Alfred Hitchcock and the 54-minute intermission

We don't see intermissions in movies anymore -- your occasional throwback Quentin Tarantino movie notwithstanding -- because studios think we can suffer through the increasing lengths they're throwing at us. That's more true in some cases than in others. Plus there's the fact that it's just, like, old-fashioned, ya know?

Back in the day, when you were working your way through some ungodly three hour and 40 minute epic, you met the intermission at about the two-hour mark with no small measure of relief -- even if you were enjoying the movie in question. (The only time I remember an intermission in any movie I saw in the theater was when I was taken to the 174-minute The Sound of Music as a kid probably under ten.)

So I thought it was sort of funny when I was watching Dial M for Murder on Wednesday night and the intermission came after 54 minutes of movie.

I don't recall ever seeing an intermission in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, probably because his movies were tight and suspenseful and did not require his audiences to get up and stretch their legs and refill their drink. 

Dial M for Murder, at an hour and 45 minutes, should have been no exception. And that's how I found it: relatively short, suspenseful and propulsive, even if almost all the activity takes place inside one apartment.

As a matter of fact, its relatively brief running time was one of the key factors in me choosing it for a mid-week movie on a day I had been into the office and was therefore a little more tired than I might have ordinarily been.

And yet before I'd even been sitting there for an hour, Hitch and Warner Brothers told me I needed to take a break.

I find myself wondering if the fact that I saw this on Kanopy is some explanation. I never know how movies are sourced on Kanopy, but it is frequently not the same version that went around on DVD back in the day or that you would find on other streaming services. So perhaps the intermission version of Dial M for Murder was not the version seen by people who watched this on DVD, or VHS before that.

But it's clear that at some point, Dial M had an intermission, which I think is funny for its length.

And that's all I have to say about that. 

Audient Classics: The Birds

This is the tenth in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but have seen only once.

I don't like magpies.

Australian magpies, I should say, which are different from what's called a magpie in other parts of the world.

These black-and-white birds are the most territorial I have ever encountered. Now granted, in my late teens and early 20s I worked on an island where if you went out on the rocks and approached a seagull nest, they would attack you. We carried sticks with us, not to use to hit the birds, but so they would attack the top of the stick when you held it up, rather than your head. 

I assume the same is true of magpies, or might be anyway. The problem is, their territory is the same as yours. You don't have to walk way out on the rocks to get to their nests. They build their nests in any old tree that they fancy, right in your neighborhood, and when it's nesting season, they swoop. Unless you want to carry a stick with you at all times you walk outdoors -- a strange look to be sure -- you are in constant danger of being swooped in the Australian springtime. Which is now.

I have not actually had a traumatic swooping experience, though about a month ago, a magpie flew very close to my son and me as we were walking to school. I think it was intended as a swoop, but the bird didn't touch us. Around the same time, though, my wife was swooped closely enough that she felt the bird's wing against her neck.

There was a swooping incident in the Sydney area some ten years ago where a mother carrying her infant was swooped and lost her balance. The baby suffered a traumatic injury in the fall and ultimately died. If I remember correctly, a Japanese tourist himself died from a perfectly located peck that perforated some part of his brain through his ear canal. Would have been one in a million, but it did happen. 

So, magpies are no joke. When I'm walking past one, I keep a wide berth and I eyeball it like David Duke walking through Harlem.

I even saw one weird situation recently where one magpie was walking along the bike path on the ground, and another one was flying in a tight circular pattern above it, changing altitudes from about waist height to head height if measured on a human. It was like they were some two-pronged attack machine -- even if this maneuver was primarily devised for defensive purposes. 

So I thought this was a good Halloween season to finally rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Ranked #777 on my Flickchart (out of 6395 films), The Birds makes easily the lowest ranked "favorite" I've rewatched for Audient Classics, and therefore, the least qualifying for the definition of "classic." There were probably higher ranked pre-1973 horror movies I could have watched if I wanted a horror movie for October, and certainly higher ranked Hitchcock movies I've seen only once. (Rope, I'm looking at you.)

But keeping in mind the long preamble of this post, The Birds seemed like the right movie.

