Ill-Informed Gadfly

Nearly all of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies contain violence or the threat of it. In “Suspicion,” released in 1941, the violence is overt, but it’s not physical — it’s emotional. Despite being shackled by the Production Code, Hitchcock achieves an honest and disquieting portrait of an abusive relationship. Don’t play attention to the Code-mandated redemptive ending, which was clearly a compromise for Hitchcock. It’s awkward and out of place because, in his mind, he was making a movie where Cary Grant really was plotting to kill Joan Fontaine. There’s a sinister long shot of Grant, his face in shadow, carrying a glass of milk upstairs to his wife, that established a template followed by a thousand suspense directors.

The archetypes go like this: Grant’s Johnnie Aysgarth is a charming cad; Fontaine’s Lina McLaidlaw is shy, bookish and trusting. The actors ground these characteristics in specific experience. Fontaine, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress, shows why Lina is so eager to jump into marriage with the untrustworthy Johnnie. Living with wealthy, meddlesome parents, she realizes that her quirks have become self-perpetuating. Her father assumes she’ll remain a spinster. Overhearing this, Lina rebels. She imagines herself as reckless. She’s in love with the idea of love, and it doesn’t hurt that Johnnie is so handsome. He appreciates her beauty in unconventional ways, admiring her ucipital mapillary, the space between her two clavicles. She ignores his less fawning comments about her hair and his tendency to call her “monkeyface” — which starts as a bizarre term of endearment but becomes something more sinister. Fontaine exaggerates Lina’s pleasure at any hint of affection from Johnnie. At the same time, she shows how Lina tries to brush aside the pangs that hit when he’s not so nice. “Suspicion” may elicit groans from feminists because Lina seems so weak, so quick to forgive, but I think Fontaine does her best to show how powerless Lina feels in Johnnie’s presence.

Grant is remarkable as Johnnie — there’s a coldness, a calculation behind his bonhomie. Johnnie’s weakness is money. He knows two ways to get it — borrowing and gambling — and spends every cent he gets his hands on. He’ll stop at nothing to maintain this lifestyle, and he’s a shameless manipulator, using good cheer to deflect the anger of the people he takes advantage of. Perhaps the most disturbing scene in “Suspicion” comes when Lina learns that Johnnie is showering her with gifts only because he had a big day at the track — gambling with money that wasn’t rightfully his. Johnnie gets in her face, trying a variety of goofy expressions and even pinching her cheeks to get her to smile. It’s a subtly aggressive act, as insistent and smothering as shouting or physical coercion. Johnnie can’t see any point of view beyond the one that suits him, and Grant shows how dangerous that lack of empathy can be.

The details of the plot — the clues that point to an attempt by Johnnie to kill Lina for her money — are less compelling than the performances. Grant and Fontaine unnerve you. “Suspicion” is the rare 1940s movie that’s truly uncomfortable to watch — and brilliantly so.

Alfred Hitchcock could beat Hollywood at its own game. Of the Hitchcock movies I’ve seen, “Rebecca” is the least personal — it bears producer David O. Selznick’s imprint as much as Hitchcock’s — and, appropriately, it’s the only one to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Even more than now, the Academy in 1940 preferred the stolidly literary over the brazenly cinematic, and it was beholden to the tastes of Middle America — the following year, “How Green Was My Valley” would defeat “Citizen Kane.” “Rebecca” was adapted from a popular 1938 novel by Daphne Du Maurier that owes a big debt to the Brontë sisters. It’s easy to see why Selznick tapped it as his follow-up to “Gone with the Wind.”

Nevertheless, as stolid, literary movies go, “Rebecca” is fantastic. Hitchcock brought his usual flair for creating a tangible sense of place from a mixture of sets, locations, rear projection, models and painted backdrops. Manderley, the sprawling mansion where the dashingly dour Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) brings his skittish new bride (Joan Fontaine), comes to life with all its demons. And Hitchcock, with his characteristic psychological insight, breathes vitality into the familiar tropes of Gothic romance. The unnamed heroine, shy and bookish (Fontaine employs a variety of superficial gestures, like nail-biting and hair-twirling, to sell her awkwardness), gets swept up in the gloomy atmosphere of Manderley, where the late Rebecca, de Winter’s first wife, still manages to lord over everything.

