The Writer's Poke

  McDevitt and Juan offer five pages of "their impressions" on this film in their book A Year of Hitchcock. Although it includes a picture of Peter Lorre, they don't mention anything he actually does in the movie. Later in the chapter, the only thing they say about Lorre is that he didn't know English and had to memorize his lines phonetically. And yes, I would say that for someone who can't speak English, he's impressive.  The problem with his part in this film, however, is that he simply has nothing to do. I am a huge Peter Lorre fan, and I like to watch his films. Unfortunately, he's in a few films, like this one, where he really doesn't have much to make him stand out. Lorre "stands out," of course, just by the way he looks and his presence on the screen. But damn it, that's not enough. His character needs something to do, too.  In the 1956 remake with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, Hitchcock streamlines the story and makes it easier to...

The "first" Hitchcock film. As I'm reading through the Truffaut/Hitchcock book, I'm reminded that Hitchcock saw film as a visual medium. Maybe that's an obvious idea, but his point was that later, film would sort of forget that, and scenes would develop around people just finding different places to talk.  I've definitely noticed this without ever putting it into words. It's probably why I don't like shows like Law and Order, for example, but when I think of other shows I do like, I can see how some of them are more "talk shows," so to speak, than shows fully utilizing the visual to drive a story. Why does that happen? Likely because it's easier to convey information through talking (and probably because it's cheaper?). For Hitchcock, he believed that the fewer title cards needed in a silent film, the better. The challenge was to convey everything the viewer needed to know through a look, or to find other visual ways to communicate th...

Roger Ebert did audio commentary for the DVDs of only six films: Casablanca (1942) Dark City (1998) Crumb (1994) Floating Weeds (1959) Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) Citizen Kane (1941)  Why just those six? I'd be curious to know, especially because for 30 years, he used to go through movies frame by frame with students at the University of Colorado. I don't know how many of those sessions were recorded, if any.  Watching the typical "audio commentary" feature on a DVD isn't something I often do, usually because: I've just watched the movie, and I don't have the time or motivation to immediately watch it again with the commentary on. Unfortunately, I find that when I don't watch the commentary immediately after watching the movie, I don't.  So, when I finished re-watching the film this time, I immediately started watching the Ebert commentary. I watched about the first 25-30 minutes and found it to be excellent. The same DVD also has the Pet...

Farley Granger, previously in Rope (1948), is back again in another Hitchcock picture, this time as Guy, tennis player and aspiring politician.  He has a wife, but she's pregnant with another man's baby. She had asked Guy for a divorce, but apparently, she changes her mind. Did divorce laws work that way? Did both parties have to agree to divorce for it to be granted, and when she threatens to tell the world that the child is his, were there not paternity tests available to prove otherwise? None of this matters, because Bruno (Robert Walker) has carried out his end of the unagreed-to bargain, strangling Guy's wife. Guy had met Bruno on a train. He assumes it was an accidental meeting, but Bruno has clearly been following Guy and has planned the meeting. I don't know if Bruno just assumed that Guy would be eager to go for the "crisscross perfect murder plan" or if he cared.  Much is made of Bruno ending up with Guy's lighter -- not something that was part o...

This movie has the two iconic scenes -- Man being chased by crop duster plane, and couple being chased on the top of Mt. Rushmore. That probably is enough to give it at least 4 stars. What about the rest of the movie? Roger (Cary Grant) is just a typical New York dude. Somehow -- never explained in the movie -- the bad guys come to believe that he's someone else. That someone else is a Cold War undercover agent. Turns out this agent isn't even real.  By the way, the crop-dusting scene is supposed to take place in Indiana, just 90 minutes away from Chicago. It's a completely barren and flat landscape. No trees. I'm pretty sure none of Indiana actually looks like that. Maybe it could pass for parts of Kansas, but I'm not sure. In fact, the scene was shot in central California. Regardless, it's a cool scene. And about the femme fatal: The movie really makes us think about Eve's ethics (Eva Marie Saint). She knew she was sending Roger to his doom, but in her pos...

Seems like every Hitchcock film has at least someone that wants to murder someone else, often for vague reasons, and killers are all very cold and calculating about it. They all think they have the perfect plan. Even when they get caught, they remain cold and calculating, like it's all just a game that doesn't matter anyway,  In this edition of Murder by Hitchcock, Tony (Ray Milland) knows that his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly) no longer loves him and that she's been seeing another man, Mark (Robert Cummings). Mark happens to be a murder mystery writer, and so its jolly good fun to hear Tony ask Mark how he plans his murders for his novels. Mark makes the pithy comment that planning murders in novels and planning them in real life are two different things, because real-life murders never go as planned. Tony does seem like he's got everything planned out down to the last detail, but what he doesn't plan for is Margot's scissors. She has a weapon that helps her fight...