in its dichotomy — the boy represents a hopeful future and also a static and meek force at the mercy of others; but the child also invokes a level of naivete that works against Chaplin's message, and worse, the kid is often rather irksome in his self-righteousness (just as Chaplin's own pontifications could become, and this is coming from a guy that typically doesn't mind the director's long-winded pedantries).

McCarthyism provoked numerous responses in the creative arts, from Arthur Miller's The Crucible to the film High Noon, but never had it been called a spade a spade before this film, believed to be the first to use HUAC by name and stand in direct opposition to it. Like The Great Dictator, which fought against the Nazis and fascism, there is a certain brazenness in his approach (although certainly easier to accomplish filming in Europe with the penalty of going unreleased in America). When that hose is unleashed on the committee, it should be a triumphant moment. Instead it's a bit of a letdown.

Although Chaplin was born and raised in England, he'd never made a film there until A King in New York. But his involuntary exile from America (after having his reentry visa was revoked during his publicity tour in London for his previous film, Limelight) forced him to work in England if he wanted to continue making movies. Neither Limelight (1952) nor A King in New York weren't shown in the United States until 1972. Of course the great irony in all of this is that Chaplin was one of the most creative forces working in America during the early part of the twentieth century, a man who did more to launch the comedy movement in Hollywood cinema than many and a man who will probably be known centuries from now. By the time he reached A King in New York, he lacked the astute humor or the rousing occasion. There's enough to admire here, particularly some of the antics in Chaplin's last on-screen leading role, but it feels only significant in terms of completing an entire viewing of Chaplin's works.

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Family Plot (1976)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 120 mins.


Many assumed Alfred Hitchcock would end his career with Frenzy, his 1972 thriller about a necktie strangler in the vein of Jack the Ripper. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to it: his career launched widely in 1927 with The Lodger, a film also concerning a mysterious killer threatening London. And Frenzy, although I have my own personal reservations about it, was certainly seen as closer to the patented Hitchcock aesthetic than Torn Curtain and Topaz before it. But reportedly he consistently displeased at retirement questions while on his publicity tour for Frenzy. "What would I do?" he told one journalist. "Sit in the corner and read a book?"

His next film, however, did come from a book. Victor Canning's The Rainbird Pattern followed a faux clairvoyant and her boyfriend as they search for the missing heir to a rich old woman and cross paths with a vicious kidnapper and his wife. Hitchcock and North by Northwest scribe Ernest Lehman adapted the novel into a script they called "Deceit" but which would eventually become Family Plot — a Hitchcockian film title if there ever were one. The con artist clairvoyant and her boyfriend are played by Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern, both adequate. Karen Black and William Devane, however, are sort of deliciously evil; their chemistry onscreen is strengthened by the hesitation in Black's character, Fran, and the growing menace of Devane's character, Arthur.

Like all of the director's films post-Marnie, Family Plot doesn't quite work as a whole. Most surprising is the fact that the direction feels so strangely anonymous, even more than the failure that was Topaz, and for once it can't be chalked up to the director's apathy. There is little by way of technical sophistication in the film, and most of the suspense and excitement occurs during bursts of quick editing. Whereas Hitchcock had always been a master of composition and the power of the image, Family Plot relies more on its, well, plot to grab the audience.

Lehman's script is far from his clever work on North by Northwest. The source text was much more maniacal than Hitchcock desired and he ordered Lehman to tone it down; in the novel, evil triumphs and the seemingly good characters die, and although Hitchcock loved exploring the darker side, it had never won in one of his films. The story's singular strength is the way it initially plays with audience allegiance in its first half; neither couple, the clairvoyant and her boyfriend or the kidnappers, can technically be considered good. There is only less bad (attempting to swindle $10,000 from an old woman by pretending to be a medium) and what turns out to be worse (kidnapping men and collecting jewels as a ransom). That motif isn't unfamiliar Hitchcock territory; doubling and contrasting is best exemplified in Strangers on a Train, and rooting for a less-than-ethical character has never been done better by anyone than Hitchcock with Psycho. But for a film that feels as if it's trying to belong in 1976, its soft duality feels too dated.

Moreover, the dialogue isn't as punchy and the humor certainly lacks energy. One of Family Plot's supposed banner moments for laughter, where a car's accelerator becomes lodged and the breaks are cut, feels like a pathetic rehash of Roger Thornhill's drunken escape from Vandamm's thugs. Toss in Barbara Harris kicking and screaming like a lunatic and the humor becomes more of a turn-off than anything else.

It is correct to say that Family Plot is lighter fare as far as Hitchcock is concerned. This is the sort of loose and carefree variety of comedy not seen since his work in the mid-1950s — i.e., The Trouble with Harry (although Plot lacks the black humor bite) and To Catch a Thief (although Plot lacks the glossy and gorgeous veneer of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the Riviera). But while it's lighter, it shouldn't be dismissed of its more sinister elements. Hitchcock was nearly 77 years old upon the release of Family Plot, and what once felt like a twisted pleasure in death and murder in his earlier works carries an eerie feeling of mortality in his later works. More a few scenes take place in a cemetery, yet somber they are not. In one scene, a young woman carving a headstone listens to pop rock music so loud she's told to turn it off by the offbeat caretaker.

