Best Picture? I don't think so

The 91st Academy Awards will be broadcast on February 24, 2019, and I doubt that I'll be watching. Not only is the whole self-congratulatory exercise overlong, tacky and often boring (except when it's a train wreck), but the influence on the awards of campaigning and of box office success or failure has meant that the Academy has a pretty terrible track record when it comes to honoring cinematic achievement picking winners.

Best Picture has been a category where particularly poor choices have been made. Inspired by this Guardian article, for each of the nine decades of sound films I've chosen a single year (generally among several) in which the Best Picture winner was clearly the wrong film.

Best Picture winner of 1938: You Can't Take It With You, written by Robert Riskin and directed by Frank Capra, based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

You Can't Take It With You has a great cast, including Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore. But as I wrote in The Films of Jean Arthur, "A major mistake made by Capra and Riskin is to marginalize the winsome Arthur and Stewart, who disappear for long stretches while screen time is taken up by the 'zany' (i.e. gratingly irritating) antics of the other family members."

The film that should have won: Grand Illusion, written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak, directed by Renoir.*

Perhaps the greatest anti-war film ever made, Renoir's La Grande Illusion is set during World War I but is clearly intended to sound the alarm about the conflagration about to engulf the world. A group of French prisoners is held in a German camp; while confined there, the aristocratic French officer Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) discovers that he has more in common with the German commandant von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) than he does with his own enlisted men. And both men come to recognize that their code of military honor has become outdated in an age of mass slaughter.

Best Picture winner of 1944: Going My Way, written by Frank Butler and Frank Cavett, directed by Leo McCarey.

I'm not an enemy of sentiment—I think either The Bishop's Wife or Miracle on 34th Street would have been a better Best Picture of 1947 than Gentleman's Agreement—so I can't be too curmudgeonly about Going My Way. After all, it's got opera star Risë Stevens playing, well, an opera star, and Bing Crosby playing a priest whose laid-back fatherliness is just what his new parish's dead-end kids need. Jazz critic and Crosby biographer Gary Giddins calls it "funny and resonant." And, no doubt, immensely comforting for home-front audiences. But it wasn't the best picture of 1944.

The film that should have won: Double Indemnity, written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, directed by Wilder, based on the novel by James M. Cain.

Double Indemnity features the doubly indelible performances of Fred MacMurray as an unscrupulous insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck as a seductive siren; together they plot to murder her inconvenient husband and, of course, collect the insurance. It's also formally inventive, narrated in flashback over the course of a single night by MacMurray's character. Infidelity, murder, betrayal: far from offering comfort, Wilder's ink-black noir is distinctly unsettling.

Double Indemnity was hardly the only film noir overlooked by the Academy in the 1940s. If you were putting together a noir festival you'd undoubtedly also include The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Gilda (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Out of the Past (1947), and Gun Crazy (1949). You can count on one finger the number of those films that were nominated for Best Picture (The Maltese Falcon, which, together with Citizen Kane, lost to How Green Was My Valley).

Best Picture winner of 1958: Gigi, written by Alan Lerner with music by Frederick Loewe, directed by Vincent Minnelli, based on the novel by Colette.

Even for someone who is generally a fan of movie musicals, Gigi can be hard to watch, particularly when Maurice Chevalier's smarmy Honoré is onscreen (yes, this is the film with "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"). The plot, such as it is, turns on whether the virginal but hardly innocent young Gigi (Leslie Caron) will agree to become the mistress of Honoré's nephew Gaston (Louis Jourdan). The sexual politics of the movie must have been jarringly anachronistic even in 1958. Like Chevalier, this film hasn't aged well.

The film that should have won: Vertigo, written by Samuel Taylor, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the novel D'Entre les Morts by Boileau-Narcejac.

In the first post on this blog I wrote that Vertigo, Hitchcock's masterpiece of obsession, is a film that "becomes richer with every viewing." It features Hitchcock's swirling, disorienting camera; Bernard Herrmann's sweeping, powerful score; James Stewart's tormented detective Scotty Ferguson; and Kim Novak's brilliant double role as the coolly erotic Madeline Elster and the pleading, insecure Judy Barton. On its release a box office failure, in 2012 it was chosen in the Sight and Sound Critics' Poll as the greatest film ever made.

As is well known, Hitchcock was regularly snubbed by the Academy. Among his other films from the 1950s are Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and North By Northwest (1959). Remarkably, none of these films (including Vertigo) was nominated for Best Picture.

