Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)

Anthony Perkins and Geraldine Chaplin in Remember My Name

Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Berry Berenson, Moses Gunn, Jeff Goldblum, Timothy Thonerson, Alfre Woodard, Marilyn Coleman, Jeffrey S. Perry, Alan Autry, Dennis Franz. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph. Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto. Film editing: William A. Sawyer, Tom Walls. Music: Kenneth Wannberg, Alberta Hunter (songs). 

Casting Anthony Perkins as a construction worker sets up the kind of cognitive dissonance that permeates Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name, which has to be classified as a kind of screwball film noir. It was intended by Rudolph as an homage to the "women's pictures" of the '30s and '40s that starred Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck and that peaked in the 1950s in the oeuvre of Douglas Sirk. Geraldine Chaplin plays Emily, who has just been released from prison where she served a term for killing her ex-husband's lover. Perkins plays the ex, now married to Barbara (Berry Berenson), and Emily is intent on stalking them and getting retribution. She manages to make their lives not exactly miserable, but certainly unsettled. It's a film full of offbeat characters, including Mr. Nudd, the young manager of the store where Emily gets a job. He's played by a very young and very skinny Jeff Goldblum. There are also memorable bits by Alfre Woodard as Emily's superior at the store and Moses Gunn as the security officer of the apartment complex where Emily lives. Both the store and the apartment house seem to be transition zones for ex-cons re-entering the world. Remember My Name teeters between the comic and the serious, with the balance tipped slightly toward the latter by the fact that it's set to a song score by the blues/jazz singer Alberta Hunter, whose contribution is one of the chief reasons, along with a great performance by Chaplin, for seeing the film. 

Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968)

 

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Beverly Garland, John Randolph, Dick O'Neill, Clarice Blackburn, Joseph Bova, Ken Kercheval, Don Fellows. Screenplay: Lorenzo Semple Jr., based on a novel by Stephen Geller. Cinematography: David L. Quaid. Art direction: Harold Michelson, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: William H. Ziegler. Music: Johnny Mandel. 

The Last of Sheila (Herbert Ross, 1973)

Actor Anthony Perkins and songwriter Stephen Sondheim moonlighted as screenwriters to create this jeu d'esprit, a murder mystery involving the kind of elaborate games that Perkins and Sondheim and their friends used to play: treasure hunts with ingenious clues. The setup is this: A year earlier, Sheila, the wife of film producer Clifton Green (James Coburn), was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Green invites six people who were at a party the night of her death to spend a week on his yacht, which is named for her. Before they board, he arranges them for a photo under her name on the prow of the yacht. Then he announces that he is going to give each of them an envelope that contains a secret: something that a person would want to conceal about themselves. Each night, they will dock at a different location and will be given a clue that they must follow to discover the secret. If the person who holds the card with the secret on it solves the puzzle, the hunt of the night is over. So, on the first night, the clues lead to the secret: "Shoplifter." And when Philip (James Mason), a washed-up film director who holds that clue, solves it, the game ends. But the next night, the game isn't completed: Green is found murdered during the hunt. Meanwhile, realization dawns in the group that the secrets were their own: Philip wasn't a shoplifter, but the actress named Alice (Raquel Welch) admits that she once lifted a valuable fur coat from a store. And when the secret for the night Green is killed is revealed to be "Homosexual," Tom (Richard Benjamin), a screenwriter, admits that he and Green once had a brief affair. And so it appears that Green was murdered by someone who didn't want their secret to come out. But just when it appears that the murder has been solved, there's another intricate twist. The screenplay is fiendishly clever, and it's well acted: The other players include Dyan Cannon as a high-powered agent, Joan Hackett as Tom's rich heiress wife, and Ian McShane as Alice's manager-husband. Unfortunately, Herbert Ross directs things a little clunkily, although some of the awkwardness may come from the fact that shooting began on the yacht itself, but bad weather held up the shoot and sets eventually had to be constructed on a soundstage. There was also reportedly some conflict among the cast members and the director, centering on Welch. Today, some of the film's attitudes seem a little antique: Homosexuality is no longer such a terrible secret, although at the time Perkins and Sondheim, both of whom were gay, were still closeted. And perhaps not enough is made of the fact that one of the clues outs a character as a former child molester. The resulting film is something like a soufflé that didn't rise, turning out tasty but a little chewy. The best moments belong to, not surprisingly, Cannon, one of those performers who make every film they're in a little better.