If you wanted, you could call it a horror comedy, keeping with the theme I'm pursuing this month in my other horror viewings. By today's standards, there is something funny about the snapping beaks of fake birds as the film's human characters fight them off. Sixty years ago, Hitchcock didn't have the more sophisticated effects we have today. (Thank God for that, I'd argue.)

Watching the film, though, you are not inclined to laugh. It's sinister as hell. We don't know why these birds are attacking, which makes them different from a magpie protecting a nest. They just decided they were fed up with millennia of micro- and macro-aggressions from humans and now, enough was enough.

A thing I really noticed on this viewing, which I'm sure is one of the regular talking points about The Birds, is that there is no conventional musical score, Bernard Hermann or otherwise. The only soundtrack is the menacing screeching of the birds, when they are attacking. Otherwise the only sounds are silence and dialogue.

What I found fascinating and unnerving -- another talking point I'm sure -- is why the birds sometimes attack, and sometimes don't. The movie's most famous scenes are undoubtedly not the attack scenes, but the ones where characters move slowly through an avian field perched on various fence posts and jungle gyms, as though waiting for a signal to attack, but not actually attacking. When a character gets close enough, a bird offers some mild pecks, kind of like a puppy's first attempts to nip someone's finger. But they know they do not have -- permission, would it be? -- to really go at this human. Not at this exact moment, anyway.

The thing that makes it a great horror, rather than just the genre of suspense that gets applied to the majority of Hitchcock's films, is the bodies left in the birds' wake. The first we see is a man whose eyes have been pecked out, lying in the corner of a room in his house, which he certainly would have thought was a safe haven. Then there's the character played by Suzanne Plechette -- who I initially mistook for Shirley MacLaine -- lying at the foot of her front steps, one of her own feet cocked up at an angle as it rests on a step. We don't really get to see her face -- a little bit of mercy from Hitchcock on that one -- and we only learn what happened to her because young Cathy explains it to Teppi Hedren's and Rod Taylor's characters after they extract her from the situation. Could Hitchcock have showed us the birds swarming on Plechette's Annie Hayworth -- covering her, as Cathy says? Maybe, but maybe he knew he couldn't get the effect right to convey the horror. Better leave it to our imagination.

One effect he does get right, I think, is the relentless close-range pecking of the birds in other situations, as they open new wounds and steadily exhaust the stamina of the victim. It's chaotic and unrelenting and you really feel the anxiety Hitchcock is going for. If you went into this film thinking someone couldn't be pecked to death, you emerge feeling quite the opposite.

Because it is a Hitchcock film, I found myself looking for the mise-en-scene techniques Hitchcock was famous for, ways of arranging elements in the shot that we always studied in film class. I don't think The Birds is really that sort of film, and that could be why it isn't among the director's most revered. Again this is something that would have been written about, but without reading anything about it myself, I'm concluding that Psycho was such a radical film that prompted so many varying reactions that he just wanted to make a more contained genre picture with his next film -- even though this does get into some of that movie's same themes about mothers and sons. (Jessica Tandy plays Taylor's mother, something I might not have noticed or at least remembered from my first viewing.)

I do think, however, that there was a little more carryover from Psycho. With the editing of the birds attacking at close range, I couldn't help but think of the knife strokes that end Janet Leigh in that film's infamous shower scene.

Other random observations:

1) The girl Cathy is played by Veronica Cartwright, who went on to a long career, including the woman who screams so horribly when she sees the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.

2) I continue to be surprised that this is from a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. I think of her as a writer of latter day Elizabethan novels, as her books Rebecca, Jamaica Inn (which I've read) and My Cousin Rachel all are of that ilk (and all adapted into films, in some cases multiple films). That she would write a horror novel about attacking birds has always struck me as a disconnect, and continues to do so.

3) And while it was indeed based on Du Maurier's novel, I learned just now that part of the inspiration came from a real-life event Hitchcock heard about in a seaside town in California, in 1961, when the film was already in development. Sea birds dive-bombed the town as a result of what is now known to have been toxic algae, though the cause was a mystery at the time.