Best Picture winner of 1968: Oliver!, written by Vernon Harris with music by Lionel Bart and John Green, directed by Carol Reed, based on the stage musical by Bart and the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

Yes, it's tuneful and has charming urchins, but that doesn't make it the best film released in 1968.

The film that should have won: 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, directed by Kubrick.

A small team of astronauts is sent on an expedition to the outer planets. Because the trip will take years, most of the crew has been placed in suspended animation. But the HAL-9000 computer running the ship has been given secret instructions to alter the ship's mission, and cannot let mere human lives interfere. . .Kubrick's film was the first to depict the possibilities of space exploration with scientific accuracy. He captured both the wonder and the fear occasioned by the vastness of the cosmos, and our anxieties about the destructive potential of our technologies. 2001 was ranked #2 in the 2012 Sight and Sound Directors' Poll of the greatest films of all time.

Best Picture winner of 1979: Kramer vs. Kramer, written and directed by Robert Benton, based on the novel by Avery Corman.

Misogyny masquerading as male feminist enlightenment. Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) abandons her workaholic husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and their son Billy (Justin Henry) to "find herself." Over the course of the next year Ted gradually learns how to be a nurturing dad, and even has to take a lower-paying job so that he can have the time to provide care for Billy. (This is not presented as a dilemma that women are routinely compelled to face, but rather as a sign of Ted's moral superiority.) Joanna returns after a year to sue her former husband for custody of Billy, and in court reveals that (although she's been out of the workforce for a decade) she's now earning a higher salary than he is. Awarded custody, Joanna comes to the realization that Ted is a better parent than she can ever be.

The film that should have won: Apocalypse Now, written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Coppola, based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

This film is a famous mess: Marlon Brando (Colonel Kurtz) arrived on set obese and unprepared, Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) suffered a heart attack on location, and the sets were destroyed by a typhoon. Coppola took years to edit the mountains of footage and produced multiple versions of the film. In the version I saw in a repertory theater in the 1980s, Kurtz's compound is obliterated by a massive airstrike as the closing credits roll, one of the most astonishingly violent film sequences I've ever seen. (Apparently Coppola removed this footage from subsequent versions.) The French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote that Apocalypse Now is "the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis." The film was ranked #6 in the 2012 Sight and Sound Directors' Poll of the greatest films of all time.

Best Picture winner of 1989: Driving Miss Daisy, written by Alfred Uhry, directed by Bruce Beresford, based on the play by Uhry.

In 1989 a powerful film about racism and its continuing legacies featuring revered veteran actors was released. Only it wasn't Driving Miss Daisy.

The film that should have won: Do The Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee.

An urgent film that grips you from the first moment of the Public-Enemy-fueled title sequence and never lets go, Do The Right Thing addresses racism (of all kinds), tensions in changing communities, and police violence against black men and women. A great cast includes Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Danny Aiello, Bill Nunn (above), John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Roger Guenveur Smith, Martin Lawrence, Samuel Jackson, Rosie Perez and Lee himself. Unfortunately still as relevant as the day it was released, Do The Right Thing is one of the greatest American films of the past 30 years.

Best Picture winner of 1990: Dances with Wolves, written by Michael Blake, directed by Kevin Costner, based on the book by Blake.

A film that attempts to honor Native Americans, but indulges in discredited white savior and noble savage narratives.

The film that should have won: Goodfellas, written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, directed by Scorsese, based on the book Wiseguy by Pileggi.

The story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a mob hanger-on who turns informer, Goodfellas is one of Scorsese's best films. The "Do you think I'm funny?" scene, in which a seemingly offhand comment Hill makes to psychotic gangster Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) suddenly becomes a matter of deadly seriousness, is one of several brilliant set pieces in the film. Another is the sequence just before Hill's arrest, as, high on cocaine, he tries to instruct his wife in the making of a Bolognese sauce, manage a collapsing drug deal, and control his paranoia about FBI surveillance (which turns out to be justified). In the 2012 Sight and Sound Directors' Poll, Goodfellas is tied at #48 with Hitchcock's Psycho (1961) and Rear Window (1954), Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), and Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Best Picture of 1975), among others.

Best Picture winner of 2001: A Beautiful Mind, written by Akiva Goldsman, directed by Ron Howard, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar.

Aussie action hero Russell Crowe as a schizophrenic genius? As you might guess, A Beautiful Mind glamorizes, simplifies and falsifies mathematician John Nash's life story, omitting his bisexuality, his violence towards his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), and their 1963 divorce (they remarried in 2001). As usual for Hollywood biopics, the film goes for uplift over the actual complexity of the subject's life.