“Rebecca” unfolds in three distinct acts, each of them engrossing. First, we get the furtive romance between de Winter and the heroine — who, in a clunky concession to the novel, remains unnamed — in Monte Carlo, where she’s traveling as a paid companion to an insufferable society lady. We see that de Winter is a man of integrity. While he’s quick to point out the heroine’s flaws — clumsiness, fragility — he’s genuinely kind to her. The second act tracks the heroine’s disastrous attempts to live up to Rebecca’s standard and the torment she suffers at the hands of the demonic Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson, who creeps you out with her placid visage). The third act, surprisingly, is a taut police procedural that puts the audience in a uniquely tense position — we want the cops not to discover the truth. Olivier was never an intuitive film actor — you see the calculation behind his every move — but he still broods masterfully, and he was never easier on the eyes. And Fontaine comes into her own as her character does, abandoning the nervous tics and showing an impressive depth of feeling. Sure, “Rebecca” is an overwrought potboiler — a damn fine one.

The first screen pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy is probably more interesting today to scholars and film historians than to general audiences. “Woman of the Year” has a flaccid pace, and it’s burdened by tired, obvious and sometimes wildly off-the-mark stabs at humor. At its best, though, it fumbles toward a rough-hewn pseudo-realism that was nearly unheard of in romantic comedies at the time. It’s a proto-feminist work that asks, what happens when a smart, driven, highly unconventional career woman falls in love and gets married? A relevant question, even in 1942, when “Woman of the Year” was released. Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a high-strung, impossibly worldly international-affairs correspondent at a New York newspaper; Sam Craig (Tracy) is a laid-back, straight-arrow sports columnist. First they spar in print; then they meet in person and sparks fly. For some mysterious reason, Tess happens to be showing off her shapely gams when Sam first lays eyes on her. From that instant, he’s a goner. Today, with the benefit of hindsight and biographical knowledge, the moment carries an even deeper charge, since we know that it signals the beginning of a passionate, quarter-century onscreen and offscreen partnership between Hepburn and Tracy.

Sam takes Tess to a Yankees game, which she enjoys in spite of herself. (The stock baseball footage doesn’t match at all; “Woman of the Year” is an oddly junky-looking movie, especially considering what fine work director George Stevens was capable of.) Romance blossoms quickly, and at about the 40-minute mark of this nearly two-hour movie, they’re married. For a romantic comedy, the genre that exists to forestall marriage – and, until the last few decades, sex – this is rare indeed. Perhaps the smartest, most adult sequence in “Woman of the Year” comes when a savvy female friend of Sam’s realizes he and Tess have yet to be alone together on their wedding night and shoos everybody out of her apartment. (Sam moves in with Tess – one of many subversions of traditional gender roles.) They also sleep together in a double bed, a rarity during the heyday of the Production Code, which absurdly and arbitrarily mandated twin beds for married couples. Later, Sam complains that whenever he and Tess have an argument, she makes love to him before they can address the issue.

They continue to clash, though, as Sam tries to reconcile his conventional ideas about marriage with his gloriously unconventional wife. Meanwhile, Tess appears not to have given a moment’s thought to the possibility that marriage might change her life. Even when the screenplay fails them – which is often, notwithstanding the Academy Award that went to writers Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr. – Hepburn and Tracy shine. Hepburn is at the height of her brazen, bewitching stardom, and Tracy projects an affable Everyman quality. Their chemistry, built on contrast, is unforced and wondrous.

“Woman of the Year” concludes with an embarrassing sequence in which Tess tries to win Sam back. Again, I like the idea, because in romantic comedies it’s always the boy who loses the girl, then makes amends, but the execution is horrific. In an effort to prove her worthiness as a wife, she tries to make him breakfast, and it goes wrong in all sorts of wacky but gloomily unfunny ways. According to IMDB, this sequence was the result of a reshoot after the original ending – contents unknown – fared poorly with test audiences. It concludes when Sam gives the violent heave-ho to Tess’s fey assistant – bleh. But then Sam brings the movie to a satisfying close by telling Tess he doesn’t want her to be Tess Harding or Mrs. Sam Craig but rather Tess Harding Craig. What a lovely, ahead-of-its time sentiment. “Woman of the Year” is remarkable merely for expressing it.

I was relieved to find out that this 1945 movie — justly regarded as a masterpiece of romantic longing — has a sense of humor. Moments of levity deepen your understanding of and respect for the lead characters, a man and woman who carry out a chaste affair over the course of several Thursday afternoons. Brilliantly structured, “Brief Encounter” begins with Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) saying goodbye, and it’s not the perfect bittersweet parting they deserve. They are interrupted in their final moments by Dolly Messiter (Everley Gregg), an oblivious, gossipy acquaintance of Laura’s. After Alec departs — placing his hand on Laura’s shoulder for just the briefest of seconds — director David Lean frames the ensuing conversation in medium shot, with Dolly’s back to us as she jibber-jabbers irrelevantly to the stricken Laura. The overwhelming sadness on Laura’s face becomes more potent because Dolly doesn’t even notice it — and even as we empathize with her, we laugh at the absurdity of the situation. As the two women ride the train back home (the opening scene, like much of the movie, takes place in a refreshment stand at a train station), Laura memorably communicates her hatred of Dolly in voice-over.

