The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

Looking Back at “Rear Window”

When I was much younger, I always had trouble with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 thriller, Rear Window.  Set in New York’s Greenwich Village, it’s the story of Jeff, a globe-trotting photojournalist (James Stewart), who has broken his leg in the line of duty. Stuck in his tiny upstairs flat, with much too much time on his hands, Jeff has nothing to do but spy on his neighbors, through binoculars, in the apartment building across the way. Critics discuss this film as an exploration of voyeurism, with audience members essentially joining Stewart as Peeping Toms. Some recent feminist scholars have gone further, seeing Rear Window in terms of the notorious “male gaze,” the way movies are designed to reinforce men’s stereotypes about the women they can’t stop watching.  

 My problem with the film was this: I too had endured a broken tibia. In fact, I’d endured two, from ski accidents a year and a half apart. (Yes, I quit skiing thereafter.) So I was sensitive indeed to any inaccuracies about life in a plaster cast. I could well understand Jeff’s restlessness, and appreciated the detail of him desperately trying relieve the itchy skin inside the cast by cautiously inserting a long-handled backscratcher. But! Why was he stuck in a wheelchair throughout the film? Why wasn’t there a pair of crutches around?  Yes, a few weeks in a thigh-to-toe plaster cast can indeed seem like an eternity, but why was Jeff so helpless, and so miserable, when his cast was apparently due to come off a mere seven weeks after the accident, thus implying that the break wasn’t all that drastic? (Try wearing a cast for six months sometime!)  

 Fortunately, my legs are both whole these days (knock wood!), which frees me to appreciate Hitchcock’s work on this clever and  original film. I was not surprised to learn that it was made entirely on the Paramount Studios back lot, with Jeff’s fixed point  of view focused almost entirely on a multi-story apartment building that spreads before him like a stage set. It’s a  midsummer heatwave, which means (in an era before the widespread advent of air conditioning) that life plays out through wide-open windows and on fire escapes. He’s spent so much time observing the building’s inhabitants that he’s given some of them nicknames, like Miss Torso (a curvaceous dancer who seems to have few clothes and a lot of company) and Miss Lonelyhearts (who only pretends to have visitors, and appears on the brink of being  suicidal).

 One neighbor (played by the hulking Raymond Burr) apparently likes growing plants in the building’s small flowerbed, but has no use for his neighbor’s little dog. He also doesn’t seem, from Jeff’s wheelchair-bound perspective, to have the best relationship with his invalid wife. He’s a traveling salesman, so perhaps it’s not odd that he comes and goes at odd hours, carrying a suitcase. But Jeff is quick to cast him as the bad guy in a murder mystery. Is he?

 Jeff’s accomplices in trying to solve this mystery that may or may not exist include a peppery visiting nurse (the always delightful Thelma Ritter) and a gorgeous socialite (Grace Kelly) who’s deeply in love with him. Kelly’s Lisa Fremont makes old-time viewers like me recall what was so great about 1950s fashion.  Lisa claims she’s ready to give up her lavish lifestyle to join Jeff in holy matrimony; he’s skeptical, and perhaps he has reason to be. In the course of this film she shows her underlying pluck, but are they ready for happily ever after? That’s one mystery that Rear Window never solves.

 

Hitchcock-Lite: “The Man Who Knew too Much”

 I’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s a thriller, of course, one that climaxes with an assassination attempt planned for a climactic orchestral  moment at London’s Albert Hall. Peter Lorre is involved as a criminal mastermind, so you know that things are going to get seriously creepy.

 More than twenty years later, Hitchcock basically recycled his original plot for Hollywood. His 1956 take on The Man Who Knew Too Much is 45 minutes longer than the British version, and features two of Hollywood’s most popular actors, James Stewart and Doris Day. (Taking advantage of Day’s musical chops, Hitchcock and company make her a retired singing star, and weave into the plot her crooning of a new song, “Que Sera Sera,” which ultimately won an Oscar.)