The film that should have won: Mulholland Drive, written and directed by David Lynch.

Set on the fringes of Hollywood, Mulholland Drive is a dreamlike neo-noir that turns nightmarish. Lynch masterfully creates an atmosphere of suspense and dread. Characters are doubled and may exist in each other's dreams or fantasies. As with any David Lynch film the narrative is non-linear and open to multiple interpretations. Mulholland Drive was ranked #28 in the 2012 Sight and Sound Critics' Poll of the greatest films of all time.

Best Picture winner of 2014: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), written by Alejandro Iñárritu and others (did it really take four people to produce this script?), directed by Iñárritu.

An utterly insufferable actors' and director's exercise, Birdman is an attempt to remake John Cassavetes' semi-improvisatory Opening Night (1977) using the pseudo-continuous-take technique of Hitchcock's Rope (1948). Neither the director nor the actors seem to be aware of how annoying narcissistic self-regard, inflated self-importance, and rampant self-pity can be. I defy anyone to sit through this turkey more than once.

The film that should have won: The Grand Budapest Hotel, written and directed by Wes Anderson.

Perhaps based in part on Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England, Anderson's film features an old hotel, a priceless painting, and a murder mystery set against the violent history of Central Europe in the 20th century. In my list of favorite films seen in 2014, I wrote that the movie, a "matrushka doll of a fairy tale, with its stories within stories, is a visual and narrative delight."

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* Because there was no Best Foreign Language Film award in 1938, Grand Illusion was eligible for Best Picture (and was nominated in that category).

Exotic and Irrational's 10th anniversary: 10 favorite posts

The internet technology in use when this blog began.

This week I'm celebrating the 10th anniversary of Exotic and Irrational Entertainment: my first post was published on July 22, 2007. Since that time I've published another 363 posts (including this one) which together have been viewed, to my astonishment, over 405,000 times. My profound thanks to everyone who has visited E & I over the past decade to read my thoughts and sometimes share their own.

Ten favorite posts

To mark the anniversary I've made a selection of 10 of my favorite posts. I've cheated by linking to post series and not just individual posts, but since I'm both making and enforcing the rules, I get to bend them at will. (Of course, my judgment about my favorite posts/series is rather unreliable, and is also subject to immediate and continual revision.) But here are 10 posts that struck me as perhaps worth revisiting. And if you are a new reader, these posts will certainly give you a sampling of my obsessions:

The first post: The Disappointment Artist (July 22, 2007)

"Sometimes the movies (and books and music and art) that are most immediately appealing don't end up sustaining our admiration, while those that are difficult, that we have to work a bit to understand (or that we find ourselves deliberately resisting), wind up being the ones we return to again and again."

It seemed appropriate for someone whose pseudonym means "the most pessimistic" to inaugurate this blog with a post about a book entitled The Disappointment Artist. The post focusses on the first essay in Jonathan Lethem's book, which is about John Ford's The Searchers. But I quickly followed a train of thought (not for the first or last time) and discussed instead my response to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which I disliked intensely at first.

Alfred Hitchock: Obsession, perversity and recapitulation: Hitchcock's Vertigo and its sources (September 13, 2015)

Of course, such is the gravitational pull of Vertigo that I had to return—some might say obsessively—to Hitchcock's masterpiece. I did so after seeing a little-known Cary Grant movie from 1932, Hot Saturday. There is a scene in that film in which, after being knocked unconscious during a drenching rainstorm, the heroine awakes to discover that she is in a strange bed and that all of her wet clothes have been removed and are hanging up to dry. The almost shot-by-shot parallels between that scene and a similar one in Vertigo are striking, and to my knowledge had never been noted before.

I would later notice similar parallels between a knife-murder that takes place in a Cuban bar in the 1946 film noir The Chase and the UN assassination scene in Hitchcock's great North by Northwest. You can read that post, and my post on Hitchcock's Rebecca, by following the movies: Hitchcock tag.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Fred & Ginger Parts 1 - 4 (December 19, 2009 - January 23, 2010)

"You may think you remember what a typical Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie is like. There's initial antagonism—they meet cute, but while he's instantly smitten, she is unimpressed. He pursues her; she rebuffs him, but eventually acquiesces to a dance. As they move in a sweeping, fluid duet to a gorgeously romantic song, now a standard, that was written for them—Irving Berlin's "Let's Face the Music and Dance," say, or "Cheek to Cheek"—she finds herself falling in love with this odd-looking but beautifully graceful man. . .So it was a bit of a shock to discover, as we began to re-watch the eight 1930s Astaire-Rogers comedies for RKO Pictures (excluding the musical biopic The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)), that only two of their first five movies together actually conform to this model."