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

I think the most Hitchcockian moment in Psycho is the scene in which Norman disposes of the evidence by sinking Marion Crane's Ford in the swamp with her body and the slightly less than $40,000 she stole in its trunk. We watch as the car slowly settles into the murk with a comically disgusting blurping sound. And then it stops, and we watch Norman's face as he anxiously bites his lip. But just as he is starting out to see if he can help sink it farther, the blurping noise returns and the car sinks to the depths. Who doesn't feel Norman's anxiety and relief in that scene, even though he's a psychotic murderer? This trick of alienating viewers from their own moral values is essential to the greatness of Alfred Hitchcock. On the other hand, I used to think that the least Hitchcockian moment in the film was the psychiatrist's long-winded explanation of Norman's dual-personality disorder, which tells us nothing that we don't already know. But now I think it's a bit of masterstroke. Simon Oakland's performance as the psychiatrist is so florid and self-satisfied that it reveals the character as a pompous showboater, which only heightens the cool, ironic smugness of Norman/Mother in the film's chilling final moment. He/she wouldn't hurt a fly, indeed. What is there to say about Psycho otherwise? That Anthony Perkins is nothing short of brilliant as Norman? Of course. That Janet Leigh's Marion is so well-crafted that we wish she'd been given roles this good throughout her career as a mostly decorative actress? Yes. That Bernard Herrmann deserved all the Oscars he never got for his work on Hitchcock's films? His score for Psycho, for which Hitchcock rewarded Herrmann with a screen credit just before his own as director, didn't even get a nomination -- but then, neither did his scores for The Trouble With Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Marnie (1964). For that matter, Psycho didn't receive a nomination for George Tomasini's film editing, despite the shower scene, a literal textbook example of the art. (That the scene had been storyboarded -- perhaps with the aid of graphic designer Saul Bass, who later even claimed that he had directed it -- doesn't deny the fact that someone, namely Tomasini, had to lay hands on the actual film.) Yet Psycho remains one of the inexhaustible movies, those in which you see something new and different at each viewing, even if it's only to add to your stock of trivia. This time, for example, I was struck by the fact that one of the cops guarding Norman at the end looked vaguely familiar. I checked, and he was played by Ted Knight -- The Mary Tyler Moore Show's Ted Baxter. How can you not love a film that provides revelations like that?

The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)

There may be sensibilities more different from each other than those of an exiled Midwestern bon vivant and a consumptive Middle European Jew, but they rarely come together in a work of art the way they did in Orson Welles's version of Franz Kafka's The Trial. It was made in that fertile middle period of Welles's career that also saw the creation of Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), and it holds its own against those two landmarks in the Welles oeuvre. In the end, of course, the Wellesian sensibility dominates, the American tendency to affirmation overcoming (barely) Kafka's pessimism: Welles's Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is rather more assertive than Kafka's protagonist. He doesn't succumb "Like a dog!" to his assailants but defies them. That said, Perkins, now carrying the indelible stamp of Norman Bates into all his roles, is superlative casting: We can believe that he's guilty -- even if we never find out what his supposed crime is -- while at the same time we sympathize with his plight. The real triumph of the film is in finding the settings in which to stage K.'s ordeal, ranging from K.'s stark, low-ceilinged apartment to bleak modern high-rise apartment and office buildings, to ornate beaux arts exteriors, to the labyrinthine courts of the law. The film was shot in the former Yugoslavia, in Italy, and in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris. Welles chose a novice, Edmond Richard, who had never shot a feature film, as his cinematographer. Richard went on to shoot Chimes at Midnight, too, as well as some of Luis Buñuel's best films, including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The cast includes Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli, and Akim Tamiroff, with Welles himself playing the role of Hastler, K.'s attorney, after failing to persuade Jackie Gleason or Charles Laughton to take the part. The Trial is probably longer and slower than it needs to be, and there is some inconsistency of style: The scenes involving Hastler, his mistress (Schneider), and K. are shot with more extreme closeups than the rest of the film, where the sets tend to overwhelm the human figures. And the ending, with its explosion followed by a rather wispy mushroom cloud, is a little too obviously an attempt to bring a story written during World War I into the atomic era. Some think it's a masterpiece, but I would just rank it as essential Welles -- which may or may not be the same thing.

