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As I posted once on the IMDB boards:
Some folks complain that Hitchcock was not a very good director of actors. TO which I say: anyone who can get a funny performance out of Wendell COrey has to be a great director of actors!
My Comcast cable now provides TCM On Demand where for no extra cost you can view a slew of their current month's offerings whenever you want. Including a bunch of the Hitchcocks.
A bit of irony on last weekend's Decades schedule. THey had planned on a marathon of AHH, but in tribute to Martin Landau, they ran Mission Impossible instead.
So the guy who got his big break in a major Hitchcock film bumped Hitchcock from the schedule!
For me, and others who came of age in the late 60s who saw Kubrick's 2001 a dozen or more times and then learn that his followup, A Clockwork Orange, was widely praised in advance as the year's best film, it felt like dying and going to heaven. When I showed up for the first show the first day in NY, I have never experienced such a collective buzz from the audience before the film started, and it didn't disappoint.
But 2001 was still better.
But in the late 60s when a lot of road show films tanked at the BO, they would ruthlessly edit the films down for the nabes. I know for a fact that Camelot and Far From the Madding Crowd got this treatment, with Camelot the musical numbers (the best part of the film) were trashed.
So if you saw Camelot in the nabe and see it now on TCM and can't recall hearing some song verses back then, it's not necessarily a memory issue; you're getting the uncut film now.
At the age of 7, my favorite comics were Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason and Groucho Marx. What passed for comedy on kids TV in the 50s was kind of lame.
ecarle, I remember those as as well, and I believe the phrase was "playing at a theater near you with continuous performances at POPULAR prices"/ TO which we would joke "Who would want to see a movie at unpopular prices?"
Thorwald is very different from the Hitchcock psychos. He's a very ordinary type who loses it for a moment. Yes, his cleanup is grisly, but he lives in a crowded city and can't very well carry the body to his car and dump it in a swamp as Norman does.
And given his ordinariness and the anonymity of urban life, he would certainly have gotten away with it if not for Jeffries's relentless pursuit.
A perusal of Balsam's credits shows as I suspected a lot of TV work both before and after Psycho, in the 50s a lot of live TV drama. Not many movies, notably 12 Angry Men before, Breakfast at Tiffany's after, then nothin much till his Oscar for A THousand Clowns.
That Oscar didn't do much for his career either. It cam a year before Matthau won his for Fortune Cookie, which was a big star making role. An interesting parellel: a year befor Fortune Cookie, Matthau appeared in Mirage in a role very similar to Arbogast: a private eye who enters midway in the film and is killed off before he can solve the case. And like Arbogast, he gets some of the best lines in the film.
Back to Balsam, it occurs to me that in 12 Angry Men, his character stands out from the rest in that by the end of the film, we still know almost nothing about him; as the foreman of the jury, he's playing a role in the jury room, so very little of who he is comes out, maybe a brief moment when he exaperatedly offers to give up his leader role to anyone who thinks he can do a better job. But mostly he's a true everyman in the film, while the others are all specific types.
A line from Cali Charlie that always got hisses from revival house audiences:
You can do anything you want. (Pause) And being a woman, you will.
Yes, Charlie may be an old fashioned MCP, but it's a great line both in recalling what's already happened and foreshadowing what's about to happen:
If a woman wants to steal $40,000 and run off with her boyfriend... she will.
If a woman wants to hack up young women to keep them away from her son...she will (even if she happens to be dead!)
Interesting if you think about it, the murder and cleaning up in Rear Window is much grislier than that in Psycho, except all the gore is kept off screen.
Like the Thelma Ritter character, audiences in the mid 50s would "want no part of it".
The 39 Steps was the film that made Hitchcock's reputation. IT was the biggest BO film of the time in the UK, and a number of critics called it the best British film ever made to date. So it's understandable that Hitchcock would revisit it throughout his career, but at the same time, avoiding an explicit remake.