Yes, Vertigo is my favorite film and Hitchcock my favorite director, but I don't just watch dark, perverse suspense films. For evidence you can see my posts on the films of Jean Arthur, Busby Berkeley, Ernst Lubitsch, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck and Pre-Code Hollywood. For a complete list of non-Indian movies discussed on E & I, please see the film index.

The Fred & Ginger series was in part sparked by my curiosity about how I would perceive the Astaire-Rogers movies several decades after seeing them for the first time. It was also in part a response to Arlene Croce's The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (Outerbridge and Lazard, 1972), a copy of which I'd come across in a used bookstore. As you'll see if you read the posts, I often disagree with Croce's judgments about the films. But no one would disagree that seeing Astaire and Rogers dance together is one of the most purely enjoyable experiences in the history of cinema.

Rekha in Umrao Jaan (Beloved Umrao, 1981); image from Philip Lutgendorf's Notes on Indian popular cinema

The first post on Indian cinema: Why I Love Bollywood (July 27, 2007)

"I'm a Bollywood-loving white guy. I want to make it clear that I'm not some hipster whose ironic or camp 'appreciation' is really a form of mockery—I truly enjoy Bollywood movies, and what's more I find myself unexpectedly moved by them."

A major inspiration for starting this blog was the articulate, thoughtful, and highly enjoyable writing by a group of Bollywood fans including Beth, Filmi Girl, Filmiholic, Memsaab, theBollywoodFan, Philip Lutgendorf, and many others who longer post, alas. Still, despite these excellent examples I felt the need to explain, or at least examine, my newfound love of Indian movies.

The opening sentences of this post would later cause some cross-cultural misunderstanding; for details, see the comments of Non-Indian fans of Bollywood Part II. To see all of my reviews of Indian films, take a look at my Indian film index.

Seeing things overlooked the first time: Vivah and India's missing daughters (July 10, 2011)

"On my first viewing of Vivah I called it 'porn for parents.' I wrote,

'Almost every character is unrelentingly good, and except for the last few minutes the story is almost entirely lacking in drama. Instead, we're treated to the beautifully photographed three-hour long spectacle of the 'journey from engagement to marriage' of two really nice young people from really nice families.

I loved it.'"

But by the second time I watched Sooraj Barjatya's Vivah (Marriage, 2006) I had become more aware of a real-world issue that Vivah addresses, obliquely but almost certainly intentionally. In 1990 the Indian economist Amartya Sen (later to win the Nobel Prize) wrote a now-famous article for the New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing." He found, after studying demographic statistics for South Asia, China, Africa, and other areas, that there were more than 100 million fewer women than would be expected. One reason women in India are missing, as researchers Prabhat Jha, Shirish Seth and others have shown, is that girls are selectively aborted, particularly after one daughter has already been born.

Celebrating, honoring and valuing daughters is one of the main themes of Vivah. The second time I watched it I realized that Barjatya was addressing the issue of India's missing daughters, and detailed that realization in this post.

About ten months after I wrote this post, the first episode of Aamir Khan's journalistic television show Satyamev Jayate was devoted to the issue of gender selection in India. I sometimes have wondered whether the information cited in this post was part of the background for that episode. That speculation is not completely far-fetched, since a significant proportion of E & I pageviews are from India, and this post is among the most-viewed on this blog. Whether or not there is any connection, I would be deeply honored if this post had even a small impact on such a vital issue.

I later returned (briefly) to Vivah to touch on its connections to the Ram-Sita story—only, with the trial by fire becoming a test of the hero's worthiness of the heroine, and not the other way around—in Bollywood heroes: Ram vs. Krishna part 1.

Beyond Bollywood: Films by Satyajit Ray featuring Madhabi Mukherjee (December 15, 2015 - January 2, 2016)

When I would mention my enjoyment of Bollywood movies, friends and acquaintances would often look at me with incomprehension, disdain or pity. Although I thought those feelings were misplaced, I had long been wanting to see some of the major films of the renowned Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray. But the terrible prints of the Apu Trilogy and other films that were in circulation were a barrier to my appreciation of his work. I actually walked out of a theatrical screening of Pather Panchali because the umpteenth-generation print was so badly scratched and the print had such high contrast that the images were barely visible and the subtitles unreadable. It was like watching a poor photocopy of a movie.

