Book: The Terror of Living, by Urban Waite (2011)

AMC’s The Killing aside, Washington State seems to get short shrift in the popular imagination. But this neck of the deep woods is front, center and fully alive in this strong debut thriller from Urban Waite.

Phil Hunt killed a man during a botched robbery when he was younger. Now in his 50s, he lives just south of Seattle raising horses, supplementing his meager income by bringing in the occasional load of drugs. Deputy Bobby Drake prevents the delivery of one of those shipments, and the tentative grip Hunt had on stability gives way. Soon he’s on the run, hounded by a killer in the employ of his bosses, and his only hope out of trouble is the man who put him there.

Waite’s novel owes a debt to the work of Cormac McCarthy, as indicated by the ponderous title and his implacable hit man. But there’s nothing metaphorical about Grady, an assassin who enjoys his work but is no fearless killing machine. Waite creates a lovely tension between Drake, the lawman struggling to emerge from his father’s crooked shadow, and Hunt, “sure of himself in all the wrong situations. A good man, made up of all the bad things in the world.” Each man also has a spouse supportive in her own way. Muscular prose, relentless pacing, and a true sense of place make this a rock-solid thriller.

Movie: The Big Bang (2011)

In the wake of an extremely limited theatrical release earlier this month, The Big Bang is now available on DVD. No doubt you’re thinking, “Another particle physics neo-noir? Does Hollywood make anything else?”

Ned Cruz (Antonio Banderas) is a bottom-feeding L.A. private eye having serious doubts about his profession. A boxer surprised to be sprung from prison following a homicide conviction shambles into his office with what should be an easy case: find his stripper penpal. But the Uncertainty Principle is in full effect. Before long Cruz finds himself dealing with Russian mobsters, a trio of angry cops (one played by habitual offender William Fichtner, who steals every movie he’s in), some missing conflict diamonds, and a hippie billionaire (Sam Elliott) who has bought a sizeable chunk of New Mexico to further his quest to discover the God particle.

The gaudy visual scheme deployed by director Tony Krantz is distracting and the polyglot of accents is, in the early going at least, tough to follow. But Erik Jendresen’s script has some genuine wit and cleverness, finding parallels between theoretical physics and detective fiction, between mysteries large (the universe) and small (the human heart). There are amusing riffs on Farewell, My Lovely and Kiss Me Deadly among other classic noirs. Johnny Marr of The Smiths provides the soundtrack. Jimmi Simpson has some good scenes late as Elliott’s boy genius. And Autumn Reeser explains fundamental scientific precepts in a most illuminating manner, featuring highly effective visual aids.

Is The Big Bang good? Probably not. But I was never bored. If you find the notion of Snoop Dogg shooting an existential porn film in Schrödinger’s warehouse amusing, then you may be in this movie’s burgeoning cult following. I’m there, and I hate being alone.

Sundays with Hitch: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Alfred Hitchcock is on the short list of directors who remade their own movies. The second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is a globe-trotting adventure featuring a big star in James Stewart plus money and style to burn. It’s also one of the only Hitchcock films that I find boring.

The original is a full forty-five minutes shorter and a very British affair indeed. It shares the same basic plot as the remake. You’ve got a couple on holiday with their child. They befriend another man who is murdered – and with his dying breath reveals himself as a spy. The couple retrieve information the dead man was carrying about a planned assassination. The plotters kidnap the child in order to guarantee their silence. Can our heroes save their offspring and the day?

Hitchcock said the 1956 version was better, calling it the work of a professional while the first film was made by a gifted amateur. If that’s the case, give me the gifted amateur every time. The command Hitchcock demonstrates in the years since The Lodger is astonishing, never more so in the famous Albert Hall sequence. It’s to be the site of the assassination. The conspirators (led by Peter Lorre with a skunk stripe in his hair and speaking his lines phonetically) listen to the concert on the radio, waiting for the fatal gunshot. Jill Lawrence (Edna Best) has slipped into the hall, desperate to foil the scheme but fearful that her daughter and husband will be killed if she does. Hitchcock briefly lets the film go out of focus as tears of frustration fill her eyes. Then Jill finds a suitably Hitchcockian way to prevail.

There are terrific set pieces prior to this. Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) showing resourcefulness at the office of the dentist who’s one of the villains, an extended sequence at a church where Bob and his pal Clive (Hugh Wakefield, bearing the stiffest of upper lips) try to blend in with the baddies. When the Lawrences resist entreaties to help the authorities they’re asked if they would have shown similar indifference toward the prospect of averting the death of Archduke Ferdinand, a speech given extra teeth considering that the events of Sarajevo were only twenty years earlier. The climactic shootout, modeled on a famous London showdown between police and anarchists in 1911, drags a bit and seems to be headed toward a grim outcome until you realize that Hitch is going to make every detail count. This was the first of the remarkable run of 1930s films that would bring Hitchcock to Hollywood’s attention, and it’s easy to see why.

Movie: Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Apparently it’s Classic Thrillers Involving Telephones That I’ve Seen But My Wife Has Not week, if two movies can be said to constitute a theme.

Sorry, Wrong Number is based on Lucille Fletcher’s famous radio play. I know it’s famous because the credits say so: “Screenplay by Lucille Fletcher, based on her famous radio play.” Barbara Stanwyck is a wealthy, bed-ridden woman who overhears a phone conversation between two men planning a woman’s murder to take place that night. But she can’t get anyone to believe her. Her husband (Burt Lancaster) is for some reason unreachable. And who, she wonders, could this poor targeted woman be?

Fletcher’s play was clearly so famous that the producers were reluctant to change a word. Stanwyck’s character is introduced with a torrent of expository dialogue that might as well be streaming out of a Philco. Dialogue rendered largely unnecessary thanks to director Anatole Litvak; his camera glides through Stanwyck’s luxe digs highlighting details that convey everything Stanwyck insists on relaying to a procession of beleaguered operators. The story that follows, which includes flashbacks within flashbacks, is a daisy chain of contrivance. Stanwyck happens to be patched into a phone call that strikes close to home. The old flame still carrying a torch for Lancaster (Ann Richards) is, by coincidence, married to the D.A. who – can you beat that? – is investigating Lancaster’s business dealings. At one point, Richards tails her own spouse to a desolate stretch of Staten Island beach. There’s not a soul around, yet no one spots her in a scene that stretches credulity to the breaking point.

But, amazingly, not past it. Credit again is due to Litvak, whose direction gives the sequence an ethereal quality making it seem like a dream Richards is relaying to Stanwyck at the other end of a long, long telephone wire. We come to feel for the isolated, neurasthenic Stanwyck, and for Lancaster as a decent man frustrated to discover that marrying above his station means he can’t make his own way in the world.

The movie’s first half, with its labored set-up and on-the-nose speechifying, is dated but fun. Then comes a point when sheer narrative momentum takes over. Tension mounts with a sinister precision throughout the last act. The final three minutes are unbearable, with a denouement enshrined in the thriller hall of fame. Sorry, Wrong Number is like a ride on an ancient wooden roller coaster at some forgotten amusement park; the prospect that the rickety structure may shake itself to pieces is part of the excitement. Or to use another tortured metaphor, sometimes watching those toppling domino artists lay out every piece first only adds to your appreciation when that last one falls into place.

Sundays with Hitch: Dial M for Murder (1954)

Welcome to a very special installment of Sundays with Hitch.

