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Doghouse's Replies
Cagney in One, Two, Three...well done; excellent citation. The only other one I can think of still getting away with it at that time (and age) was Gable: a bit gruffer and a bit wearier, perhaps, and he effectively worked his maturity into such roles in the second half of the '50s (in '59's But Not For Me as a high-powered B'way producer, his age itself is the basis of both a central theme and a series of running gags and droll quips from the likes of Lili Palmer and Lee J. Cobb as he makes a last stab at recapturing his professional and personal vigor).
Veering off-topic, have you ever seen The Gallant Hours, which Cagney did immediately before One, Two Three? It suffers from a primary weakness of heavy-handedness, but Cagney's work therein was a revelation. I thought I'd seen all the sides he had to show, but he displayed nuances, subtleties and a quiet, deeply-felt intensity that was eye-opening, and makes the film worth viewing for his performance alone.
Still further off topic, has it come to your notice that we seem to have the MovieChat forum(s) entirely to ourselves? There are maybe a couple dozen classic non-Hitchcock "go to" movies that I regularly monitored on IMDB, and not a one has had any activity, save for the archiving of IMDB threads as of the time of their discontinuation.
Or maybe I'm simply not monitoring the right films.
That sounds like a fair assessment.
The melodrama of the denouement is something I guess has to be chalked up to the wartime era. The very same year as Mr. Lucky, even something as overtly innocuous as a Fred Astaire musical (The Sky's the Limit) concluded on a melodramatically uncertain note, with Flying Tiger Astaire returning to combat, leaving bravely optimistic Joan Leslie behind as onscreen proxy for thousands of stateside wives, sweethearts and family members carrying on in anxiety-ridden hopefulness.
Grant's Joe Adams/Bascopolous represents one of the last of the brash fast-talkers to which I referred in my recent reply to ecarle, and which had been a regularly-revisited facet of the Grant persona during his first decade or so of films.
I suppose that's so about Grant and Charade, although it seems in many ways to be a distillation of the Grant persona at that point: we get samples of the "athletic action" Grant; the comically indifferent one; the goofy and absurd one; the suavely elegant one. And I don't know the film well enough to recall: are there samples of the stoically cold one (of Only Angels Have Wings, Suspicion, Notorious or Crisis, for example)?
I'm leaving off the brash, fast-talking one (Topper, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, for instance), as that seems to have been an aspect that he'd shed by the close of the '40s.
Of all of Day's so-called professional virgin roles, this one's the hardest to take. It comes the closest to a stereotypical "dumb blond" one, and the incongruity of approaching-middle-age Day and Audrey Meadows - who seems to harbor an unnatural obsession with Day's virtue, spending much of the film in states of either high dudgeon or tearful hysteria over the "fate worse than death" prospect of its being lost - sharing a bedroom like sixteen-year-olds borders on the creepy. And the less said about aspects like attempting to extract humor from gay subtext - neither the first nor last time it would crop up in one of the Day/Ross Hunter pictures - in Gig Young's psychiatric sessions, the better.
I'm sure I won't prejudice you, for I know of the independent-mindedness of your opinions, but I won't be at all surprised if you should find Mr. Lucky, while perhaps formulaic for the mid-war era, a step or so above mediocre. At the very least, it provides Grant with a character of some dimension who finds himself facing more than one moral crossroads.
Continued...
Mr. Lucky, on the other hand, would have worked well with any attractive leading man adept at playing fast-talking charmers (Gable would have been an optimal alternative, although someone like David Niven, Joel McCrea or even Cagney would have served well), but works better with Grant, who exercises one of his rare opportunities to integrate his Cockney heritage into the character, and has no competition for the spotlight from an equally high-powered leading lady (Laraine Day, who's reprising her Foreign Correspondent "I trust him-love him/I trust him-love him not" balancing act).
Perhaps the big difference between the 1943 and 1961 Cary Grants was that the first was still artistically hungry and ambitious, and still had new sides of himself to show to audiences, who had already seen the earnest younger leading man, the goofy comic one who was willing to deflate his own urbane sophistication with a pratfall, the serious one with a hard edge, and had had only a hint in The Philadelphia Story of the one that would finally stick, and would carry him through films like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, To Catch A Thief, North By Northwest and, perhaps its ultimate expression, Charade.
