The Birds

Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock was out of ideas after Psycho. Has there ever been a more arbitrary plot in a movie than in The Birds? It's one of the most obviously artificial plots among Hitchcock's body of work. (And it lacks the smart humor of some of his best films.) However, the world of Bodega Bay, where The Birds is set, is interesting enough, and the bird attack sequences are suspenseful. Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, a spoiled rich girl who becomes attracted to Rod Taylor after he's rude to her in a bird shop. She's so infatuated with him that she buys his kid sister some birds and then treks all the way to his small hometown to deliver them personally. Thus she becomes embroiled in small-town politics, namely with Taylor's mother (Jessica Tandy) amidst an unexpected war waged by the birds. And it's especially convenient that during one attack on the town, there's an ornithologist on hand in the local diner. (Not that she does any good.) With Veronica Cartwright and Suzanne Pleshette. Based--very loosely--on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. 1963.

The Haunting

The Haunting (1963) is a somewhat labored but elegant ghost story, with the always annoying Julie Harris playing a nervous Nell type (and her name is really Nell) who's invited to participate in the research of a ghost specialist named Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson) at Hill House, which is the site of a number of supernaturally tinged tragedies. It's a finely made film, directed by Robert Wise with fluid cinematography by Davis Boulton, engrossing music by Humphrey Searle, and an impressive set design by John Jarvis. But Nelson Gidding's script, which he adapted from Shirley Jackson's neo-gothic novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), falls short. It's overly talky, and once you get past the self-consciously hip dialogue it becomes rather tiresome. What kept me going was the atmosphere, which is admittedly creepy yet beautiful.

Harris' character is unhinged from the beginning (like any good Shirley Jackson heroine), and you know right off the bat that her being drawn to Hill House is no mistake. But her pathetic, emotionally needy performance grates on the nerves. Her repetitive inner-monologue goes something like this: "This is the first thing that's ever happened to me. I'm wanted here. I'm going to stay here forever. I'm accepted here." Nell is such a shaky, dithering bore of a character, and I was far more interested in Theo, the chummy, sophisticated lesbian and fellow ghost hunter (played with skill by the lovely Claire Bloom) she meets at Hill House. Richard Johnson is perfect as Dr. Markway: he exudes that serious intellectual quality you need for an educated witch doctor like Markway, and it's interesting to note that he played a doctor in another horror film, the Lucio Fulci walking dead opus Zombie (1979). Russ Tamblyn, as a likable but goofy playboy whose elderly aunt owns Hill House and who attends the ghost party to keep tabs on everybody else, rounds out the principle cast. He looks as though he were plucked from one of those Frankie and Annette beach party movies. His lack of seriousness lifts the film out of its perpetually gloomy nature.

The most exciting thing about The Haunting are the ominous opening titles and the accompanying narration (by Richard Johnson), which features the wonderfully uncanny opening line (slightly edited) from Shirley Jackson's novel. I enclose it here for the reader: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality... Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." Such brilliant writing. And visually speaking, the film does Jackson's elegantly creepy prose justice.

But there's a feeling of being gypped: you never really know if the ghosts are real or imagined. Viewers looking to get their money's worth in terms of shocks might be left wanting. But if you're interested in a more ambiguous psychological thriller with the "smells and bells" of the gothic, you'll might enjoy The Haunting. It was remade--with ghastly results--in 1999. Also starring Lois Maxwell as Dr. Markway's skeptical wife. 112 minutes. ★★½

Hud

Hud (1963) is just about the only great Western I've ever seen, and one of the great entertainments of the 1960s. It's a grown-up Western, set in modern times and unconcerned with Indians and lawless towns. Instead, Hud concerns itself with the encroaching decay of civilization. It's a battle waged between the aging rancher, Homer (Melvyn Douglas), a man who lives his life according to the law, like Moses with a cowboy hat, and Hud (Paul Newman), his son, who doesn't put much stock in morality, and has a reputation as a womanizer. Homer despises him, and Homer's 17-year-old grandson, Lon (Brandon deWilde)--Hud's nephew--idolizes him, to a degree. (Lon seems to be making up his mind about things for most of the movie.) Lon sees Hud as independent and charming. He leads an exciting life (as exciting as one life can be in a flat Texas cattle town), always bedding a different married woman in town, living it up at the local bar. Hud represents the kind of excitement that is denied someone of Homer's strict moral constitution.