The point of this series is for me to watch the Alfred Hitchcock films that I’ve missed. Rosemarie’s list of such titles is far shorter. The early English movies that are my biggest Hitchcock blind spot? She’s seen ‘em all. She even took a class taught by Donald Spoto, Hitch’s most prominent biographer. A few of the movies we’ve watched so far were new to her – good luck finding people who have made it through Topaz – but many were old favorites.

Dial M for Murder is different. It’s the only Alfred Hitchcock film that I had seen but Rosemarie had not.

In the opening minutes of this adaptation of Frederick Knott’s stage thriller, Hitchcock manages to convey a complicated story of infidelity without dialogue. Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) could easily be Strangers on a Train’s Guy Haines a couple of years down the road, a one-time tennis pro who married well but now finds himself trapped in an unsatisfying job. Worse, the man his wife (Grace Kelly) truly loves – successful American mystery novelist Robert Cummings – has returned to England intent on winning her over. In a scene so long it becomes as thrilling as a high-wire act – how long can Hitch keep this up? – Wendice blackmails an old school chum into bumping off the missus and lays out how it’s to be done. But that only marks the start of Milland’s scheming, in a performance that reaches spectacular heights of both cunning and odiousness.

When I saw the film as a teenager I dismissed it as a lesser effort, thinking it stagy. But I was an idiot then. I disavow most of what I said in the 1980s. Hitchcock doesn’t make the expected attempt to open up Knott’s play, keeping the action almost entirely in the Wendices’ flat and using the claustrophobia to his advantage. He relishes every bit of Knott’s stagecraft no matter how hokey; he practically imposes a proscenium arch over the closing moments, making you appreciate how effective the piece must have been when performed live. John Williams reprises his Tony-award winning performance as Inspector Hubbard, the blandly implacable detective. There’s more than a hint of Lieutenant Columbo in the character, right down to the “one more thing” question as he’s heading out the door. The film was shot but not initially released in 3-D. To think that audiences missed all the excitement of a key going into a lock.

For the record, Rosemarie thought it was great.

On The Web: My Guilty Pleasure at Crimespree

Crimespree Magazine is your go-to source for information on crime no matter the format: in print, on TV, or at the movies. Redoubtable entertainment editor Jeremy Lynch has brought back his Guilty Pleasures series and was kind enough to ask me to participate.

I could have taken the easy way out. I could have waxed rhapsodic about Jade and been done with it, emerging with some of my dignity intact.

But no. I had to give poor Jeremy more than he bargained for. I’ll say this for myself: I am unafraid to put the guilt in guilty pleasure.

Skate on over to Crimespree to see which movie I picked.

Extra, Extra!: Noir City

The wait, ladies and gentlemen, is over. The all-new issue of Noir City is out. Completely redesigned by Michael Kronenberg, the house rag of the Film Noir Foundation is now a true magazine – and renamed to boot. (Noir City Sentinel, R.I.P.) To commemorate the new launch, this gorgeous issue is the biggest to date, tipping the scales at over 100 pages.

I’m particularly excited about this edition because yours truly penned the cover story. It’s a survey of songbirds in film noir, those world-weary chanteuses who step up to microphones in swank joints and dive bars alike to provide a few moments of comfort. The article covers dozens of films and includes a sidebar on forgotten thrushes, the singers who provided the vocals for some of noir’s most glamorous dames. The piece was a labor of love, and I hope readers enjoy it.

I also contributed to the exhaustive tribute to Raymond Burr and the Perry Mason stable of players with a salute to Della Street herself, Barbara Hale.

Also in this issue: Jake Hinkson on Orson Welles, Mark Fertig on the sad life of Alan Ladd, reviews of contemporary noir, and so much more. It’s an embarrassment of riches and I’m honored to be a part of it. To get your copy, simply donate a minimum of twenty dollars to the Film Noir Foundation. You’ll be supporting their important work.

While I’m at it, let me also note that the Noir City Sentinel Annual #3, featuring several of my articles including a history of the Whistler films, is now for sale at Amazon. Look at all those glowing reviews! You’d be a fool not to buy it.

Movie: A Somewhat Gentle Man (U.S. 2011)

This somewhat gentle movie slipped into a handful of theaters at the start of the year and is now on DVD and Netflix Instant. Ulrik (Stellan Skarsgård) walks out of prison after serving 12 years for murder – and finds out everyone has his release date wrong. He’s got that kind of luck. His old boss sets him up with a hovel and a lousy job, expecting him to seek vengeance on the man who sent him away. But once Ulrik discovers he’s due to be a grandfather, he considers the completely alien prospect of simply living his life.

Everything about the movie is beautifully deadpan; even the composition of director Hans Petter Moland’s shots is funny. The Norwegian Tourist Board cannot be happy with the chosen locations. The characters are uniformly shabby and disreputable, grabbing for what they can at the margins, yet they’re treated with real affection. You generally know where the story is going but it still manages to sneak up on you. Much of the credit goes to Skarsgård. From the second you glimpse his ponytail, it’s clear he owns this character. He gives an epically Zen performance; the simple joy Ulrik is able to take in small things becomes a sizeable joy indeed. And if there’s not a soundtrack album, there ought to be. A lovely surprise of a film.

Sundays with Hitch: Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

Time now for the most atypical film Alfred Hitchcock ever directed. There’s plenty of humor in his work, provided you take it dark. (See: Harry, The Trouble with.) But Mr. & Mrs. Smith marks Hitch’s sole foray into screwball comedy.

Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard play a couple given to epic feuds and equally epic reconciliations. They learn separately that, owing to a legal oversight, they are not technically married. Thanks to assorted miscommunications, Lombard decides she’s in no hurry to tie the knot again. Hitchcock doesn’t break a sweat selling screenwriter Norman Krasna’s premise, wisely realizing that you’ll either buy it or you won’t.

There’s not enough of the nimble Jack Carson as the hound sharing Montgomery’s doghouse. Once Montgomery’s law partner Gene Raymond expresses romantic interest in Lombard, we get a lot of Southern-fried hokum, including a casual reference to “white trash,” and a shrill third act. And that goddamn whistling on the soundtrack? I never need to hear that again.

But a comedy, like a thriller, can be judged on the basis of its set pieces, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith features a pair of beauties. The first occurs when Montgomery arranges to meet Lombard at their former favorite restaurant to re-pop the question, only to discover that the old joint isn’t quite the same. The tone is both funny and wistful – maybe the restaurant isn’t all that’s changed – and Montgomery has some great business with the house cat. Even better is a hilarious extended sequence at a nightclub involving a “high class girl” named Gertie and a self-inflicted nosebleed. Factor in an effervescent performance by Carole Lombard, who would prove the most tragic of Hitchcock blondes, and the movie certainly merits a look.

Book: So Much Pretty, by Cara Hoffman (2011)

Haeden, New York is not one of those quaint upstate towns that serves as a weekend getaway for Manhattanites. It’s an isolated, hardscrabble town at the base of Appalachia’s spine. When the local girl dating the local golden boy disappears and eventually turns up dead, the residents immediately affix blame on some outsider, a “drifter.” Only those with roots elsewhere resist the explanation. Stacy Flynn, the transplanted tightly-wound journalist who has taken over Haeden’s newspaper. Gene and Claire Piper, a pair of unreconstructed hippie doctors who abandoned New York City to go back to the land. And above all their whip-smart daughter Alice.

