NFR Project: 'Strangers on a Train' (1951)

 

NFR Project: “Strangers on a Train”

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock

Scr: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde

Pho: Robert Burks

Ed: William Ziegler

Premiere: June 30, 1951

101 min.

Director Alfred Hitchcock continued his run as the Master of Suspense with this film, one of his most efficient entries in the genre.

The movie is adapted from the great crime writer Patricia Highsmith’s first novel of the same name. The idea is perfect: what if two individuals “traded” murders?

Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is on a train where he randomly meets an attentive stranger, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker). Bruno, who gradually reveals himself to be mentally disturbed, eventually gets around to theorizing that two people could get away with murder if they each kill the other’s intended victim – giving both an alibi and no link to the commission of the crimes.

As Guy wants to be rid of his promiscuous wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers) in order to be with his beloved, senator’s daughter Anne (Ruth Roman), and Bruno wants to kill his hated father, Bruno thinks they should do each other’s dirty work. “Your wife. My father. Criss-cross!” he exclaims.

Guy nervously turns him down, thinking he is joking. He meets Miriam, who reveals she is pregnant by someone else. Guy wants a divorce, but Miriam won’t cooperate. In fact, she intends to claim that the baby is Guy’s.

Bruno then stalks Miriam at an amusement park and kills her –strangling her in a scene reflected dimly in Miriam’s shattered glasses on the ground – a difficult and masterful shot.

Guy immediately comes under suspicion, as he cannot prove his whereabouts at the time of the murder. Bruno then tries to blackmail Guy into killing Bruno’s father, using his possession of a distinctive lighter of Guy’s as evidence.

Bruno stalks Guy, crashing Anne’s father’s party. While there, he chats gaily about the best way to murder someone. Catching sight of Anne’s sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock, the director’s daughter), who resembles Miriam, he gets carried away and squeezes the neck of one of the guests until she cries out.

Bruno sends Guy a map of his house, a key, and a gun. Guy goes along, hoping to alert Bruno’s father about his intentions. However, Bruno is in his father’s bed, waiting for him. Bruno vows that he will make Guy fulfill his part of their supposed bargain.

Guy is trapped. Anne suspects the truth, and gets Guy to confess it to her. She tries warning Bruno’s mother about his insanity, to no avail. Bruno catches up with Anne and tells her that he intends to plant Guy’s lighter at the scene of the crime.

Now the race is on. Guy must compete in a championship tennis match before he can go to the amusement park to stop Bruno. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy getting to the scene first. Guy’s match goes long; he struggles for point after point as the clock ticks on. At the same time, Bruno loses the lighter down a grating and hysterically struggles to reach through it and grasp the incriminating object.

Both men succeed. Bruno gets there first, and is recognized by a witness to the murder. He leaps aboard a carousel; Guy follows him. A policeman shoots at Bruno, but kills the carousel operator instead, who falls onto the controls. The ride whirligigs out of control; the passengers scream (save for one delighted boy) as Bruno and Guy fight it out.

The carousel smashes up; Guy is flung free, but Bruno is crushed. Guy tries to get Bruno to confess before he dies, but Bruno refuses. As he dies, his clenched fist relaxes – and there is Guy’s lighter. Guy is exonerated.

Hitchcock has a marvelous time making this film. Bruno is Guy’s doppelganger, his shadow self. Guy wants to kill his wife – at one point, he cries out, “I could strangle her!” – but his civilized impulses restrain him. Not so for Bruno, a spoiled rich kid with a mother fixation and a father complex. Guy talks; Bruno, darkly, acts.

Everything is doubled in the film – the main characters, the glasses, the party guests, the detectives trailing Guy. The director keeps things bright around Guy, while Bruno operates in darkness. Hitchcock works his accustomed magic – ratcheting up the suspense as Guy toils to finish off his court opponent in tense silence, while simultaneously Bruno gropes for the lighter which could hang him.

Hitchcock was shortly to begin making color feature films. Strangers on a Train shows off his marvelous black-and-white technique, aided here ably by cinematographer Robert Burks.