But then the Criterion Collection undertook the restoration of many of Ray's early films, and I could finally see their gorgeous black-and-white cinematography (often by Subrata Mitra) in something approximating its original glory. So I did finally get to see the Apu Trilogy, and particularly enjoyed The World of Apu (featuring Soumitra Chatterjee and a young Sharmila Tagore).

But I think my favorite of Ray's Criterion Collection films are the three he made in the early sixties with the luminous Bengali actress Madhabi Mukherjee. In Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963, cinematography by Mitra) she plays a young wife seeking work outside her home in opposition to her husband and father-in-law; in Charulata (1964, cinematography by Mitra) she is a stifled and lonely wife whose husband's attention is consumed by his political interests; and in Kapurush (The Coward, 1965, cinematography by Soumendu Roy) she is the wife of a boorish plantation owner in a remote village who has an unexpected encounter with a former lover. As I wrote in the post Favorites of 2016: Movies and television, "All are brilliantly realized."

18th-century literature: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (July 26 - August 29, 2016)

". . .she was the medical heroine who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, saving thousands of lives. She was also an acclaimed poet, a woman noted for her learning and wit, and the first Western woman to give an account of Ottoman culture."

Lady Mary lived a life of extraordinary adventure, eloping with her best friend's brother to avoid a forced marriage to a man she hated, forming erotic attachments to both men and women, travelling to Turkey overland in winter (and quickly adopting Turkish dress and health practices, such as immersion bathing, antiseptic birth rituals, and having her infant son inoculated for smallpox), and in middle age abandoning her husband and adult children to pursue a much younger man to Europe. Much of her writing was destroyed by herself or her relatives; we only have her letters about her experiences in the Ottoman lands because the manuscript was pirated.

Lady Mary was only one of many extraordinary women in this period; I wrote about some other literary women of the 18th century, such as Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith, in the series Jane Austen's predecessors.

Victorian Literature: The Victorians and opera: Trollope meets Verdi (September 4, 2011)

"I have looked for evidence that Trollope might have seen performances of La Traviata, and have found it."

It was a great surprise to me when I started reading the novels of Anthony Trollope—and discovered that I enjoyed them immensely. This was my first post devoted to one of Trollope's novels (I had previously written about some of the Palliser novels in the context of abandoning the 1970s BBC series The Pallisers a few minutes into the first episode). In The Last Chronicle of Barset there is a scene that is strongly reminiscent of a key moment in Verdi's opera La Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1853); I was able to determine that it was highly likely that Trollope had seen a production of the opera before writing that scene.

A few weeks later I would go on to write a three-part series on Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, the Palliser novels, and some other works. To see this series and my other posts on Trollope, please follow the Anthony Trollope tag.

I've also written about other 19th- and early-20th-century writers including Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, the Bronte sisters, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Susan Ferrier, Gustave Flaubert and his translator Eleanor Marx, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Thomas Moore, Alexander Pushkin, William Thackeray, and Edith Wharton. For a complete list of the books discussed on E & I, please see the book index.

Opera: Opera guides 1 - 6 (January 4, 2008 - August 25, 2009)

I came to love opera through a highly unconventional path. Most people, I suspect, first encounter the form through one of its mainstay 19th-century works. Of the ten most-performed operas of the past five years, seven were written in the century between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the beginning of World War I, and five of those seven were composed by Verdi or Puccini. For us, though, the conversion experience was Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, a 17th-century opera in English that's about an hour long. And we saw it in a performance by the Mark Morris Dance Company, in which Morris himself danced both Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her enemy, an evil sorceress. A less typical opera experience would be difficult to find.

I started the Opera Guide series, not in the expectation that anyone else would necessarily follow the same path to appreciation of the form, but just to introduce some of my favorite operas. In chronological order by date of first performance, they include:

Claudio Monteverdi and Giovanni Busenello's L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), which features some of the most corrupt, ruthless, and cynical characters in opera (Opera guide 5).

Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate's Dido & Aeneas (1689), our opera conversion experience (Opera guide 1).

George Frideric Handel's Alcina (1735), where loss of magical power becomes a metaphor for the loss of erotic power (Opera guide 6).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte's Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), in my estimation the greatest (and most warmly humane) opera ever written (Opera guide 2).

Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa's La bohème (The Bohemians, 1896), which deserves its place as the most popular opera of all time (Opera guide 4).