In her debut novel Cara Hoffman opts for a mosaic approach that ping-pongs back and forth through decades, assumes the POVs of a dozen characters, and incorporates a variety of documents. Despite the high degree of difficulty every voice rings true, none more so than Claire, a profoundly decent woman who is “exhausted ... from hearing nothing new for half a year at a time - not even a new joke or figure of speech - from constantly explaining what she’d said or what she meant, or putting the places she was talking about into context. Tired of being poor now for almost twenty years.” Hoffman’s facility with this complex technique is daunting, and at times makes one wish she’d stick with one thread a little longer. She also tackles a brace of issues like the environmental effects of factory farming without slowing the narrative, and expresses a righteous fury about the silence surrounding crimes against women without resorting to Stieg Larsson-style sensationalism.

Some readers will undoubtedly be frustrated by Hoffman’s emphasis on the why rather than the who of one of her book’s central mysteries. But there is absolutely no denying the potency of its shocking ending. So Much Pretty is occasionally maddening and frequently brilliant, an astonishing feat of storytelling. It’s a tough book to love and a tougher one to shake.

Sundays with Hitch: The Lodger (1927)

The Lodger isn’t Alfred Hitchcock’s first movie. It’s just the first “Alfred Hitchcock” movie. Not only did it announce him as a singular talent, it sounded many of the notes that he would play like a virtuoso for decades: the hounded innocent, romance blossoming amidst suspicion, the merging of sex and danger, the personal cameo, and blondes blondes blondes.

So how was I introduced to it? As a poorly transferred bonus feature on a lousy DVD of Sabotage. The launch of one of the great cinematic careers reduced to an afterthought.

The poor quality of the print was soon forgotten, though. A serial killer calling himself “The Avenger” claims his latest fair-haired victim, and word spreads like a contagion. Even the title cards in this silent film are disturbing. MURDER wet from the press, one cries as the tabloids feast on the story, followed by MURDER hot on the aerial as fearful people crowd around radios. There’s a lurid, lip-smacking glee to this coverage of the coverage that remains almost unseemly. Which, need it be stressed, is intended as a compliment.

The title character (heartthrob Ivor Novello) takes a room in the house owned by the parents of lovely blonde Daisy. Our heroine isn’t afraid of the killer lurking in the London fog, possibly because she’s seeing a policeman. Although that should be of little comfort, considering he resembles the sort of unfortunate chap described by Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol as “the fish course.” Daisy and the mysterious stranger grow closer while Inspector Haddock fumes. When The Avenger strikes again, Daisy’s parents begin noticing their tenant’s unusual hours.

It would be churlish to complain about the occasional creakiness of the plot, taken from Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel. The movie holds up astonishingly well, and the true thrill lies in seeing Hitchcock’s command of the medium so early. Daisy and her parents are adjusting to the idea of their new boarder when they hear him pacing the floor upstairs. Hitchcock shows us the ceiling – which then vanishes, revealing the soles of Novello’s shoes as he stirs relentlessly. And the ending is a still-chilling depiction of mob violence.

A far better DVD than the one I watched was released as part of the Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection in 2008. At some point I’ll seek it out. The Lodger is fascinating enough to watch more than once.

Book: The Savage City, by T. J. English (2011)

“It’s ten p.m. Do you know where your children are?”

For decades, New York’s WNEW led into their nightly newscast with that ominous pronouncement. It never failed to unnerve me, conjuring up visions of lost boys and girls huddled under streetlamps as darkness and the city itself closed in on them.

That level of dread was endemic in the Gotham of the 1960s and ‘70s, the era laid bare in the new non-fiction book by T. J. English. Its chronicle of “race, murder and a generation on the edge” begins with a gruesome coincidence: the slaying of two young white women in their Manhattan apartment on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. English weaves together the stories of three men who never met, but whose lives repeatedly intersect with the fallout of what became known as the Career Girls Murders.

There’s Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who became a key figure in the Black Panthers. This material, while fascinating, is the weakest of the book’s three legs as the Panthers get bogged down in paranoia and infighting. Bill Phillips, the bent cop who would end up a star witness for the Knapp Commission at which Frank Serpico testified, personifies the NYPD’s entrenched corruption. (ASIDE: Phillips’ book On the Pad, co-written by sportswriter Leonard Schecter, was an inspiration for Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. The latest Scudder novel A Drop of the Hard Stuff will be out shortly. I reviewed it a few months back.)

The book’s primary focus is George Whitmore, Jr., a young black man in the wrong place at the wrong time who would be charged with the Career Girls Murders and spend a decade protesting his innocence. Whitmore would become more symbol than man as the issues played out only to become an afterthought amidst the turmoil of the times, but English never strays from telling his personal story. A perfect example of Whitmore’s funhouse-mirror fate: what started out as a movie about his wrongful imprisonment ended up becoming the world’s introduction to Telly Savalas’ Kojak. Whitmore couldn’t even be the star in a film about his own life.

English, whose The Westies is another true crime favorite, has written a biography of both a place and a time that seem almost alien now but are closer than we care to think. The Savage City is a hugely ambitious book, and one that largely succeeds.

On The Web: The Mystery of the Guest Post

It’s vintage young adult fiction week over at the Abbott Gran Medicine Show, the must-read blog co-hosted by novelists Megan Abbott and Sara Gran. This week’s sterling posts include Megan’s interview with Lois Duncan, Sara on the Sweet Valley High books, and Alison Gaylin’s singular twinning of Helter Skelter and Judy Blume.

But boys read, too. So we hear from writer/cartoonist Ed Brubaker, offering a tribute to Encyclopedia Brown and The Great Brain. And, for some reason, me. In my post, I do what few will. I stand up for the Hardy Boys.

Many thanks to Megan and Sara for letting me into their clubhouse. Go read my post and all the others. Wonderful stuff galore.

Sundays with Hitch: Sabotage (1936)

Sabotage is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. It’s not to be confused with Secret Agent, another Alfred Hitchcock film from 1936, adapted from W. Somerset Maugham. Or with Saboteur, which Hitch made in 1942. Also, Sabotage was released in the United States as The Woman Alone. Any questions?

Charles Bennett’s screenplay loosely follows Conrad’s book, shifting the focus from Mr. Verloc (Oscar Homolka), a foreigner in London who has allied himself with a group of terrorists, to Verloc’s gorgeous young wife Sylvia Sidney. This change facilitates, if not quite a happy ending, at least a happier one than Conrad’s. Sylvia wants to be loyal to her husband, but doubts are stirred by an undercover detective masquerading as a greengrocer (John Loder).

The previous year’s The 39 Steps is a film that simultaneously invents and perfects an entire genre. Hitch is up to similar tricks here, building the template thrillers still follow. He stages a meeting between Verloc and his handler in the London Aquarium that prefigures decades’ worth of clandestine rendezvous in public places. (Hitch ends the scene with Verloc’s dream of the city in ruins envisioned in the glass of a fish tank, a potent moment achieved with an ingenious use of stock footage.) He cleverly integrates the movie theater that Verloc owns into the proceedings, and builds a real feel for the bustling London of the period.

Sabotage is best known for the sequence that illustrates Hitchcock’s classic dictum about the difference between suspense (There’s a bomb on that bus! When is it going to – ka-BOOM!) and shock (ka-BOOM!) Audiences at the time were upset by this passage of the film, and Hitchcock later told Francois Truffaut that he regretted including it. The scene still works beautifully, so much so that the remainder of the movie feels muted. We know we’ve already seen the worst that will happen. And yet nothing in that storied sequence is as unsettling as a simple off-center close-up of Sidney’s extraordinary face, her eyes looking nervously to the left as her questions begin to grow.

Oh, and birds in Hitchcock movies? Always bad.

