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Hi, ecarle. How ya be?
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"On the other hand, Yelburton seems to be "ready" with his story about "releasing some runoff" to get rid of water(as opposed to diverting it entirely) so he seems to be a certain distance into the plot: a bureaucratic covering up an inconvenient situation with a standard "pat" answer."
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One point in support of any theory that Yelburton was involved concerns those diversions. Mulwray was clearly kept out of the loop, but was suspicious, as demonstrated by his own gumshoe work visiting the beach and the river bed where he questioned the boy on horseback. Yelburton would have been in a perfect position to direct those diversions without Mulwray's knowledge.
But as I always say, one of the many splendors of the Chinatown screenplay is that we viewers can fill in such gaps to fit the explicit details the film supplies as we like.
In order to reach a conclusion, it's helpful to review the details of the conspiracy. As Jake put it, Valley farmers were being "blown out of their land" by water department harassment, then to be purchased dirt cheap by Cross's investors - who were also members of Cross's Albacore Club and made the land transfers in the names of elderly relatives at the Mar Vista Home - in anticipation of its value increasing many times after the new dam project provided it with a steady water supply. The efforts to publicly smear Mulwray were meant to neutralize his opposition to the dam and ensure its approval.
With that in mind, the film provides a very subtle clue to suggest Yelburton's knowledge and involvement: when Jake visits him in his office, there's an Albacore Club flag insignia - identical to the one Jake spotted in the quilt at the Mar Vista - visible on Yelburton's wall behind Jake.
So, although the film doesn't state it explicitly, sharp-eyed viewers can easily draw the conclusion that he was indeed aware and involved.
"(for likely two weeks work...or less.)"
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Hi, bud!
Just thought one of your regular readers should go on record with an acknowledgement that (what is the phrase?) ... I saw what you did there.
About those remixed music & effects tracks: just finished rewatching it with all the Blu-ray bells and whistles, and I'm of two minds.
As nice as the improved mixes are, revealing all sorts of nuances and spatial subtleties not apparent in even the best theatrical exhibitions in the '70s-'80s-'90s, they struck me this time around as almost the aural equivalent of colorization.
I insert here that I'm no militant opponent of colorization; I figure if that's the way someone prefers to watch a classic B&W, it's no skin off mine as long as it remains available its original form to others of us. But even in its visually pristine state, it's now a film displaying the best mid-20th-century images accompanied by gussied-up 21st-century sound, the combination of which didn't represent what would have been an optimal 1960 experience. It's as though the digitally-enhanced audio overwhelmed the visuals, despite their crisp clarity.
Of course I'm aware that there were any number of circa 1960 films with multi-channel, hi-fi sound, and those experiences have been approximated in lovely recent-vintage HD home video forms. But even such a film as North By Northwest, now available in full stereo on home video (and which would have been seen in deluxe '59 exhibitions with directional Perspecta Sound), doesn't impart the suggestion of audio/visual disconnect I got from Psycho this time.
In sum: it sounded great and I enjoyed hearing it, but, I dunno, it just didn't seem to fit quite right. Like Sheriff Chambers in tails dancing with Ginger Rogers.
Not that it's important, but there's one more Psycho fade-out/fade-in, which I remember because it's my favorite in the film: Marion surrendering to sleepiness her first night on the road (complemented by reduced tempo of Herrmann's insistent theme before coming to a halt), followed by the fade-in to the peaceful yet somewhat desolate view of her car parked alongside the lonely highway. It's very much a visual echo of those in Rear Window of Jeff drifting in and out of sleep in his wheelchair.
It gets me to thinking about how much stylistic trends influenced scene transitions from one decade to another. The iris-out/in of the 'teens and '20s seemed to have become obsolete along with silent films. By the '30s, everything else was in vogue: fades; dissolves; optical wipes of all imaginable permutations. By the late-'60s, straight cuts were customary for "serious" films like '68's Bullitt, in which I think there were only two dissolves, while the same year's lighter The Odd Couple was full of them.
Hitchcock seems to have clung to fades well into the '60s as other directors were abandoning them.
Yep, Martoto, there are definitely exceptions to a dissolve denoting passage of time.