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier (The Rose-Bearer, 1911), which contains some of the most sublime music in all opera (Opera guide 3). For the fascinating story of the sources of many of this opera's characters and scenes in the contributions of Count Harry Kessler to the libretto, please read The Rosenkavalier trio.

When I began the Opera Guide series I said that it would be open-ended. Although I haven't added to it since 2009, I have continued to write about opera regularly on this blog (to the dismay, no doubt, of some of my readers). For a list of operas discussed on E & I, please see the opera index.

Attunement: Conversion experiences (May 18, 2015)

How a typically insightful essay by Zadie Smith, a brilliant work by choreographer Mark Morris, the generosity of Dwayne to a regular customer of his San Francisco shoe-shine stand, and a few moments in an otherwise forgettable film each made me realize "the importance of re-evaluating my judgments, revisiting my conclusions, and trying always to remain open to changing my mind."

The future (?) of Exotic and Irrational Entertainment

Of course, ten posts aren't enough to cover the range of the subjects I've considered over the past decade: I didn't have room to include any posts on punk and post-punk music, BBC television series, contemporary fiction, behavioral economics and decision theory, chamber music and lieder. . .the list goes on.

I sometimes feel like E & I is one of the last blogs standing; everyone else seems to have decamped for Instagram, Twitter or Tumblr. As regular readers know all too well, though, I don't think I'm cut out for microblogging.

But despite having too little time to write, too many things that interest me, and finding the whole process of putting my thoughts into semi-permanent form to be pretty agonizing, I have no plans to stop anytime soon. I hope that in another decade you'll be reading my 20th anniversary post; until then, thank you again for spending time with E & I.

A knife in the back: The Chase and North by Northwest

The Chase is a 1946 film directed by journeyman Arthur Ripley. Remarkably it seems to prefigure several of Alfred Hitchcock's 1950s movies, including Stage Fright (1950), Dial M for Murder (1954), Vertigo (1958), and most especially North by Northwest (1959). Never seen it? Well, then, you know what you have to do now. The Chase has just been restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and issued on DVD by Kino Films.

It's based on the Cornell Woolrich novel The Black Path of Fear (1944), but screenwriter Philip Yordan, who also wrote the screenplay for The Big Combo (1995), introduced some radically new elements into the story. Robert Cummings (the poor man's Dana Andrews) is Chuck Scott, a pill-popping, down-and-out WWII veteran who may be suffering from what we might now diagnose as PTSD. Chuck is hired as a driver by psychotic gangster Eddie Roman (Steve Cochrane); another indication that taking the job may not be the smartest move on Scott's part is that Roman's sinister right-hand man Gino is Peter Lorre. Scott's main responsibility is to chauffeur Roman's unhappy wife Lola (French actress Michèle Morgan) on nightly drives around Miami Beach.*

Soon Lola is offering Scott $1000 to escape with her to a place where no 1940s gangster could ever find them: Havana. Before you can say "Is that really a good idea?" Scott has booked a passage for two on a steamship headed to Cuba leaving the same night; he ignores some obvious signs that perhaps he should reconsider this move:

Note the warning over Scott's shoulder

In a Havana nightclub the couple are murmuring tender endearments when suddenly Lola stiffens, then slumps to the floor. When Scott takes her in his arms his hand touches something; pulling it away he discovers that he's clutching a knife:

The knife resembles one that Scott bought earlier that day, and the circumstantial evidence of his guilt is damning. But we know that the cops are after the wrong man; Scott must escape arrest in order to find the evidence that will prove his innocence.

This image may recall another scene filmed more than a decade later. In the United Nations, a conversation between two men is interrupted when knife thrown by an unseen assassin finds its mark, and an innocent man finds himself hunted by the police:

Both scenes take place in a crowded public place. In The Chase, it's La Habana bar:

In North by Northwest, it's the UN public lounge:

In both scenes a photographer is present:

In The Chase in the background of a shot the photographer has inadvertently captured the image of the real killer:

In North by Northwest a photographer instead takes a picture of Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) holding the murder weapon, a picture that makes headlines and seems to prove his guilt:

Did Hitchcock or North by Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman see The Chase? The parallel of a murder by a knife-throwing assassin implicating an innocent man seems too direct for coincidence. And the knife-throwing man was one of the details introduced by The Chase's screenwriter Yordan; it wasn't derived from Woolrich's novel, in which Roman's wife is stabbed by a man standing next to her. If Hitchcock and Lehman did borrow and rework the elements of this scene, they could only have encountered them from a viewing of the film.

