The Fatale-est of Femmes

Film: Gone Girl
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I think the Academy hates Ben Affleck. I say this despite him having won two Oscars. Argo, which he produced, starred in, and directed, saw him unnominated as an actor or director. Things got worse with Gone Girl, a tense mystery thriller with a complex, intriguing plot. Despite a great screenplay, solid direction from David Fincher, and a solid performance from Affleck, it was nominated only for Best Actress. I can only think that Ben Affleck’s presence is to blame, because there are some nomination misses here.

That said, I’m not really sure how much I like Gone Girl. I remember people going crazy for it when it first came out, but since I rarely go to the theater, I didn’t rush off to see it. I even consider myself a fan of Fincher, so were I going to see one of the many films that were looking for nominations at the end of last year, this is one that would definitely be on my radar. This has a lot of the hallmarks of David Fincher—complex plot, tons of flashbacks, huge sections of the film designed specifically to mislead the audience…even a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack. But there’s something about this film that’s like chewing on tinfoil.

Boom Goes the Dynamite

Film: Sabotage
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen.

It’s interesting to watch the early work of a great director. With some directors, you can see where they are headed long before they get there. With Hitchcock, for instance, a film like Sabotage (sometimes known as The Woman Alone) gives a clear indication of precisely where the man wanted to go with his films. While his films eventually became very dark at times, there was always an edge to them, and with this film, he goes very dark, indeed. While his themes would become more refined over time, Sabotage shows that he was steering in the direction he’d come to be known for even at this early stage.

The film is a modified retelling of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. A saboteur with a network of other agents in London essentially hides himself in plain sight by posing as a business man. It’s not clear where the man, Karl Verloc (Oskar Homolka) is from, but there’s a definite hint of Bela Lugosi in his voice. Anyhow, he and a few other men are planning a series of bombings in London. To avoid suspicion, they are posing as business men in a London district. Despite this, there is some suspicion, as Scotland Yard has posted an agent named Ted Spencer (John Loder) at a nearby grocery to keep tabs on the suspects.

Two people who don’t suspect him at all are his wife (Sylvia Sidney) and her kid brother, Stevie (Desmond Tester). After all, he’s been good to them. But, Verloc is most certainly guilty, and is responsible for a power outage throughout London at the start of the film. But a power outage really is little more than an inconvenience. He and his cronies plan a bombing on the Tube underneath Piccadilly for a larger impact on the greater London area. Even more nefarious, because of delays on his end, he puts the bomb in the hands of the easily distracted and rather slow-witted Stevie.

The last 20 minutes or so of the film are really the crux of the film, and rather than risk spoiling anything, I’m going to leave them alone. It’s the last half hour of the film that really makes the film what it is, though. While this is still rudimentary Hitchcock just getting his legs under himself in the directing business, there’s evidence of the man’s sense of creating tension and building suspense. We know (because he reminds us) that the bomb Stevie is carrying is going to go off at 1:45. And as Stevie unknowingly transports the bomb from one end of town to the other, we get constant reminders of exactly what time it is. Over and over, we see him pass by clocks, with time ticking down inevitably to the fateful moment when the bomb will detonate. It sounds pretty standard, really, but it’s quite gripping.

If the film fails anywhere, it’s in the person of many of the characters on screen. It’s the bad guys, particularly Verloc, who are the interesting characters here. Mrs. Verloc is timid and fairly tepid, not showing much in the way of emotion or personality until the film draws to its climax. Similarly, Stevie is a baby step or two above a complete halfwit. And the story has trouble hanging together as it should. There’s plenty going on here that doesn’t really fit too well, like Spencer’s conduct around the still-married Mrs. Verloc.

The good news is that Sabotage for all its pre-war message about vigilance against the red menace, is all about the visual style of the film. The reason is that even at this early point in his career, Hitchcok had a penchant for rough stories and brutal, unflinching looks at the stories he undertook.