Grant himself had famously said, "Everybody wishes they were Cary Grant. Even I wish I were Cary Grant." And by the time of TTOM, he was, as far as the viewing public was concerned. And for better or worse, was stuck with it.
I'll be interested in swanstep's report as well, although I'm not sure how definitive the comparison proposed can be.
Mr. Lucky doesn't really fit in to the My Favorite Wife/That Touch Of Mink romcom universe. Following The Philadelphia Story, Grant was concentrating on more serious fare (Penny Serenade, Suspicion, The Talk Of the Town, Once Upon A Honeymoon - which sounds like a romcom but was more romantic espionage thriller - and Destination Tokyo). Mr. Lucky fits into this group: it's light drama with only comedy relief courtesy of supporting players such as Alan Carney.
Along with this is something about TTOM that can't be ignored: it's a "two star" picture, and more a Doris Day one than a Cary Grant one: it would have worked just as well with Rock Hudson, Rod Taylor or even James Garner...possibly even better, for one of its primary weaknesses is its lazy dependence upon Grant being Grant: Day is angry at him before even meeting him (for splashing her when his limo drives through a puddle), and her intention to tell him off is derailed in quite literally the first moment she lays eyes upon him (the only thing missing is an optically printed gleam upon his dazzling smile, à la Tony Curtis in The Great Race), and she ends up apologizing to him! Grant pretty much coasts through the film, whereas any of those other actors could have been expected to work at selling the too-good-to-be-true aspects of this overachieving character.
Here's some interesting context: Grant had never cracked the top five moneymakers (according to an annual exhibitors' poll) until 1959, and did so only twice more before his retirement ('60 and '62). Day accomplished the same feat the very same year, and remained there every year thereafter until '67.
[quote]Today, I work near some buildings which have public, posted signs directing the reader on how to elude the "random building shooter." I like the last line: "Stand and fight only if there is no where to run or hide."[/quote]Wow! Isn't that...hmmm...I can't even come up with the right word! Raises all sorts of questions about the neighborhood, the buildings themselves, the particular atmosphere of the period in which they were posted; I can honestly say I've never seen the like.
[quote]The Out of Towners(Lemmon/Sandy Dennis version.) It was sold as a "comedy" but I saw it, start to finish, as a horror movie. Stuck in the sky in a holding pattern over the airport. Mugged. Lost luggage. Booked hotel room. It kept up Jack Lemmon's losing streak between Felix Unger and his Oscar-winning schmuck in Save the Tiger.[/quote]Great citation. In a way, it bridges the two constructs: it certainly qualifies as "urban nightmare" on the one hand, but on the other, it embodies the "it can't happen to me" kind of horror. Maybe any one of them at a given time, but not the entire series of miseries that befalls this one hapless couple in a city of eight million over the course of a day and a night.
So much of comedy is predicated on the misfortunes of others. We all remember Alan Alda's pompous producer in [i][b]Crimes and Misdemeanors[/b][/i] ([i]"Comedy is tragedy plus time"[/i]), but I think Mel Brooks got closer to nailing it:
[i]"Tragedy is: I cut my little finger. It could get infected...could be very serious...this is very important to me. Comedy is: you fall into a manhole and die. What do [b]I[/b] care?"[/i]
[quote]Thank God he finally got to play a macho hero airline pilot in the otherwise banal "Airport 77."[/quote]Probably the first Paycheck Project Lemmon had taken on (after which he took two years off). Looking very '70s-dapper in an uncharacteristic mustache, and giving maximum conviction to lines like, [i]"I know you're scared, we're all scared, but we can't let them see that!"[/i] I remember catching it second-run at a neighborhood theater on a double bill with [b][i]Voyage Of the Damned[/i][/b]. Either a strange coincidence, or some booker had a sly sense of humor: two films depicting passengers aboard mass conveyance stranded mid-ocean, and two Lee Grant "mad" scenes in one evening.