Circumstantial evidence that Hitchcock knew The Chase is also provided by additional parallels to several of his other films. Here are some other suggestive connections:

• Towards the end of The Chase we learn that some of what we've seen occurred in the dream of one of the characters. This dream sequence violates film conventions because it is presented objectively (for example, scenes occur in the dream that the dreamer isn't present to "witness"). Towards the end of Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) we learn that some of what we've seen occurred in a false flashback related by one of the characters. This flashback violates film conventions because it is presented objectively (for example, as in The Chase's dream sequence details are depicted that did not actually occur).

• The Chase stars Robert Cummings. He had earlier appeared in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), and would later portray Grace Kelly's lover in Dial M for Murder (1954). It wouldn't be unusual for Hitchcock to make a point of viewing his other films. It should be noted as well that in Michèle Morgan The Chase features an elegant blond heroine of the type that Hitchcock favored in many of his movies.

• In The Chase, Cumming's character Chuck Scott (often referred to as "Scotty") is tormented by the apparent death of the woman he loves. In Vertigo (1958), James Stewart's character John Ferguson (often referred to as "Scotty") is also obsessed with a woman he believes has died.

Hitchcock often reworked narrative elements or scenes in his films. A character precariously dangling from a height, for example, occurs in his Young and Innocent (1937) and Saboteur before reaching its perfected form in the finale of North by Northwest. Famously, he even entirely remade one of his early films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956).

But as I have tried to show previously, I don't think his borrowings and reworkings (which generally resulted in improvements) were limited to his own movies. In the same way that the UN assassination scene in North by Northwest seems to have made use of elements from the parallel scene in The Chase, a key scene in Vertigo seems to have had its visual origins in a Cary Grant film from 1932, Hot Saturday (for more details, including stills, see the post "Obsession, perversity and recapitulation: Hitchcock's Vertigo and its sources".)

Raymond Foery has looked at the Frenzy-related material in the Alfred Hitchcock papers held at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills and reports that during the casting of that film "Hitchcock screened literally dozens of films, in whole or in part, as he scanned them for suitable actors and actresses...[H]e spent hours in the screening room...in order to evaluate performances." [1] There is no reason to think he did anything differently in preparing for his other movies. Perhaps a closer look needs to be taken at those "dozens of films" Hitchcock watched in order to trace how some of them—such as, perhaps, The Chase—may have influenced his distinctive visual style.

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* Both the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia give Morgan's character's name as "Lorna" (it's Eve in Woolrich's novel). But Lorna is a Scottish name, while "Lola" would be congruent with her obviously French nationality. Roman never calls her by name; Chuck Scott does, but Cummings swallows the middle consonants in such a way that it's impossible to distinguish which name he's saying. Since Lola makes sense in the context of the film and Lorna doesn't, I'm sticking with Lola until I see a copy of the script (the movie credits don't name the characters).

1. Raymond Foery, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy : the last masterpiece, Scarecrow Press, 2012, pp. 40-41.

Obsession, perversity, and recapitulation: Hitchcock's Vertigo and its sources

Alfred Hitchcock was famous, or perhaps notorious, for making changes to novels and short stories when adapting them into films. Vertigo (1958) is a classic case in point. It was based on the 1954 novel D'Entre les Morts (From among the dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The novel is centered on a detective, Flavières, who is hired to follow Madeleine, the wife of an old friend. Flavières soon falls in love with Madeleine, who believes herself possessed by an ancestor who committed suicide. When Madeleine herself dies, Flavières is bereft; when he meets a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, he begins to obsessively make her over in Madeleine's image in a doomed attempt to recapture the past.

There are many differences between the novel and the film. Hitchcock altered the novel's settings and character names, and added characters and scenes that didn't exist in the book. Perhaps the most radical change was in the timing of the revelation of Madeleine's identity: in the novel, there is a surprise twist at the end, while in Hitchcock's film, that twist is revealed at the beginning of the film's second part. As Hitchcock told François Truffaut, "Everyone around me was against this change; they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture…We're back to our usual alternatives: Do we want suspense or surprise?" [1] As ever, he had no hesitation in making substantial changes to the source in order to make it more Hitchcockian.