There's an arc written into the story--which was adapted by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. from Larry McMurtry's novel Horseman, Pass By--about Homer's cattle being infected with foot-and-mouth disease, which forces Homer to have every single one of his cows shot in a big, dramatic scene near the end of the movie. This scene was held up as a somber, powerful moment of modern tragic cinema by some critics, and criticized as audience manipulation by others. I would argue that it's somewhere in the middle. It's mostly the plot contrivance that gets the action of the movie rolling. The characters, and their pieces of the overall story of Hud, are what make it a fascinating, tough, lean, and outstanding movie. The cows are merely fodder.

Newman gives one of his best performances: he's mean and selfish, and even suggests unloading the cattle (which could potentially spark a nationwide epidemic) rather than take an enormous loss by killing them, but it's hard not like Paul Newman, even when he's a boor. It is one of those brilliant casting choices in movie history, because as bad as Hud is, and as convincingly as Paul Newman plays him, it's still Paul Newman. There's no pleasure from hating Hud, the way you get a kick out of despising a nasty villain (and such contempt is usually rewarded when said villain suffers some kind of justice for his wickedness at the end of the movie). Instead we're lead deeper into Hud's amorality, as though we could start to buy into some of his logic simply because it's him pitching it. And there's nothing all that appealing about what stodgy old Melvyn Douglas is peddling. He's sanctimonious and weather-worn, and we're led to believe that the two go hand-in-hand with such a principled existence applied over some seventy years.

Patricia Neal, as the sexy-plain housekeeper Alma, also delivers a good performance. She keeps pouring cold water on Hud's sexual advances, but always with a look of coy design in her eyes, as though she's turning him down to build him up for the ultimate acquiescence. Neal and Douglas won Academy Awards for their performances, and Newman was nominated, but once again lost. Cinematographer James Wong Howe also won an Oscar for what is an impressively mounted picture that moves along with a sort of deceptively breezy consistency. Howe and director Martin Ritt manage to make the film weighty without feeling portentous: he turns a genre piece into a movie with panache and real narrative style.

(For this review, I must give some credit to Pauline Kael, whose piece "Deep In the Divided Heart of Hollywood" goes into further detail on the appeal of Hud, why it's a great movie, and why critics at the time of its release, despite much praise, missed out on why it was so great. Her thoughts have certainly helped shape mine, even though I loved the picture well before I read the review. You can find that essay in her book I Lost it at the Movies.)

Charade

Cary Grant was 59 when he played opposite Audrey Hepburn (25 years his junior) in Charade, but his age isn't as much of a hindrance as you'd think. He's still able to pull off the image of a suave leading man (he'd also done remarkably well four years earlier in North By Northwest). He plays a stranger who comes to the rescue of a young widow in Paris (Hepburn) whose husband was the target of three ruthless goons (James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Ned Glass) who are after 250,000 dollars that he swindled them out of. Her husband is murdered (and his body thrown from a train) before the opening credits, and so Hepburn becomes the central focus of the goons' continued quest for the elusive money. (They're cartoonish and yet menacing, like sociopathic Coyotes and Audrey is the Road Runner.)  

Charade is like a vacation from the stodginess of Audrey Hepburn's other movies that seem to hoist her on a pedastal like Galatea (Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Sabrina and then later My Fair Lady). She's at her best when she's allowed to be fun and intelligent, but also accessible. She's always one-upping Cary Grant, but she's never too good for him. She's wholesome without being a prude, and she's game enough for the fun of this movie, which is set completely in Paris. The city becomes a labyrinth for us to try and find our way out of, but once we become engrossed in the movie we're hard-pressed to want to leave.

Along with the comic suspense that makes Charade so engaging is Henry Mancini's music score. Mancini's music is positively creepy (it's so slick and sophisticated and yet incredibly menacing) when it comes to thrillers. So many early thrillers didn't get the music right. It was as though the composers were told to de-emphasize the terror and the suspense, so their music takes a frightening or exciting scene and turns it into sentimental corn. Mancini, on the other hand, isn't afraid to take the material and run with it. His work on Experiment in Terror and Wait Until Dark is fantastically freaky, and in Charade  he captures something of the allure and the magic of Paris and Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and of the entire genre itself, and for that Charade is a better movie. It's the loveliest kind of trashy entertainment, and ironically enough it was not a hit when first released.

Directed by Stanley Donen. With Walter Matthau. ★★★★