In the case of the film's opening shots, Hitchcock covers those dissolves, which were done because he couldn't accomplish his pans and zooms across the city skyline in a single shot, with title overlays during them: "Phoenix, Arizona;" "Friday, December the Eleventh;" "Two Forty-Three P.M." I believe he did this to distract from those dissolves, and I daresay most viewers never notice them.
"But...again...with the shrink's explanation ..we SEE Norman do those things(in our imaginations) and to a certain extent, we DON"T see Norman doing those things. "Mother" lives on as a separate monster in our minds."
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I like that. I'm sure Hitch never imagined years of sequels, prequels and TV series, but by leaving those images unseen except in imagination, he enabled not only Mother but the whole story to live on.
Those "explanatory flashbacks," which were quite popular in whodunit programmers going back to the dawn of sound and remain a staple of Christie adaptations and their imitators, are the cinematic equivalent to "closing the book:" all questions answered; all mysteries solved; the story itself laid to rest with finality along with the victims.
"Now Hitchcock DISSOLVES to Norman in his motel office, the phone receiver in his hand. He hangs it up on the main device(remember those?)"
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Actually, the dissolve reveals the receiver already back in its cradle, but with Norman's hand still gripping receiver and base, in the manner you would if you were going to carry the phone to another part of the room. It could be toying with time if he's only just hung up, or it could suggest that the sheriff's questioning has so unnerved Norman that he's been frozen in that position for those three minutes while considering his options. And the dissolve leaves it vague enough to interpret it either way.
The important thing is that it provides a visual connection to the conversation so viewers will intuit the thinking that Norman soon articulates: "He came looking for her and now someone will come looking for him."
"And...a "new movie" begins in our heads...in which we can PICTURE Norman dressing up and creeping up on his victims. I salute Hitchcock for NOT filming that as flashbacks. Thus, "Mother" remained alive as the killer in our memories even as we imagined Norman NOW as the killer."
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It occurs to me that, in all the years of discussion on this and the old board about Simon Oakland's long monologue, the notion of illustrating his explanation with flashbacks is one that's never even crossed my mind. Hitchcock being such a visual director, one might logically expect him to give audiences such a "show" along with the "tell," and indeed, I'll wager that many other directors might have done just that. Yet, aside from Stage Fright's infamous "flashback that lied," I can't off the top of my head recall other instances of his employing the device. Leave it to Hitch to turn it on its head when he did use it.
That said, I'm in complete agreement that just a guy talking for five minutes was the way to go for preserving the mystique of Norman's transformations.
The transition from the drain closeup to Marion's dead eye is accomplished with a dissolve, which has long been "film grammar" denoting an indeterminate passage of time. Even when viewers don't take conscious note of cuts vs. dissolves vs. fade-outs/fade-ins, that "grammar" has a subliminal effect on their understanding. Norman's cries of "Blood, blood" heard from the house could have come five minutes after the murder or forty-five. Doesn't much matter except to impart an awareness to viewers that enough time has passed for Norman to have effected both the psychological and physical changes necessary to become himself again.
As for where he saw the blood, it could have been on the dress "Mother" was wearing and then left in a heap on the floor after Norman removed it while still in his altered state. The bloody knife may have been left in the kitchen or bathroom sink. Part of the pathology of Norman's psychosis requires that he discover evidence of "Mother's" misdeeds so that he can protect her by concealing it and cleaning up.
"Enigma" is an apt word, because the mechanics and duration of Norman's transformations are rightly left vague. All the doctor says is that, "When danger or desire threatened that illusion, he'd dress up." By the time we have an opportunity to consider what he's said and how it comes to bear on what the film has shown us in earlier scenes, it's over. Yet, even when we do consider it, we find that Hitchcock has given himself cover with that very vagueness.
"Well, I think producers are meant to pick up Best Picture awards -- which is why nowadays you'll have 20 people on stage with "Producer" credit."
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Quite so. It's easy to imagine, then, that a 1960/61 business landscape resembling today's might have billed all three Mirisch brothers as "Executive Producers" who'd have been up there on the stage with Wilder.
Those mass acceptance moments always made me uncomfortable. The first guy would hog the mic thanking everyone from the wife and kids to their first-grade teacher, while the others fidgeted like children with full bladders, waiting for their own precious seconds to articulate their abbreviated gratitude. And inevitably, one would get cut off by the orchestra in the middle of his.
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"Its the "studio" aspect of this that is confusing to me."