Hitchcock planned a fifty-fourth film — The Short Night, a spy film based on a true story of a British double agent — and between 1976 and 1979, he and writer David Freeman worked extensively on the script. Once finished, however, Hitchcock knew he could never film it. Family Plot would be the final film in a career that spanned more than half a century and produced many irrefutable masterpieces in the form. In many ways it's a strange film to have at the end of the Hitchcock catalogue, save one important element. In the moment, after it appears that Barbara Harris's character has performed a genuine act of clairvoyance, she looks directly into the camera and winks. It was reportedly not planned, but Hitchcock kept it. In the context of the film, it is ridiculously cornball. But you have to think a part of Hitchcock delighted in the fact that the final moment in what would be his final film was a wink.

After all, hadn't he been essentially been doing that at us for fifty years?

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Frenzy (1972)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 116 mins.


Returns to form are often greeted with commercial and critical exuberance, and even if such assessments are occasionally inflated, as they are with Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, there's no denying the satisfaction gleaned from the experience of a director in familiar territory. This, Hitchcock's penultimate film, is a casserole of the director's favorite themes: a murder-by-numbers plot with a bumbling police detective on the heels of a wrongfully accused man. But as close as Frenzy seems to the heart of what it means to be Hitchcockian, there's also an unshakable feeling that we've been whisked away to a foreign land where subtle craftsmanship yields to the opportunity of gratuity. I'm no prude when it comes to sex and violence, but the lack of inhibition on Hitchcock's behalf makes Frenzy somewhat of only a novelty to me — it is certainly interesting to see what the director does as an artist unshackled from content limitations (and no doubt it put to rest what could have been decades of debate regarding what he could have done without censors), but it is also spotty and a little wearisome.

Which makes it all the more ironic, when you think about it. Hitchcock spent almost his entire Hollywood career fighting the rigorous standards of the Production Code; there were always liars, murderers, criminals, the morally corrupt, and the mentally unstable in his films, but there was also a sophistication and elegance in the way he cut corners to squeak by the censors. (Although the Production Code existed in opposition to every First Amendment principle I hold dear, I'm still of the mind that its inherent difficulties forced creativity out of its artists; the effect, while constitutionally reprehensible, is nonetheless artistically rewarding.) When the Code was scrapped in favor of a letter-rating system in 1968, Hitchcock, in the twilight of his career, was finally able to go places on-screen that he never could have gone before.

For Frenzy, he returned to his native England — his first British film is more than twenty years — to make what would be his only R-rated feature. It is a postwar Jack the Ripper-inspired thriller, adapted from Arthur La Bern's novel Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, about a murderer who asphyxiates his victims with neckties. Hitchcock discloses the true identities of all involved within the first half-hour of Frenzy, but nevertheless I'll avoid giving too much away about the plot; if you haven't seen it, one of its strengths is that Hitchcock tantalizes the audience with the faintly veiled mystery and then completely abandons any pretense that we're to be the detectives. He wants you to know who the Necktie Killer is, wants to watch the depictions of rape and strangulation (not to mention nudity), wants the audience as always to be one step ahead of the bumbling police force. The suspense isn't quite as tight as it should be, but what is created in the space between the innocent man and the guilty man is a intriguing twist: which one will make the first false move? As such, Frenzy is ultimately about its two male leads — Jon Finch and Barry Foster — who provide two of the most interesting performances in a Hitchcock film since his early work in the 1960s. The film's female characters come off as too slight, however, and the chief inspector (Alec McCowan) doesn't deliver the laughs Hitchcock wants him to.

Aside from the suspense not being quite as taut as it could have been, the freedom to see the crimes somehow diminishes their shock value. Some have argued the simple fact that we are witnessing tremendous violence in a Hitchcock film should make them shocking enough. Perhaps in 1972 upon Frenzy's premiere that was the case, but today the violence doesn't translate as well as the sublimely crafted sequences in Hitchcock's earlier films, where he was forced to make your imagination work.

The film does have a great moment of imagination at work, however, and it's also the most dazzling sequence in the whole film. Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer rightly convinced the director that showing multiple murders would be redundant. The Necktie Killer's first on-screen attack is prolonged, vicious, and meticulously staged (the quick editing resembles, but fall short of, the infamous shower scene in Psycho). The next time the Necktie Killer strikes, however, is one of the most memorable shots in all of Hitchcock's films: the camera smoothly follows him and his victim up the stairs to his apartment where the camera then stops, watches them enter, then slowly reverses its course down the stairs and out of the building where any sounds from the apartment have been drowned out by the diegetic noises on the street. It's all done in a single shot, and it's superb in its technique, all the more so because not a single violent moment is seen yet we clearly know what's going on inside. The effect is far spookier than any filmed murder could be, and if Frenzy had more of these moments — as opposed to the killer's loony scrummaging in the potato truck as he searches for a lost item and the body of his victim serves as comic relief — I think what is a rather adequate film could have been a final brush with greatness.