Movies: Hookers, Spies and Grifters

The Economist looks at the current state of home video and finds IFC Films “miles ahead of the big studios” in terms of video-on-demand. Currently available through their IFC Midnight series is X (2011), which offers additional proof that the best genre films are coming from Australia. Holly (Viva Bianca) is a veteran Sydney call girl who vowed to get out of the life by age 30. On her birthday, she’s determined to make good on that promise. Needing a partner to work one of her last appointments with her, she approaches young runaway Shay (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence). Then the job goes horribly wrong, and a very long night begins.

The thriller plot is perfunctory – the villain too broad to be truly scary, the underworld too small – but the film is obviously more interested in its two lead characters. Both actresses are terrific, offering different portrayals of female resilience. The street scenes have an authentic desperation; an encounter with heroin addicts nails their spiteful neediness. Shay’s reasons for running away are laid out in a single, beautifully brief flashback. Director/co-writer Jon Hewitt keeps the action taut and the violence brutal. A tough film with sex placed front and center. In other words, the kind of movie that’s unlikely to be made in America. Here’s the trailer.

While I’m at it, some DVD recommendations. Two recent releases that are better than the Oscar bait films that stole their thunder late last year.

Fair Game. Maybe the wrong-headed belief that we already knew everything about l’affair Valerie Plame et Joe Wilson contributed to this film’s getting lost in the awards season noise. But the script, co-written by sweary playwright Jez Butterworth, wisely keeps the focus on their marriage. The scenes set at the CIA are beautifully deadpan, The Office meets Le Carré. Director Doug Liman channels his typical pell-mell energy into a frame that’s calm but never static. Sean Penn captures Joe Wilson’s self-righteousness, which never mitigates the fact that he was, well, right. And Naomi Watts is magnificent as Valerie Plame, her reliance on traditional American values of loyalty and keeping one’s own counsel painting her into a corner. As strong a performance as I saw in 2010.

I Love You Phillip Morris. Jim Carrey is utterly fearless in this movie – his hairline is proof of that – as a secretly gay cop turned flamboyantly gay con artist. With Ewan McGregor as the fellow convict who makes an almost-honest man out of him, and a very funny Leslie Mann as the ex-wife who finds ways to remain in his life. The movie, based on a true story and co-written and directed by Glen Ficarra and John Requa (Bad Santa), is consistently surprising and frequently moving. Featuring a two-word line of dialogue that’s one of my favorites of last year. You’ll know it when you hear it.

Sundays with Hitch: Jamaica Inn (1939)

Alfred Hitchcock made three films based on the work of Daphne du Maurier. One is Rebecca (1940), Hitch’s American debut and his only Best Picture winner. Another is The Birds, which remains a signature work. It’s the least known of the bunch that concerns us today.

Jamaica Inn was the last movie Hitchcock made in England before heading for the bright lights of Hollywood. Speaking of bright lights, there aren’t any on display here. Jamaica Inn is in the public domain, and the available prints on DVD aren’t of the highest quality. The one I saw was murky and missing almost ten minutes of footage, a gap not mentioned anywhere on the disc. Which is unfortunate, because while Jamaica Inn is far from top-shelf Hitchcock it’s still entertaining. At any rate, it’s better than the movies watched the last few Sundays.

A battery of fine writers adapted du Maurier’s novel: Sidney Gilliat (Hitch’s The Lady Vanishes and the wonderful Green for Danger), regular Hitchcock collaborators Joan Harrison and Alma Reville (aka Mrs. Hitchcock), with additional dialogue by J. B. Priestly. We get off to a brisk start: a band of scalawags douses beacons along the rocky Cornish coast as a ship approaches, then loots the wreck and butchers the survivors. Into this wretched hive of scum and villainy rides the virginal Mary (Maureen O’Hara). She’s meant to live with her aunt and uncle at the hostel of the title, but the place is so disreputable that the coach abandons her by the side of the road. Local nobleman Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton) comes to her aid. Things turn a bit stagy once Mary arrives at the inn and realizes that her uncle has thrown in with the rogues. More reversals follow, none surprising and none really supposed to be.

Laughton is the entire show here, at times to the movie’s detriment. He seems to have found a way of enlarging his forehead, giving his eyebrows more room to roam. His performance verges on being a cartoon, but Laughton tethers it to reality; Sir Humphrey needs money, he explains, because he knows how to spend it. The result is perhaps the first great villain in the Hitchcock canon, one who meets a fitting end. The movie’s rousing last act makes up for the earlier lulls with frantic horse chases via moonlight and a grand harbor-set climax.

Hitchcock and Laughton sparred frequently, with Laughton practically taking over production. Du Maurier disliked the movie so much that she almost withheld the rights to Rebecca. She fortunately changed her mind, and Hitchcock and Laughton eventually worked together again on The Paradine Case. (And we all know how that turned out.) Enough of Hitch’s panache survives to make Jamaica Inn worthwhile ... if you can find a complete version.

Book: Tough Without a Gun, by Stefan Kanfer (2011)

The last few show business biographies I’ve read have tended toward the exhaustive. Not so Stefan Kanfer’s look at Humphrey Bogart. High Sierra has made Bogie a star by page 60. 25 pages later, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca have wrapped.

But that’s because Kanfer is taking an unconventional approach, focusing not so much on the well-trod ground of Bogart’s life but, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the actor’s extraordinary afterlife. The unique confluence of circumstance and individual personality that transformed Humphrey Bogart into “the American male par excellence: operating in a compromised and often evil world, a man without illusions.” Kanfer’s breezy style does allow a few errors of the kind Bill Crider calls out in his review to creep in. And I disagree with him on some key films in the Bogart canon. Kanfer overpraises To Have and Have Not, which aside from being Lauren Bacall’s debut is dull. And the Truman Capote-scripted Beat The Devil may have been years ahead of its time, but it’s still not funny. Being the first movie to pitch its failings and excesses as satire merits a footnote at best.

But Kanfer is passionate and insightful on why Bogart has lasted and will continue to loom large as the silver screen shrinks, crediting the combination of old-world manners (more than once he calls Bogart, born on Christmas Day 1899, the last nineteenth-century man) and contemporary skepticism. He also rightly singles out the chilling In a Lonely Place, which remains one of the great shadow portraits of Hollywood, as a career highpoint. There’s none of the theatrical distance of the same year’s Sunset Boulevard to soften the blows. Frequent Bogart collaborator John Huston prompts some of Kanfer’s best writing. Huston “had learned how to pare a book down to its essentials, retaining only the most vital, pivotal scenes and conflicts.” That’s a definition of a lost art. According to Kanfer:

Both considered themselves ‘men’s men,’ tough-minded personalities who bucked authority, talked intelligently on a variety of subjects, worked professionally, and held their liquor.

Not many like that anymore, and it’s that sense of not so much a lost world but a lost way of seeing the one we have that permeates the book. In Bogart’s eyes, it was simple: you were either a professional or a bum. Kanfer’s book is more an essay than a biography, and I enjoyed it.

Sidney Lumet, RIP

Various deadlines kept me from posting about the death of Sidney Lumet. He was a premiere chronicler of New York and of institutions large and small, which made him a premiere chronicler of America.

Few filmmakers have had careers like his, studded with so many memorable films. 12 Angry Men, which staggeringly was his first feature. His Big Apple crime dramas – Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, the magisterial Prince of the City. Network. The Verdict.

