The Lady Vanishes: C/D

Good movie.

Unintentionally or intentionally hilarious? It's tough to tell. But a good film. Particularly the cricket fans who are also clearly fans of sodomy.

obviously the funniest hitchcock film, but i don't think any one scene topped the cheering-up-joan-fontaine scene on the deck in suspicion.

a lot of early hitchcock films had really crap endings didn't they? (not that this really was one)

i haven't seen enough to know whether many of them have crap endings, but this one and "the 39 steps" certainly don't.

yeah the title's great - i've been wanting to see it for a looong time and then i finally get the chance and it's not at all what i expected, but perhaps all the better for it.

what was the name of the "memory man" from "the 39 steps"? anyway i believe that film ends with the protagonists holding hands for the first time. i found that charming.

oh, i don't think anyone does, and i agree - but that doesn't mean your culminating scenes have a right to be terribly contrived or apalling abrupt (they could even be, as hitchcock later showed, terrifically contrived, or terrifyingly abrupt). i'd like to be more specific about the 39 steps, but like i said i don't really remember and i'm super tired anyway.

you're totally right about rebecca, but i just kind of assumed it wasn't a studio-mandated "censorship" as that seems unnecessary even by old hollywood standards (i mean it ain't sex, right? (and mrs. danvers was handlded superbly)). not that i have any better explanation, so occam's razor and all. i guess it doesn't really matter, it sucked.

the problem was not sex but murder: at the time the studios did not make movies in which characters got away with it. therefore, the wife's death had to be "accidental." which removes the essential moral ambiguity from the story and drains it of much interest. but i still like the opening scenes and joan fontaine and the lesbian maid.

...

terrifyingly abrupt

that certain sums up the conclusion of vertigo.

Not that it needs that subtext to work, it's a great movie on its narrative merits (and one of Hitchcock's funniest), but from what I've read, Hitch's intentions were pretty clear.

"the problem was not sex but murder: at the time the studios did not make movies in which characters got away with it."

wow. that's almost depressing, really, that they would confine themselves so much by such misguided morality. i'd always assumed censorship was only applied to explicit sex or violence, which is why, f'rinstance, mrs. danvers had so much room to strut her stuff.

have you ever seen "scarlet street"? the lead character there "gets away" with murder in that he's not caught, but it's made abundantly clear (in an almost kitsch way) that he's in for a lifetime of abject despair and terror, so he's effectivelt punished. certain of lang's hollywood films have endings that seem to clash in tone with the previous film, rendering them rather absurd--i think this was his own (perverse? lazy? genius?) way of dealing with censorship. obviously this is not true of *all* lang's american movies--"moonfleet" has a ambiguously happy ending that makes perfect sense. but "fury" has one of those somewhat ridiculous optimistic endings that inevitably make you think of how the story *should* have ended--as the story so far had been so bleak.

the last shot in "the birds"--of the characters driving off the island (??) through a path littered by birds on either side--lingers a bit if i recall. so it's technically not abrupt, but the jolt that it gives you while watching it might lend the claim of abruptness some legitimacy.

i was thinking of the moment at the end of "vertigo" where as soon as you've noticed the nun arriving up the stairs, judy stumbles off the tower and then scotty wanders out and stares down numbly and the nun toll the church bell. it happens too quickly to register obviously as an accident or a suicide--in fact that's vital, because it isn't really either by the design of the story--it's just scotty's fate. i think this is *felt* not necessarily *understood* (until after you've seen it the first or second time).

many of the best moments in films work this way IMO. moments that are only worth making if they can be done economically--because their economy (and a resulting kind of subliminal understanding) is essential to their power. think of the scene in "the searchers" where rev. clayton notices martha edwards caressing ethan edwards's uniform as she hangs it up to dry.

"and some screenwriters/directors, including hitchcock at other times, got away with things by various means."

he sure did, which is why i'm not convinved he can legitimately wash his hands of rebecca's failings.

I'm reading a book about the making of The Third Man, and one censor advised Carol Reed that under the Code he couldn't show Harry Lime killing a cop. He managed to blithely ignore that, among other instructions.

Dr. Morbius, what's this book now?

The book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0879102942/002-5408102-5480027

aha, its' nice to know hitch and i are in cahoots then. but he definitely succeeded there given the constraints, i think.

SPOILER ALERT
What's the clue that tips him off that the lady was really there. A windblown teabag that sticks to the dining car window?

i don't really mind the end of suspicion, or at least it doesn't wreck the movie for me. it's still one of my top 5 hitchcocks.

hold on, i have the dvd in this very room, i'll have to check on this in a moment.

The whole UK period seems like a frothy warmup to me (AJH said as much when he described the FIRST "Man Who Knew Too Much" as the "work of a talented amateur"). The depth and sophistication of his oeuvre from "Strangers on a Train" on is generally astounding.

Yup, looks like you're kidding.

I hate to say it but Hitch probably said that about the first MWKTM because he wanted people to go and see the second one. I think a lot of those early Hitchcocks are great and are an essential part of his career. For one thing he, along with Bunuel and Fritz Lang, was one of the few great directors to bridge the silent and sound eras. So you can see

The Lodger - the first fully realized signature Hitchcock
Blackmail - a part silent/part sound film with some interesting sonic experiments.
Murder - his first, and one of the first, full-blown sound films, with all kinds of sonic experiments, and a great plot twist involving a "half-caste."

It's true that the British films don't have any Hollywood sparkle provided by the likes of Cary Grant or Grace Kelly. But they have something else, more of a naturalist flavor of London and the greengrocers and shopkeepers, bobbies and music hall entertainers. Or just the physical reality of the city, the buildings and the streets and the buses, particular in Sabotage. It's true that he has his trademark landmarks, Big Ben, the Aquarium. I guess he got some local color in NYC in North by Northwest and San Francisco in Vertigo but it was more bourgeois than lower middle class.

there are a million such directors!

add to your list: ford, lubitsch, vidor, borzage, clair, renoir, dreyer, ozu, mizoguchi, kinugasa, walsh, pabst, eisenstein, vertov, pudovkin, etc., etc.

the other outstanding english director of the late silent era was the young anthony asquith.

Look, I think a number of the British films are great entertainment (and in the case of Sabotage, maybe something more), but they lack the despair and multi-tiered universe established in the late '40s-mid '60s films. I mean, he got a moving performance outta DORIS DAY, fer Chrissakes! (Also his MWKTM quote is from the Truffaut interview book, circa '68, so I doubt he was tryin to scare up business 12 years after its release.)

Do you REALLY prefer the '34 version of MKWTM-- why, in God's name? Everything's better in the remake, particularly Stewart-Day and the Albert Hall sequence. I have trouble remembering anything about the original besides Peter Lorre, and he's better in that one with Gielgud.

Do you also think Luis Bunuel's Mexican films are charming enough little examples of great director warming up at his trade, but that his French films are the real keepers? I mean apart from art-house staples like "Los Olvidados" and "The Exterminating Angel."

But given that smart artists *should* get better as they get older ... I'm not sure, Maltese Falcon aside, that John Huston made any better films than Prizzi's Honor and The Man Who Would Be King.

i mean: jimmy stewart! that's all you really need to compare the two.

You know what Jimmy Stewart said to the other actors about working with Hitch?