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Limelight (1952)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 137 mins.


This review discusses details of the film's ending.

Although infrequently screened and often derided in contemporary conversations, Limelight is Charles Chaplin's most personal and autobiographical film. He would go on to make two more films after this 1952 comedy-drama, but this is unmistakably his swan song — and what a graceful and touching goodbye it is. In it he plays an aging music hall comedian named Calvero who helps a young and suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom) appreciate her life and her art. They form a bond, and she falls in love with him; but knowing he is in the twilight of his life, he bows back so she can form a relationship with a younger man. The only thing left is to take a final curtain call.

It says a great deal about Chaplin that he would try something as brazenly self-reflective as Limelight. Perhaps he believed he owed it to himself, or perhaps he believed he deserved it (his large ego could have simply wanted it). Whatever the reason, I'm not sure many other artists could pull this off as well as Chaplin does. The film is set it in England on the eve of World War I — 1914, to be exact, the year Chaplin himself debuted. His aged comedian Calvero (which, like Chaplin, is a C-name with seven letters) is inhabited so wholly by Chaplin that even those unfamiliar with the man can sense an immediate connection between the actor and his character. Limelight was one of the earliest Chaplin films I saw as a teenager, and there is a surprising amount of visibility in the emotional closeness of the two, both of whom have a prime that seems far behind them and whose audiences has abandoned them. Chaplin was often not given the credit he deserved for his acting, and when you consider how laudatory audiences can be when an actor or actress seemingly adopts a character persona similar to their own (Mickey Rourke in last year's The Wrestler, for example), it's a shame more credit hasn't been given to Chaplin for this touching and seasoned role.

Certainly it is no mistake that Calvero is the only Chaplin character to die on screen; other Chaplin incarnations have stepped back and allowed others to experience happiness (the Tramp does in The Circus, for example), and still others go to their deaths (Henri Verdoux, most notably), but as Chaplin was so in control of every aspect of his films, we must give proper consideration to the on-screen death of Calvero. The plot would work without it, but the meditation on life, death, art, and impression would be null.

Chaplin has success as well in what are his final set pieces of slapstick, odes to his early silent days. Like The Great Dictator, Limelight returns to the structure that alternates between the progress of the plot and the timeouts for sideshows. It's a quality to most of Chaplin's sound films that many dislike, but when executed well, the sketches can be timeless — Adenoid Hinkel dancing with the inflatable globe in The Great Dictator, or the most famous sequence of Limelight, the pitch-perfect pantomime routine performed by Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Limelight is the only narrative film both men appeared in, and indeed, the scene alone might singularly justify a screening of the film. Reportedly Chaplin's urged Keaton to join the film when he learned how down on his luck Keaton had become (although it's also been said Chaplin just wanted someone good at pantomime; others contend Keaton appeared after realizing how depressed Chaplin was). Over the years the scene has generated a great deal of rumors and controversy — whether Keaton was better than Chaplin, whether Chaplin selfishly cut Keaton's screen time, etc., all questions that originate in the unsolvable argument of which comedian is better. People familiar with production, as well as Keaton and Chaplin themselves, have practically squashed all the rumors as nonsense. I've always thought it showed maturity on Chaplin's part to share the necessary scene of Calvero's final triumph with Keaton.(But then again, it might be the only bit of maturity Chaplin showed toward Keaton; in Keaton's autobiography he called Chaplin the "greatest silent comedian of all time," and in Chaplin's autobiography he doesn't even mention Keaton.)

Outrage over Chaplin's politics prevented many in America from seeing Limelight for nearly two decades. While traveling in Britain for the premiere of the film, he was infamously denied reentry on the suspicion that he was a Communist. (In his autobiography, he corrected the U.S. government's paranoia: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.") Many theater owners, still angry about Chaplin's critique of capitalism and the Western war machine in Monsieur Verdoux, picked up on this line and did not screen it. It failed to meet the distribution standards for the Academy Awards in 1952, but when it was given a proper screening in Los Angeles during 1972, Chaplin, Ray Rasch, and Larry Russell won the Oscar for Best Score — the only competitive Oscar Chaplin ever won. The score is arguably Chaplin's best, memorably haunting and wonderfully expressive.

