Horror of Dracula

I love Peter Cushing. It seems a shame to me that most of my generation only knows him as one of the bad guys in the first Star Wars movie (he was Tarkin). Cushing is one of the reigning icons of the horror genre. He epitomizes the Professor Van Helsing role that has become a staple of modern horror films. (The old-timer who saves the clueless young people from the evil they would never have believed could exist.) Horror of Dracula (1958) was the first of the Hammer Horror Productions' Dracula films. It's a very loose adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, but it's known more for its casting than its reverence for accuracy. Thanks to Cushing as the fearless Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as the sexy but fearsome Count, this admittedly dated chiller is still worth seeing. The ending is still a wonderful show-stopper, and you can certainly see how many other vampire movies have paid tribute to this one (including Francis Ford Coppola with his 1992 Dracula film, which perfectly imitates the scene where Lucy is branded by the cross). This modestly produced chiller (with blood that looks more like paint --oh how nostalgic it makes me!) was financially successful enough to warrant five sequels, starting with The Brides of Dracula in 1960. Directed by Terence Fisher. With Michael Gough (you may remember him as the crusty old butler in the 1989 Batman) as Arthur Holmwood; Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, and John Van Eyssen. ★★½

Vertigo

Vertigo (1958) may be Alfred Hitchcock's most beautiful film, but it's also his most overrated. I don't mean to suggest that it's a crummy movie. It is well-made and absorbing to a point, but not the perfect masterpiece that everyone says it is. It's an imperfect gem, lacking the humor that makes some of Hitchcock's best, most entertaining films (such as Strangers on a Train and Rear Window) so good. Vertigo operates like a voyeur's idea of Freudian psychology: a man (James Stewart) becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman (played by Kim Novak) and when she dies, he becomes obsessed with a girl who looks a lot like her, to the point that when he actually develops a relationship with this new girl, he forces her to change her hair and wardrobe to get the look down perfectly. If anyone ever needed a movie to refer to for ways not to treat a girl in a romantic relationship, it's Vertigo.

Set in San Francisco, it's a tale of obsession that feels obsessive. The colors and the sensual music by Bernard Herrmann (a fantastic score, to be sure) are all hypnotic, and the film has some kind of an enchanting spell to it. But it lumbers on and on like an elongated episode of The Twilight Zone in which the befuddled hero, Scotty Ferguson, is the character whom nobody understands: the alienated figure. Scotty is a private detective, but ever since he nearly fell to his death from a very tall building (he was chasing a criminal, and another cop did fall to his death), Scotty has been unable to deal with heights.

Maybe there's something too unsettling for me about Jimmy Stewart playing such an obsessive person. He's downright creepy, and this from Hollywood's favorite "Everyman." Hitchcock should have gotten someone more heelish to play the part, like William Holden or Tony Curtis. Only then he might have lost the sympathy of the audience, because those would have been actors easy enough to dislike--in a "love to hate them" kind of way. They're both handsome and charming in ways Stewart never was, but they didn't conjure up that Americana image the way Stewart did. (Personally, I'm fine with this, but I can see why Stewart got the part.) Ironically, the picture was a failure at the box office initially, so the casting didn't seem to make much of a difference in terms of box office.

Nevertheless, Vertigo is the one the critics love to theorize all over, to the point of redundancy. People see a movie like Vertigo and like to read all kinds of things into it: it's the most personal film by "the Master," they say in hushed tones. Hitchcock's perversely dark pleasures are certainly showcased here, but the sense of humor that marked other films--North By Northwest, The Lady Vanishes, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 version), etc--is missing. It's a deadly serious affair, and it stays with you, haunting you, for days afterward. It's sort of a shame that this is the one people put at the top of the list, because it tends to negate one of the chief qualities people love about a Hitchcock film: his ability to entertain us by showing us a good time. Here we're morbidly curious--fascinated even--in a dirty, disgraceful sort of way. And we become the corrupted voyeurs along with Scotty. But it's not like in Rear Window, where we were part of his team. Instead we're like amateur psychologists, pretending to diagnose him with some kind of Freudian-sounding neurosis. Nevertheless, Vertigo is compelling in its own morose way, like being unable to look away from a traffic accident.

With Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones, and Ellen Corby. Written by Alec Coppel and Samuel L. Taylor from the French novel D'entre les morts ("From Among the Dead"). 128 min. ★★½

The Long Hot Summer

You'd be surprised to discover that a movie as commercial as The Long Hot Summer (1958) came from a few stories by William Faulkner, culled from his three-part novel The Hamlet and another short story called "Barn Burning." It may contain the seeds of Faulkner, but it's been filtered through the MGM mill and turned into a glossy-looking soap opera about a Mississippi patriarch named Will Varner (Orson Welles) who wants to marry off his 23-year-old daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward) to a slick stranger named Ben Quick (Paul Newman), whose reputation as a barn burner precedes him. Will sees in Ben Quick a youthful version of himself: someone bold and sly and opportunistic, and with enough charm and charisma to con anybody.

The screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., is full of movie lines that could never be mistaken for realistic dialogue. That's part of the fun, because the actors are so skilled and so much fun to watch as they turn the bad poetic lines into intentional self-parody. You always feel that the cast is winking at you, that they aren't taking The Long Hot Summer too seriously, and neither should you. But the movie has a certain pull to it, too. Director Martin Ritt knows how to keep a movie from going dull. His chief appeal is the cast, which is full of fresh-faced young actors, most of them trained at the Actors' Studio (a fact which is said to have caused a certain degree of conflict with Orson Welles, who didn't have a background in the Method, and who may have looked down on it as an inferior acting technique.) Ritt keeps the cameras on the faces of his mostly attractive cast. Welles has been made-up to look older, and his weight, which had accumulated in the last few years, has turned him into something unintentionally comical. He looks the part, a bloated Southern tycoon who refuses to be contradicted by anyone. Welles turns his dialogue into food: he's gobbling the lines so ferociously that it's difficult to understand what he's saying half the time. (Many of his lines had to be re-recorded later because they weren't intelligible).

Everyone in this movie is in heat. (This is, first and foremost, a movie about sex: who's getting it and who isn't getting it and who's contented with it and who isn't.) Joanne Woodward's character, for one, isn't getting it, and moreover she's feeling pulled in too many directions: her domineering father wants grandsons to carry on his family name (a concern for which he exhibits a certain dogged obsession). Her longtime gentleman caller, Allan (Richard Anderson), is content to maintain the status quo. Allan treats her like a respectable eternal virgin, and she responds to this with a certain degree of graciousness because it seems like the right way to be treated. Ben Quick riles her, because he treats her like a woman with full of passions. It's the fact that he can sense her desires without her acknowledging them that steams her, and attracts her, to him. But she can't let herself like him too easily, because that's what her father wants. It's all delightfully uncomplicated complication, and only the ending, where too many dramatic points are wrapped up too easily, feels clumsy. The rest of the movie is breezy and energetic.
With Anthony Franciosa as Will Varner's simpering son Jody, who can't compete with the new rival, Ben, for his daddy's respect; and Lee Remick as Jody's trophy wife, a giddy young thing who spends most of the picture being chased around playfully by her amorous husband. Also with Angela Lansbury, as Will's longtime companion, a no-nonsense innkeeper named Minnie Littlejohn.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) is a Southern-fried family drama, adapted from the Tennessee Williams play and directed by Richard Brooks (James Poe co-wrote the script). It's one of the better films to come from Tennessee Williams, despite the fact that MGM completely removed the play's most controversial subject matter in the adaptation.

Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor play a not-so-happily-married couple. Taylor is electric, even when she climbs into histrionics, as the sexually frustrated Maggie. She's stunning in this, and Brooks frames her in doorways to heighten her allure. Newman is intense but vulnerable as Brick, the alcoholic ex-football hero who claims Maggie slept with his now dead BFF, Skipper. Brick's repugnance with his wife is half-hearted at best. In one scene, after he pushes Maggie away, only to be confronted with her nightgown hanging on the bathroom door, he lets down his guard, drinking in her aroma. You know he wishes he could stop playing the offended husband. He's at his best when he's laughing--his sense of humor humanizes him. Newman was always at his most appealing when he was clearly having a good time with his performance, even if he was playing a heel like in Hud (1963).

As with any Tennessee Williams story, the room is always thick with raw emotion, and skeletons are lining up behind the closet door waiting to tumble out. But you can forgive it for being over the top. It's lusciously entertaining, full of self-loathing and big revelations, like nine months of therapy condensed into 100 minutes with a glossy MGM sheen over it and beautiful people on the screen. When I first saw it years ago, I was so stunned that I immediatately rewound the VHS and watched it straight through again. Almost every character has a moment of self-awareness that is actually quite touching. The veneer is lifted even if only momentarily, and a kind of inner-truth is revealed--one that's deeply broken and human.

With Burl Ives as Brick's father, Big Daddy (yes, really), the booming-voiced Southern tycoon who likes controlling everything from his plantation to his sons, and is confronting his own mortality when he learns that he has inoperable cancer. Judith Anderson plays Big Mama, the stereotypical Southern matriarch with a big voice and a short fuse. Jack Carson plays Brick's brother, Gooper, the dutiful firstborn who's doing everything he can to please Big Daddy and assume control of the family fortune when the inevitable happens. He's got an obnoxious, conniving wife (Madeleine Sherwood) and a litter of plump, rude, ruddy-faced little imp-children. ★★★★

Touch of Evil

This week I showed two Orson Welles classics to my students: Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958). I learned more than I ever dreamed I would about Welles and his career. He caused a sensation in the New York theater world when he produced Macbeth but set it in Haiti, and of course when he broadcast a radio version of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and scared the bejesus out of America.

Welles was brought to Hollywood soon after, even though he'd never made a motion picture before, and the legendary Citizen Kane was born. Kane is a thinly veiled biography of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and a film that was nearly doomed to a life on the cutting room floor because Hearst did not want it to see the light of day. The American Film Institute voted it the number one American picture of all time. It's certainly innovative. The cinematography is unlike most of the movies you'll see before 1941. However, after watching both Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil virtually back to back, I must say I like Touch of Evil better. It's a nightmarish looking film noir set in a sleazy border town, with Charlton Heston playing a Mexican narcotics cop (!) who gets in the crossfires of a corrupt Texas police chief (played by Welles).

The movie is outlandish and offbeat: it pulsates with a wonderfully lucid rhythm that makes it still fresh despite its age and some of the corny dialogue. Janet Leigh co-stars as Heston's wife, who spends a terrifying night in a rural motel that foreshadows her experience in Psycho two years later. The film boasts one of the most famous opening shots in movie history. Cinematographer Russell Metty used an incredibly long tracking shot to show us a stick of dynamite being placed into the trunk of a convertible, then letting us watch as the car's owner gets in, drives off, and eventually is killed in the impending explosion. That suspenseful, almost voyeuristic feel never leaves the movie, and you spend the rest of Touch of Evil as a complicit audience member rather than a passive one.

Henry Mancini's Latin-enthused score drifts through the picture giving you the feel that you're wandering through a busy city--lit up with neon--at midnight. Smoky bars with moody music seeping out into the twilight. The seedy underbelly of the film noir world at its darkest most irresistibly enthralling (and the genre was on its way out by 1958). Alas, Touch of Evil was taken away from Welles and dramatically re-edited, then released as a B-grade thriller. It made very little money, but after being restructured to fit Welles's original vision, it has become something of a classic, one that is more exciting, more twisted, and more unhinged than the magnificent Citizen Kane.