Aside from the technical advances between 1935 and 1959, NBN is a much more mature film. For one thing, we know ab solutely nothing about the protagonist of 39 Steps, he literally could have been chosen at random. But the little we do know about Thornhill provides irony and a poetic sense of justice to his dilemma. He's spent his life as an ad man cultivating the "expedient exaggeration", but suddenly he's up against not just VanDamm and his crew, but the Professor and his team, who are masters of the expedient exaggeration, never mind who gets hurt or "slightly killed".
Another 1974 film not listed here but somethimes discussed on these boards is Murder on the Orient Express, with its many Hitchcock alums.
Speaking of which, a remake is due out this fall, to which I ask:WHY? The original is a near perfect entertainment, and for purists who didn't care for the in jokes, there's the PBS version as well. What I cringe at is the possibility that the makers of the new film are seeking to "imporve" on the original story. A tagline on IMDB says that the hunt for the killer is a race against time, before he/she strikes again, a concept that goes totally against the resolution of the original where the killer striking again is never a possibility.
Hopkins and Perkins are professionally linked by the fact that they played the shrink in Equus on Broadway back to back, and Perkins's notices were eqully good. (Actually, Hopkins wasn't the first to play the role, that was Alec McCowan in London.)
Hitchcock said many times that he remade MWKTM because he wasn't very satisfied with the original and wanted to get it right. That's not the same as remaking just for the sake of the almighty dollar; I'm sure he would not have considered remaking The 39 Steps, it was perfect as it was.
Interestingly, in the late 50s, Paramount was into remaking classic comedies of an earlier era, but not even acknowledging them as remakes, the titles were always changed. So Sturges' Miracle at Morgan Creek became Jerry Lewis's Rock a Bye Baby, and The Lady Eve became a godawful vehicle for George Gobel.
1969 wasn't all that bad if one looks a little out of the mainstream. THere was Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky's debut, which turned the American sex comedy of the 50s/60s on its ear - sorry, Rock/Doris, no room for you in that bed! And Arthur Penn followed B&C with Alice's Restaurant, truly a film of its time, which if nothing else, captured the narrative of the song in all its glory. And if Hitchcock flunked with Topaz, Costa Gavras gets an A for Z, opening the same week in December.
And in the mainstream, it's hard to understand the negative reaction to Hello, Dolly except in the context of how big budget musicals were going out of fashion.
And if that still leaves the plate a little empty for 1969, you didn't have to wait long for quality films in 1970, since both Patton and MASH opened in January.
A 4 season back story to Rear Window? Hardly, Except when confined in a wheelchair, it's very difficult to imagine Jeff sitting in his apartment spying on the neighbors. He's out in the world globe hopping and taking "real" pictures, not imaginary ones in his head, which is all he has to divert himself while his leg is healing.
NBN? Possibly, would be interesting to see what happens next. As for back story, might be interesting if they concentrate on Eve and Van Damm, but Thornhill? As he himself admits, his wives divorced him because he led too dull a life.
IMO, these "extension" series of books/films are getting out of hand. The original creator made very definite artistic decisions as to what to include and what to leave to the reader/viewer's imagination and speculation and in most cases, more is certainly next.
You can blame Kubrick for his reshoots on The Shining, which was supposed to be Warners big Xmas film in 1979 but wasn't ready. Warners had nothing else available but GIS.
No, there was no blood in UY, but, for the time, the multiple slashes by the razor were pretty graphic nonetheless.
And speaking of a barber's chair.... there was the episode of AHP where this guy gets revenge on the man who ruined his life, by getting a job as a barber and luring his prey into the chair. But the neat twist is, when they come to arrest him, there isn't a single mark on his victim's throat, he literally died of fright, so there was no crime.
The thread on The Lodger got me thinking that Hitchcock's "charming" (and usually sympathetic) villain who got equal time with the protagonist did not really emerge until nearly 20 years into his career, in Shadow of a Doubt. Up till then, his main focus was on innocents falsely accused of a crime or caught up in a web of espionage.
A classic example is Young and Innocent in which the killer makes two short cameos, at the beginning and the end, and is a thoroughly repulsive character, one who would never get close to his victim except for the fact he's married to her.