One of those changes relates to a key scene in both the novel and the film: Madeleine's attempted suicide by drowning. In the novel, Madeline is standing alongside the Seine when she suddenly steps off the quay and plunges into the water. Flavières, who has been following her, leaps in after her and pulls her out. She is conscious:

Her eyes were open, gazing pensively at the sky, as though trying to recognize something.
"You're not dead," Flavières said simply.
Her eyes turned towards him, and her thoughts seemed to come back from some other world.
"I don't know," she said softly. "It doesn't hurt to die." [2]

Flavières carries her into a nearby café. There Madeleine is able to stand, shakily; the proprietress gives each of them some dry clothes to change into, and they return to Flavières's flat. As they enter, the phone is ringing: it's Madeleine's husband, who is concerned about her lengthy absence.

In the film this incident is altered and elaborated in ways that are highly significant. Madeleine (Kim Novak), followed by detective Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart), drives out to Fort Point underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

Suddenly, she leaps into San Francisco Bay:

Scotty jumps in after her and pulls her out:

He carries her unconscious body to her car, where he tries to revive her without success:

There is a cut. When we next see Scotty, he's in his apartment; Madeleine is in his bed, and her clothes—all of them—are drying on a line.

Madeleine is awakened by the ringing of a phone: it's her husband, calling Scotty to find out where she is. She is shocked, first to discover that she's in a strange bed:

And next, by her realization that she's been completely undressed:

This moment—awkward and embarrassing for both of them—is also the moment when love begins to dawn between Madeleine and Scotty.

I had thought that this scene was simply one more example of Hitchcock improving on his literary sources: it provides a basis for Madeleine and Scotty's subsequent intimacy, while at the same time providing hints of Scotty's obsessiveness and perversity (particularly with regard to his minute attention to women's clothing).

But I think I've discovered that this scene has a cinematic as well as a literary source. Hitchcock seems to have adapted pivotal elements of this scene from another film: Hot Saturday (1932), a pre-Code film directed by William Seiter and starring Nancy Carroll, Randolph Scott, and Cary Grant.

In Hot Saturday, Ruth Brock (Carroll) tries to escape rumors that she's spent the night with rich ladies' man Romer Sheffield (Grant) by fleeing to the campsite of her earnest childhood friend Bill Fadden (Scott). Bill has returned to town after seven years away to do some geological exploration (but he's too shy to declare his real reason: his love for Ruth). A violent storm is raging, and as Ruth tries to reach the cave where Bill is staying, she slips and falls unconscious:

Bill hears a noise, investigates, and carries the unconscious Ruth into the cave:

Bill tries to revive her, without success.

 When Ruth awakes, her clothes—all of them—are drying on a line:

Ruth is at first shocked to discover that she's in Bill's bed:

And next, by her realization that she's been completely undressed:

The parallels between these two scenes seem too close to be coincidence. Although I know of no incontrovertible evidence that Hitchcock was familiar with Hot Saturday—it does not appear in the indexes of any of my small collection of books on Hitchcock—it was one of Cary Grant's first starring roles. Grant went on to star in four of Hitchcock's movies, and occupied a special place among Hitchock's leading men. Donald Spoto, in his biography of Hitchcock, wrote that "Cary Grant...represents what Hitchcock would like to have been." [3] Hitchcock himself, in an after-dinner speech given at the Screen Producers Guild in 1965, jokingly referred to Grant as his alter ego: "You may be sure that in securing an actor for my next picture I was more careful. I gave casting an accurate and detailed description of my true self. Casting did an expert job. The result: Cary Grant in Notorious." [4] It seems inconceivable that Hitchcock would not have seen all of Cary Grant's early films.

We know, too, that Hitchcock—shall we say, obsessively?—restaged and reworked similar scenes over multiple films. Such recapitulations have been the subject of at least one book, the not-very-enlightening Hitchock's Motifs by Michael Walker. Perhaps the most famous example is the heroine dangling from the face of Mt. Rushmore in North By Northwest (1959), prefigured more than two decades previously in Young and Innocent (1937):

Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest:

Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney in Young and Innocent:

In North by Northwest Hitchcock is restaging, on a grander scale, a powerful scene from one of his earlier films. What makes the Vertigo scene I've discussed in this post so unusual is that Hitchcock seems to have been adapting a scene from another filmmaker's work, rather than his own.

Boileau and Narcejac's Vertigo can be borrowed with a free account from the indispensable Open Library. Hot Saturday is available on DVD in Universal's Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, and is worth seeing as an early example of Cary Grant's screen persona (as well as for its eyebrow-raising sexual mores).

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1. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, Revised Edition. Simon and Schuster, 1985, pp. 243-244.
2. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo. Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury. Dell, 1958, pp. 41-42.
3. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Ballantine, 1984, p. 442.
4. Sidney Gottlieb, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, University of California Press, 1995, p. 56.