Can't help but reflect, ec, on how these references dovetail into what we were discussing a few days back about the "it can't happen to me" frights vs those of the "urban nightmare" sort; this time, however, in relation not to varying dramatic themes but to real life.
The atrocities of WWII - and even Vietnam, for that matter - were "over there." And if there was a real-life parallel to gothic, Psycho-style jeopardy here at home, it was simply one of being unfortunate enough to venture into the wrong place...one where unanticipated danger waited. But Speck, Whitman and Manson's so-called family demonstrated that horror could come after you, visiting itself upon you anytime, anywhere.
Small wonder, perhaps, that following JFK and other assassinations, social unrest surrounding civil rights and anti-war protests along with those maniacs who went forth and committed their horrors upon society at large rather than upon only someone unlucky enough to blunder into their webs, a "cinema of paranoia" developed in the '70s, manifesting itself in everything from smaller, overlooked films like Joe or Little Murders, multiple explorations by Alan Pakula, thrillers like Straw Dogs and even bitter comedies like The Out-Of-Towners and The Prisoner Of Second Avenue, to Taxi Driver.
Oddly enough, swanstep, I don't recall visibility ever having been a problem. Dad would be over on the driver's side of the front seat, Mom all the way over on the passenger side, and even with three of us in the back seat, I don't remember there being a problem seeing the screen through the space between them. Now that I think of it, there may have been some "rotation" among we kids being placed in that space. As a teen later on, we'd sometimes go in groups of four or even five friends, but I still can't dredge up any recollection of issues with visibility.
There must have been some science involved in the design of those places. Each row of parking stalls was on a slight incline which, when viewed in the daylight with no cars present, gave the impression from a distance of a giant sheet of corrugated aluminum covering acres. They did seem to place the cars in each row at an optimal viewing angle (which, I admit, has little to do with your question).
More problematic was the sound quality from those speakers, which were in heavy metal encasements that clipped to the inside of your partially-lowered window (and could probably have withstood blows from a sledgehammer), and were connected by a thick cable to poles maybe four feet high located between each pair of stalls. By the time drive-ins advanced to the systems allowing you to tune the sound in on your car radio, I had long since stopped going to them.
I'm not sure I can speak to ecarle's "kid control" issue. When we went to regular theaters, we knew enough to sit still and be quiet, and tended to be less restrained in the car, either with our unsophisticated questions about the film itself ("What's going on...why are they doing that?") or just plain restless rowdiness. As often as not, the trip home (if we were still awake) or the next morning would involve barked words like "brats" or phrases such as "This is the last time...."
In my family, an evening at the drive-in was more likely to result in grumpy parents than grumpy kids.
"What were those modern Sixties horrors trying to tell us?"
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If any messages are to be gleaned, I wonder if it would be of value to subdivide those Sixties horrors.
Whether urban, suburban or rural, your Psychos, Baby Janes, Sweet Charlottes, Night Walkers (I didn't think anyone but me remembered that one), Rosemary's Babies and the like are very much in the gothic/Grand Guignol tradition or mold, which had antecedents in Night Of the Hunter, Shadow Of A Doubt, Gaslight, Night Must Fall and others: unseen, isolated evil may lurk behind the most placid, benign or mundane of exteriors.
Lady In A Cage exists, I think, as part of a different subset that might be called "urban nightmare," perhaps kicked into high gear in the wake of JFK, but likely having its roots in the postwar disillusionment and cynicism of film noir, which observed that danger and evil lurk not only behind the facade of this individual setting or that, but around any corner and everywhere, which in turn had its own antecedent in the depression-era gangster film: all are at the mercy of the ills of modern society; anyone can become a victim at any time; no one is safe even in one's own home. Along the way, that had found its own prior expression in rural or suburban offshoots such as The Petrified Forest, He Ran All the Way, Suddenly, The Desperate Hours and, mining the emergent youth culture, Rebel Without A Cause and Blackboard Jungle, as well as in later exercises such as The Incident and In Cold Blood, all of which suggested that a new kind of chaos was an outgrowth of something systemic rather than pathological.