Sabotage is not a film that anyone will consider adding into the pantheon of great films or even of top-level Hitchcock. However, as an artifact of something early in Hitchcock’s career, films like sabotage show the direction in which he was headed long, long before he ventured into the full thriller and intrigue set of films.

In other words, Sabotage does nothing to advance the portrayals of characters in the world of the cinema. It really is a great indication of the direction he was going in thanks to his dedication to the basic story of innocents hurt and killed for political reasons. I’m not ready to put this on a high pedestal; it deserves at least a little love.

Why to watch Sabotage: Is there a reason to avoid Hitchcock?
Why not to watch: His early work didn’t show the promise of his later career.

Haunted

Films: Rebecca; Vertigo
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player (Rebecca); DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television (Vertigo).

If you’ve watched the Hitchcock that everybody watches, it’s easy for him to fool you. The truth is that virtually all of Hitchcock’s movies have a similar thread running through them. He only had a couple of basic stories he liked to tell, and most of them involved murder in one respect or another. But Rebecca, the first film he made in the U.S., has the feel of a romance, at least at the start. There are certainly romantic elements that run through the entire film, but this is not a real romance.

A young woman who is never named for us (Joan Fontaine) is vacationing in Monte Carlo with the overly-wealthy Edythe van Hopper (Florence Bates). The younger woman is a paid companion, there to keep the older woman entertained. It is here that they counter George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who goes by Maxim. He’s in Monte Carlo as a sort of recovery. See, a year earlier, his wife died in a mysterious boating accident. Mrs. Van Hopper tries to ingratiate herself with the rich, young man, but he’s having none of it. He does, however, appreciate the pretty young thing at her side. They have a whirlwind romance, and when it’s time for Mrs. van Hopper to go away, the young woman instead marries Maxim.

And then the fun starts. The two return to Manderley, the ancestral home of the de Winter family, and the new Mrs. de Winter is suddenly confronted with a few important facts. First, Rebecca, at least according to a lot of people, was pretty damn near perfect. Second, she (our main character) has no real idea of how to run a large manor house like Manderley. Third, and most importantly, Rebecca’s former servant and current housemistress Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) worshipped Rebecca, and thus hates everything about the new Mrs. de Winter.

Like I said a the start, Hitchcock really only had a couple of stories he liked to tell. One of them was about mistaken identity, and he got a lot of mileage out of that basic idea. The second of his major themes was insanity, and that’s the role that Mrs. Danvers is going to play for us here.

Anyway, Mrs. de Winter tries her best to fit in, and seems to be thwarted at every turn by Mrs. Danvers, who hates her passionately. Regardless of how evident it is that this hatred exists, Mrs. de Winter attempts to trust her, going so far as to use Danvers’s suggestion for a costume party with disastrous results. And then, the unthinkable happens. The boat in which Rebecca foundered is discovered and it still has Rebecca’s body inside—a problem since Maxim identified a body as hers a year earlier. And, it seems that Maxim has a few skeletons of his own that need to be revealed before we get to the end.

It’s an interesting story all the way around. There is a sense of doomed romance about our main couple that would seem to be very much at home in the Victorian period. While the film is modern in the sense that it essentially takes place in the time it is filmed, it does have that sort of antique feel to it. The story feels older, like it should be playing out a century or so before it actually is, and it would play in that time as well.

It’s also too long. The run time is just over 130 minutes, and a good half hour or so could be easily trimmed from this film to speed up the process and tighten up the suspense a bit. It feels far too roomy for the story it wants to tell, almost as if Hitchcock wanted to explore something new and wasn’t quite yet sure of how to do it. While the story never really gets boring, there are too many scenes that don’t have much impact. For instance, in one scene, the new Mrs. de Winter breaks something. This comes up later when Danvers accuses another servant of stealing it and threatens to have him fired. It doesn’t establish much—perhaps that Maxim becomes aware of his wife’s discomfort with Danvers, but that can be easily established elsewhere and get rid of a good five minutes between the two scenes. There’s too much of one thing in a scene being set up and a lot more call for efficiency in the way the story is told.