 As in so many Hitchcock films, the leading characters are innocents who find themselves caught up in an evil scheme they must ultimately help to foil. See, for instance, the classic North by Northwest, in which businessman Cary Grant ultimately helps uncover some serious skullduggery.. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Stewart and Day play a married couple traveling abroad with their young son. In Morocco they meet a mysterious Frenchman whose sudden death embroils them in intrigue, resulting in young Hank being kidnapped and whisked off to England. Of course the rest of the film involves the couple’s desperate search for their child, certainly a matter of the greatest seriousness. But this is a movie in which Hitchcock’s playful side shines through. Though the kidnapping of a kid is horrendous, we in the audience are never in doubt about Hank’s ultimate safety. That’s because Hitchcock plays down the jeopardy he faces, while devoting much of the film to the comedy of innocents abroad trying hard to grapple with unfamiliar cultures and unexpected bad guys.

 We first meet Ben, Jo, and young Hank McKenna on a bus ride from Casablanca to Marrakesh, where they immediately run afoul of local customs. (As the bus lurches, Hank accidentally snatches the veil off a Muslim woman’s face.) Though they’re surrounded by questionable characters, the focus is on the comic joshing and bickering of husband and wife. He’s an Indiana  doctor, and at one point they humorously note how his various operations back home have helped fund the luxuries they’re enjoying on this trip. And there’s a great deal of comedy in the key scene where they make new friends at an authentic Moroccan restaurant. (The tall, lanky Ben can’t manage the low couches in the dining room, nor can he figure out how to successfully eat with one hand, Moroccan-style.)

 Even after the horror they face when they learn of their son’s abduction, the McKennas are thrust into situations that can only be called comedic. When they arrive in London, a gaggle of British friends descend on their hotel suite, eager to reminisce about old times. While Ben dashes off to confront a certain Ambrose Chappell, who may hold the key to their son’s whereabouts, Jo is ordering drinks and desperately trying to entertain these unwanted guests. Ultimately, the action moves to the Albert Hall for that climactic concert. (Composer Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the score containing the would-be-fatal cymbal crash, makes a cameo appearance as the orchestra’s conductor). When all three McKennas, reunited at last, return to the hotel, they find their guests are still ensconced in their suite, totally snockered.

 The famous Hitchcock cameo? It’s  not one of his better ones--and the same goes for this enjoyable but very slight film.

 

 

 

Anatomy of a Murder: Piecing Together a Heinous Crime

Anatomy of a Murder fascinated me when I was a kid. Not that I ever saw this 1959 courtroom drama. But the title was intriguing, and I was captivated by the poster art. Against a lurid orange and red backdrop, it features the fragmented silhouette of a crudely drawn human body, with the film’s title sprawling across the figure’s legs and torso. This was the work of Saul Bass, the graphic designer whose long list of Hollywood credits includes the title sequences from some of Hitchcock’s finest: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho. On the Anatomy of a Murder poster, there were no glamour shots of film’s stars, who included veteran Jimmy Stewart and up-and-comers Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott. This was not, clearly, intended as a star-spangled production: the poster was all about the movie.

 This movie was the work of Otto Preminger, an Austrian emigré who had first made his mark in Hollywood with classy noirs like Laura (1944). When the studio system was in its death throes, he moved on with great success to independent production. I’m grateful to film scholar Nick Pinkerton, whose notes to the DVD edition of Anatomy of a Murder include the following: “Preminger didn’t court controversy; he went steady with it. He frankly depicted heroin addiction in a 1955 screen adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. He helped to bust the blacklist by crediting Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter on 1960’s Exodus. He visited a gay bar in 1962’s Advise and Consent, tangled with Cardinal Spellman over 1963’s The Cardinal and in Anatomy of a Murder put the [Production Code Administration’s] stock-in-trade, the very idea of euphemistic or insinuating language, on trial.”