"Anyway, UA aint got no place to hang those Best Picture photos."
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Yeah, and neither has MGM since the mid-'80s. Yet, they're still thought of as one, no? Clearly, it confuses me too. I suppose it could be said that, since the collapse of what was called "the studio system," the concept has become as fluid as that of producer: Streisand's hairdresser/boyfriend Jon Peters in the '70s comes to mind; and Doris Day's husband/agent/personal mis-manager Martin Melcher in the '50s-'60s.
It's enough to make one cynical. What with a half-dozen or more production companies and those 20 producers on any given project, I'll bet lawyers and accountants are makin' out like bandits.
"I saw it recently and I didn't detect the "Universal sound effects" of honking horns or doors closing that are shared by both Psycho and The Birds(of course, Inherit the Wind was a period piece...I suppose a 1960 horn wouldn't fit.) Suggests it was made at another studio except for the Universal backlot stuff."
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My guess would be that, in spite of any shooting at Universal (exterior or interior), the post-production was done elsewhere; hence, the absence of those distinctive Uni sound library effects (which were still being employed well into the '70s).
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"Burt Reynolds in his autobio said he was filming the TV series "Riverboat" on the Universal lot and would watch Spencer Tracy act in Inherit the Wind"
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Plausible enough. It could have been while Tracy was shooting exteriors there (his arrival on the bus and walk through town with Kelly to the hotel).
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"But damn, we never got "Metro-Goldfish-Mayer.""
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It's always been odd to me that Mayer retained the Goldwyn roaring lion logo, duplicating it down to the last detail with only the name changed. Those two hated each other from way back. Maybe Louis did it just to gall Sam.
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"I think I recognize the name Lowe...or was it Loew?"
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Ya got me! Indeed it was.
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"Again, here...confusion about how "official" a studio UA was. I THINK UA took credit for The Apartment as a Best Picture; In the Heat of the Night(also Mirsch), too."
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This is where it gets murky, isn't it? Wilder himself, as the titular producer of The Apartment, accepted the Oscar. Frank Capra complained in his autobio of never quite being able to make sense of a new film world in which it was no longer just a studio boss, a director and actors, withdrawing from a picture he was to do with John Wayne when realizing he was no longer dealing with people, but corporations.
It's even more confusing now. I was recently watching a 2019 film that displayed no fewer than eight corporate logos before the credits.
"Was any of Inherit the Wind filmed at the Goldwyn studio, I wonder?"
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That's something I've never been able to determine. Such an arrangement wouldn't be at all unusual, though.
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"I'll keep reading but I'm wondering Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer -- the MGM lot -- when did Goldwyn end up personally over there?"
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He never did. He was out of the Goldwyn company, I believe, a year before MGM was formed. Sam Goldfish and partners Edgar and Archibald Selwyn started their company in the 'teens when they purchased Thomas Ince's Culver City lot, coming up with the name by combining one syllable from each of theirs (the only alternative possibility was an obvious no-go: "Selfish"). Goldfish liked the sound of Goldwyn so much that he legally changed his name, and the Selwyns sued to stop him, claiming trademark infringement. The judge ruled, in essence, that you couldn't trademark a syllable.
Anyway, Goldwyn never got along with partners, and the Selwyns forced him out of the company before selling to Marcus Lowe, who in turn merged the Goldwyn and Metro Companies with Mayer.
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"Were not the Goldwyn studios used for the films of that triad of directors -- Capra, Stevens, Wyler -- who formed that producers group?" "And what films at "The Lot"? Movies? TV series?"
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Dunno. Hafta look into both.
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"I kind of wonder when "United Artists" REALLY got going as the producer of Best Picture level product."
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Although they owned production facilities, to the best of my knowledge, they were never really a production entity; only a releasing one and rental lot, distributing many Best Picture nominees going back to the early '30s, but produced by indies like Goldwyn, Roach, Zanuck (before his 20th Century company acquired Fox), Kramer and the Mirisch Company (producer of both Some Like It Hot and The Apartment). Same with the Bond films (EON Productions). I think the Pink Panthers were also Mirisch.
How's by you? A little historical backfill, if I may.
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"I think that Inherit the Wind was released by United Artists(which had no studio and ALWAYS rented out space to make movies like The Apartment and Some LIke It Hot.)"