Lumet had a long and productive working relationship with Sean Connery that resulted in some of the actor’s finest work: for proof, watch the still deeply disturbing The Offence. Even the films of his that weren’t entirely successful always had something to recommend them. An awareness of an issue years before it hit the mainstream: the rise of political consultants in Power (1986), the harsh economics of medicine in Critical Care (1997). Unexpectedly strong performances brought about by Lumet’s abiding love of actors, like the ones by Nick Nolte and Armand Assante in the underrated Q&A or Don Johnson in Guilty as Sin. Or a brilliantly executed sequence, such as the opening of Night Falls in Manhattan in which a drug dealer exploits bureaucratic police confusion to escape.

Most impressive of all was that Lumet’s last efforts still had plenty of energy. 2006’s Find Me Guilty never received a full theatrical release, but it’s a rewarding off-beat courtroom drama with strong work from Vin Diesel. And Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead found Lumet embracing neo-noir and digital filmmaking with equal vigor.

Two more things about Lumet, and why he was such a huge personal favorite. One is his book Making Movies, as clear-eyed and rational a description of the process as you will find. The other is his 1982 film Deathtrap. It’s not a particularly well-remembered movie of his. But I watched it repeatedly while growing up, and still pop in the DVD at least once a year. It was the first movie I ever saw that I thought of as “sophisticated,” and that was Lumet all over. Sidney Lumet told stories aimed at adults, and he showed me that’s what I wanted to be.

Sundays with Hitch: Under Capricorn (1949)

Comes now another title from the middle of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography that tends to provoke blank stares. Let’s find out why, shall we?

The costume drama begins with Michael Wilding as a young wastrel arriving in Australia. (Oh, under Capricorn. Now I get it.) He’s instantly befriended by the unfortunately named Samson Flusky (Joseph Cotten), ex-convict turned wealthy landowner, who offers to set Wilding up in a shady deal that will make his fortune. Things turn promisingly lurid as Wilding arrives at Casa Cotten and finds the maid whipping the household retainers. But then he meets Lady Flusky (Ingrid Bergman), a childhood friend now drunk and unstable, still reeling from the scandal of having married Cotten, a mere groom. Wilding, with Cotten’s blessing, sets out to reintegrate Bergman into society but in the process various ardors are flam’d and past sins confess’d.

We’ve got three main characters who are supposed to be from the Emerald Isle played by an Englishman, an American and a Swede. This non-Irish stew of accents tackles a talky script containing some true howlers; at one point Bergman, in loon mode, cleaves to a staircase and says, “Now I have the balustrade. Good old balustrade.” Her affections toward the two men in her life go through a few too many unmotivated reversals. The rest of the plot unfortunately echoes Rebecca, and while Margaret Leighton’s maid is no Mrs. Danvers she still gives the film’s strongest performance.

Hitchcock again used 10 minute takes as he did in the previous year’s Rope, but for all the fluid movement of the camera in and around Cotten’s cabin the sequences call attention to themselves. The best moments are less ostentatious: Wilding using his coat to turn a window into a mirror for Bergman, a shot that holds on Cotten’s hand holding a necklace behind his back that he is at first eager to present as a gift and then desperate to hide.

Ultimately, Under Capricorn is a disappointing, static film from a period when the bloom had gone off the Hollywood rose for Hitchcock. Things would soon improve; Strangers on a Train, which depending on the day you ask may be my favorite of Hitch’s movies, is only two years in the future. But I’ll be moving into the past and watching some of Hitchcock’s earlier English films next.

Books: What I’ve Been Reading

California, by Ray Banks (2011). Brother Banks, the Saturday Boy hisownself and creator of the peerless Cal Innes series, returns with a book that’s short and none too sweet. Shuggie Boyle is out of prison after a four year bid and telling himself he’s a changed man. And maybe he is. He’s trying to keep his impulses in check, because if he learned anything in therapy it’s that anger is a deluded mind. And for the first time in his life, he has a goal: he’s going to hie himself from Scotland to the title state, where all dreams come true (unless they’re publicly funded). He just needs to recover his stash from his girlfriend and he’ll be winging his way west. But his old life keeps intruding on his new one.

I’ve sounded this note about Ray’s work before, and here I go again: his work is bruising, moving, and above all funny. Some writers who work the darker side of the street fall prey to self-seriousness. Others have a sense of humor that reeks of superiority; the phrase “laughing like drains” comes to mind. Banks’ punch lines are charged with both surprise and humanity. In other words, life. If you’re not reading him, kids, you’re missing out.

Kill Me Again, by Terence Faherty (1996). Scott Elliott thinks that making a sequel to the wartime classic Passage to Lisbon (think Casablanca, and think it real hard) is a terrible idea. But he’s a former actor turned shamus, not a film critic or a studio executive. His job is to find out who is accusing the follow-up film’s writer of being a Communist. Faherty ably recreates the mood of 1947 Hollywood, in particular the way returning veterans like Elliott used their wartime experience to size each other up. His faux Bogart, here named Tory Beaumont, is a genuine piece of work. Most impressive of all is his carefully wrought quasi-Casablanca sequel Love Me Again, which might have actually worked. The Elliott series is being brought back in eBook form, and I’ll certainly seek out the others. Here’s Faherty at Ed Gorman’s blog on a new collection of Elliott stories.

Sundays with Hitch: The Paradine Case (1947)

First lesson: It’s pronounced Para-DEEN, not Para-DINE. I’ve been getting the title of this Alfred Hitchcock courtroom drama wrong for years.

Second lesson: Never let it be said that Hitch didn’t make a bad movie. Because The Paradine Case stinks on ice. How bad is it? I didn’t turn it off, because I vowed to watch every Hitchcock film and I pride myself on being thorough. But a Scrabble board did make an appearance partway through the proceedings.

Maddalena Paradine is accused of poisoning her much older retired colonel husband. He was also blind, because if you’re gonna stack a deck you might as well shoot the moon. Her attorney is Gregory Peck, who promptly falls for Mrs. Paradine and compromises both his marriage and her defense. The rest is hokum; it’s a strain on my memory to recall even that much of the plot.

Paradine was the last collaboration between Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick, and the tension in their relationship is evident in the film. Selznick is credited with the screenplay, and if ever a movie was written by its producer this is it. Critical events happen off-screen and are relayed to us after the fact. Peck’s wife and her friend Greek chorus their way through the trial, underlining the blatantly obvious for those not paying attention (maybe because they’re too busy trying to land on those coveted triple word score squares). And Peck’s feelings for his client are never dramatized, simply asserted.

The casting, a bone of contention between Hitchcock and Selznick, further compromises the movie. Peck is wildly out of place as a barrister. I know actors and audiences weren’t as particular about accents then, but hearing that oh-so-American voice break out the m’lords is too much. Selznick discovery Alida Valli never registers as the alleged object of his affection, the worst-written part in the film. And how do you underuse Charles Laughton?

The few overtly Hitchcockian flourishes – shadows of clouds scudding across Valli’s face during an interview with Peck – come across as desperate attempts to liven up staid material. A passage where Peck visits the forbidding Paradine estate briefly grants Hitch firm footing on the Gothic ground he knew so well, but it’s too little too late.

An interview with the director excerpted on the DVD reveals that he essentially disowned the film because of Selznick’s interference throughout production. I hereby do likewise. Making matters worse, I also lost at Scrabble.