But such unfettered emotional displays fuel the typical strikes against Limelight, namely that it's too sentimental. Fair — but tell me this: what Chaplin film isn't too anything? As a filmmaker, Chaplin perfected emotion taken to the extreme; he is among the few who have made me cry from laughter (The Circus and Modern Times) and just flat out cry (The Gold Rush and City Lights). His critique of totalitarianism had him playing a blatant and buffoonish take-off of Adolf Hitler; his critique of Western society had him playing a polygamist Bluebeard who knocks off wealthy women so he can support his invalid wife and child. Chaplin was not a man to take a subtle approach to art, and if Limelight baldly teeters along the razor of sentimentality (and certainly it does), it's the sort of sentimentality and human drama that Chaplin himself thrived on and could make enjoyable in the most unabashed of ways. Stretches of Limelight are no more and no less sentimental than many of his silent films; only here emotion has been set to sound. Granted, if Limelight is guilty of anything (and it isn't perfect), it's the occasional over-reliance on platitudinous dialogue, which feels all the creakier when compared to the sharpened barbs in Monsieur Verdoux. But this is a film of warmth and remembrance, of frailty and finality, and such things are bound to offend the sterner sensibilities of others. As for me, Chaplin had my heart from start to finish.

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Topaz (1969)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 143 mins.


There's a part of me that is sympathetic to the notion that a mediocre film from Alfred Hitchcock is still better than most other films. I'm guilty of extending that analysis to a few films that I recognize as interesting only because I bring to them a love, knowledge, and admiration of Hitchcock. If my views on some of his films are slightly inflated due to my interest in the man and his art, don't take that to believe that I think all of his films are above reproach. He made his share of bad movies, and a painful clunker like Topaz is particularly in need of some yellow police tape and a caution to stay away at nearly all costs.

Reeling from the relative catastrophe that was Torn Curtain, Hitchcock climbed back onto the spy thriller bandwagon with Topaz, released three years later and after much reflection on the director's part. It's disappointing that this film fails in virtually every way Torn Curtain did: bloated and overlong, lacking a central and cohesive theme, victim to its scattershot pacing and suffering from an absence of any thrills. Like the previous film, Topaz contains a few moments worth the Hitchcock name, but most of what we consider to be the director's hallmarks, from the narrative to the stylistic, are curiously absent. By the denouement, there is perhaps only a single shot that might stick with you in the coming days. If you were to dust Topaz for fingerprints, you might not turn up any of Hitchcock's.

It's not surprising how things could never quite come together for Topaz. The first draft of the script was written by Leon Uris, who adapted his own novel into something Hitchcock believed was impossible to film. To salvage Uris' script, the director turned to Samuel Taylor, who had delivered a delicately psychological and rich layered detective story for Vertigo; but even if Taylor's finished script is twice as good as Uris's, then I think that says more about how awful the first draft must have been. This is the director's longest film, and it feels like it. Although the plot could have been developed into something substantial, there are missed opportunities from start to finish, and what is too convoluted at first turns too simplistic in the end. (Far too simplistic, if you ask me, but Hitchcock was put in the corner by the studio after the original ending didn't test well. He shot three possible endings, and what made it onto the film is the least offensive, although that's hardly praise.)

Set against the Cuban Missile Crisis, two spies — one American (John Forsythe) and one French (Frederick Stafford) — are working together to help bring down a global network. There is some general international intrigue, including attention paid to the beautiful Juanita (an under-valued Karin Dor), mistress to the French agent who is also involved with a Castro-lookalike (John Vernon). But the affairs of men and governments is not woven together with any intricacy by Hitchcock, whose Notorious is among the best films to explore the murky line between love and duty. Perhaps you, like me, are occasionally willing to let something of depth and nuance slide in exchange for excitement and action, but Topaz lacks those latter elements as well (largely attributed in some circles to that its fact leading men are bland and its only alluring character, Dor's Juanita, disappears all too swiftly; even Torn Curtain, for all its shallowness, had Paul Newman, for God's sake). More damning than the lack of psychological exploration is the fact that even the Cuban Missile Crisis itself feels flat and astonishingly drab, and when you have a director that can send you to the edge of your seat as two characters search for a wine bottle, flubbing the brink of nuclear annihilation does not bode well for the film at large.

In addition to being Hitchcock's longest film, it was also his most expensive (and his biggest commercial flop). His team had fully dissolved, and Hitchcock knew he had another dud on his hands. The seams show where he tried to fix what he could see was too gone to rescue. With its foray into Cuba as well as on-location shooting in Harlem and Copenhagen, Topaz attempted to correct the bland Eastern European tourism of Torn Curtain by taking its characters to exotic locales; but the promise of exoticism is never paid off.

Then there's a simple matter of mechanics. Typically Hitchcock rewards his audience with something of value in almost every scene, but for Topaz only two moments are noteworthy. The first, a rather superb moment involving the theft of a red briefcase belonging to Cuban militants, I'd nearly forgotten about until I went back through my notes. The second, however, has stayed with me since I first saw the film. In the moment of Juanita's death (see above in the accompanying still), the camera flows into a bird's-eye view angle and captures Dor's purple dress flowing out from underneath her with the liquidity of oozing blood. Such a moment is proof Hitchcock wasn't finished yet, but for one stupendous shot to come in the vast expanse of 142 minutes is be drowned in a sea of problematic filmmaking.