Okay, only two more months in this series ... time to clamp down and really figure out which, among my dozens of remaining choices, are most demanding of my attention. 

No Audio Audient: The Lodger

This is the fifth in my 2016 series No Audio Audient, in which I'm catching up with classic silents I haven't seen.

If you watched Charlie Chaplin's The Kid expecting to come here and compare your thoughts with my thoughts on it -- because that's totally something you're doing -- you have been the victim of a programming change.

As part of one of my recent weekly trips to the library, I picked up Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger, recognizing it only as a Hitchcock movie I hadn't seen. A little closer look at the cover revealed that indeed, it was one of his silents -- none of which I had seen yet. Seemed like a great choice for May, especially given that two of my four choices thus far have already been comedies from silent greats (Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton).

I was a tad wary, though. The oldest Hitchcock film I'd seen previously was the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I found decidedly disappointing -- even without having yet seen Hitchcock's 1956 remake. I found Hitchcock's trademark faculties severely diminished in this earlier work, and part of me worried the same about a film made seven years earlier -- without even the benefit of sound.

How little did I realize how little Hitchcock needs sound.

The Lodger -- or as it sometimes goes by, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog -- had me in the palm of its hand from its first shot. Which is this:

That's the Hitchcock I know and love.

And what an arresting way to start a movie about a serial killer murdering a new blonde woman every Tuesday night. Hitchcock spends about the first five minutes of the film just establishing a sense of paranoia through images alone, with barely any title cards. Detectives encircling the latest body. Panicked bystanders descending deeper into fear. The flashing lights of a theater marquee, as the victim was one of the girls in a revue. Hitchcock does communicate some exposition during these five minutes, but it's largely through newspaper headlines and stories being dictated via teletype, the circumstances of the crime marching out ominously one letter at a time. Score is also instrumental in establishing this mood, though that would have been something Hitchcock had less (if any) control over, and may not have even been the score that was used at the time. I try to set aside score in my analysis of silent films, even though it can undeniably contribute to my experience, as it did here.

The story comes to be about a mysterious lodger staying in an extra room in the home of his kindly old landlords and their daughter -- who just so happens to fit the profile of the women this serial killer has been killing. Upon his first arrival on screen, the lodger (the creepy Ivor Lovello) fits the description witnesses have reported of the murderer -- the lower half of his face is shrouded by a scarf. He's also got a queer way about him and seems to recoil at the images of young blonde women on the walls of his room. Thinking him just eccentric, they don't make the connection with the story filling all the newspapers ... until a few strange occurrences makes it impossible to overlook.

If The Man Who Knew Too Much seemed flat by Hitchcock standards, The Lodger seems to embody what we think of as a Hitchcock movie almost perfectly. I wouldn't have guessed that he was already devising unconventional filming techniques and props by 1927, but clearly, he was. One of these is a see-through plexiglass floor, which takes the place of the natural floor for a couple shots. This allows the lodger's male landlord to "visualize" him pacing back and forth a floor above, a seeming indicator of his guilt (or at least an unsteady mind). What he's actually seeing is the chandelier shaking, but the plexiglass floor shows us what he's imagining. This type of trick with sets and props would come to be a Hitchcock trademark.

Another was just a shot that floored me. As the lodger is going out secretly late at night, we see him descend the spiral staircase from above. But we don't see his whole body. We only see his gloved hand gliding along the bannister, making all the turns in the stairs as it gets lower and lower toward the first floor. The effect was profound.

I was also surprised by how little this seemed to feature what I will call "silent film acting." By 1927 I suppose directors knew that actions didn't have to be broad and over-the-top to communicate meaning, but Hitchcock shows an even greater sense of subtlety than would come from the natural refining of filmmaking techniques over time. He's already a master of this craft, even in the film that would come later to be thought of as "the first Hitchcock film." (It was his eighth overall, though that also includes shorts and lost films.)

