Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

 

Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Cast: Farley Granger, Alida Valli, Massimo Girotti, Heinz Moog, Rina Morelli, Christian Marquand, Sergio Fantoni, Marcella Mariani. Screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Carlo Alienello, Giorgio Bassani, Giorgio Prosperi, based on a novel by Camilo Boito. Cinematography: G.R. Aldo, Robert Krasker. Production design: Ottavio Scotti. Film editing: Mario Serandrei. Costume design: Marcel Escoffier, Piero Tosi.

They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)

Though usually remembered as a precursor of another, more celebrated lovers-on-the-lam movie, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), They Live by Night stands on its own, largely because of novice director Nicholas Ray's attention to characterization and detail. This is a film with texture, rising above its melodramatic core by constantly introducing peripheral detail. Instead of opening, as a conventional movie might have, with a dramatization of the prison break by Bowie (Farley Granger), Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva), and T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen), it begins with an aerial shot of the stolen car speeding across the landscape -- a daring early use of what has become routine in filmmaking, namely, a helicopter shot. Ray continues to fill his frames with the unexpected: As Bowie hides behind a billboard, waiting for Chickamaw and T-Dub to return with another car, a small dog appears and hangs around the young fugitive. Later, when Bowie and Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) begin their flight on a Greyhound bus, Bowie is seated beside a woman who is determined to ignore her crying, squirming baby, leaving Bowie to try to quiet the infant. Neither dog nor baby is essential to the scene, but by their very presence they lend a quality of innocence to the boyish fugitive. Bowie and Keechie decide on the spur of the moment to get married in a quickie ceremony conducted by an anything-for-a-buck justice of the peace (Ian Wolfe), who calls on his standby witnesses. After the perfunctory ceremony, the woman witness hugs Keechie, but the male witness declines because he has a cold. Again, the witness's cold is irrelevant to the plot, but it serves to add a subtle note of disorder to the scene, a hint that Bowie and Keechie will always be subject to forces as far beyond their control as the common cold. I don't know whether dog and baby and cold were present in the novel by Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us, on which the film is based, or if they were introduced in Charles Schnee's screenplay or in Ray's revisions of it, but the fact that they were either introduced or retained in the film speaks volumes on the kind of director Ray was: one attentive to the contingencies that bring a film to life. Granger and O'Donnell are incredibly touching in their performances, and the rest of the cast rise about the stereotypes they could easily have become. Anderson's novel was filmed again, under its original title, by Robert Altman in 1974, and I remember liking that movie. But unless another viewing of Altman's version changes my mind, I think They Live by Night is better.

Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest (1959) are the best of Alfred Hitchcock's "wrong man" thrillers, in which the protagonist is suspected of a crime he didn't commit and spends most of the film trying to prove his innocence. They have something else in common: Both involve seduction scenes that take place on a train, except that in the latter film the seduction, of Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) by Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), is conventionally heterosexual. It's the gay subtext that marks Strangers on a Train from the very beginning, when we watch the feet of Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) as they board the train and eventually bump up against each other in the club car. It's Bruno's flamboyance, especially the gleaming white of his brown-and-white spectator shoes, that we notice first, before we see his lobster-patterned tie and the gold tie clasp that proclaims his name. Even the straightest viewer gets it: Bruno is cruising. And he lights upon the handsome athlete, Guy. Bruno is blatant, and he's more than a bit obnoxious, as he invades Guy's space and continues to talk after Guy has signaled that he'd be happy to be left alone with his book. Yet somehow Guy, who on the surface of it seems the kind of man who would brush Bruno aside swiftly, lets himself be talked into having lunch in Bruno's compartment. Only when Bruno makes his shocking tit-for-tat murder proposal does Guy make his exit. I think that Hitchcock is suggesting that Guy is at least intrigued by the possibility of hooking up with another man. Guy's sexuality is brought into question by his marriage to the promiscuous Miriam (Kasey Rogers, then billed as Laura Elliott) and by the obvious motive of political ambition that has led him to the daughter of a senator, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), who looks older than he does. (Roman was, in fact, three years older than Granger.) Hitchcock goes about as far as he can under the Production Code in making his characters gay, but even this little helps heighten the paranoia that's haunting Guy.  It was 1951, after all, when homosexuality was still considered "deviance" and ferreting it out became an obsession of the FBI and other watchdog groups. That said, Strangers on a Train works even if you prefer to ignore subtext and see Guy and Bruno as a conventional hero and villain. Walker's performance is one of the best in any Hitchcock film, and his failure to be nominated for it by the Academy remains a marked injustice. Strangers received only one nomination, a deserved one: for Robert Burks's cinematography, the first of 12 collaborations with Hitchcock. Also overlooked were editor William H. Ziegler and special effects creator Hans F. Koenekamp, who gave us one of the most exciting scenes in the movies: the runaway merry-go-round. Hitchcock was deservedly proud of the film, having fought with his first choice as screenwriter, Raymond Chandler, who retained credit after he was fired and the script was rewritten, under Hitchcock's guidance, by Czenzi Ormonde and the uncredited Ben Hecht and Alma Reville, who followed an initial adaptation by Whitfield Cook of Patricia Highsmith's novel. Roman's casting is the film's major weakness: The studio forced Hitchcock to cast her, and he made no attempt to turn her into a real actress. She quickly exhausts her limited supply of anxious looks, practically the only ones the screenplay gives her; perhaps only the fear of getting lipstick on her teeth kept her from actually biting her lip. But the film launched what some think was Hitchcock's greatest decade, culminating in the amazing trifecta of Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest, and Psycho (1960).

Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

Montage, the assembling of discrete segments of film for dramatic effect, is what makes movies an art form distinct from just filmed theater. Which is why it's odd that so many filmmakers have been tempted to experiment with abandoning montage and simply filming the action and dialogue in continuity. Long takes and tracking shots do have their place in a movie: Think of the suspense built in the opening scene in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), an extended tracking shot that follows a car with a bomb in it for almost three and a half minutes until the bomb explodes. Or the way Michael Haneke introduces his principal characters with a nine-minute traveling shot in Code Unknown (2000). Or, to consider the ultimate extreme of anti-montage filmmaking, the scenes in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), in which the camera not only doesn't move for minutes on end, but characters also walk out of frame, leaving the viewer to contemplate only the banality of the rooms in which the title character lives her daily life. But these shots are only part of the films in question: Eventually, Welles and Haneke and even Akerman are forced to cut from one scene to another to tell a story. Alfred Hitchcock was intrigued with the possibility of making an entire movie without cuts. He couldn't bring it off because of technological limitations: Film magazines of the day held only ten minutes' worth of footage, and movie projectors could show only 20 minutes at a time before reels needed to be changed. In Rope, Hitchcock often works around these limitations by artificial blackouts in which a character's back fills the frame to mask the cut, but he sometimes makes an unmasked quick cut to a character entering the room -- a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it cut.* But for most of the film, we are watching the action in real time, as we would on a stage. Rope began as a play, of course, in 1929, when Patrick Hamilton's thinly disguised version of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case was staged in London. Hitchcock, who had almost certainly seen it on stage, asked Hume Cronyn to adapt it for the screen and then brought in Arthur Laurents to write the screenplay. To accomplish his idea of filming it as a continuous action, he worked with two cinematographers, William V. Skall and Joseph A. Valentine, and a crew of camera operators whose names are listed -- uniquely for the time -- in the opening credits, developing a kind of choreography through the rooms, designed by Perry Ferguson, that appear on the screen. The film opens with the murder of David Kentley (Dick Hogan) by Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger), who then hide his body in a large antique chest and proceed to hold a dinner party in the same room, serving dinner from the lid of the chest, which they cover with a cloth and on which they place two candelabra. The dinner guests are David's father (Cedric Hardwicke), his aunt (Constance Collier), his fiancée, Janet (Joan Chandler), his old friend and rival for Janet's hand (Douglas Dick), and the former headmaster of their prep school, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Everyone spends a lot of time wondering why David hasn't shown up for the party, too, while Brandon carries on some intellectual jousting with Rupert and the others about whether murder is really a crime if a superior person kills an inferior one, and Philip, jittery from the beginning, drinks heavily and starts to fall to pieces. Murder will out, eventually, but not after much talk and everyone except Rupert, who returns to find a cigarette case he pretends to have lost, has gone home. There is one beautifully Hitchcockian scene in the film, in which the chest is positioned in the foreground, and while the talk about murder goes on off-camera, we watch the housekeeper (Edith Evanson) clear away the serving dishes, remove the cloth and candelabra, and almost put back the books that had been stored in the chest. It's a rare moment of genuine suspense in a film whose archness of dialogue and sometimes distractingly busy camerawork saps a lot of the necessary tension, especially since we know whodunit and assume that they'll get caught somehow. Some questionable casting also undermines the film: Stewart does what he can as always, but is never quite convincing as a Nietzschean intellectual, and Granger's disintegrating Philip is more a collection of gestures than a characterization. The gay subtext of the film emerges strongly despite the Production Code, but today portrayals of gay men as thrill-killers only adds something of a sour note, even though Dall and Granger were both gay, and Granger was for a time Laurents's lover.

*Technology has since made something like what Hitchcock was aiming for in Rope possible. Alexander Sokurov's 2002 Russian Ark consists of a single 96-minute tracking shot through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg as a well-rehearsed crowd of actors, dancers, and extras re-create 300 years of Russian history. Projectors today are also capable of handling continuous action without the necessity of reel-changes, making possible Alejandro Iñárruitu's Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), with its appearance of unedited continuity, though Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki resorted to masked cuts very much like Hitchcock's.