Movies: Whip Round

Tamara Drewe (2010). The latest film from director Stephen Frears slipped briefly into theaters under cover of darkness last year. A funny, sexy, literate romp, it’s well worth catching up with on DVD. Set in and around a writers’ retreat, it throws together a hugely successful and deeply fatuous crime novelist (Roger Allam), his long-suffering wife (Tamsin Greig), an academic constipated in every conceivable sense, the title character (Gemma Arterton) who has returned to the village where she grew up, two teenage girls who are desperate to leave, and a host of other characters. A textured movie that surprises throughout, it’s based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds (shrewdly adapted by Moira Buffini) that in turn updates Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. (Not that I am so versed in the work of Thomas Hardy. I had to learn that elsewhere. If it were based on the work of Frank and Joe Hardy, that I would have figured out on my own.) The marketing campaign consisted entirely of Gemma Arterton in hot pants; even though the scene in question lasts only a few moments and makes sense in terms of the story, it’s exploited repeatedly on the DVD’s special features. A splendid sight to be sure, but it sells the movie, um, short. Featuring the best ill-timed will-you-sign-your-book-for-me? moment ever, it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in the literary life.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945). This Robert Siodmak film screened at Noir City in San Francisco but didn’t make the trip to the Seattle fest, so I was pleased to find it on Netflix Instant. George Sanders plays Uncle Harry, a New England bachelor who lives in a rambling home with his two sisters. When Harry falls for Ella Raines, Geraldine Fitzgerald decides she’s not going to share her brother with anyone. Psychosexual tension galore, deftly dealt with in the face of the censors of the time. Raines’ character is allowed to be smart, sending the film down some unexpected paths. Sanders is quite touching, and Fitzgerald is, as usual, a powerhouse. The ending, alas, is a complete cheat, but you’ll know the real climax when you see it.

Sleep, My Love (1948). Also streaming on Netflix. The second movie I watched in as many days in which doctored hot chocolate is essential to the plot. Such is the life I lead. Claudette Colbert is a New York socialite who wakes up on a train to Boston with a gun in her purse and no memory of how she got there. What follows is a variation on Gaslight, with Don Ameche as the scheming husband. But it’s served up with uncommon flair, thanks to a sophisticated screenplay co-written by Leo Rosten from his novel and skillful direction by Douglas Sirk before he entered his lush melodrama phase. The movie’s secret weapon is Robert Cummings, his delivery so sharp and fresh his scenes could have been filmed yesterday. Also with the gorgeous Hazel Brooks, hell-bent on finishing her dialogue as quickly as possible.

Sundays with Hitch: The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Everyone has their limits, some act of cruelty that they don’t care to see rendered onscreen. For me it’s any disrespect paid to a dead body. I’ve never watched Weekend at Bernie’s for that reason. Much less Weekend at Bernie’s II. My God, what that poor man went through …

It’s therefore a sign of Alfred Hitchcock’s skill that I was able to enjoy his black comedy The Trouble with Harry, in which the entire plot revolves around a corpse that is buried and dug up repeatedly.

Gorgeous credits establish the mood, Bernard Herrmann’s first score for the Master playing over a child’s drawing of the bucolic setting in which mystery man Harry turns up stiff. We transition to the leafy magnificence of the Vermont locations, the screen bursting with color. Harry’s dead up in the woods, and most of the local residents have a reason to blame themselves for his demise. Hence the repeated spadework.

Harry has a very English feel - that’s where the original novel by Jack Trevor Story unfolded - and would function better in that setting. The dynamic in the town would certainly make more sense, as would the madcap painter who comes across as a neo-Beat. Cary Grant or David Niven, for instance, would have been ideal. (Dream actor for the role: Leslie Howard.) Still, the very American John Forsythe does his best with a tricky characterization. And the rest of the cast – Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, and especially Shirley MacLaine in her screen debut – is perfect.

The shenanigans start out as arch, occasionally veering into twee. But Hitchcock eventually establishes a more interesting tone, using fades between scenes to lend the film the feel of an adult fable. By the close, it has struck a note of silliness spiked with gravitas. Life goes on in the midst of death, and Hitchcock finds the notion both right and rather amusing. Harry is a slight bit of business, but it’s a film no one else could have pulled off.

Guest Post: Books, Movies and a Beardy Scotsman, by Russel D. McLean

No, don’t run away. I know I’m not quite as rakishly handsome as your usual blog host, the marvellous Vince Keenan. But don’t let the beard scare you. I may be Scottish, but I don’t bite. I’m not related to Sawney Bean.

My name is Russel D. McLean, and I am an alcoho... I mean, an author. An author of dark and deadly crime stories set on the east coast of Scotland in the city of Dundee. I’ve been spending the last week invading blogs in an attempt to spread the word about my latest US release, The Lost Sister. So let’s get the marketing out of the way and say that people have been very kind about the book and its predecessor, The Good Son. Both are PI novels in the grand American tradition, but set in modern Scotland with all that entails. Dig what Vince had to say about the first book right here. They’re available now in hardcover and e-format from those wonderful folks at St Martin’s Press.

Every day I’ve been covering a different topic. I’ve talked about everything from the city of Dundee’s dark side to my own journey of discovery as a writer. I’ve even listed my top 10 books. You’d think by now I’d have run out of things to say. Well, you’d be wrong, brother. Because an innocuous answer to an upcoming interview got me thinking about movies. And when I remember that Vince loves to talk movies, including his great Sundays with Hitchcock series, I knew what I’d be yakking about here.

Movies.

Because despite what you think, there’s as much influence to be found in movies as there is in prose. And any modern author who claims not to be literate in the language of movies is plain kidding themselves.

I grew up on movies. My dad loved ‘em, and he passed that love on to me. When I was young we’d seek out the few remaining Saturday Matinees. Older movies. Great movies. We still quote Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester (“the vessel with the pestle has the pill that will kill ...”) and double over with laughter. When I got older, he introduced me to films I needed to see. We went to Perth cinema to watch the first two Godfather films over two nights. We travelled to Kirkcaldy just to watch two Bogey movies back to back. We saw some weird stuff (I think we were maybe one of the only people in the cinema for the sadly ignored Trigger Happy) but we always talked about what we saw, same as we did with books.

So I figured, since I did a top ten of my favourite crime novels for Declan Burke a few days ago, I’d do something similar for Vince with crime movies. This is a carefully selected list of movies that had an immediate effect on me or that I come back to time and again. Some films are floating just above this list (I know some people will ask where Goodfellas is, and while it nearly made it, I couldn’t justify the effect it had on me at the time compared to other films) and some may be curiously absent due to gaps in my film knowledge. Some films that I come back to again and again are mere comfort food (The Big Easy and Midnight Run) and some films I may just have forgotten about during composition. After all with only ten spots and so many great films, you just have to go on instinct.

10) Point Blank – Decades later Mel Gibson would make an inferior film by the name of Payback. But this is the closest we’ve ever come to seeing professional criminal Parker – from the novels by Richard Stark – on screen. Lee Marvin is simply perfect in this role, conveying menace with the minimum of movement and dialogue. Okay, a few sequences (the nightclub) are relics of their time, but as a whole this is pretty much a masterpiece of a movie. Why it doesn’t have a release on R2, I’ll never understand.

9) Bullitt – That car chase. Steve McQueen’s stoic portrayal of Frank Bullitt. That car chase. Pretty much one of the most perfect and concise crime movies ever shot.



8) In the Heat of the Night – I still to this day love the story of Rod Steiger going to an audition years after this was released and being asked if he could “play a bigoted Southern sheriff”. In the Heat of the Night is a perfect little movie; a perfect time capsule of a time and place. Steiger and Poitier are the perfect double act, and the film refuses to pull its punches.