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The Best Films of 2001

My list for Counting Down the Zeroes is up over at Film for the Soul. I'll officially post the list here in a week after you've given proper and polite traffic to our series coordinator. Feel free to leave your own list there, and feel free to castigate me here. (Don't want Ibetolis' site getting too messy.)

— T.S.

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Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 124 mins.


The following review discusses major plot points.

The appeal of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux is, I think, rooted in the dichotomous fact that it's profoundly anti-Chaplin and yet a near-pure embodiment of his philosophy and creativity. A story about a struggling banker during the 1930s global depression who marries wealthy women, coolly knocks them off, and casually pockets their money to support his invalid wife and charming son is not the sort of film an audience would expect from Chaplin, particularly because it's also a blistering post-war critique of western society. But it also makes a great deal of sense that Chaplin, whose ferocity in politics had grown to match his famously gigantic ego, would come to end up with something like Monsieur Verdoux, a curious and complex and ultimately flawed black comedy. The distance between this film and his silent films is quite remarkable; Chaplin as Henri Verdoux doesn't just kill women for their life savings — he kills The Tramp as well, once and for all.

At its best, Verdoux is methodical in its take-down of war and violence, less bombastic than The Great Dictator and more pointed than A King in New York. All three films possess urgent political messages, but only Verdoux's continues to feel crucially relevant. The lasting impression is of Chaplin's mind at work, and for sympathetic liberals what he has to say is rousing and sincere. Words matter more in Verdoux than any Chaplin film previously; although he had already done sound and dialogue in The Great Dictator, it wasn't until Verdoux that he made his first true film in sound. The film lacks the elaborate and virtually silent setpieces that are worthy many good laughs in The Great Dictator. The topic here may be murder and death — the most corporeal of subjects — but for Verdoux Chaplin took everything out of the physical realm and made it more cerebral. The dialogue is punchier, wittier, subtler than any he'd written before. The metaphor built into the man is stronger in Verdoux than The Great Dictator, and the satire is less an indictment on something singular (Hitler and totalitarianism) than it is on something more dynamic, widespread, and fragile (democratic Western societies).

"Under the right circumstances, murder can be funny," Chaplin is to have said, and Verdoux is a funny film. For long stretches, Chaplin plays his hand close to his chest, preferring to drop his jokes with dainty wit and boyish insouciance. His murders have an air of the Hitchcockian — in one he menacingly ascends a staircase after one of his wives, cautioning her that everything has been taken care of, and awakens the next day to jaunty music. Others, or rather other attempts I should say, are patent Chaplinesque absurdity. Comedienne Martha Raye plays Annabella, an ingratiating and extraordinarily lucky lottery winner who continually and unknowingly foils Verdoux's attempted slayings. (The director Claude Chabrol has suggest Annabella epitomizes the obnoxious pluck of Americanism that the Europeans were never able to kill off.)

So when Verdoux takes Annabella fishing with the intent to drown her, and just as he's about to chloroform her she rocks the boat and he falls backward, the cheesecloth landing on his own face, Chaplin's humor radar is exacting. Ironically, if Verdoux were simply a comedy of these murderous errors, it might have been more successful upon its initial release. What makes it thrive, especially today, is Chaplin's equally shrewd ability to do math. One murder can be funny; one murder repeated for a film can build rhythm; any more than that, particularly as you begin to approach the level of warfare, and there's nothing worth joking about. In that regard, although it's considerably darker and bleaker than his other films, Verdoux is no less humanistic than Chaplin's previous works. The most famous and poignant scenes come at the end, where Chaplin is as moralistic as The Great Dictator but with a softer touch. On the stand at his trial, he revels in his own homicidal amateurism compared to the industry war complex, scientifically honed and encouraged around the globe. As he awaits his beheading, a few of his final words to a reporter loom as some of the best Chaplin ever penned: "Wars, conflict — it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify."

The production history of Verdoux contributes to understanding how the film succeeds when it does. Orson Welles, fresh off Citizen Kane, wanted to make a film about Henri Désiré Landru, a real Bluebeard serial killer, and offered Chaplin the lead. Always one to call his own shots, Chaplin bought the idea from Welles and wrote the script for himself to direct. Although the entire script was initially rejected by Joseph Breen and his readers at the Production Code office as "unacceptable," "blasphemous" and atheistic, and guilty of trivializing murder, Chaplin only had to make a few tweaks in dialogue and scenes to gain approval. More significantly, however, is the fact that for the first time in his long career, Chaplin was forced to make certain concessions. He had previously had such broad creative control over his films that he was able to take his time, experiment on the set, and feel his way through to the end. However, the soaring cost of film stock after the war canceled his traditional creative process of improvisation and perpetual tweaking. Whereas he'd previously film a scene dozens of times, trying something new with each take until he proclaimed he'd found it and was ready to move on, Verdoux forced Chaplin to be completely prepared — he began filming with storyboards, a finished script (which was new to him), and a shooting schedule. Writing the film took years; all told, making it took less than three months.

