1948 suspense, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Farley Granger, James Stewart; IMDb / allmovie. Two students commit the perfect murder, and to prove it host a dinner parry over the corpse.
Ths is not at all a mystery: it's made explicit up front just what has happened, and more or less why. So all that's left is the tension: will they look in the chest? No, not yet. Will Phillip break down and confess all? Yeah, it's only a matter of when. Which makes it a little disconcerting when James Stewart's Rupert clearly things he is in a mystery and that this needs to be solved, when in fact it's must a matter of waiting for the weak reed to break.
The famous trick of shooting without apparent cuts is not terribly impressive to this modern viewer (though I wasn't terribly impressed by Birdman either). You could load up to ten minutes of film into a camera, and up to twenty minutes onto a projection reel, so that sets the parameters: a hard cut every twenty minutes, and soft cuts half-way between them. The soft ones usually manage just to have a few seconds with nobody in frame, while the camera can be stopped and the film changed, but the hard ones seem very blatant to me: oh, we'll zoom in on the back of Brandon's jacket, or on the top of the chest as it's opened, for no particular reason. More to the point, it has nothing to say to the story; it's just a gimmick.
The men here all look very similar to me; presumably a contemporaneous viewer would have been able to read subtle stylings of clothing and hair. As it is, I'm grateful for the different suit colours, like the hair colours in an anime series.
Patrick Hamilton, who wrote the original play (as well as Gaslight), claimed this this was not inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case. But it shows some obvious similarities.
I think the reason I ended up not being impressed with this is that it's got one gimmick (the ten-minute shots) and one point to make (these killers are not the supermen they think they are), and once the gimmick ha fallen flat and the point has been made there's nothing much to enjoy for the remainder of the running time.
I talk about this film further on Ribbon of #Memes.
2024 romance. Cole James was the bad boy on a soap opera, bought into the image a bit too much, and has being trying to rehabilitate his life and career ever since. Maggie Niven was a school drama teacher forced out by a parental complaint, now starting a new career as an intimacy coordinator. They're both working on the Bridgerton-esque TV adaptation of The Heart of Midlothian.
1951 suspense, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Farley Granger, Robert Walker; IMDb / allmovie. Tennis star and political wannaba Guy Haines meets a strange man on a train, who seems to know too much about his private life and proposes that they each commit the murder that the other would find convenient. The price of fame. Then Guy's estranged wife is killed…
This is based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, but differs in important ways: when the book's Bruno contacts Guy to demand that Guy kill his father, he goes through with it, and is caught in the end only through his own incompetence. This Guy is more sympathetic: he's trying to deal honestly with Miriam (while she boasts to him that of course the baby she's now carrying isn't his, but no court will disbelieve her when she says it is), and doesn't for a moment think of killing Bruno's domineering father.
I'll admit that this film got me on its side in the opening shots, when we see Bruno's two-tone shows walking through the station. I don't know whether the US ever called them "co-respondent shoes" in the way the UK did, but at the very least they implied a chap who didn't care much for the politenesses that let society keep running if they got in the way of what he wanted.
But Robert Walker, reminding me slightly of the young Robert Vaughn, does a fine job of seeming like a reasonable person and then pivoting into being just a bit too creepy. But surely he doesn't mean it about the murders, right?
I found the excuse for not involving the police something of a weak one, but it needs to work for the rest of the film to happen: we have to have Guy blackmailed, Guy on the run, Guy thrown on his own resources much in the manner that Roger Thornhill would be in North by Northwest—but Farley Granger is no Cary Grant, and I never find myself quite believing in the suffering and desperation he's trying to portray. Obviously any film is a work of artifice, but it shouldn't to my mind feel like one.
I find myself unreasonably amused the police tactics here: given a roundabout with a bad guy in the middle and lots of children riding it, they happily open fire in an attempt to hit the bad guy.
I like this for the atmosphere much more than for the characters or plot.
2025 horror-romance-fantasy. The town of Lake Argen, deep in rural Ontario, seems quiet and boring. They work hard to keep it that way…
1965 Shakespearean adaptation, dir. and starring Orson Welles: IMDb / allmovie. Falstaff!
2023 SF, thirteenth of its series. After the attempted kidnapping of the Mage-Queen of Mars,the authorities are trying to find out who did it and how people loyal for decades were compromised. Meanwhile, Mage-Commander Roslyn Chambers is coming to the end of a teaching stint at the Naval Academy when an old friend from her disreputable days gets in touch…
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sets and combinations. (Note that this ends today.)
2019 horror, dir. Ari Aster, Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor: IMDb / allmovie. After the tragic death of her family, Dani goes along with her boyfriend and other anthropology students to visit a commune in Sweden…
2024 short fantasy novel in the World of the Five Gods (formerly known as Chalion). A girl washes up in a fishing village, and promptly sets things on fire. Penric is sent to deal with it.
I have noticed the same thing happening twice in my interaction with software, and two data points makes a straight line.