7) The Limey – An updating in many ways of Point Blank, The Limey features Terrence Stamp as an English con just out of jail and coming to America to find the man who killed his daughter. It's funnier than you might expect and yet the rage emanating from Stamp is electrifying and the final revelations are heartbreaking. “Tell him I’m fucking coming!”.

6) The Big Lebowski – Probably the only post-millennium film on my list, it's just a genius screenplay and a perfectly cast movie. There’s a reason it's become a cult, and quite honestly, man I’m thinking of converting to the recently founded church of Dudeism. That’s like, man, once I find my rug. It really tied the room together ...

5) North by Northwest – “That’s funny. That plane’s dustin’ crops, where there ain’t no crops.” A brilliantly constructed, tense little movie that’s a perfect product of its time and still stands up as a perfect adventure film. The least exciting part, if I’m honest, is the finale. But the sequence on the train, the moment where “Mr Kaplan” tries to make an escape while drugged, and of course that sequence in the corn fields… all absolutely brilliant. And Cary Grant is perfect as the suave but slightly dangerous Roger Thornhill (just watch the movie and you realise he’s just a little bit more callous than your average hero)

4) The Maltese Falcon – Bogart’s going to appear time and again on this list, I’m afraid. Yes, he plays basically the same part every time with minor variations but he’s so damn good at it. I first saw this in a double bill with THE BIG SLEEP thanks to my dad’s influence. Gutman, the fat man, is one of the screen’s greatest bad guys without ever appearing to do anything evil on screen and he gets one of my favourite lines: “I like to talk to a man who likes to talk.”

3) Psycho – I first saw this at the Steps Theatre in Dundee. I went with my flatmate who thought he was in for a cheesy evening. But the film still holds up remarkably and it says a lot that the moment where the detective creeps up the stairs to mother’s room and ... oooo, well, I can’t say what happens, but it elicited a scream of terror from a member of the audience. A member of an audience watching the film some thirty-odd years after it was made. There’s the sign of a good movie.



2) The Godfather (all 3 of ‘em) – No, listen to me. Don’t walk away. Part 3 is nowhere near the same level as one and two but it provides a kind of closure, like the gentle fading out of a classical piece of music. It is the end of the story, and when we see Michael’s final fate an air of wistfulness permeates the frame. That said, your mileage for three may vary but you cannot and will not deny the sheer power of one and two.

1) The Big Sleep – A perfect script. A perfect cast. Bogart and Bacall just sizzle there on the screen, and the dialogue is perfect. “I enjoyed your drink as much as you did, sir.” “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up” “My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains!” and so many others. This is the movie that made me want to write private eye novels. And is it a coincidence that the book also made it to my number one slot?



So there you are. Ten movies that influenced me as a movie goer, as a crime fan, as a crime writer. I love all these films in different ways, and I think that each of them probably played a part in my development as a storyteller. Because as a novelist you don’t just want to pay attention to your own medium. You need to keep your eyes and ears open. The silver screen has a lot to teach us about storytelling. And vice-versa of course …

Sundays with Hitch: Topaz (1969)

In conversations about Alfred Hitchcock, Topaz doesn’t come up. It’s not one of Hitch’s weird psychological movies like Marnie that has a cadre of ardent admirers. It’s simply never mentioned. Going in, I wasn’t even sure what it was about.

It’s about the Cold War, inspired by a scandal that occurred in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s about two and a half hours long. Considering that it’s based on a novel by Leon Uris, whose books snap the needle on the Michener meter, that’s no small accomplishment on the part of Hitchcock and screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor (Vertigo).

The globetrotting thriller opens in Copenhagen, with a Soviet official and his family defecting to the U.S. in the care of intelligence operative John Forsythe. Upon learning about the Russians’ plans in the Caribbean, Forsythe reaches out to a French counterpart (Frederick Stafford) for assistance. Stafford journeys to New York, Washington and Cuba to confirm the threat at great risk to both life and career. He then returns to Paris where he must square off against the title spy ring, a group of officials in his own government who are relaying information to Moscow.

In many ways Topaz feels like Hitchcock’s reaction to his disappointments on his previous film Torn Curtain. The studio forced stars on him; here he relies on a cast of little-known European actors. There is no love story. Stafford and his wife are jaded sophisticates, each having an affair that has bearing on the plot. Hitchcock puts the narrative squarely at the center, emphasizing tradecraft and the incremental gathering of knowledge and not his flamboyant visuals. He allows himself one “Hitchcock” moment in the Cuba section, a dazzling overhead shot granted additional impact because it stands alone.

The director’s genius expresses itself in more subtle ways. Like the cunning use of silence during the set piece in Harlem, where the Cuban legation to the U.N. stayed. We don’t hear Stafford’s instructions to his agent Roscoe Lee Browne, and when Browne tries to suborn a Cuban official we watch their conversation from across the street, filling in the blanks ourselves. Hitchcock takes this adult approach throughout.

Poor responses during test screenings led to changes in the film’s ending. The DVD print uses the climax Hitchcock preferred, but the disc includes the intriguing original coda and the slapdash one put together for the American release. Watching the Washington scenes I became convinced that several of the same locations were used in the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading. It’s the kind of oblique tribute I wouldn’t put past those scamps.

Topaz is low-key but consistently engrossing, a procedural with a markedly Continental feel. It’s atypical Hitchcock, more akin to The Day of the Jackal than any of his own films. Hitch partisans may not care for it, but I do.

Book: Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter, by Simon Brett (U.S. 2011)

The whole frightful business begins with the discovery of a corpse in the library at Tawcester Towers (pronounced “Taster,” as people of refinement such as yourselves are no doubt aware). It’s between the wars, don’t you know, when England stood astride the globe like something really rather large, when all was cricket, and when the right sort of people were in charge. People like Devereaux Lyminster, youngest son of the Duke of Tawcester, called Blotto even though he seldom drinks. “Amongst people of his class it was thought bad form for nicknames to have logical explanations; they were items to be scattered about with random largesse, like small donations to charity.” Not to mention Blotto’s beautiful and relentlessly capable sister Lady Honoria, known to all as Twinks. The siblings, with the aid of a discreet butler, a saucy housemaid, and a possibly psychotic chauffeur, will untangle the business of the corpse in the library, even if they have to venture all the way to the besieged and benighted nation of Mitteleuropia to do so.

The fact that Simon Brett feels free to make up countries should tell you all you need to know. Brett channels P. G. Wodehouse in this very funny book that is not afraid to get deeply silly. He also mercilessly skewers every convention of the Golden Age mystery; you will never look at idiosyncratic but basically lovable rustic eyewitnesses the same way again. If the notion of a Central European retreat dubbed Bad Vibesz or conversation “as stilted as a twelve-foot clown” doesn’t amuse, well, then perhaps you’d better look elsewhere for your entertainment. But why would you? My thanks to Mystery File for bringing this corker to my attention.

Sundays with Hitch: Family Plot (1976)

Alfred Hitchcock’s final film has its admirers, including Rosemarie. I don’t know why I’d never seen it. Maybe it’s because I’m a fan of Hitch’s previous movie Frenzy and wish that had been his curtain call: a psychological thriller brimming with black humor and shot on the streets of London. Or maybe I’m still holding out hope of a comeback, that somehow there’ll be another new Hitchcock. But I don’t abide magical thinking. Let’s put this one to bed.