What was being offered, then, could have been in the nature of a "choose your brand" selection of horror: creepy, old time (if updated) "it could never happen to me" escapist thrills, or a sobering brand intended to induce paranoia and other more lingering visceral reactions.
"The intractable risk for Hitchcock with Sinatra would have been if Sinatra had resisted the schedule and sought to cut the script."
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I suppose it can be assumed that Sinatra's ability to throw his weight around was sufficiently rehabilitated by the start of The Wrong Man's production (exactly two years and one day after his From Here To Eternity Oscar), and having finished with Preminger only four months earlier on The Man With the Golden Arm, would he have been more inclined to rebelliousness or perhaps have considered a stint with the generally sedate and genial Hitchcock a welcome change of pace? Working in Sinatra's favor might have been the amount of shooting that, for him, wouldn't have been dialogue-dependent.
Oh, my: the castings that might have been. Speaking of which...
"I can see Tracy in the lead in Foreign Correspondent or Saboteur . Possibly Rope -- where the male lead has no romantic interest and is kind of a bad guy(the professor.)"
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Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, absolutely. Rope...hmmm...gotta think on that. Maybe even Spellbound? Peck always struck me as too callow for that role, and Tracy had done tortured intensity quite nicely when it was called for.
I'm among those who feel that, while Stewart did his best, he was miscast in Rope. I don't remember where it was (maybe while the IMDB boards were still active), but someone somewhere suggested James Mason might have been good for that role, and with which I heartily agree. Rupert's gently mocking, is-he-or-isn't-he-kidding demeanor would have been right up his alley, as would the righteous outrage he exhibits when he realizes what his so-called philosophy has wrought. Another tantalizing suggestion made was that of Rex Harrison. Fun to mull over. In any event, either one would have more comfortably borne a name like Rupert that Stewart.
"With Capra I think you get the twin issues of 'clout' and 'what does the movie need?' A good overall director like Capra could decide in advance which way to go . Personally, I love how over the top and manic Arsenic plays."
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It's never bothered me as much as it does some others (along with Grant himself, reportedly), and in his autobiography, Capra himself said, "I let the scene stealers run wild; for the actors, it was a mugger's ball." Figuring into that was the hurry on the part of everyone involved to get it into the can in advance of Capra's late-'41 entry into military service. Just the same, I've lately come to think Fred MacMurray would have been an ideal choice for Mortimer. He did befuddled desperation and delayed-reaction shock and amazement so well. If you've ever seen - or ever do see - 1945's Murder He Says, in which he finds himself in a remote farmhouse at the mercy of a family of homicidal hillbillies (led by whip-crackin' Marjorie Main), you'll know what I mean.
"I tell you the truth: I'm not so sure that modernly, the "table read" isn't more of a Hollywood affectation mainly driven by TV production. "Everybody does it" - its a chance to get the cast together, get some camaraderie going, show off for each other ("Oh, Jon -- you did that line PERFECTLY!")"
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I'm willing to bet that's very much the case. I'll also say I can readily see its value, particularly where it concerns rehearse-all-week/shoot-one-day sitcoms with studio audiences. Some weeks back, one of the cable channels ran a Mary Tyler Moore Show weekend marathon, and over dinner we've been working our way through the episodes we DVRd. One of the striking things about them is the degree to which performances enhance what was on the script pages: Ed Asner's meticulously-timed development and delivery of Lou's methodical and seductively manipulative disarming of some issue Mary would bring to him in one of her "Mr. Grant, I need to talk to you about..." moments, for example, after which she'd leave his office unable to dispute his circuitous logic but not quite sure how she'd been talked out of whatever her objective had been.
If I had to assign a ratio to the success of such bits, it might be something like writing, 30%; performance, 70%. Or in the case of Moore's brilliant invention of a dozen different ways to suppress inappropriate laughter at Chuckles the Clown's funeral: writing, 5%; performance 95%. What, after all, could the script have said? "Mary snickers...Mary giggles...Mary snorts..." For me, those five minutes are the only worthwhile ones in the entire episode. The tasteless jokes that Murray and Lou crack in earlier scenes are just not that funny and, for all my admiration of Asner's way with dialogue, uncontrolled laughter was something that he - or Gavin McLeod, for that matter - didn't convincingly pull off. Then come those five minutes, and Moore shows everyone how it's done. The way she blossomed as a creatively comic actress from her days with Van Dyke is something to behold.