There are other moments that draw laughs. Laura’s husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond) is kind and well-meaning — but he’s also an obtuse clod. He’s obsessed with crossword puzzles but isn’t very good at them. And he seems to fancy himself stylish — with double-breasted suits, a trim mustache and slicked-back hair — but he’s tragically inelegant. Raymond’s savvy performance communicates both why Laura would have no reason to complain about her marriage and why she would yearn for more. Most of the movie plays in flashback, guided by Laura’s voice-over narration as she imagines herself confessing the affair to Fred. The first 15 minutes are a beautiful tease; we yearn to know exactly what was going on between Alec and Laura before they were interrupted by Dolly. Howard and Johnson communicate an unspoken anguish that haunts you as we follow Laura back home.

Her reminiscence begins with their cute meeting; she gets a piece of grit in her eye as she watches an express train go by, and, in the refreshment stand, Alec gallantly removes it (he’s a doctor). It turns out that train schedules bring them together every Thursday afternoon, when Alec works a hospital shift and Laura does her shopping and catches a movie. They end up having lunch together because Alec can’t find an open table, and they bond over their enthusiasm for the absurd — an old woman abuses a cello in a string quartet at the restaurant, then pops up again as the overzealous organist at the movie theater. (We already know Laura appreciates music — a Rachmaninoff piano concerto emerges as the love theme for the movie.)

Alec insists that Laura meet him the following Thursday, and their bond quickly deepens, but Lean makes it clear that their carefree first date, which happens entirely by chance, will be the best time they have together. Once they agree to meet again, they cross a threshold into infidelity. Laura wonders what Alec will tell his wife about their time together — and realizes he won’t tell her anything. She does tell Fred, but of course he doesn’t at all grasp what his wife is saying. Relief overwhelms her, and she laughs uncontrollably at her husband’s lack of curiosity about her spending time with a strange man.

What a marvelous performance by Celia Johnson. Laura is unremarkable, unbeautiful — and unforgettable. Johnson teases out the contradictions that give Laura her roundedness — she’s delicate and timid but earthy and avid. And she shows how Alec’s sensitivity and spontaneity bring out Laura’s radiance. Howard brings grace and intelligence to Alec — unlike Fred, he carries himself with ease. “Brief Encounter” is, crucially, a romance between smart people. That’s why it’s a love affair even though Alec and Laura do no more than kiss.

Director Lean, of course, would go on to craft sprawling widescreen tales, peaking with “Lawrence of Arabia.” But he began his career as a collaborator of playwright Noel Coward, on whose one-act play (set entirely in the refreshment stand) “Brief Encounter” was based. It’s a testament to Lean that the movie never once feels like an opened-up play, even though the low-comic romantic byplay between two railway station employees (Joyce Carey and Stanley Holloway) is clearly a theatrical device. “Brief Encounter” is a movie through and through, one that uses cinematic language to enrich the story. Lean grounds the action in the real world with location shooting — beginning with a train chugging through the station. And his flashback structure allows us to understand that memory will not diminish the intensity of Laura’s feeling for Alec. “Brief Encounter” stands as proof that a great director is a great director — no matter how big or small the canvas.

This histrionic potboiler-noir, released in 1948, would be unremarkable if not for the ending. It’s got mannered performances and little visual flair, and it’s garnished with subplots that are sometimes embarrassing. But it still packs a few surprises, so (SPOILERS AHEAD) don’t read this unless you’ve already seen the movie.

She dies! That’s the big one. “Sorry, Wrong Number” is the rare Production Code-era movie with no hero and little redemption. Even most noirs, with their violence, moral turpitude and atmosphere of seething menace, have happy endings. Sometimes the triumph of good over evil feels empty and tacked on, but in the best noirs the sunny conclusions don’t diminish the dark, paranoid thrills that precede them.

In “Sorry, Wrong Number,” adapted from a short radio play starring Agnes Moorehead (I suspect it was much better than the movie), the great Barbara Stanwyck stars Leona Stevenson, a high-strung, “invalid” (her word) heiress who, thanks to a crossed telephone line, overhears two men plotting to murder a helpless woman. We figure out long before she does: It’s her. But here’s the shocker: They do it! It happens just the way the killers describe it. Yes, Burt Lancaster, as her husband, Henry, who’s behind the murder plot, confesses to his wife and tries to stop the killers. But he’s too late.