That said, it’s a good film and one worth watching. It goes to some pretty lurid places for the time, and I imagine it may have had a difficult time skating past the Hays Code. It’s also quite interesting to me that when Hitchcock first decides to film in America, he films a story set in his own country.

Much the same ground is covered in Vertigo, a film that comes nearly two decades later in Hitchcock’s career. There are some real similarities in that the main character in this film is haunted by the spirit of a dead woman. This time, though, the plot is far more intricate and far closer to what most people think of when they think of Hitchcock. There are twists and plots within plots, precisely what we expect.

Policeman John “Scottie” Ferguson discovers that he has acrophobia when the chase of a criminal leaves him hanging off the edge of a building and leads to the falling death of an officer. Essentially unfit for duty now, Scottie retires from the force and looks for something else to do. That something else comes in the form of Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), an old college acquaintance. Gavin tells Scottie an incredible story; he wants Scottie to tail his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), because he thinks she is slowly going crazy. More specifically, he believes that Madeleine is being possessed by the spirit of her grandmother, Carlotta Valdez.

It’s at this point that I heartily recommend that you go listen to the Harvey Danger song “Carlotta Valdez” while reading the rest of this review. Anyway…

Scottie decides to take the job to help out his old pal and because he gets a good look at Madeleine, who is quite the Hitchcockian cool blonde. He tails her for awhile, and it does seem that she is acting in very strange ways. But Scottie is entranced by the woman, and appears to develop feelings for her, so it comes as a terrible shock when she takes a swan dive off the top of a bell tower, killing herself on the rocks below. Because of this, it comes as an even greater shock to his system when he starts seeing a woman around town who looks exactly like Madeleine in every detail. It’s strange enough, in fact, that he starts to get suspicious and launches his own investigation.

This is where the film starts to get really strange. I won’t spoil it or even get too close, but essentially, Scottie is so taken with this new woman that he attempts to turn her into Madeleine, bleaching her hair to blonde, and forcing her to dress exactly like Madeleine did in an effort to recreate the relationship with the dead woman. He takes it to an obsessive, nearly psychotic extreme, attempting to convince her that she really is the dead woman. It’s a dark fantasy, one that borders on the taboo of necrophilia, and while it’s fascinating, it’s also pretty creepy.

I’d be remiss at this point if I failed to mention Scottie’s former fiancée, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). She acts as a sort of conscience throughout the film, giving Scottie someone to talk to and bounce ideas with. Midgs is a really fun character, the kind of a girl who is the protagonist’s best friend despite their failed romance. I like Midge, and sort of wish there was more of an excuse for her to be on screen more.

It’s worth saying here that Hitchcock was a smart director in that he liked very much to keep his audience guessing. Sometimes he gave his audience the standard Hollywood happy ending with the bad guys dead or captured and the good guys triumphant. He also sometimes went the other direction and ended the films on a down note. Vertigo is extremely dark in its ending, about as dark as Hitchcock ever got, and it’s something that very much makes the film work the way it should. This one probably couldn’t end on an up note and be even remotely palatable. That, and like many a film in Hitch’s repertoire, the conclusion comes a few moments before the end of the film—there’s almost no denouement to give the audience a moment to recover from the final shock.

It will ruffle a few feathers when I suggest that of Hitchcock’s great films, Vertigo is probably the least. His five great films are Rear Window and then the incredible four consecutive Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. All are great and worthwhile, but this one in many ways has aged the worst. The surreal elements, certainly some of the highlights of the film when it was made, come off a bit silly now despite the fact that they are still pretty stylish and have that unique Saul Bass-y feel to them. But Hitchcock’s desperate need to control every aspect of every shot led him to use a lot of in-studio shots with a lot of rear projection, and rear projection never looks as good as it should to a modern audience.