 How exactly was language on trial in Anatomy of a Murder?  We spend much of it in a courtroom, where the proceedings move forward so realistically that law students cite this movie as one of their favorites. Stewart, as the defense attorney in a murder case, performs his courtroom role so artfully (beneath an aw-shucks exterior) that we’re rooting for him, even though we’re not quite sure that the defendant (Gazzara as a hot-tempered soldier with an enticing wife) deserves to be let off. In the name of realism, words and concepts are bandied about—rape, woman chaser, panties—that in earlier days would have run afoul of stringent MPAA rules about what can be said or implied on screen.

 Part of the reason the film seems so real is that its basic story really did happen, in the same Upper Peninsula town where Preminger staged his production. It was made into a bestselling novel by a certain Robert Traver, this being the pen name of a Michigan Supreme Court justice who went back into private practice after losing an election, much like Stewart’s character. Partly to keep to the reality of the situation, Preminger was inspired to bring in an actual attorney—and a famous one—to preside over the film’s courtroom. He was Robert Welch, a superstar in that era for taking down Senator Joseph McCarthy in the nationally televised Army hearings of 1954.

 Preminger too had studied law, as had his father before him. Maybe that’s why he ends his film with ambiguity, not with a clear sense of of who’s right and who’a wrong. Says a character in another Preminger film, “The truth is what the jury decides.” This is a fascinating movie about complicated people whose depths we’ll never entirely plumb . . . and the unexpectedly jazzy  Duke Ellington score has its own enigmatic allure.

 

 

Roping Us In: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope”

The grizzly case of Leopold and Loeb has fascinated filmmakers for generations. It was back in 1924 that two wealthy young men from Chicago, convinced of their own intellectual superiority, kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy as an experiment in committing “the perfect crime.” Films inspired by this gruesome episode include 1959’s Compulsion (which focuses on Clarence Darrow’s ringing indictment of the death penalty while defending the two killers), as well as 1992’s Swoon and 2002’s Murder by Numbers. But Alfred Hitchcock—always fascinated by murder and the motives behind it—in 1948 beat everyone else to the screen when he adapted (along with actor/writer Hume Cronyn) a 1929 British play called Rope. This was the period when the always-inventive Hitchcock was trying out new filmmaking techniques. Four years earlier he had challenged his own directorial skills by crafting a survival drama set entirely aboard a small lifeboat in the thick of World War II. (Yes, it was called Lifeboat.) In Rope, he introduced color cinematography, while also shooting and editing in such a way that the film seems to exist in a single long take.

 This ambitious attempt to simulate “real time” fascinates film students, though other viewers understandably tend to find it contributes to the movie’s quasi-theatrical stiffness. (The camera occasionally lingers on somebody’s back so that the shooting angle can be changed without our seeming to notice.) From what I’ve read, the actors were not enthralled with all of this experimentation. The set—a posh Manhattan penthouse—was a complicated one, full of walls that could be moved to accommodate lights and camera as well as furniture that had to be hustled out of the way as filming proceeded. I think it was the film’s star, James Stewart, who griped that the only rehearsing that took place involved the constant fully-choreographed rearrangement of chairs, tables, and an essential wooden chest as the drama unfolded.

 Aside from its technical challenges, what is Rope actually about? What unfolds is a Leopold and Loeb-like story in which two suave young men strangle a former classmate for kicks, then stuff his body into the chest on which they’ll serve a festive repast while hosting his parents, his sweetheart, and a prep school mentor played by Stewart. We’re asked to believe that Stewart’s character, Rupert Cadell, is the one who first introduced them to the Nietzschean idea that a man of superior intellect can get away with just about anything. To their dismay, though, he refuses to applaud their murderous (not to say sadistic) behavior, and emphatically turns against them.

