One Is A Lonely Number

If The Mary Tyler Moore Show had been adapted into a dramatic film, One Is A Lonely Number (1972) is what it might have turned into. It opens with a man walking out on his wife of four years with virtually no reason given, and then follows her journey into self-reliance and acceptance. Her name is Amy, and she's never had to live without a man. She fights off the grubby advances of a sleazy employment agent, gets a job as a lifeguard, befriends a four-time divorcee (Janet Leigh) who's now the head of a club for divorced women who want to get even with their ex-husbands, and forges a sort of father-daughter relationship with an elderly produce man (Melvyn Douglas).

This film is a good example of the many episodic, slightly whimsical dramas to come out of the early 1970s. The director, Mel Stuart (best known for helming Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) manages to keep Amy from being too pathetic, but she has her moments, especially when she breaks down at a production of Shakespeare, crying on the shoulder of the wise old grocer who tells her to "cry until she's finished crying and then learn to live again." It's a noble, obvious women's picture, bolstered by Amy's eventual pluckiness. And the moral of the story isn't something completely silly like, "just wait and you'll find the right man." (When the "right man" does come along--a suave art aficionado played by Monte Markham--he turns out to be married.) Instead, Amy learns to forge a life for herself, and we're left with a cliched but encouraging image of her diving into a swimming pool, frozen in the air so she resembles a bird finally taking flight.

One Is A Lonely Number is certainly dated, but that's part of its charm. It has an enjoyable time-capsule quality to it, and it's refreshing that the film never pretends to be anything other than the story of a woman learning to live on her own. If you can accept the movie on those terms, you'll likely enjoy it.

As for the lead actress, Trish Van Devere, this was her star vehicle. Van Devere's film career was mostly eclipsed by her more famous husband, George C. Scott (with whom she starred opposite many times). But here she's quite good, though miscast. Trish Van Devere almost always is miscast. She's a capable actress who has the makings of an ice queen or a sexy New England boarding school headmistress. But it's hard to believe she could ever be from San Francisco (where this movie is set). (Indeed, Van Devere hails from New Jersey, and she exudes that proper, almost English dignity that makes her always appear to be acting. You can hardly picture Van Devere allowing a man to treat her so badly in real life.) But when she's smiling and cutting up her acting loosens up.

It doesn't help that the dialogue (the script is by David Seltzer from a Rebecca Morris story) feels stilted and stagey, too much like writing. But, as it is, I enjoyed One Is A Lonely Number. (It comes on Turner Classic Movies every once in a while. Since it's never been available on DVD, this is the only way to see it currently.) With Jane Elliot. 97 min. ★★★

The Fog

John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) may be ludicrous as a thriller, but as an exercise in creepiness, it's wonderful fun. Carpenter and co-conspirator Debra Hill had just come off the phenomenal success of their low-budget thriller Halloween (1978), so by comparison The Fog seemed tame to audiences who were by now growing accustomed to more shocks and splatter, and less patient with an atmospheric, deliberately paced ghost story.

The plot involves a cadre of vengeful spirits bent on doling out vengeance (and murky weather) to a small California town on its 100th anniversary. The founding fathers of the community apparently betrayed a group of lepers, leading them to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. Now the lepers have come back to celebrate.

Carpenter relies too much on plodding slasher-film death sequences as the film progresses, but overall it's still one of his best mood-pieces. You find yourself enjoying all the little stories being weaved together throughout the film.

Carpenter imitates two masters in The Fog: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. The movie feels like a noirish, supernatural re-imagining of The Birds (the setting reminds you of that film's coastal locale, Bodega Bay, and the fog serves as a stand-in for the birds, creating a similar feeling of apocalyptic doom). Simultaneously, Carpenter invests his scenes with a Hawks-esque film noir feel. That feel is best developed in the scenes of the main character, a local deejay named Stevie Wayne (played by Adrienne Barbeau). Stevie sits solitarily perched in a lighthouse, from which she runs a radio station that plays old jazz standards. From the lighthouse, she has a bird's-eye-view of the whole town. As she observes the fog and begins linking it to a series of deaths, Stevie becomes a voice of warning to the community. Barbeau is perfectly cast as the heroine: she's gutsy and smart, and carries the film well, especially since she's hardly on screen with any other actors.

The Fog deflates a little at the end. The whole movie is a big buildup, layering the scary atmosphere with relish, but there's not a whole lot beneath the atmosphere. Evidently, there were attempts to punch things up by adding a little more violence to the movie after the first cut was finished, but the movie's problem isn't lack of violence but lack of a genuinely scary threat. Fog almost always adds to a horror film, but when the things in the fog are only moderately scary, fog ceases to be effective.

Most of the cast members compensate for the movie's lack of follow-through. Janet Leigh makes a good impression as a local busybody who's spearheading the town's centennial anniversary gala. Jamie Lee Curtis (Leigh's daughter in real life) returns to Carpenter-land, this time not quite as helpless as Laurie Strode was in Halloween. However, she's not memorable in this movie. Her part feels unnecessary to the story, and because there are stronger female characters around her, she fails to stand out. She's even overshadowed by fellow Halloween co-star Nancy Loomis, who plays Leigh's droll assistant in this. The two have an endearingly irritated-with-each-other relationship. With Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook as an alcoholic priest, Charles Cyphers, and John Houseman, in a creepy bit at the beginning, giving us the town's dark secret in perfect ghost-story fashion.

It might be thinking too deeply to call The Fog an indictment of colonialism, but it certainly points out the irony of celebrating people who murdered and stole to get what they wanted.