Leona doesn’t deserve to die, but the movie bravely makes her deeply flawed and shows how she drives her husband to crime and ultimately to murder. She spends the entire movie in her bedroom, making and receiving a variety of phone calls as she searches for her absent husband. (Amusingly, early on, everyone Leona speaks to would rather not be bothered with her drama. Henry’s secretary is playing bingo; her father (Ed Begley), a pharmaceutical magnate, is hosting a raucous party; and, bizarrely, a police officer is trying to entertain an African-American toddler whose mother is absent for some reason.) But the conversations eventually reveal mysterious activity by Henry and spark flashbacks that illuminate the Stevensons’ dysfunctional marriage. Leona learns a lot from her former college roommate and rival for Henry’s affections, Sally Hunt Lord (Australian native Ann Richards, bizarrely attempting the affected pseudo-British accent that many American actors spoke in during the 30s and 40s). Conveniently, Sally is married to a prosecutor who’s investigating Henry; in the movie’s least convincing sequence, she follows her husband to a remote Staten Island beach where he looks into some shady dealings.

More to the point, we learn about how Leona met and courted Henry — snatching him away from Sally by force of will. She’s the aggressor throughout, and she throws a fit whenever she doesn’t get what she wants. This pattern continues after the marriage, when Henry is dissatisfied by the empty-suit job he’s been given by Leona’s father. He feels like a kept man. None of this stuff is all that compelling, and frankly it feels more like hackneyed women’s fiction than the bleak and harrowing noir that “Sorry, Wrong Number” aspires to be. Ultimately we learn that Leona’s long illness is entirely psychosomatic (shocker). The movie embraces the hysterical-woman cliche, and while Stanwyck performs it with gusto, it’s second-rate work from one of the sauciest and most self-possessed female stars of her era. Lancaster, too, has plenty of better performances to his credit, although he does achieve a jittery macho unease.

Still, “Sorry, Wrong Number” deserves credit for following this troubled marriage through to the grimmest possible conclusion. It’s brave enough to stare into the abyss.

All things being equal, I’d rather watch Cary Grant and Irene Dunne than, say, Adam Sandler and Kate Hudson, but it’s important to remember that sometimes, in the case of a strained, disposable trifle like “My Favorite Wife,” all things are equal. In other words, they don’t make ‘em like they used to, and that’s not always a bad thing. “My Favorite Wife,” released in 1940, is occasionally amusing, but it telegraphs many of its gags, relies on a cloying Mickey Mouse score and labors to fill an 88-minute running time. The setup is a perfunctory bit of silliness: Seven years after his wife, Ellen (Dunne), was lost at sea, L.A. lawyer Nick Arden (Grant) has her declared legally dead so he can marry the gauche Bianca (Gail Patrick). But Ellen isn’t dead, and she returns on Nick’s wedding day. She schemes to drive Nick and Bianca apart, which shouldn’t be too tough because he doesn’t love his new bride anyway, but Nick’s fear of confrontation — and the revelation that Ellen was trapped on an island for seven years with another man (Randolph Scott) — delays his eventual reunion with his true love. In his best performances, like in “The Philadelphia Story” and “North By Northwest,” Grant projected a confident virility, but when you see him play an emasculated ninny like Nick, it’s easy to imagine how the rumors of his homosexuality got started. This movie muzzles Grant, turning him into a waffler and a ditherer. The masterful “Bringing Up Baby” does the same, but its antics are much more inventive, and Grant layers sexual frustration and macho panic beneath his politeness and indecision. Here, he’s just a twit. Dunne fares better, projecting intelligence, grit and sex appeal. She manipulates and dissembles out of love.

Romantic comedies, which by definition end with marriage, necessarily derive their tension from delaying sex. But “My Favorite Wife” seems terrified that sex might actually take place, and its prudishness seems overdone — in particular because Nick is technically married throughout the movie. We don’t get the sex-by-inference that so many Production Code-era movies managed to communicate. There’s little electricity. We just wait, patiently, for Nick to get over himself and reassume his rightful place — in a twin bed next to his wife’s.

… For tonight, we’ll merry merry be / Tomorrow we’ll be sober.

Rotund, rakish, gravelly-voiced ale magnate Horace Pike (Eugene Pallette) sings these words as he descends the stairs during his introductory scene, a little more than halfway through Preston Sturges’s “The Lady Eve” (1941). It’s an earthy, funny moment that connects instantly, and it illustrates the care with which Sturges wrote and cast the supporting roles in his daring, strange and magnificent romantic comedy. All Horace has to do is sing this little drinking song for the audience to understand him and to understand how, in rebelling against him, his son, Charles (Henry Fonda), became a ramrod-straight, socially awkward naturalist.

