Saturday, October 31, 2020

1940 revisited on Netflix

Round numbers of years since something has happened always make for a convenient news peg, as it were, to reconsider that event. That's especially so in movies, where they often try to time sequels, or remakes, or reboots, to some multiple of five years after the original.

It's still a bit interesting that Netflix is, probably through sheer coincidence, doubling down on a year eight decades in the past.

The first instance is Ben Wheatley's Rebecca, which I watched last night. I've made the movie seem a bit more interesting than it actually was through the choice of this poster. It's a lot better than the blander one I could have chosen, which more befits the mode of this film:

The original film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel came out, of course, 80 years ago, in 1940. I say "of course" not only because it won the Academy Award for best picture that year, so certain cinephiles would be familiar with it that way, but also because it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, so certain other cinephiles would be familiar with it that way. 

In fact, part of the reason I chose it for the night before Halloween was because I remembered how Hitchcock had made this melodrama into quite the eerie ghost story, using his incomparable cinematic gifts. We spent a week dissecting these back in my Art of the Film class my senior year in high school, which I believe remains my only viewing of Hitchcock's original to date. Such was our concentration on what the film was doing -- its camera angles, its use of black and white's distinct chiaroscuro -- that I remember it well enough to feel like I've watched it numerous times. 

Alas, in all its beautiful modern-day color, Wheatley's film does not really feel like much of a ghost story, despite exactly one scene that makes concessions to modern-day horror movie tropes. It's handsome to be sure, but the actors owe a debt to the performances made iconic by Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson, and the movie in all other ways fails to really distinguish itself. Given Wheatley's career to date, which has included genuinely eccentric films (for better or worse) like A Field in England, Sightseers, Kill List and High Rise, I expected a lot more. But it's as straightforward as it gets.

Now, there have been a number of other versions of Rebecca over the years, but the link to 1940 seems difficult to overlook when considering that Hitchcock's is the definitive version. And also when you notice that Netflix has -- again, possibly by coincidence -- its eyes on 1940 in other ways.

Rebecca's win for best picture, much deserved as it may have been in most years, feels shocking in retrospect given one of the films it beat out: Citizen Kane. Rebecca has borne an unfortunate and undeserved sense of being sort of a historical footnote, given that it was lauded by the Academy over what is now considered to be the best film of all time. (The recent ascension by Vertigo to the top of the Sight and Sound poll not withstanding.)

Annnnnd shit.

I had written what you've read so far before I did one core piece of research, which was something I shouldn't have found necessary at all: confirming the release year of Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane did not come out in 1940. It came out in 1941. Given that this movie is my #5 movie all time on Flickchart, it seems just plain dumb that I did not know this. But when I made the connection last night that prompted the writing of this post, I temporarily re-convinced myself of a mental mistake I have made over the years, which was that Rebecca and Citizen Kane came out in the same year, and Citizen Kane was beaten by Rebecca at the Oscars.

In fact, the film that bested Kane at the Oscars was something far less deserving: John Ford's How Green Was My Valley. Which might just be the dullest Ford film I have ever seen. "How Long Was My Movie" is how an ex-girlfriend used to refer to it. 

What I was going to say, before I realized this mistake, was that Netflix has another movie about 1940 coming out just a month from now, David Fincher's Mank, which examines the writing of Citizen Kane by Herman J. Mankiewicz, played in the film by Gary Oldman. It hits Netflix on December 4th after a brief theatrical run on November 13th.

But wait, maybe I can salvage what I've written so far rather than consigning it to my scrap heap of unpublished posts. 

Given that the film will examine the production of Kane, prior to its release, the movie will certainly take place in part in 1940. Kane premiered on May 1st of 1941, so it was almost certainly shot largely in 1940 and written that year or before. Fincher's movie concentrates on the struggle between Mankiewicz and Orson Welles for the screenwriting credit, so I'm assuming there's a bunch of 1940 in there.

As it turns out, Netflix is not re-staging the 1940 best picture race on its streaming service this fall, meaning my original premise behind this post was flawed. 

However, I want "writing credit," as it were, as much as the next guy, as much as Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles both wanted it. So I needn't throw out this baby with the bath water, even if the bath water was never what I thought it actually was. 

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