Family Plot announces itself as an odd duck from the start. Barbara Harris (wonderful) plays a bogus psychic whose spirit guide sounds a lot like Sydney Greenstreet. A client offers her ten thousand dollars to find a nephew put up for adoption decades earlier so that he can be made an heir. Harris’ cab driver boyfriend (Bruce Dern) turns out to be a decent detective, and soon is on the trail. But the nephew, played by William Devane, has been a bad boy – he’s carrying out a series of shrewdly orchestrated kidnappings with his girlfriend Karen Black – and is in no hurry to be found, blithely unaware that the bumbling twosome dogging his steps can make him legitimately wealthy.

The cast is the film’s best feature. Considering Devane played this silky psychotic the same year as his memorable turn in Marathon Man, it’s a wonder he ever worked again. (Devane said Hitchcock’s main direction was “think William Powell.” When Devane proved initially unavailable, Hitchcock cast Roy Thinnes in the part. Thinnes still appears in several long shots.) The script by Hitch’s North by Northwest cohort Ernest Lehman has a rambling quality suitable to its time that occasionally verges on Altmanesque, especially whenever Dern’s loquacious loser is onscreen. Hitchcock underscores the seedy vibe by shooting in nondescript corners of the Northern California landscape he loved.

At this point Hitch was set in his ways. The rear projection he insisted on using looks terrible and feels woefully out of place in a film made in the 1970s. A comic car chase is simply leaden. But Hitchcock could still work his magic. A slow-building crane shot at a cemetery keeps Dern and his quarry in the frame to amusing effect. And the wit and playful spirit is intact. Family Plot is a shaggy dog story of a movie, taking its time to reach a payoff that’s never in doubt. But the trip is an engaging one. There are worse ways of leaving the stage.

Book: The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino (U.S. 2011)

Some book posts should simply be a photo of the cover and the words READ THIS. This novel – spare, haunting, meticulously assembled – deserves to be the best-seller here that it was in Japan.

Ishigami is a math teacher who keeps to a strict routine, and to himself. His only indulgence is a deep, unspoken affection for Yasuko, the divorced mother living next door. He gets an unusual chance to come to her aid when she kills her ex-husband after he threatens her and her daughter. Ishigami puts his fearsome intellect to work creating a flawless alibi. What he doesn’t know is that an old college friend, every bit as brilliant, works as a consultant for the police. Soon he’s matching wits with a most dangerous adversary: someone who knows and likes him.

Mathematics and Ishigami’s appreciation of its beauty is a constant theme, and one can’t help drawing parallels to the book itself. There is a simplicity to its language and its storytelling that is indistinguishable from elegance. Higashino, one of Japan’s most popular authors, weaves in fully wrought characters one at a time, slowly expanding the world as Ishigami’s action draws him out of his shell. It’s possible to read Suspect X as a meta critique of the age-old literary versus genre fiction debate. Only by hewing to a structure can it access the deep wells of emotion at its conclusion. Like a proof, it methodically follows rules to reveal a powerful, almost overwhelming truth.

So yeah. READ THIS.

Miscellaneous: Anatomy of a Weekend

The McCoy Tyner Quintet. Might as well kick things off by seeing a legend in person. Tyner is one of the great jazz pianists and a living link to John Coltrane. (He played on A Love Supreme, people.) At Jazz Alley, he was backed by a brace of sterling musicians: Gary Bartz on saxophone, John Patitucci on bass, Herlin Riley on drums and the one and only Bill Frisell on guitar. Each had his moments to shine, but all were happy to defer to the master at the keyboard. Their rendition of Duke Ellington’s “In a Mellotone” was pure joy. The show was packed, to the extent that I was initially concerned about our seats at the side of the stage. But that’s where the boys hung out right before they were introduced. And we were positioned perfectly to see Mr. Tyner’s face throughout the set, issuing signs like a wily catcher calling a close game behind the plate. I may request those seats in the future.

Local 360. Dinner was terrific at this new locavore restaurant, but what do I know? I’m no foodie. Of greater interest was the application of their philosophy to the cocktail menu. I had a Manhattan made with Desert Lightning corn whisky from the Yakima Valley. The whisky’s sharp, almost astringent taste was reminiscent of moonshine – yes, I’ve had moonshine – and resisted blending with the vermouth. The result was not entirely successful. But damned if I don’t want another one.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011). This Philip K. Dick-inspired thriller about a man who stumbles onto the mysterious forces who keep us mere mortals on plan is, at heart, a love story. Its light tone makes a nice change of pace from the usual paranoid intensity. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have better chemistry than any screen couple in recent memory. Writer/director George Nolfi provides them with some good dialogue. Throw in great New York locations and fine haberdashery and I was happy to go along for the ride.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948). James Hadley Chase’s 1939 novel about a kidnapping gone wrong, and then really wrong, is one of the premier WTF reading experiences, with jaw-dropping, mind-bending and occasionally eye-rolling plot twists all the way to the closing paragraphs. This lurid U.K. adaptation, its cast of English actors Noo Yawkin’ it up, kept some lulus that an American version would never have gotten away with, but still had to water the strongest stuff down. Despite gutting Chase’s book, it remains deeply nuts.

Sundays with Hitch: Torn Curtain (1966)

A particular scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain came up in reference to a project I’m working on. I’d seen the sequence in question several times – it’s one of those signature Hitchcock moments that is regularly excerpted and studied – but never in context, because Torn Curtain is one of the Hitchcock films that I’d missed. I set out to rectify that at once. And because I never do anything in half-measures, desperately crave structure, and need something to stave off the crippling ennui that attacks at the end of every weekend, I decided to devote Sunday evenings to Hitchcock films that are new to me, along with some that I want to revisit.

Torn Curtain finds Hitch working with a script credited to the brilliant novelist Brian Moore and indirectly inspired by l’affair Guy Burgess. Physicist Paul Newman arrives for a conference in Copenhagen with his assistant/fiancée Julie Andrews but then takes an unannounced detour to Berlin, where he defects. A flummoxed Andrews follows him, but of course our all-American boy isn’t really switching sides. He’s simply taking a brief foray behind the Iron Curtain to see what the Reds know about missile defense. It’s a deeply flawed premise: Newman’s harebrained scheme is without government sanction, aided only by a poorly-defined civilian intelligence network. And it’s all so Newman can steal information from the Russians that he can’t figure out on his own. Not exactly the strongest position to put our protagonist in.

The script is a series of set pieces, the best of them the one I already knew. At a secret meeting with his contact Newman is surprised by his Stasi handler and must take drastic action to keep his ruse alive. Done without music, it’s a lengthy, grueling sequence meant to demonstrate how physically difficult it is to kill someone. Hitchcock at his best, this passage makes Torn Curtain worthwhile all by itself.

The other set pieces are good ideas in theory – a slow-motion chase involving a bogus bus operated by the intelligence network, a bit with Lily Kedrova as an exiled Polish noblewoman who may or may not aid Newman and Andrews in their escape to the West – but muddled in execution. The climax cleverly pays off a running gag about a prima ballerina, but is too reminiscent of the ending of The Man Who Knew Too Much. That the stars have little chemistry doesn’t help matters. Both leads were forced on Hitchcock by the studio. In addition, he had a falling out with longtime collaborator Bernard Herrmann that ended their relationship.

It was a troubled production, and the seams show. Aside from one episode of brilliance Torn Curtain is a misfire. It’s utterly impersonal yet thoroughly competent. Even when Hitchcock’s heart wasn’t in his work and he clearly feared losing his way, he was still able to bring his talent to bear. Which makes Torn Curtain thrilling in a completely different way.