In the novel, Guy commits the reciprocal murder. Hitchcock changes that to make it yet another one of his stories, like The 39 Steps and Saboteur, about an innocent man dragged into a disoriented world where death and calamity reign. Once again, Hitchcock’s hero stares into the abyss.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Ace in the Hole.

NFR Project: 'Winchester '73' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Winchester ‘73”

Dir: Anthony Mann

Scr: Borden Chase, Robert L. Richards

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Edward Curtiss

Premiere: July 12, 1950

92 min.

Anthony Mann (1906-1967) was a genius.

Although he is best known today for his extensive work with Jimmy Stewart, with whom he made eight films, five of which were Westerns, Mann worked his way up from nothing. He started his career as a stage actor, and worked his way up to the position of director.

In 1937, he went to Hollywood and again, working from the bottom up, graduated into the role of director. He was versatile, but he became first known for his film noirs – T-Men, Strange Impersonation, Railroaded!, and Raw Deal. When a deal to make this movie with director Fritz Lang fell through, Jimmy Stewart picked Mann to helm the film. Mann rewrote the script with Borden Chase, and Winchester ’73 was born. It was the first of his Western collaborations with Stewart.

The idea of the “adult” Western was new. John Ford had always presented Westerns as adult dramas, but by and large Westerns for decades were kid stuff – featuring a white-hatted hero, a dastardly villain, and a damsel in distress. Chases, fistfights, and shootouts were crammed onto the screen.

Then, in 1947, Raoul Walsh made what is considered the first “noir” Western, Pursued. Dark, forbidding, and full of psychological torment, it heralded a shift in the way Westerns were made. Suddenly, the genre could accommodate complexity and ambiguity, and began to address real-life issues.

Winchester ’73 is firmly in this new tradition. Here, Stewart plays Lin McAdam, a sharpshooter in pursuit of the villainous Dutch Henry Brown, for reasons we are not privy to. He and his saddle pal High-Spade (Millard Mitchell) ride into Dodge City, Kansas. Lin finds his prey but can’t shoot him, as all guns in town are confiscated on entry by the sheriff. Both men enter a shooting contest to win a “One in a Thousand” Winchester 1873 rifle. Lin wins, but Dutch Henry ambushes him and steals his new rifle. He and his gang flee town without their guns.

Now the film takes us on an odyssey. The gun is a fetish; it imbues those who possess it with distinction and dominance. For a while. The rifle changes hands many times, and it brings bad luck and destruction to all who come across it. First, a sharpie, Lamont, (John McIntire) wins the gun a card game. He goes to sell arms to the Indians. There, the chief (a young Rock Hudson) decides he wants the rifle, and casually kills Lamont for it.

The tribe then attacks a troop of soldiers, and the chief is slain. A young trooper (Tony Curtis!) then gives the rifle to another man, who is promptly killed for it by Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea, playing his usual film role of creep, only in Western wear). Johnny hooks up with Dutch, who takes the rifle back from him. Seeking to thwart another robbery by the gang, Lin kills Johnny.

Finally, Lin pursues Dutch into the bare and rocky landscape – and it is revealed that they are brothers. Dutch killed their father by shooting him in the back. A brief but exciting gun duel follows, with the brothers trying to kill each other with ricocheted bullets. Finally, Lin takes aim and nails Dutch, who falls to his death. The rifle has returned to Lin’s possession.

Stewart was playing a new kind of Western hero – a man haunted by past trouble, out for revenge. Stewart’s happy, lovable persona was replaced by something deeper. Lin is bitter, untrusting, obsessed. He refuses to share his problem with others, moving sternly forward in his quest for retribution. In a scene with Dan Duryea, Stewart snaps and dashes Duryea’s head on a bar, twisting his arm and demanding to know where Dutch is. There’s a wild gleam of rage in Stewart’s eye, and we feel how close he is to being overwhelmed by his violent instincts.

Mann’s West is markedly different from the usual setup. It’s dusty, dirty, crowded with characters following their own selfish agendas. Tragic blindness takes a front seat in Mann’s Westerns. Additionally, Mann upped the ante by shooting on location – the players are let loose in the vast empty space of the frontier, where their battles play out on an epic canvas.