Gee, I kinda went off on a tangent there. I guess the point (if there is one) has to do with the differing requirements of filming sustained performance and action in one evening, and those of exposing "bits of film" (as Hitchcock put it) over a period of weeks that, once assembled, would create the illusion of continuity (of which the shower murder would be the definitively extreme example, I suppose).
"Newman told Leigh his next movie was Torn Curtain. She was excited he would now get to work with Hitchcock. He was excited too and told Leigh -- 'And we get two weeks of rehearsal, I hear Hitchcock doesn't usually do that.'"
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Isn't THAT interesting? A magnanimous, star-pleasing gesture on Hitchcock's part? An acknowledgement of and attempt to adjust to the changing nature of film making in an emerging age of marquee-name independence and power? Doubts about the script itself? Or about Hitchcock's own abilities at that stage of his career? Some combination thereof?
D'ya mind if I consolidate replies to your further comments here in this one?
"Also: a young film writer/director named Curtis Harrington watched Hitchcock physically direct John Vernon and Karin Dor in the "murder of Juanita" scene in Topaz. Hitchcock walked the actors through their every move, personally positioned Vernon's hands on Dor's shoulder and back, etc. Hitchcock told Harrington: 'Ordinarily, I wouldn't get so involved, but these are unseasoned actors and need more personal direction from me.'"
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That also sounds as much like an example of that precision to which I referred earlier. Another would be William Prince's stylized, abrupt throwing back of his head and wide-eyed, skyward gaze when the bishop is injected by Fran in Family Plot: a very specific visual effect and rhythm Hitchcock was after.
"I can see Sinatra in The Wrong Man(as Italian-American Manny Ballestrero)"
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That's something I'd very much have liked to see. While bewildered forbearance and quiet suffering was effectively portrayed by Fonda, Sinatra would seem to have been a natural for the role, not only for his real-life heritage, musical background and east coast manner and sensibilities, but for his diminutive physical stature as well (which he worked to his advantage in From Here To Eternity and The Man With the Golden Arm) as opposed to Fonda's towering presence.
"I think maybe memory suggests I've read of table reads for three Hitchcock films: Rope and Dial M(because they were from plays to begin with), and for some reason, Lifeboat comes to mind..."
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Those are the very three that popped into my head as I began considering the question, Rope being the most obvious one in the affirmative, if for no other reason than the technical challenges involved (which I think might have applied to some degree for Under Capricorn as well). Makes sense for Lifeboat too, what with an entire ensemble within a confined space for every scene. But it sure doesn't sound like anything that would have applied to Hitchcock's normal M.O., does it?
From what I've read and heard, actors' subjective impressions of working under him ranged from frustrating/maddening/excruciating (Sylvia Sydney, Paul Newman...and Doris Day, until she received her well-recounted reassurance from him) to what I'd imagine must have felt quite liberating for players like Cary Grant or Balsam and Perkins. I think we talked some time back about Frank Sinatra vis a vis Hitchcock, and it's appetizing to consider at which end of the spectrum his comfort level could have fallen, given his instinctively spontaneous approach to acting on the one hand, and his distaste for multiple takes on the other. Spencer Tracy's another interesting one to consider; while he was apparently adaptable to either efficient one-take-wonders like Woody Van Dyke or practitioners of both extensive rehearsal and multiple takes such as George Cukor, he also resented directorial micromanagement of the mechanics of his performances (as illustrated by a story Stanley Kramer liked to tell about Inherit the Wind).
Which raises an issue about which I realize I know pretty much nothing where Hitchcock is concerned: multiple takes. Closer to "One-Take Woody" or "40-Take Willie" Wyler? I'm guessing that, with his own preference for pre-production over production, it would have been the former. But there's still the matter of the precision of his vision for a given film. I figure if anybody knows, you do.