Why to watch Rebecca: Hitchcock branching out a bit.
Why not to watch: It’s too long for its story.

Why to watch Vertigo: It’s essential Hitchcock.
Why not to watch: It hasn’t held up as well as it could have.

Suspense, Old School

Film: Les Diaboliques
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I disagree with the entry of some films on this list. That’s hardly a surprise with a list of this size, or any size. The only way I’d be able to have a perfect list is if I created it myself. Still, there are a number of pleasant surprises on the list—films I was excited to see make the list. There are still others that I would have been shocked to not see on the list. Such a film is the classic suspense drama Les Diaboliques, the masterpiece of Henri-Georges Clouzot, and a film that Alfred Hitchcock wished he could have made, at least by my reckoning.

What we have here is a tragic little domestic drama in a French boarding school. The school is owned by Christina Delassalle (Vera Clouzot, the wife of the director, in one of her three film roles ever). Christina is a kind soul who cares deeply for the children in her charge. She also has a serious heart condition, making her susceptible to severe shocks. Sadly for her, she has married very poorly. Her husband, Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is a complete villain. He’s domineering, abusive, and hateful. Worse for Christina, he is having an affair with Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), one of the teachers at the school. And he’s just enough of a pig that he makes sure Christina knows of the affair.

Of course, things aren’t much better for Nicole. When the film opens, Nicole is wearing dark sunglasses to disguise the bruises from a beating administered by Michel. The two women console one another and hatch a desperate plan. They will trick him into leaving the school and kill him.

The plan is, if you will pardon the pun, diabolically simple. On a school break, the two women take the school car and drive to Nicole’s home away from the school. Once there, Christina calls Michel and tells him she wants a divorce. He arrives by train to confront her, and it appears that the two are on the verge of patching up their differences until he again becomes abusive, stiffening Christina’s resolve. He drinks several glasses of whiskey pre-drugged with a sedative. Once asleep, Nicole returns from establishing an alibi for the pair, and they drown him in the bathtub. The next morning, the two of them drag the body out in an enormous chest and return to the school, where they dump the body into the abandoned, unclean swimming pool.

Their thought is that eventually, the body will rise to the surface. When, after a few days it does not, Nicole arranges for a minor accident that necessitates the draining of the pool. When it is drained, they find…nothing. The body is gone. That same day, the suit Michel was wearing the night of his death returns from the cleaners. A body in the Seine turns out to be someone other than Michel; this episode brings in the attentions of a retired police commissioner named Alfred Fichet (Charles Vanel), who takes it upon himself to discover what has happened to M. Delassalle. Regardless of what the good commissioner might think, it is evident to the two women that something has happened. Nicole believes they are to be blackmailed, while the religious Christina is convinced that the disappearance of Michel’s body might have a higher, more sin-driven meaning.

Clouzot’s film works for a variety of reasons, but the largest and most important is that every scene is filled with a palpable tension. He holds the tension for as long as he possibly can, ramping up the discomfort of his characters as much as possible in each scene. For instance, when Christina goes to check on the body retrieved from the Seine, it takes a substantial amount of screen time for that body to come up the elevator and into the viewing room, and we see most of it. All that for a reveal that is essentially nothing—it’s the wrong body. Much of the tension in these scenes is created by Clouzot’s use of camera on Christina listening to the conversations of others, attempting to be stone-faced and failing.

Christina’s complete lack of a poker face is, in fact, one of the most effective parts of this film. A simple conversation between two people takes on entirely new meaning when viewed through the lens of her inner turmoil over the murder of her husband and the disappearance of the body. Her conflict goes from fear of committing a mortal sin to a fear of being discovered, and these tensions are revealed in her face at every moment. Additionally effective is the role reversal of Nicole, who starts as a battered mistress and quickly becomes the domineering and dominating leader of the relationship with Christina. Stern but supportive at first, she devolves into abusiveness and snide comments once the murder has been committed.