The controversy that followed, however, would last a lifetime. Chaplin planned the film's Washington, D.C., premiere to follow the day a close friend was scheduled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, intentionally stoking the flames already burning around him. Because the film pulled no punches in its critique of war and mass murder, throngs of sore post-war Americans came out in protest. (Incidentally, it was a hit in Europe.) United Artists caved and withdrew it from circulation. Congress called Chaplin a communist, senators called for his deportation, and in the coming years his reentry visa would be revoked and he'd spend the rest of his life living in Europe. (Still, Chaplin's script, which had originally been rejected in toto, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which went to the decidedly happy Miracle on 34th Street.)

And certainly one of the more intriguing footnotes is that Verdoux has a cinéaste favorite, even more than his silent masterpieces. Bosley Crowther of the Times, writing in a retrospective of cinema's 50th birthday, called it "the most extraordinary of all Chaplin's films." André Bazin and Federico Fellini embraced as a masterpiece. Jonathan Rosenbaum and others count it among the century's finest comedies. The great James Agee devoted three essays to it in The Nation, continuing to praise it even after it closed. (I've even seen it sitting in the cushy #1 spot on a reproduction of Agee's list of favorite films.) All of this praise doesn't surprise me — film criticism can sometimes serve as a necessary corrective to previous artistic misunderstandings. But the greatness of Monsieur Verdoux, if it's there, continues to elude me. The wit is sharp, yes, and Verdoux's failed attempts at murdering Annabella do provide some belly laughs, but the strongest sections of the film bookend a soggy middle, which I think keeps it from true greatness. But this is still a wicked and important film, and above all, a testament to the fact that there was and will only ever be one cinematic mind like Chaplin's. You can't ignore a fact like that; as Verdoux himself says, numbers sanctify.

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Torn Curtain (1966)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 128 mins.


The following review discusses significant plot points.

Torn Curtain has its origins in the James Bond series, which Alfred Hitchcock believed had been stealing liberally from his work in North by Northwest. There's a relative amount of truth in that, particularly the first few (and the best) installments. He became infatuated with the idea of making a "real" spy movie, something that erased the glamour and instead showed the darker side of espionage. The story of an American scientist posing as a turncoat (and fooling his own fiancée) to slip into the Soviet Union to collect intelligence seemed like it might just be twisted enough to show a spy get his hands dirty. Hitchcock had reason to believe a film like this would be a breeze — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps, Notorious, North By Northwest are all espionage jewels. But this project would prove to be a mistake for Hitchcock; his remaining cinematic collaborations fell to pieces, and the resulting film is among his worst.

In fact, everything that's wrong with this milquetoast political thriller has been passed down through film lore: the on-set squabbling between the director and his method-actor leading man, Paul Newman; squabbling between the director and master composer Bernard Herrmann; squabbling between the director and the studio, between the director and ... well, you get it. One after another, the pieces fell apart on Torn Curtain. If the rationale behind the film was purely dubious (why couldn't he have been satisfied with the glossy and decidedly unrealistic spy flick he had perfected in North by Northwest?), then the final product was doomed from its launch.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Torn Curtain is that it features Paul Newman in his '60s heyday, and neither he nor Hitchcock seem capable of raising the viewer's pulse. Much of that can be attributed to the anemic script, adapted first by Irish novelist Brian Moore and polished by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. (It should be noted Hitchcock tried to lure Vladimir Nabokov on board, to no success.) The script simply provides little by way of genuine suspense; the cinematographer, John F. Warren, and the editor, Bud Hoffman, lack the rhythmic rapport of Robert Burks and George Tomasini, so the sequences that should show the dirty side of spy life are too stagy. (The most famous sequence in the film is called "the farmhouse murder" in Hitchcock-devotee circles; the idea, as Hitchcock imagined it, was that the audience should observe how difficult it actually is to kill another person. Enticing, yes, but it falls flat, too.)

In theory, the typically wonderful Newman would be great as the next generation of Hitchcockian leading man, a slot most frequently filled by Cary Grant and James Stewart, but his performance as Michael Armstrong, an American physicist/spy, comes off as too apathetic and bland. But what worked for Hitchcock in the 1940s and 1950s was changing in the younger guard. Newman became frustrated because Hitchcock consistently rebuffed his attempts to understand the character to a greater degree (your motivation, Hitchcock is to have told him, is your salary). Newman's resignation is palpable in the character of Armstrong, and it doesn't help matters much that Julie Andrews is utterly miscast as Sarah, Michael's nitwit assistant/fiancée.