What I know about the general topic is that it depended almost entirely upon the director. "Actor's directors" like the aforementioned Cukor, or Elia Kazan or Paul Mazursky favored the comprehensive approach, as did those who came to feature film from the days of live television (like John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann or Robert Mulligan), although during the heyday of the studio system, that would in turn have depended upon an individual director's prestige and clout, which itself would have been reflected in the schedule and budget.
Then there were those like Frank Capra, who had as much autonomy as a director could attain at cost-conscious Columbia under combative and tyrannical Harry Cohn, but who was guided by what he felt productions or individual scenes therein required: unrehearsed spontaneity for It Happened One Night, You Can't Take It With You or Arsenic and Old Lace; precisely-coordinated multi-camera setups for Mr. Smith Goes To Washington senate scenes, for instance.
"...the caper itself comprises the briefest part of the narrative"
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Ah, that's encouraging. And yet another reminder to me not to make too many assumptions based on what's included in trailers.
Funny enterprise, that: it's probably the only business that consists entirely of giving away free samples of the product. You generally want to show audiences just enough to generate that "I have to see this" reaction, but avoid spoilers and blowing the bankroll in terms of highlights. But then there are those occasional cases where everyone concerned knows they've got a dog and, with only the highlights to sell, they cram what there are of them into the trailer, leaving consumers nothing to appreciate about the product once they've purchased it (the strategy being, I assume, to get the coffers as full as possible as early as possible, because after you've got their ten bucks, who cares if they liked what they spent it on?).
And in a larger sense, the film business is probably the ultimate exercise of caveat emptor: absolutely no satisfaction-or-your-money-back guarantees, and the rare instances in which refunds occur, they're borne entirely by the merchant rather than the manufacturer. Consumers understand and accept that you pays your money and takes your chances. I remember reading an anecdote about one of the early film pioneers (might have been Laemmle, or Zukor or Goldwyn, but I really can't recall) expressing his realization of what a great business it was to get into: "You assemble only one of each product, sell it over and over to millions and still own the inventory."
Another anecdote: in the early days of home video, we were in line behind a guy at the counter who told the clerk he wasn't willing to pay for the rental of the cassette he was returning.
CUSTOMER: "This tape was no good."
CLERK: "Oh, I'm sorry. What was wrong with it?"
CUSTOMER: "It sucked."
CLERK:"I mean, what was the problem? Did it jam in the machine? Was it creased or full of dropouts or wouldn't play or what?"
CUSTOMER: "No, it played fine, but the movie on it just sucked."
CLERK: "Uhhhh....I'm sorry, sir, but..."
And you can imagine how the rest went.
My full disclosure here is twofold: no plans to make any effort to see the new one (I may check it out if it happens to turn up on HBO in coming months) and great affection for the original (which we re-watched some weeks back).
Avoiding spoilers, I'll say that while the '79 has downbeat aspects to it, it's not an adjective I'd apply to the film as a whole. As swanstep guessed, it does have that trademark '70s grittiness to it, and plays as neither comedy nor drama, although it's both plenty funny (but never shticky or punchline-dependent) and plenty serious (but never heavy-handed). What it does, it does in understated ways. The premise, sounding cute, intriguing and amusing, isn't executed in what came to be called "high concept" fashion. In tone, it's not dissimilar from another of Carney's late-'70s efforts, The Late Show (another for which I have great affection, and about which more in a moment), going for quiet humor rather than big laughs. In other examples of that understatement, the caper itself comprises the briefest part of the narrative, with the bulk concerning itself with preparation and aftermath, and two key dramatic moments are staged completely silently while photographed from a distance with long lenses.
Interesting about director/writer Martin Brest, whose entire feature output (from '77 to '03) numbered only seven; the five remaining after GIS could easily be called either "high concept," "shticky" or both (Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, Scent Of A Woman, Meet Joe Black, Gigli). I didn't see the last, but none of the rest would hint at what to expect from GIS.