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There had once actually been a United Artists Studio in both name and real estate, but by the time Wilder shot interiors there for Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, it had become the Samuel Goldwyn Studio. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, along with producer Joe Schenck, originally purchased the Santa Monica Blvd property in 1919, the year they formed the United Artists company along with Charles Chaplin (who had built his own studio on LaBrea two years earlier and used UA only as a releasing arm) and D.W. Griffith (whose best days were already behind him).
By 1928, when the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio was renamed United Artists Studio, indy Sam Goldwyn had become the lot's major tenant. In '35, Schenck deeded his share of the property to Goldwyn and when Fairbanks died in '39, Pickford inherited his share. So began a years-long power struggle between the two. Although Pickford was no longer active in the business, she maintained offices there at the east end of the lot, and Goldwyn would regularly either implore or browbeat her into selling out to him, once even concern-trolling her about the proximity of oil storage tanks adjacent to her offices facing Formosa Ave. (They're notably visible in a scene in Goldwyn's The Best Years Of Our Lives.)
By 1955, their battle had gone to court, which ordered the facility auctioned. Goldwyn outbid Pickford, and he finally had his prize. And then produced only one more film: 1959's Porgy and Bess. But it remained the Samuel Goldwyn Studio after both his retirement and death, until Warners' bought it in 1980, renaming it Warner Hollywood Studios. In '99, Warner Bros sold it and it's been known simply as The Lot since then. But for 27 years, it was the United Artists Studio.
That's one way of looking at it, but it's dramatically sound if the screenplay finds motivations within the characters to justify it. I think this one does.
And how uninteresting so many films would be without those things they sometimes need to happen.
This is all richly layered thematic material, and only scratches the surface of the depth and complexity that Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler brought to James M. Cain's story in adapting it for the screen.
Yet, they did so by eliminating subplots and some quite florid melodrama from Cain's novella, streamlining the dramatic curve and boiling all motivations down to basic human drives and instincts needing no explanation. And all of it within the constraints of the all-powerful Production Code Administration which, under the dictatorial control of Joseph Breen, had deemed the book unfilmable since its 1935 publication. Even Wilder's frequent writing partner, Charles Brackett, passed on collaborating on it, considering the story altogether too sordid. Indeed, the novella's wild and rather perverse conclusion is quite far removed from that of the film, but is chilling and haunting in its own way. It's a brisk read at only 110 pages or so, and I recommend it.
While some of Cain's prose tended to be overblown, there's one line in the book I wish could have found its way into the screenplay, into which it would have fit perfectly: “That's all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.”
Everything you say is quite true. But...
A great deal of the most beloved fiction, whether on the page, the stage or the screen, hinges on bad decisions, stupid mistakes and surrendering to compulsion. Without them, some of our best films would be only about ten minutes long. Walter's narration begins with citations of two compulsions. "I killed him for money, and for a woman." Greed and sex: two of the most primal human instincts, immediately recognizable and understood by every adult viewer.
Other things we learn about him in the course of the story is that he's weak and corruptible, in spite of thinking of himself as something of a hotshot who's more clever than he actually is. It takes him almost the entire story to realize he's been manipulated, outmaneuvered and betrayed by Phyllis every step of the way, from the very start.
When he resolves to devise a plan to help her kill her husband, he believes it's been his idea, and as he lays it out for her, he describes "Nothing sloppy, nothing weak." In the end, he discovers he's been both. So, yeah, he can't resist yet another compulsion: revealing to her how he's cleverly figured it all out, and taunting her with his final clever plan.
And yet, he still hasn't fully understood the kind of person he's dealing with, and is brought down by his own hubris. Which, incidentally, is a classic theme in drama and lore going back to Greek mythology.
It's this ultimate realization that restores his basic decency and humanity. Even wounded, he could just as easily have stuck to his plan and let Nino walk into that house to be framed for Phyllis's murder, but he already understands what Keyes will so tersely articulate for him in just a few hours: he's "all washed up." He's then free to surrender to two more compulsions: altruism (or self-sacrifice, if you like) and confession. He could still have attempted his plan to head straight for the border if he wanted, but he must unburden himself to Keyes.