Accounts vary as to how excited Hitchcock was about the two leads. Hitchcock's agent, Lew Wasserman, lobbied for them, but apparently they weren't high on Hitchcock's radar. Still, he was familiar with both and he relished the chance to undercut their images, specifically Andrews's, by placing the two as an unmarried couple in bed together in the sexually charged first scene. It's slightly humorous in that deft Hitchcock way, but there isn't much joyous in Andrews's performance. The role seems to call for a firm but skeptical woman who believes she has lost her husband to the global enemy. (He can't tell her of his spy work, after all.) Deciding she'd rather have him than her home country, she sneaks overseas with him, but the film portrays her from this point on as confused, muddied, blank, and ineffectual. First drafts of the script call for Sarah to be the viewpoint character; between the two in this incarnation, Newman is certainly more engaging, and I wouldn't have wanted to see how Andrews would have fared as the lead. But the film is ultimately weaker on a narrative level for switching its point-of-view because the possibilities of Sarah's psychological dislocation prove more intriguing than Michael's scientist-as-spy persona. And once you set weak performances and a weak script against a set with a color palette dominated by shades of gray, it's not difficult to experience the sluggish.

The general lethargy can also be traced back to the score. Torn Curtain was the first Hitchcock film since 1955's The Trouble with Harry that did not have its music written or overseen by Bernard Herrmann. (He advised the aural elements of The Birds, but there was no formal score.) Hitchcock might have begun the film in denial, but by its end he knew what he had on his hands and wanted Herrmann to save the film outright — "If you cannot do this then I am the loser," the director wired to the composer ahead of Herrmann's work. However, Hitchcock had also come to believe the composer was recycling too much of his work and the director and the studio both wanted Herrmann to produce a pop score to fit with the height of pop rock in the mid-1960s. (Horrifically, Universal even wanted a possible musical number for Andrews.) Herrmann agreed, but turned in a traditional score anyway. Fighting ensued; in Hitchcock's version, he fired Herrmann, and in Herrmann's version, he quit. The absence of such a score — pins-and-needles mixed with heavy and sonorous brass — affects the film in exactly the way Hitchcock imagined it would. What was sluggish and needed emergency resuscitation received no such thing.

Devotees, particularly myself, are always curious as to why Hitchcock's later films are perplexingly bad. After all, he is one of cinema's giants, with so many masterpieces under his belt that he's secured his place in the pantheon of twentieth century art. Keith Waterhouse, who co-scripted the polishing of the film's first draft, has as sound of a theory as I've ever heard on why Hitchcock's later work suffers. It has to do with numerous miscalculations on the director's part: a strong sense of caution and trepidation previously unfelt in the 1950s; an incapability to new crews and actors; a preoccupation with seemingly irrelevant details; and, finally, a move downward toward satisfying the expectations of a younger audience instead of challenging them as he had done for the previous two decades. A Herrmann score (for example) wouldn't have saved Torn Curtain, but it's indicative the situation Hitchcock was in: he wanted something more contemporary, but was unaware how to pull it off. His reign as the Master was coming to an unfortunate close, and this sort of spy film, which might have worked in a different incarnation thirty years prior, became one of the most mediocre offering from the director, as tense as a limp balloon.

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Thanks, LAMMY nominee voters

So, Screen Savour picked up a few 2009 LAMMY nominations, and that sort of recognition amongst one's peers (and strangers) is about as great a thing as a chap can ask for. I'm honored to be in three categories, although I can't help but feel I'm a supporting actor in a field of Heath Ledgers. Anyway, it's nice to be noticed and I'm thrilled many blogs and writers I nominated made the cut in many categories. Touch choices lie ahead.

You can go vote for yours at LAMB between now and May 31.

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Marnie (1964)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 130 mins.


The one thing people seem to agree upon when it comes to Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie is that it's a fascinating movie; everything else is up for grabs. It's perhaps the most critically divisive of his fifty-one feature films, which alone makes it mandatory viewing. It was derided upon its release as hokey, meandering, and simplistic; it's been given second life by Hitchcock aficionados who, in remeasuring the Master's legacy, declare it neo-expressionistic, psychologically complex, and cinematically influential. The two most famous takes on it come from Pauline Kael and Robin Wood. Kael said it was "Hitchcock scraping bottom" and "hardly seems worth the trouble." Wood, wading consciously into hyperbole, said, "If you don't like Marnie, you don't like Hitchcock. If you don't love Marnie, you don't love cinema."

I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't think you can say, as Kael does, that Marnie is Hitchcock at the bottom until you've seen Torn Curtain and Topaz, released within the following five years. Unlike Wood, I think the socially responsible thing for Hitchcock (and film) lovers to do is approach this film with a right blend of reverence and skepticism. But what lover of cinema can't help but be fascinated by a film that's simultaneously lauded for harkening back to Hitchcock's roots as a title designer during the silent era of filmmaking in Germany, and conversely accused of being sloppy, lazy, shallow, and overtly artificial?