For all this, my favorite character in the film is Fichet. While I have no proof, he appears to be the basic inspiration for Peter Falk’s Columbo. Fichet appears to be a harmless old man, but he always has one more question, and is always at least twice as clever as anyone gives him credit for being. While we in the audience are spun on a merry-go-round, never knowing what to expect next, Fichet has all the answers, and has always had them. He just wants the proof and the confession to back up his hunches.

Les Diaboliques has one of the great endings in film history, and it is this more than anything else that makes this film feel like it should have been directed by Hitchcock. It almost was—the legend is that Hitch was a mere few hours late in attempting to buy the rights to the story, and the author penned something else for Hitch to adapt—a short story that turned into Vertigo.

Edit: Incidentally, you should really avoid the shitty remake with Sharon Stone and Chazz Palminteri.

Why to watch Les Diaboliques: More Hitchcock than Hitchcock.
Why not to watch: There is not a single reason in the world to avoid this film.

Danskjävlar!

Film: Riget (The Kingdom)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Let’s assume for a moment that ghosts exist. If we go by the traditional thoughts and beliefs of ghosts, the most likely places a ghost would inhabit would be either a place important to that person in life, or the place of that person’s death. Based on that, it would be an easy assumption that hospitals would be the most haunted places in the world, since hospitals are where most people die.

Riget (The Kingdom), a mini-series made for Danish television, takes that basic premise and runs with it in several different creepy directions. The series of four episodes, totaling about four-and-a-half hours, takes place at the largest, most technologically advanced hospital in Denmark. This hospital, called “Riget,” is experiencing a rush of spectral, otherworldly, inexplicable events that occur either in the hospital or in the lives of the doctors and patients.

Riget is, for lack of a better way to explain it, a medical soap opera from hell. Get rid of the supernatural elements, and it would be a very boring week of General Hospital. This is not to say that Riget is boring or dull. On the contrary—it’s fascinating, and this is entirely because of the disturbing and supernatural elements.

Like any good soap opera, there are a variety of plots that roll around and bounce off each other. When the director has enough space for 280 minutes of film, he’s able to give weight to more than just a single driving story. The main character is Dr. Stig Helmer (Ernst Hugo Jaregard), a Swedish neurosurgeon who has been forced out of his country because of research he stole and published under his own name. Helmer is a complete bastard, the stereotypical doctor who thinks he is God himself, and he despises almost everything about Denmark. Typically, episodes end with Helmer standing on the roof of the hospital screaming about “Danish scum.” Sadly for the brusque and rude Helmer, he botched an operation on a young girl named Mona (Laura Christensen) early in his tenure at Kingdom Hospital. The girl is now in a persistent vegetative state, and Helmer needs to destroy the records of the surgery to keep his own job. Helmer is dedicated to science and frequently squabbles with his love interest, Rigmor (Ghita Norby), who is interested in holistic healing, herbal therapy, and voodoo.

Enter Mrs. Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes), a sensitive who complains of neurological problems in her hands. She hears the sound of a child crying in the elevator, and with the assistance of her son Bulder (Jens Okking), a porter at the hospital, she investigates and finds evidence of the ghost of a girl named Mary (Annevig Schelde Ebbe), who died there in 1919.

Helmer’s foil is Jorgen Krogshoj (Soren Pilmark), whose name is translated as “Hook” according to the subtitles. Hook is also a neurosurgeon, and frequently butts heads with Helmer because the two disagree on almost everything from the way the hospital is run to treatments for specific patients (particularly Mrs. Drusse). Hook lives in the basement of the hospital, a fact known only to a few. Here he collects various objects from the hospital that are being misused (he claims) and redirects them elsewhere. In truth, he runs an active black market, using what he acquires to get what he wants. He has a relationship with Judith (Birgitte Raaberg), who is pregnant by another man. The baby is growing at an unnatural rate, and as evidenced later in the series, there is more than just the growth rate that is unnatural—evidence comes to light that she was actually impregnated by a ghost.