One thing I did find strange as I was watching it, that probably contributed to a slightly diminished appreciation of the film, is that it barreled past its projected running time. The movie was supposed to last 71 minutes, according to the DVD case, but as it ticked up into that range I could tell it was nowhere near resolution. I found a different running time of 80 minutes on the web, but that minute mark came and went as well without a resolution. It finally wrapped up around 94 minutes -- which was not a running time I could find listed anywhere on the web. (And in yet a fourth different running time, IMDB lists it as 68 minutes.) I didn't get the sense of there being any filler footage, and I couldn't imagine what might be missing from shorter versions of the film. The only reason this bothered me was because I was trying to watch the movie during a set window of time, and the more it ran over the budgeted time, the more it threatened other things I had to do that day. Which made me wish I just hadn't known the running time at all, so I wouldn't have spent the last 20 minutes feeling impatient.

So The Lodger didn't only jump easily into the upper half of the Hitchcock films I've seen, but it also had clear influences on some of the other greats from this time period. The movie it reminded me of most was Fritz Lang's M, which wouldn't come along until 1931 and was clearly inspired by The Lodger. That's not to say The Lodger is better than M, because I don't think it is. But M might not exist, or exist exactly as we know it, without it.

Okay! Barring another unforeseen library rental, The Kid will indeed make its way onto the docket for June.

My highest ranked movie I'd seen only once

Given how much Alfred Hitchcock has been in my life lately -- seeing two of his movies for the first time this year, and also rewatching Vertigo for a recent podcast discussion -- it seemed like even more of an oversight than it usually does that I'd seen my favorite Hitchcock only once.

So I took steps to correct that about a month ago, renting Rear Window for an overnight at a hotel that was a Father's Day present for me. I didn't watch it at the time, but got to throw it on with my wife this past Sunday night, when the rental was within five days of expiring.

Not only was this my favorite Hitchock movie I'd seen only once, it was also my favorite movie, period, that I'd seen only once. Rear Window currently slots in at #29 on my all-time list on Flickchart, eight slots ahead of Schindler's List, my next highest single viewing.

Now that I've corrected that, I suppose I have to figure out when I'm going to sit down a second time with Steven Spielberg's 1993 best picture winner, a consummate one-timer if ever there was one.

And now that I've corrected that, I may need to do some more correcting. I feel like the very foundation of my feelings about Hitchcock and his movies has been shaken.

It pains me greatly to say this, dear readers, but my second viewing of Rear Window was a slog.

The first sign of trouble occurred when I checked out the film's running time. An exhausting weekend in which I'd stayed up way too late on both nights had left me excited for Rear Window to be about 90 minutes, which is what I fully expected it would be. As it takes place exclusively inside L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries' apartment, I have always thought of this as a lean and tight movie. In fact, its apparent leanness and tightness are two of its attributes I have celebrated most chiefly when discussing the works of Hitchcock.

Nope. Rear Window is 113 minutes. I felt myself start to worry a little bit.

Now before I go any further, let me remind you that I was very tired on Sunday night. Not only had I had two late nights, but also two days out that were various degrees of trying, due largely to my kids being shitheads. Add to that the inevitable biological impact of a stark change in the weather. Just in the past few days it's gotten a whole lot hotter, a possible early promise that this summer will make up for the wimpy one we had last year.

So it will be impossible to purely judge the basis for me liking Rear Window less than I thought I did. Viewing circumstances always factor in to these things, and the circumstances for watching Rear Window were unfavorable to me, to say the least.

But boy, was our viewing of Rear Window a slog.

My wife felt it too. She had not stayed up as late as I did on either Friday or Saturday night, but we did have a whole discussion earlier in the day about how exhausted we both were. This is something you discuss regularly when you are a parent. So she was not at her freshest either, but she wasn't nodding off like I was. Still, she also found that it seemed like a bit of a chore.

"I mean, it's an old movie," she said, acknowledging both the likelihood of a different pace and the need to come in with different expectations.

But Rear Window didn't feel like an old movie when I watched it the first time. It grabbed me by the lapels and demanded my attention. And according to my memory of it, it had me on the edge of my seat. It seemed fast and momentous and bursting with a kind of nervous tension that became the tonal building blocks for the modern thriller.

Where was all of that on Sunday night?