Throughout this retrospective on Hitchcock, I've placed emphasis on his collaborative nature, the names and talent that he used from film to film, particularly in his 1950s powerhouse heyday. Marnie is the end of the line for many of those collaborations. It was the last film edited for Hitchcock by George Tomasini, who died shortly after its release; it was the last film shot by cinematographer Robert Burks, who did not work with Hitchcock on Torn Curtain and died in a house fire on 1968;

For a director interested in staircases and all their metaphorical treats, it's fitting that his career should wind down in a way that mimics a stair-step descent. Psycho is his last masterpiece, his grand experiment and the film for which he will forever be remembered. The Birds was his final great thriller, the sort of movie that isn't flawless but is as good as any non-masterpiece that reflects the sort of high-quality production that most of his films possess. Marnie, for all intents and purposes, is the last Hitchcock film Hitchcock made. Everything else afterward — four more films, to be exact — wouldn't have the same twisted soul.

Tippi Hedren — fresh off Hitchcock's previous film, The Birds — is the titular Marnie, a kleptomaniac with a fear of thunderstorms and the color red who bounces from town to town, dyeing her hair and acquiring jobs as secretaries in order to swindle thousands from different companies. Her thieving streak runs afoul when she encounters Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a widower who ranks in a printing company. Rutland is intrigued by Marnie's mania (actually, intrigued might be too soft a word; it's outright fetishistic) and blackmails her into marriage. Love, then you might say, is not the modus operandi. Mark approaches Marnie from his classically trained zoological past and his own psychological position, intent on curing her, even to the point of forcing her to attempt to overcome issues by raping her on their honeymoon.

Evan Hunter, the author of the first draft of the screenplay, was possibly fired because he was too disturbed by the rape scene, which was the essential element Hitchcock latched onto in Winston Graham's 1961 novel of the same name; when he wouldn't write it to Hitchcock's specifications, he was apparently let go. Hitchcock's wife, Alma, suggested the director bring a woman onto finish the screenplay, and thus Jay Presson Allen joined up. Hitchcock relished her straightforwardness, and she became one of his many co-worker crushes. Allen herself is the proponent of one of the theories as to why the film doesn't succeed like the director's others: "He loved what I wrote, he shot what I wrote, and he shouldn't have."

In other words, the light Hitchcockian touch was replaced with a Hitchcockian sledgehammer. As Marnie stands, things are Hitchcock-turned-to-eleven: characters reeling from tumultuous sexual psychology and begging to be analyzed to their Freudian extremes; dueling forces of dominance and submission; the obsession with blondes and the latent misogyny; the suspense, the melodrama, and the bizarre expressionism; and its utterly unclassifiable existence. The result, however, is somewhat unexpected. Because the director's themes and motifs are cranked up to their loudest setting, they tend to drown out the simple underlying mechanics of the movie. And for being so provocative, it's also a bit stuffy. There are a few great scenes, proving Hitchcock hadn't lost all his magic. A perfectly constructed shoeless theft by Marnie, for example, is about as suspenseful as anything else in Hitchcock's canon. But the good is slightly off-balanced by the strange, including pretty much everything about the ending.

Hitchcock was a man who had to settle perpetually in his career — he never snagged Gary Cooper for Foreign Correspondent, he never convinced the studio to give him William Holden for Strangers on a Train — but still, he often made the best of what he had. One of the curious aspects of his later films, however, is the profound and tangible sense of settling. The job of an actor is often to stand in for something larger, but many of his later films have actors who feel like they're also standing in for other actors, a sense that can mar a film from the start. Bond-era Connery and post-Birds Hedren do adequate jobs in performing roles Hitchcock clearly envisioned for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But this time, Kelly wasn't merely a pipe-dream for Hitchcock. She had been wanting to get back into a film, and her husband, Prince Rainier, signed off on the project. Without politics and contracts, she might have actually ended up in the film, but the citizens of Monaco (angry at the film's sex-charged themes) and MGM (who demanded Kelly return to fulfill her commitments to them if she was going to work for other studios) essentially nixed the deal. My bias is, like Hitchcock, to Kelly; I've never found Hedren to be an engaging screen presence, and with Marnie she's not even particularly convincing. It's unfair to the film to wonder what Kelly would have brought to it, but there is this undeniable feeling in me that the right level of subtlety on Kelly's part could have positively counterbalanced the heft of the expressionism.

Still, I hold firm to my original statement. Two factors make Marnie mandatory viewing, regardless of how you feel about it in the end: the divisiveness among critics and scholars, and the fact that it's Hitchcock's final film before he moved into the final stage of his career. It's flawed, but it's not void of entertainment. There are some wonderful set pieces, though not enough to save the entire film. It might not be the masterwork some claim it is, but it's also too often unfairly dismissed simply for not being as good as his forays into psychological realms.

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