Interesting also to compare the casting: three pedigreed, longtime movie stars in '17 along with Ann-Margret, Christopher Lloyd and Matt Dillon in support; in '79, three non-movie-stars who had only recently been reinvented on the big screen with nominated and/or winning roles. In the cases of both Burns and Carney, I consider their post-Oscar work (Burns in GIS; Carney in the aforementioned TLS) superior to that for which they were awarded. No other recognizable names and only one perhaps-familiar face: Charles Hallahan in a very nice turn as Carney's son-in-law.
I can evaluate the new one only on the basis of trailers, clips and reviews, but it appears they've gone "high concept" with it: action sequences and zeitgeist-worthy invocations of pension-fund raiders and too-big-to-fail banks, as opposed to the appropriate-to-any-era simplicity of marginalized existences among widowed retirees. Following a title sequence in which we see (but don't hear) the three walking home from the market and presumably bickering over purchases and prices, we're presented with a typical, idle afternoon on a park bench, abruptly summed up by Burns: "I'm sick of this shit."
I hate to sound cynical and curmudgeonly, and maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised when I get around to the new one, but it all sounds so trendy and market-based in a funny-old-farts-kick-up-their-heels way, and between this, The Bucket List and Last Vegas, Freeman seems to be operating his own cottage industry.
Well, I'm getting to be an old fart myself, and you'd be kind to overlook that, but I really can pass on a hearty recommendation for the '79 GIS.
Thanks, ec. I really must get around to reading the Rebello book (even though it would appear to make my theorized "romantic" possibility more remote).
About those other usages: Stage 28 would indeed have been like any other stage on the lot, but only up to a point. The Phantom opera house interior set (and you're correct - it did make that Torn Curtain appearance, along with those in '31's Dracula, '35's The Raven, '37's One Hundred Men and A Girl and the '43 Phantom remake among others) remained in place from 1925 on and was dismantled only just before the building was razed a few years back, but it occupied no more than half the stage's floor space, leaving the remainder free for the pretty much constant cycle of construction and striking from one production to the next.
There's probably an element of irony in the fact that the most common instances of standing interior sets remaining in place over a period of years would have been those built not for feature films, but for long-running television series.
"I STILL can't figure out exactly how he did it. Did that camera spin out from a still photograph of Leigh? Or PARTIALLY from a still, that then resolved into actual footage?"
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I think that's pretty much it: a freeze frame that was optically rotated and zoomed out from in the lab, transitioning to motion once the rotation ends, and with the camera lens continuing to zoom out (the two are astonishingly well-matched).
The aspect that's always intrigued me is the cut that occurs "mid-door" during the seemingly continuous pan from Marion's face, past the open bathroom door and into the bedroom, dollying in to the newspaper on the night stand. This must have been done either because the camera movement was too cumbersome to accomplish in one shot, or had to do with balancing the bright lighting of the bathroom set and that of the dimmer bedroom; possibly both.
If I recall, you've remarked and speculated in the past about the "floor level" aspect of the Marion closeup as well. I can think of only two ways in which it might have been done: either the entire adjoining bedroom/bathroom sets were constructed on a platform, or what I judge to be the more likely guess, it was done on one of the sound stages with a below-ground-level "well" (of which I think every major lot has at least one). Universal's Stage 28 (the legendary and now-demolished Phantom Of the Opera stage), listed as one of those used for Psycho, was one such.
The "well" was used for, among other things, the orchestra seats and pit for productions employing the opera house set, so there's the possibility that the shower scene was shot on one constructed in the very space occupied by that larger set's stage and proscenium (and later used by Hitchcock for Torn Curtain). I have no way of knowing if that was the case, but inasmuch as the studio involved is responsible for three of the most notable "send them screaming into the aisles" moments in cinema history (the first appearance of Karloff's Frankenstein monster being the third), I find that possibility an irresistibly romantic and fitting one.
Reading your comments and looking back over mine, ec, I realize mine came off more harshly than I'd really intended. I might have added, for instance, that I've been enjoying most the moments when it "gets real," as in the sincerely-played heart-to-hearts between Davis and Aldrich and later, she and Crawford. Whether or not such exchanges actually took place seems secondary to their having, for the sake of drama, felt real.
Parenthetic interjection: I sure do miss by bold and italic fonts for emphasis. But hell, maybe their absence will teach me how to better communicate meanings without depending on such textual crutches.