"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." - Noah Cross, Chinatown
Some of those 1972 reviews minimizing or even denigrating Psycho suggest how long it took the film, among critics at least, to achieve widespread respectability. For all their murder and mayhem, Hitchcock's pre-1960 entertainments had been safe and relatively harmless; dirty deeds the whole family could enjoy; thrills without threats. And suddenly, that benign, beloved and impish little Englishman was showing his audiences visual brutality to which he'd never before taken them. Looks like there were some who held their resentful grudges for quite some time.
Perhaps you could, ecarle, but I honestly couldn't say when Psycho achieved a consensus of classic status that surpassed its notoriety. But the fact that some of those critics cited it as a turning point in their reviews of Frenzy over a decade later says something. And after several years of graphic, slow-motion, blood-pack-spurting violence from directors like Sam Pekinpah, Hitchcock could hardly have been accused of violating norms or breaking barriers, as some did a dozen years earlier.
Neither one very successful upon release, it took both The Wizard Of OZ and It's A Wonderful Life nigh unto 20 years to achieve their "beloved classic" status, primarily through celebratory annual TV broadcasts (the latter aided by having fallen into the public domain).
At this late date, I suspect Frenzy has reached the zenith of what comprises its place in the Hitchcock canon and general cinematic landscape. And perhaps in its small-scale modesty, alongside the Strangers On A Trains, Rear Windows and North By Northwests, that's fair.
But it's got everything I need in a Hitchcock. I'll have to paraphrase, but he summed it up himself in the 1960s: "A quiet little murder here and there, a joke or two and some expert cutting."
Modestly put.
"Hitchcock's movies may seem "slower" to a Bill Maher, but we know that Hitchcock rather "pioneered" the kind of fast cutting montage excitement currently available in a Bourne movie, just BETTER"
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And better, I'd submit, for the build-up to them achieved only through effective pacing and rhythm, which is what those latter-day examples of Maher's omit.
One of the best "movies about movies," Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, does something most others don't bother with: it dispenses pearls of wisdom along the way about film making craft and philosophies.
One scene has flamboyant and mercurial producer Kirk Douglas taking a director to task for not getting everything he could from a scene he's just ordered printed. The director tells him, "I could make this scene a climax. I could make every scene a climax. But then, I would be a bad director. A film all climaxes is like a necklace without string: it falls apart."
Or becomes indistinguishable from its assembly-line predecessors and successors.
For good measure, it also features Leo G. Carroll and Kathleen Freeman as another director and his laconic assistant that Minnelli said were modeled upon Hitch and Alma.
And another scene I think Hitchcock must have appreciated stresses the importance of suggestion using only visuals not only in big sequences, but in quiet, intimate ones. Douglas is coaching novice screenwriter Dick Powell through his first script, and Powell protests when Douglas blue-pencils a character's long speech.
Powell pleads, "Look, you don't understand. He's going off to battle, probably to be killed. When his mother opens her mouth to speak..."
Douglas interrupts, "She DOESN'T speak. She wants to, but she's too overcome. What she's feeling, we'll leave the audience to imagine. Believe me, they'll imagine it better than any words you or I could write."
"And yet: Psycho was linked to Some Like it Hot in its use of cross-dressing and sexual confusion. (With Tony Curtis, then-husband of Psycho's Janet Leigh, in a cross-dressing man-as-woman role first turned down by...Anthony Perkins!)"
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I don't recall ever being aware of that. Fascinating. Here's a fun fact to go with it: Perkins (along with Robert Morse), had an extended cross-dressing sequence in The Matchmaker, which was released the month before Some Like It Hot went into production. Throughout that film, Perkins is as antic and unrestrained as I've ever seen him. Although the cross-dressing isn't central to the plot, something that is concerns multiple characters pretending to be something they're not (of which the drag sequence is merely an aspect). I wonder if Perkins felt Wilder's project would be just too similar in tone. He elected to go cavort in the forest with Audrey Hepburn in Green Mansions instead.
By the time Psycho came around, he'd also played the naval Lt. and young father in On the Beach and the college athlete in Tall Story (vamped by kittenish Jane Fonda). One hates to draw inferences that reflect on his private life at the time, but it was, after all, the late '50s, and people had all sorts of wacky ideas about matters of masculinity and sexuality.
In any event, Psycho was, of course, nothing like either The Matchmaker or Some Like It Hot in tone, and Perkins had put sufficient ground between it and the last time he donned a wig and dress.