Mann took the Western and moved it into new territory.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Strangers on a Train.

NFR Project: 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Sunset Boulevard”

Dir: Billy Wilder

Scr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshan Jr.

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Doane Harrison, Arthur Schmidt

Premiere: August 10, 1950

110 min.

It’s a monumental story; it’s no surprise it inspired a lavish Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It’s operatic. It’s a noir. It’s a black comedy. It’s a character study.

That a film can do so many things at once is a tribute to its director, Billy Wilder. His ability to distill the exact amount of footage to tell a story richly, serious or comic, is legendary, and he is rightly featured many times in the National Film Registry.

Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece. Richard Corliss called it a horror story; David Thomson notes its irony in that the guy who wanted a Hollywood swimming pool ends up face-down dead in his. There are a host of interpretations of the meanings to be found in Wilder’s film – so much the better for Wilder. The movie welcomes a multiplicity of thoughts, as a great film does.

It’s yet another “movie about the movies” story, about how Hollywood is all fakery and ego. Yet at its heart is a titanically tragic figure, an insane former silent screen goddess whose predatory claws turn everything around into death and waste. Norma Desmond is played by Gloria Swanson, who herself was a “forgotten” actress from the Silent Era, a great star who made millions and ruled as royalty in Tinsel Town.

Swanson here plays the role of her career. Norma is a monster of self-regard, insulated by wealth from reality, living cocooned in her past greatness. She lives in the decayed grandeur of her Hollywood mansion. Her narcissism consumes everyone around her, and into her orbit drifts lackluster young screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden in the first of his trademark “lovable heel” roles. Joe is a hack; he hasn’t sold a screenplay in years, he is behind on his rent, and he refuses to quit the movie business and go back to life as a copy editor in Dayton, Ohio.

Holden narrates the flashback from the afterlife, as his dead body is floating in Norma Desmond’s pool. It seems that Joe pulled in to Norma’s demesne one day, fleeing from men looking to repossess his car. She mistakes him for a funeral director; she is burying her pet monkey. Joe agrees to look over a script she contemplates as being for her big comeback (it is wretchedly awful). Norma is rich; she finds out he’s broke, pays off the landlord, and brings all his stuff to her house. She needs a new pet.

Slowly, Norma starts grooming him, taking him out with her, and eventually – yes, we are given to believe – sleeping with him. Swanson as Desmond is a grotesque caricature of a woman, but there are moments when you can see a ruined beauty in her tortured gaze. It is conceivable that Joe whores himself out, given his cynicism and self-contempt.

Norma is served only by her butler, Max, played by Eric von Stroheim (“the Hun you love to hate!”). Stroheim was a key director of the Silent Era; his comedown to playing a butler was not lost on studio viewers. Max writes fan mail to Norma on the sly, to keep her illusion alive. It later turns out that Max was a great director – and Norma’s first husband. (We watch Norma watching Swanson in Queen Kelly [1929] . . . which was directed by Stroheim! in her private theater.)

Joe’s lifeline to sanity is Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), fellow screenwriter and fiancée of Joe’s best friend. She reviews (and pans) his latest work . . . but then declares she sees some good in it, and proposes that they work on it together. Gradually, they fall in love.

Meanwhile, Norma thinks she is wanted to star in a new film for director Cecil B. DeMille; actually, his production sstaff wants to use her vintage automobile. Self-deluded, she begins planning her big comeback.

Joe starts sneaking out at night to work on the screenplay. Norma finds out and calls Betty. Joe reveals that he is a gigolo, and claims to prefer it. In short, he drives Betty away. He angrily tells Norma the truth – she is a has-been. He then goes to pack and head back to Dayton – and Norma drills him three times with an automatic.

The coda to the film is the most memorable closing scene of all. Norma, now completely insane and surrounded by police, is coaxed down from her bedroom by newsreel cameras she mistakes for DeMille’s crew. Down the stairs she floats like a ghost, with a leering rictus of a face. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” she says. And walks straight into the camera as the vision of her face diffuses.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Winchester ‘73.