 As in most variants of the Leopold and Loeb story, this one contains hints that the two murderers (well played by John Dall and Farley Granger) are tacitly dealing with their own homosexuality. Playwright Arthur Laurents, who wrote the Rope screenplay when he was barely thirty, was himself a gay man who strongly felt there was a homoerotic element at the center of this story. Talking about Rope decades later, he regretted that Stewart’s character was not also subtly portrayed as gay. (The role had earlier been turned down by both Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift.) Stewart seems uncomfortable as Cadell, and early audiences didn’t respond well to him as a philosophical Nietzsche enthusiast.

 One more gripe from Laurents: he had never intended for the murder to be shown in the opening scene. As the film now stands, we know all about the rope, the chest, and the body inside it. Laurens would have preferred for us to wonder—and experience the slowly dawning recognition of the chest’s grim secret.

 

Romance, 20th and 21st Century Style: "The Shop Around the Corner" and "Sylvie’s Love"

‘Tis the season, they say, for happily ever after. As a respite from the daily Zoom and gloom (thanks, Stacey Freed, for that invaluable turn of phrase), I’ve been seeking out romantic movies with upbeat endings. After watching two of them back to back, I realized what a distance we’ve traveled from 1940 to 2020.

 The Shop Around the Corner, adapted from a Hungarian play and filmed with panache by Ernst Lubitsch, is so endearing that its longtime popularity is no surprise. In fact, its basic plotline was borrowed for the Tom Hanks/ Meg Ryan 1998 hit, You’ve Got Mail. You’ve Got Mail introduces two business rivals who loathe each other in person, only to discover they’ve been exchanging romantic messages over the Internet. The Shop Around the Corner of course doesn’t mention AOL. It uses a more traditional form of communication—the letter—to tell the story of two co-workers at a Budapest leather goods shop who spar like cats and dogs in person, not realizing they’ve been anonymously pouring out their souls to one another as pen-pals

 The central idea of The Shop Around the Corner involves discovery. The shop is full of secrets,  which eventually come to light, for better or for worse. But the two leading characters, played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, are not fundamentally different from whom they appear to be in the workaday world. They’re just hiding their deeper, more sensitive sides from their co-workers, though Stewart gets clued in long before Sullivan, leaving room for some delicious moments in which he knows something she doesn’t. Eventually, of course, love will out, just in time for Christmas.

 It’s unfair to compare a classic Lubitsch comedy to a Netflix special, but the new Sylvie’s Love has benefited from major billboard display and a Christmas release. It stars the up-and-coming Tessa Thompson, and its production values are sumptuous. It’s set in Fifties and early-Sixties New York, in and around the world of TV production: everyone wears wonderful clothes (like floor-length evening attire to see a Nancy Wilson concert) and lives very nicely indeed. It all feels like the well-dressed world of Douglas Sirk, except that the central romantic characters are Black, and don’t seem to particularly be suffering because of their ethnicity.

 But they suffer: yes, they do.  Except, of course, when Sylvie—a clerk in her father’s record store who’s trying to make it in television—lays eyes on Robert, a jazz saxophone ace who comes to the store seeking work. They spar charmingly, until she actually hears him perform and is dazzled. He’s dazzled too, by her frisky cuteness and wit. Since this is a 21^st century romance, they quickly hop into bed. Which is fine, except for the fact that she’s officially engaged to someone else, an upwardly mobile doctor’s son off doing his military service.

 Of course the unthinkable happens, leading to an off-camera wedding, a growing child, and (for Sylvie) the job of her dreams as a TV producer’s assistant with a bright future ahead. All the scenes that might have been interesting in a genuine romantic drama—Sylvie’s complex interaction with her husband, her socially aspiring mother, her daughter—are elided so that we can focus on her welcoming Robert joyously back into her life. I noticed the catchphrases in the film’s trailer: “Forget who you are expected to be. Become who you are meant to be.” It’s not so much about Sophie’s love as Sophie’s self-actualization. Love, that is, of herself and what gives her satisfaction, whoever else it hurts.  How very 21^st century!