I guess maybe the biggest problem I'm having is with balancing of the varying tones. Hitchcock, of course, demonstrated over and over that it can indeed be accomplished smoothly and deftly. But the thing does have me well and truly hooked, and that says something. When it pops up on the DVR each Sunday, it makes for welcome late-night viewing.
About that ending, the show seems to be stating that the intended interpretation was that Blanche did die, but it isn't explicit, and as I always say, we can imagine anything we want about what happens after the fadeout.
Did Scarlett get Rhett back? Of course she did. Or so say I.
It's probably worth bearing in mind the title is Feud: Bette and Joan, rather than Feud: Whatever Happened To Baby Jane.
However they choose to use it, they've got two more years' worth of material to mine, presumably culminating with Crawford's ultimately abortive participation in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. In the meantime, they have the critical and box office reception of WHTBJ; plenty of potential drama surrounding the nominations; Crawford's crafty engineering of arranging to accept the Best Actress award for any nominee who might not be present which paid off with Bancroft's win (and which reportedly rankled Davis twice over for both the loss and Crawford's showboating); the effects WHTBJ had on their careers in the interim; their eventually putting business and career interests over personal ones in planning another film together; Crawford's bailing from HHSC after completing location work; post-HHSC epilogues.
It must be acknowledged that viewers tune into a series such as Feud for the dirt, whether factual, inferred or manufactured from whole cloth, and it's in this colorful direction the series indicated it would go from the very start. It's also a very "television" approach. As most are probably aware, the mechanics of film making entail laborious and really rather dull processes that don't ordinarily make for compelling drama, and the best feature films depicting the industry - both versions of A Star Is Born, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Barefoot Contessa, Day For Night, for example - concentrate the bulk of their drama on offscreen matters, limiting on-set processes largely to passing references. The necessarily brisker pace of a one-hour TV format (even in multiples of eight) demands higher concentrations of melodrama in response to the shorter and more easily-distracted-from attention spans of home viewers, and one interrupted by commercial breaks, as opposed to an HBO-type limited series, enforces an even stricter discipline, with each 10 to 15 minute "act" requiring its own dramatic arc of buildup, climax and denouement.
With these expectations, Feud has so far delivered as well as any, enhanced by the untypically high caliber of participants such as Sarandon, Molina, Tucci and Davis, but I can't say it's truly surpassed them. Rather than each entry improving on the last, I've observed a rapid slide into laziness after a somewhat promising opener. I was initially encouraged, for instance, by Sarandon's approach to portraying a personality as well-known as Davis's, feeling that she was capturing its essence without descending into a caricature of familiar mannerisms. But the two subsequent episodes have revealed just such a tendency, with the actress mimicking characteristic Davis physical gestures, or speech eccentricities like the pronunciation of the "d" at the end of a word like "good" as a "t."
Lange has a tougher row to hoe, as I'm not sure anyone really knew who Crawford was at her center. I recall reading some time back of one of her MGM cronies (I can't remember which one) remarking, "Joan tried to be all things to all people," encapsulating the importance of performance to every aspect of her life from the professional to the public to the private, as she cast herself into the role she felt most appropriate to each: tough-as-nails or dewy-eyed romantic; sweetness-and-light or strict disciplinarian. On a side note, it was disappointing to see the show falling back on more or less recreating an adoption agency scene from Mommie Dearest, right down to the staging. It may very well be that Frank Perry and Fay Dunaway set the tone 30-odd years ago for all possible future versions of Crawford.
Both Tucci and Davis began in over-the-top mode and have maintained that pitch, seemingly opting for generic portrayals of apoplectic exec and scheming, dishy gossip. What their performances - and the writing - are missing are Warner's corny joviality (by all accounts, he fancied himself quite the life-of-the-party jokester) and Hopper's deceptive folksiness or aggressive jingoism. But now I'm venturing into the realm of nitpicking, I guess.
As long as I've done so, I'll add that I'm always annoyed when current-day slang such as "buzz" finds its way into dialogue meant to have taken place a half-century ago.