Angst becomes Henry Fonda. He doesn’t have a bit of frothiness or sprightliness in him. He didn’t make many comedies, and Sturges uses him for his square, earnest goodness. He has to get his heart broken, and when he does, Fonda shows the life draining from his face. Meanwhile, Barbara Stanwyck, as the object of his ardor, is never for a second lifeless. My goodness — this is the sort of performance that tests my ability to capture in words its fabulousness. Stanwyck plays Jean Harrington, a con artist who worms her way into Charles’s graces, and she makes sure you can always see Jean’s neurons firing. She conveys both the pleasure and the discomfort she finds in manipulation and subterfuge. And she shows how ardor can shimmer through the deceit. What extraordinary sexual tension this movie has! Sturges is always pressing Jean and Charles together. They spend an inordinate amount of time in bedrooms.

The plot curlicues inventively — Sturges’s storytelling has a jazzy rhythm that keeps you off balance — and the supporting players make elegant contributions. But Stanwyck is always at the center, and gloriously so. She’s lovely to look at but not a classic beauty. It’s her mind, her confidence, her sass you fall for. Her presence conjures a tingling excitement. No wonder Charles is always falling down.

I was very tired when I saw this 1948 movie, which played for one week at the Charles Theatre in Baltimore, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see Carol Reed directing a Graham Greene screenplay, adapted from his own short story, in what amounted to a warm-up to “The Third Man,” released a year later. In a fantastic hide-and-seek sequence, we see Reed trying out the tilted camera angles he would use throughout his classic of postwar malaise.

“The Fallen Idol” definitely feels like a minor work for Reed and Greene. It’s slow and talky. While Reed makes great use of interior and exterior space, it could almost be a play. But it’s interesting to see some of Greene’s signature elements — infidelity and existential crises among the diplomatic corps — through the eyes of a child. The fallen idol of the title is a butler named Baines (Ralph Richardson) who has essentially raised the son of the French ambassador in London. Although he doesn’t completely understand what he’s witnessing, the boy finds out that Baines has been having an affair with a French woman, Julie (Michele Morgan), and wants to leave his cold, shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel). Someone dies, and in trying to protect Baines, the boy almost always does the wrong thing. Richardson, an actor I’ve seen little of, is wonderful as Baines, playing a bottled-up, unhappy man with irrepressible spirit. He knows he’s screwed, but he can’t get too morose about it.

I was excited to see this, but the rave I expected to write won’t quite materialize here. John Huston’s macho 1948 adventure was impressive and entertaining, but not the thrill I had hoped for. It’s very predictable — an early speech by Walter Huston about the perils of prospecting for gold pretty much lays out the entire plot — and it lacks psychological complexity, particularly in a showy lead performance by Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs begins as an essentially decent, down-and-out fellow with a bit of a mean streak — he throws water in the face of an annoying kid who tries to sell him a lottery ticket. But when confronted with instant riches, he immediately loses all self-awareness, behaving as if he’s trying to prove true everything that wise old Howard (Huston) said about gold corrupting men’s souls. We don’t see the insidious influence of potential wealth grow slowly — gold transforms him abruptly and saps the movie of dramatic tension. We have little doubt that in every situation, Dobbs will do the wrong thing. I prefer Bogart working in a more restrained emotional palette, as in “Casablanca” or “The Big Sleep.”

Much about the movie is terrific, starting with the two other leads, Huston and Tim Holt. Huston, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, brings a chipper fatalism to Howard, who knows everything about how to find and mine gold but has never gotten rich from it. Huston creates a wry, sardonic and fiercely intelligent prospector: Watch his perfectly evenhanded responses when Dobbs starts talking about how they should divide up the gold between themselves as they go along. Howard has been here before, and he knows he’s powerless. And Holt, as the straight man, shows what Bogart cannot: the tension of virtue being tested by wealth and one’s devious fellow man.

But the real star of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” is John Huston’s direction. He’s an intensely physical filmmaker who conveys through his images how it’s not just the weakness of men that ultimately makes it impossible to cash in on a gold strike. It’s the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Shooting largely on location, Huston creates a tactile sense of place and of man’s antagonistic relationship to his environment. He wants things to look real, not pretty. He makes his intentions clear early, in a sloppy and ugly fight scene in which Bogart and Holt need every bit of their strength to beat up a corrupt contractor who’s ripped them off. Later, as the effort to bring the gold to market becomes increasingly nightmarish, Huston eloquently communicates through his images the idea of the land reclaiming the gold from the men who extracted it. It’s almost a corny conceit, but Huston makes it bleak and harrowing.