Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

The movie addiction continues apace. I just finished watching Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. I like Peckinpah, because I like his pessimism. I’ve thus far seen his The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, and Straw Dogs, all of which have a hopelessness to them. The Getaway is less hopeless (I love the pseudo-double negative in there) than the other two, because at least there’s some non-empty resolution at the end.

(Kind of a spoiler up ahead.) I say “non-empty” because the other two movies feature a hopelessly desolate world that the climax doesn’t fix. In Straw Dogs, Dustin Hoffman has still lost nearly everything; just because the bad guys have been defeated doesn’t make his life any better. And The Wild Bunch, while it’s a classical Western (as far as my inexperienced eye can tell), features cowboys who know that their days are numbered.

These pictures are not hopeful. Sprinkled throughout them are children who delight in the death of animals and who are thoughtlessly violent; shrill women who are always within a hair’s breadth of double-crossing their men; and good guys with almost no redeeming qualities at all.

For some reason I really get into movies like that. I loved Seven, David Fincher’s best work (in my view). There’s something charming about a film that doesn’t feel it has to make the world sunny by the time the credits roll.

I thought about this while I watched The Getaway, which was remade in 1994 starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in the McQueen/MacGraw roles. It features none of Peckinpah’s pessimism, and is largely empty. I can’t remember the last time I saw a good remake.

One last thought: Hitchcock and Peckinpah both specialize in weak women. I wonder what their backgrounds were, because I’ve rarely seen a woman in either of their films who possesses one ounce of backbone; they’re always falling at their leading mens’ feet. One possible exception is, of course, Grace Kelly in Rear Window. If anyone can provide a psychosexual diagnosis of Hitchcock, I’d love to hear it. (Only kidding.)

Earlier tonight, I started watching Jimmy Stewart’s (or Frank Capra’s) Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, about the lonely, naïve senator from Missouri whom the pols back home think they can control. Near the beginning of the film, we see Stewart wandering around D.C., checking out the Washington monument, the White House, the Capitol building, and finally the Lincoln Memorial. In one of the more pandering film scenes I’ve ever seen, Stewart reads the Gettysburg address up on the wall at the Lincoln Memorial, while a little kid looks up and reads it aloud. The kid doesn’t know how to pronounce the word “freedom,” so his kindly father pronounces it for him. Capra is trying so hard to manipulate me.

 . . .  And succeeding quite handily. I was weeping like a little child by the time that scene was over.

I just watched Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. There’s a fair bit to say there, as always, but I have to pack and go to bed, so I’ll just say this: Jimmy Stewart is phenomenally awesome. His acting ability blows away that of nearly everyone else on the screen with him. What a remarkable actor. Every facial expression and word of dialogue was perfectly timed and delivered. Everyone should go out and watch him whenever possible. He rocks.

Off to bed.

I saw the John Wayne film The Searchers recently, along with the Wayne/James Stewart film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. These are some of the first Westerns I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know that I’m into them at all. The cinematography is great — rolling vistas on the lonely prairie, etc. — but that’s about it. Everyone seems to love director John Ford, but he seems really one-dimensional: there’s a good guy, a bad guy, maybe a fight between a weak hero and a strong hero, ultimately resulting in the weak hero’s developing his own heroism. I can see the influence here, if indeed there is one: the maverick, like Han Solo from Star Wars, dealing with the newbie, like Luke. The standard drama falls right out. Influential, yes; beautiful, no. At least, I don’t think so.

There’s something to be said for complication in a film: a hero with whom we don’t quite relate, something incredibly scary about the protagonist (à la Vertigo), an underlying unease, say. But neither of the Wayne/Ford films I’ve seen have these. They have Wayne being cool as their main saving grace. Don’t get me wrong, Wayne is cool, but that doesn’t save a movie for me — or make it a great movie, like Roger Ebert seems to think it is.

I love Rear Window. I ordered the DVD a while ago, and gave it another viewing today. It’s another movie that comes damned close to perfection, just like The Godfather or Dr. Strangelove.

What makes it so perfect is the combination of incredible acting, intense understanding of the characters’ psychology, cinematography, colors, and underlying meaning. The film can be viewed on a number of levels. At one level, it’s just another thriller. At another, it is about voyeurism. At another, it is about the separated worlds we all live in. At still another, it is — as François Truffaut put it — a film about filmmaking.

It’s that last level on which I connect most closely with the film, because it seems to encompass all the rest. James Stewart is a helpless, immobile and miserable photographer who’s been grounded by a broken leg in his Greenwich Village apartment, watching his neighbors through his rear window. He begins to suspect that his neighbor Lars Thorwald — played by Raymond Burr — has killed his (Thorwald’s) wife. He starts spying on Thorwald, trading the naked eye for his camera. He views the world through the lens, but most importantly he’s powerless to change what he sees. The most harrowing moment of the film is when his love interest — played by Grace Kelly — snoops over to Thorwald’s apartment, trying to find something to prove Thorwald’s guilt. Stewart watches helplessly as Thorwald returns and catches Kelly in the act. Laid up with a broken leg and seeing the world only through his lens, he fears the worst.

Hitchcock’s points, I think, are manifold. First, Rear Window makes us realize that we’re all voyeurs. Stewart watches his neighbor through his lens, and we watch the world that Hitchcock has created for us through Hitchcock’s. Second, he’s asking us about the ethics of filmmaking: we’re observing the world impassively, but not doing anything to fix it. This becomes clearer as time goes on; I’m reminded of the L.A. riots, when helicopters flew overhead and filmed a man being dragged from his truck and beaten to within an inch of his life. And still the camera kept rolling.

At a purely aesthetic level, this film is amazing. Jimmy Stewart is one of the coolest actors ever. Grace Kelly has a beauty, a grace, and a poise that are absolutely mesmerizing; her first appearance on the screen is one of the sexiest shots I’ve ever seen. It reminds me that today’s leading men and women are tawdry copies of actors and actresses from the Fifties and Sixties.

A few thoughts gathered over a weekend:

1. Sometimes I joke too much. I should just be quiet sometimes. It’s not even that I’m being offensive — though that happens too — but rather that being quiet might be a good idea rather often.
2. At the same time, I more often than not think that I’m talking too much when no one else does. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just try to be erudite all the time; then everyone would always want to hear me speak. Yeah. Right.
3. Monsters Inc. is way cool. It features an animated 1-year-old who’s just about the cutest little character ever. If Amélie Poulain were 1 year old, that’s how she’d act.
4. My friends Chris and Alisa are wonderful. I’m incredibly glad they’re getting married.

For some reason I think titling a song “Sean, c’mere with yer shillelagh” would be really funny.