I don't know, but I'm not prepared to say it's lost for good. All I'll say is that I've got to rethink this whole Rear Window adulation. At the very least, it now seems a tad ill-informed. I'd say that I will quickly prioritize a third viewing, to be held at a time when I'm fully awake or at least effectively caffeinated. But another conclusion of that discussion with my wife about our exhaustion was that it was part of our human condition. I posited to her that even if she spent a month alone on an island, sleeping whenever she felt like it and putting only good things into her body, she'd still feel exhausted. This depressed her, but she also realized the potential validity of my theory.

So in short, I may never be significantly more rested and alert to watch Rear Window than I was on Sunday night. Not enough to make the difference, anyway.

As I discussed here, though, a movie that you love should break through your corporeal weaknesses. It should be the very antidote to your exhaustion. So now I must consider the possibility that I don't love Rear Window.

Well, if Rear Window is not my favorite Hitchcock movie, then what is?

Flickchart tells me the answer is North by Northwest. And fortunately, this one stands up to recent scrutiny. I saw North by Northwest for the second time just two years ago, in 2013, and I was enthralled by it. The way I felt about North by Northwest after that viewing was the way I expected to feel about Rear Window after this one.

But am I ready to be the guy whose favorite Hitchcock movie is North by Northwest? I was comfortable with it being my #2, but #1? I don't know, it seems too mainstream or something. As though Rear Window were not already a mainstream answer to that question.

Perhaps the real answer is that I need to rewatch my #3 and #4, which are Rope and Rebecca. I remember loving both of these without hesitation. Then again, that's what I felt about Rear Window as well. What I thought I felt, anyway.

Second viewings can be dangerous. Sometimes, they don't have the effect on you that you think they will, that you hope they will. Might make a person wonder if they're better off just seeing the movie once and living contentedly in the memory of how enjoyable it was to watch that one time -- even if that could be a false memory, or a memory that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

But that's a pretty poor solution. If you suspect a movie might drop significantly on a second viewing, it likely means you know there's something wrong with it. Probably always better to find that out than to go on worshipping false idols. You can't really be sure you love a movie until it has had the same effect on you at least twice. And with movies you love, you should always want to deepen your appreciation of them by experiencing them again and again.

And besides, I never would have suspected Rear Window would be anything other than magnificent on its second viewing. That it wasn't magnificent for me was a total shock, a shock I'm still trying to grapple with.

Before I leave you today, I want to reassure you of something. I still like Rear Window. I still like Rear Window quite a bit. I especially still like the final 20 minutes. I just never expected it to be so hard to wade through the rest of it to get to those final 20 minutes. I never expected there to be so much Window dressing, so to speak.

Lesson learned? Maybe I'll just rest comfortably with my recollections of the brilliance of Schindler's List, after all.

Twice the Vertigo ... still not much fun

I've always struggled with Vertigo -- the movie, not the affliction -- but the crowning of it as the best movie of all time in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll made the condition all the more acute.

Whereas others -- specifically, the plurality of critics who responded to the poll -- have hailed it as one of the best movies of all time, I have never even considered it among my five favorite Hitchcock movies. Possibly not even among my ten favorite.

What can I say. This movie has always left me cold. Which it's supposed to do, I think, but cold in a way that you find stimulating and thought provoking. Not cold in a way that just makes you not want to watch it again.

But true enough, I have not wanted to watch it again, and have been stuck on just that single viewing, which probably occurred sometime in the 1990s. Just that single viewing of what is now reasonably considered The Greatest Movie of All Time. (Being a huge fan of Citizen Kane, which is one of my ten favorite movies of all time, and which got bumped from Sight & Sound's top spot by Vertigo, has intensified my Vertigo resentment since 2012.)

But the opportunity to reckon with Vertigo a second time arose when the other two guys on my podcast got enthusiastic about making this the next repertory pick for us to discuss, to balance out the new releases that usually comprise the podcast's discussion format. Because I have not been entirely comfortable with my minority feelings on Vertigo, I embraced this suggestion as my own opportunity to revisit it. We record on Sunday, and I watched it again last night.