The Matchmaker (Joseph Anthony, 1958)

Like Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs and Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker is not performed much these days. The chief reason is probably that they were all made into hugely successful musicals: respectively, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Hello, Dolly! And unlike George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion or William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which weren't superseded by their musical incarnations My Fair Lady and West Side Story, they seem somewhat naked without their musical adornments. Still, the film version of The Matchmaker, made three years after the play became a Broadway success but six years before the musical smash, retains a great deal of charm. Much of it comes from its cast: Shirley Booth as Dolly Gallagher Levi, Paul Ford as Horace Vandergelder, Shirley MacLaine as Irene Molloy, Anthony Perkins as Cornelius Hackl, and in his first substantial screen role, an impish Robert Morse as Barnaby Tucker. Shorn of its musical trimmings, the movie depends largely on the farce-timing of the cast, who frequently break the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience. For some viewers, a little whimsy goes a long way, and The Matchmaker has an awful lot of it. Its "opening up" from the stage version by screenwriter John Michael Hayes sometimes feels forced, and the ending depends too heavily on an unconvincingly complete about-face by Vandergelder. But director Anthony, who did most of his work in the theater and had only one previous screen directing credit for The Rainmaker (1956), keeps things moving nicely.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston, 1972)

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean belongs to a sub-genre that prevailed in the early 1970s; I think of them as "stoner Westerns." The huge success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) spawned a lot of movies that took an irreverent look at the legend of the American Old West and were aimed at the younger countercultural audience. They include such diverse films as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (Philip Kaufman, 1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973), and Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974). Most of them were seen as commentaries on American violence and the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Paul Newman, who had played Billy the Kid earlier in his career in The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958) as well as Butch Cassidy, found himself the go-to actor to portray Western legends: In addition to Judge Roy Bean, he was also cast as Buffalo Bill Cody in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976). The Life of Times of Judge Roy Bean began with an original screenplay by John Milius, who wanted to direct it and to star Warren Oates in the title role, but when Newman read the script, he arranged for the rights to be bought up and for John Huston to be brought on as director. There is a whiff of hommage to (or perhaps parody of) Butch Cassidy in the film: As in the earlier film, which has a musical interlude with Butch and Etta Place (Katherine Ross) larking around to the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," Judge Roy Bean has a scene in which the Judge, Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), and a bear lark around to the song "Marmalade, Molasses & Honey," which was written for the film by Maurice Jarre, Marilyn Bergman, and Alan Bergman. The song earned an Oscar nomination, but Huston was unable to find a consistent tone for the movie, which lurches from broad comedy (much of it provided by antics with the bear) to satire (the triumph of an avaricious lawyer played by Roddy McDowall) to pathos (the death of Maria Elena). It is laced with cameos, some of which provide the film's highlights, particularly the over-the-top performances of Anthony Perkins as an itinerant preacher and Stacy Keach as an albino outlaw named Bad Bob. But Ava Gardner simply walks through her scene as Lillie Langtry -- a decided anticlimax, given that she's been the off-screen obsession of Bean through most of the film.