We also have Dr. Bondo (Baard Owe), who teaches at the hospital. He collects medical oddities including, as it turns out, the preserved body of Mary, the ghost girl. A dying patient in the hospital has a huge tumor on his liver, and Bondo is denied the ability to extract and preserve it. Instead, he has the liver, tumor and all, transplanted into his own body as a way to keep it in the hospital’s collection.

Bondo’s main rival is Mogge (Peter Mygind). Mogge is a student who is madly in love with Camilla (Solbjorg Hojfeldt), who spurns him. As a way to stay close to her, Mogge enrolls in a sleep study (run by Hook), where he has disturbing and terrible dreams. Mogge is the son of another doctor, Einar Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen), who tries to run Kingdom Hospital as a touchy-feely place, complete with a collection of doctors who form a lodge called the Sons of the Kingdom, where they look out for each other and cover each other’s back.

A pair of dishwashers (Vita Jensen and Morten Rotne Leffers), both suffering from Down Syndrome act as a sort of Greek chorus. We get short snippets of them washing up and discussing the events of the hospital. And this says nothing of the ghost ambulance that arrives every night and vanishes. Or the very special guest appearance by Udo Kier.

Obviously, there’s a lot going on, which makes sense for something that was essentially a short-run soap with spooky stuff happening. It starts very slowly—most of the first episode is really just setting up the characters and giving us the very basics of the supernatural events. We don’t see anything incredibly disturbing until the very end, when Mrs. Drusse investigates the elevator shaft and gets her first look at Mary. From there, however, things begin to weird up quickly, getting far stranger and more disturbing in the second episode and downright creepy in the third and fourth.

As with any good film that tries to truly terrify instead of just go for the gross-out, we learn things slowly, getting new information only as we need new pieces of information. Much of what we see early on is not explained until much later in the series, as it should be. Many of the plots are interconnected, and as we learn about one, we learn about another, and pieces of one affect another.

Much of the reason for the effectiveness of this series comes from the way in which it was filmed. Every frame has a distinct sepia tone, and the cutaway shots of the hospital that act as transitions here (and presumably commercial breaks when this was originally shown on television) are completely sepia. While these are interesting, it’s more interesting to me that the main film itself is so oddly tinted, as if it were dipped in a wash of brown. The camera work looks to be hand-held cameras frequently, which gives this a documentary feel, which is also effective here.

Another effective thing here is that there are a number of comedic touches throughout the film. Many of these are darkly humorous, such as the sequence in which Bulder, Mogge, and Helmer all need to break into the records room at the same time and attempt to bully each other into leaving or avoid being seen by each other. Comedy and horror are often tightly intertwined, and here they are inseparable. A small part of this comes in the form of co-director Lars von Trier talking about his work over the credits.

The only thing that really disturbs me here is that many of the medical procedures are shown not in full, but at least in part. I don’t mind gore, but there’s something about surgery that really bothers me. I don’t want to see brain surgery from the top of the patient’s head, or the really meaty parts (pun intended) of the liver transplant. It’s the same reason I never really got into shows like ER. Even parts of NCIS bug me at a deep level, and I could have lived without it here.

Good stuff. This was vaguely remade as Kingdom Hospital with Stephen King’s name tacked onto the front. There was also a sequel miniseries made that followed up where Riget left off, and evidently left as many questions unanswered as this one does. Still, even though most of the plots are left unresolved, it is very much worth watch from end to end. Sadly, because of the deaths of two of the principal actors (Jaregard and Rolffes) as well as the male dishwasher, it is unlikely that the third and final installment will ever be filmed.

Why to watch Riget: Supernatural chills that really work.
Why not to watch: Some surgical procedures are not hidden, and most questions are left unanswered.