Psycho

Psycho may be Alfred Hitchcock's most famous thriller, because of its two notorious scenes of violence. Aesthetically and thematically, Psycho stands apart from the other films generally cited as among the director's best (Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North By Northwest). It was independently financed by Hitchcock, and shot with the same crew that worked on his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And so it lacks the silky glamour of his 50s films, and is a decidedly more American Gothic than Rebecca, even though both films are about powerful women who manage to maintain control of people and places from beyond the grave.

Because of its filming conditions, Psycho resembles television more than the movies, and its dramatics are corny the way 1950s television dramas were. (It's also economical the way TV has to be.) The story is straightforward, less sophisticated than a lot of Hitchcock's movies (e.g. Rear Window) and less darkly humorous (e.g. Strangers on a Train), but it has all the tantalizingly delicious Freudian psychology of Oedipus and Vertigo, fashioned compactly into a thriller that reshaped the way people made thrillers, and the way people saw them and talked about them and wrote about them. And somehow, its corniness, its simplicity, its one-track direction toward the big reveal, all work for it. Psycho wouldn't have been as memorable, I don't think, if Hitchcock had made it like his other movies.

Hitchcock can never be accused of putting on airs in his movies: he's at his best when he revels in the low arts. His apparently instinctive approach to movies as low art has made his work deliciously entertaining, much like Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), and Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) (three of the great American thrillers). I think most if not all good thrillers are inherently comfortable with their vulgarity. These movies deal with seedy people whose complicated lives are far from glamorous or tidy. Norman Bates is a genuine lunatic with the most dangerous facade of them all: the facade of a sweet, friendly, handsome boy-next-door. He's a villain who's sympathetic, dominated by the even more villainous presence of his mother. And Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) isn't the pure heroine: she's a thief (a one-time thief, but still a thief).

Hitchcock's previous films were certainly suspenseful, but they weren't so centered around the big reveal at the end. People didn't expect the movie's only star, Janet Leigh, to be slashed to death midway through the film, and they didn't expect the movie to then shift gears and be about Norman Bates and the secrets lurking in his creepy old house. I would imagine that even those who had read Robert Bloch's 1959 novel--on which Psycho was based--were expecting some Hollywood-style changes to protect the heroine from the grisly fate of being butchered in the shower. That simply couldn't happen.


With Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam.

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.

Harper

Harper (1966) is a self-consciously chic, sophisticated and cool detective thriller starring Paul Newman as a private eye named Lew Harper. Adapted by William Goldman from Ross Macdonald's novel The Moving Target, Harper is probably the best pure-detective-thriller of the 1960s (although Bullitt starring Steve McQueen is up there, too).



I have written before about film noir, which is possibly my favorite genre. Harper was part of the shift in detective movies and noir that took place in the 60's and 70's where a sort of deconstruction of the genre emerged. While film noir has always been cynical, I think the films became increasingly a comment on themselves. These men eat, drink and sleep their work. Somehow the glamour has been lost amidst the unkempt studio apartment and the worn-out convertible, a relic of the glory days but still a relic. Newman's character is a typical Hollywood private eye: a loner, compelled to figure out the case before him. He's hired to track down cold-hearted Lauren Bacall's missing millionaire-husband.

Bacall, of course, starred as Humphrey Bogart's cunning, brassy love interest in 1946's The Big Sleep. She comes full circle with the genre in Harper, fulfilling the part of the catalyst, the one who hires the detective, giving us the backstory on the case. Bacall's character is hardly at her wit's end with grief about her missing husband. "I only intend to outlive him," she assures Harper. "I only want to see him in his grave." And then, trying to narrate Harper's thoughts for him, she concludes: "What a terrible thing to say." Harper responds, "People in love will say anything."
That's how Harper addresses the world. He has a quip for every circumstance, taking his punches with a grin and a stubborn--sometimes futile--inability to quit. This of course mirrors several of Newman's other movie roles, most notably the title character in 1967's Cool Hand Luke and Fast Eddie Felson in 1961's The Hustler.

The look and feel of Harper is vital to the film's success. Conrad Hall--one of the most respected American cinematographers--does an impressive job of capturing the grandeur of the film's beautiful external California locations.



He also manages to capture the feel of 1960's swing culture. A good portion of the film takes place in bars and night clubs, where the movie's noirish roots meld with the zeitgeist of free love and aimlessness that pervaded the movies during the 60s.

Amidst all the offhand comments and the shootings and the innuendos you will find a somewhat distant but incredibly sad love story between Lew and his estranged wife, Susan (Janet Leigh).



Early in the film, Lew and Susan share an exchange by telephone where Lew tries to once again stall their divorce procedures, though it's unclear why exactly. Susan ends the conversation assuring Lew "I don't love you anymore. And you can get shot in some stinking alley and I'll be a little sorry, sure, but that's it. Just a little sorry." Later on, Lew comes knocking on Susan's door after a particularly rough fight with one of the bad guys, looking for someone to take care of him. There is a moment of hope that their relationship will not end. But Lew's compulsion soon returns--to finish the case. A compulsion that seems to drive a wedge between him and the rest of the world. A moral mission that excludes real human interaction.


Directed by Jack Smight. Also starring Julie Harris, Pamela Tiffin, Robert Wagner, Arthur Hill, Shelley Winters, Robert Webber, Strother Martin and Harold Gould. Followed by The Drowning Pool (1975), which paired Newman with his wife, actress Joanne Woodward, in a lesser but still entertaining sequel. ★★★