Before I tell you how I felt about it on second viewing, I should tell you about the secondary meaning to the title of this post. As is quite appropriate for Vertigo -- a movie in which doubling is such a major theme, it's almost inescapable -- this was not only my second viewing of Vertigo, but I watched parts of two different Vertigos. Let me take a moment to explain.

As is always my preference when I need to get a hold of a specific movie to watch, I checked the library to see if it was available. It was, but it was being held in offsite storage and needed to be transported to one of the branches for me to pick up. A week passed, and when I checked on Tuesday -- cognizant of the approaching viewing deadline for the podcast -- its status was still that generic purgatory of "Offsite Storage."

So I cut my losses and just spent the $2.99 to download a rental from iTunes. As it turns out, I should have waited just one more day, because the next time I checked the library's website, my reservation of a Hitchock DVD four pack (including also Psycho, The Trouble With Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much) was "Awaiting Collection." I had to go to the library anyway, so I did collect it -- even though I had a copy on the computer at home. My reasoning had something to do with not wanting to annoy the library by reserving something and then never collecting it, especially on the heels of reserving two copies of Star Wars earlier in the month and then leaving one of them uncollected. I didn't want to get my name put on some list, or my picture hung behind the counter with a note that reads "Do not reserve to this guy."

I'd say it's a good thing I had both copies, but really, I only would have needed the iTunes copy. (The reverse, however, was not true.) I started watching Vertigo on DVD because it requires less setup (I don't need to connect my computer to the TV), but when the performance started suffering from the imperfections on the disc's surface, I didn't fight it for long before just switching to iTunes.

The funny thematic parallel notwithstanding, it wasn't a particularly successful second viewing of the movie. I wouldn't say I like Vertigo any less, but neither do I like it any more. And my suspicion of why I didn't like it very much in the first place seems to have been confirmed by this viewing: It's just not very much fun.

Whether a movie is fun or not does not typically play a huge role in how much I like it. If I graded movies only on how fun they were, I wouldn't have selected 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or United 93 as parts of my top 25 movies of the 2000s. But when it comes to Hitchcock, fun does really seem to matter to me.

In looking at my two favorite Hitchcocks, they are both exceedingly fun. These would be Rear Window (which is in my top 30 of all time) and North by Northwest (which is just outside my top 100). My three and four Hitchcock -- Rebecca and Psycho, though I'm not sure the order -- are not as fun, but they are both a laugh a minute compared to the somber Vertigo.

And perhaps the inclusion of Rebecca and Psycho in this discussion allows me to expand upon my definition of "fun" in this context. Certainly, both of those are very dark movies when compared to Rear Window and North by Northwest, which have dark moments but are overall more like popcorn thrillers. And in ways, both Rebecca and Psycho are far darker than Vertigo.

But just because a movie is dark doesn't mean it can't be fun. Speaking of Psycho, American Psycho is incredibly dark but also incredibly fun -- in fact, it is as fun as it is dark, if not more so. Psycho is like that in that it contains these cathartic releases of fear and tension, and has its own twisted sense of humor. I remember Rebecca less well because I haven't seen it since we watched it in my film class my senior year in high school, either 1990 or 1991, but what strikes me as fun in that movie is the gothic melodrama milieu of Daphne du Maurier's novels (another of which, Jamaica Inn, I read earlier this year, leaving it fresh in my mind. Jamaica Inn is a Hitchcock du Maurier adaptation that I have yet to see).

Vertigo doesn't meet either a traditional or a non-traditional definition of fun, and it has no sense of humor. Simply put, it's a drag. It's a deep dive into the sad psyches of scarred individuals who are manipulating each other. These manipulations take on interesting forms, and the "mystery" of Vertigo is fairly satisfying (if revealed too early in the narrative, and with too little fanfare, in that scene where Judy writes out her confession). But entirely too much time is spent on what amounts to stalking behavior, and a type of madness that I have seen explored in more engrossing ways elsewhere. Vertigo is neither fun nor "fun."

There's a lot more I can and will say about this movie, but I'll say it on the podcast this weekend. And speaking of the podcast, here's a link to our most recent one on Trainwreck if you would like to check it out.