Uber-producer David O’ Selznick would bring director Alfred Hitchcock to America from England, team him up with one of the most popular novels of the day, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 phenom, “Rebecca,” and win that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture (Selznick’s second in a row after a little programmer called “Gone With the Wind.”) Not a bad start.  Of course, it helps if you make an amazing motion picture in the process, which is exactly what “Rebecca” is.

Our heroine is never named other than with the pronoun “I,” and is portrayed by the then somewhat-unknown Joan Fontaine (sister of Olivia De Havilland), who offers up one of history’s most impressive “arrivals” as a full-blown movie star. Our heroine is an innocent who’s terribly vulnerable and a newlywed very much in love with her husband, Maxim (Laurence Olivier), a deeply troubled man still working through the death of his first wife.

Swept off her feet, this orphan who made un undignified living as a paid companion and doormat to an insufferable woman, is suddenly thrust into a world she never knew existed. Maxim is incredibly wealthy and sole-owner of Manderley, a breathtakingly gothic estate populated with servants and also the intimidating and suffocating shadow of Rebecca, Maxim’s dead wife.

It’s within this shadow that the new mistress of the house, already a fragile flower, wilts even further. Rebecca’s hold on the living is supernatural and the primary keeper of that flame is housekeeper Miss Mrs. Danvers (an unforgettable Judith Anderson), who wields the memory of her former mistress like a psychological club to break down her “replacement.” Miss Danvers is destined to succeed until a shipwreck uncovers truths that will either result in the destruction of all involved or their salvation.

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#3: Psycho (1960)

Director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” isn’t just The Great Slasher/Haunted House film of all time, it’s also one of the greatest films period. And what’s most remarkable is that though the story of Marion and Norman and Mother is now a full half-century old, there is no movie-lover walking around today too “sophisticated” to be knocked over by it. No matter how many films, horror or otherwise, you might have seen over the course of your post-modern lifetime, if you walk into “Psycho” cold — unaware of Hitchcock’s treasure trove of groundbreaking surprises — your jaw will still hit the floor at the precise moments the then-60 year-old director wanted it to.

And that’s the other thing that’s so impressive and unique, “Psycho” doesn’t look, feel, or perform like a story told by a middle-aged director at the top of his creative game. The films immediately surrounding it, “North By Northwest” “Vertigo” and “The Birds” most certainly do (which isn’t a criticism), but tucked in the middle of those polished, elegant accomplishments is this gritty, low-budget ($807,000), black and white grinder that’s positively bursting with the kind of energy, fresh ideas, and healthy contempt for the rules that you only ever see in audaciously arrogant and talented young directors looking to stake their claim. “Psycho” is the “Reservoir Dogs,” the “Easy Rider,” the “Night of the Living Dead” of its era, but those were all films birthed by first-time directors. Prior to 1960, Hitchcock had helmed over fifty features!   

From the opening Saul Bass titles set to Bernard Hermann’s iconic and immortal score, Hitchcock starts things off with the promise of a high-level energy experience he never breaks, thanks mainly to the fact that what the mischievous master has planned for his unsuspecting audience is one the greatest cinematic mind fucks of all time. (more…)

A Los Angeles Times article I read recently made me chuckle. It began by wearily tossing an exhausted barb at the 3-D phenomenon sweeping Hollywood: “With sighs of relief, critics last week took off their Polaroid glasses and looked at a couple of old-fashioned, two-dimensional films.” The big-screen photography of one of those pictures drew particular attention, with one critic noting that “It gives reality a true third dimension. . . the kind of 3-D you cannot get with mechanical tricks or by any other means except a rich comprehension and ingenious mastery of the visual storyteller’s art.”

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz. (more…)

Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

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Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film.  The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic, since writing is truly the key – no director could make a masterpiece out of “The Ugly Truth.”  It is one of the great travesties of artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies – nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but everyone remembers Frank Capra.  Together, those three wrote It’s a Wonderful Life.  (Together, Goodrich and Hackett also worked on The Diary of Anne Frank, The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Father of the Bride.) 

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras.  (more…)

Anyone who has formally studied film certainly knows Robin Wood, who was a pioneer of the academic study of film as we know it.  One of his most famous essays, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” is one of the most important and influential essays in modern film theory.  In it, Wood provides a bridge between auteur theory (director is author of film and drives its content) and genre theory (genre characteristics drive film’s content) in a way that doesn’t try to disprove the other (which many theorists tried to do).  Wood lays out a good approach to both theories:

“One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful genre is to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they may appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.”

He provided a deep understanding for each school of thought and put them together in a way that continues to help students of the discipline over thirty years later. A good overview of his life and work can be read in this recent New York Times post. (more…)

In an industry notorious for wasteful pretentiousness — directors shooting a hundred takes, crews taking all day to light a single shot, gazillions spent on the latest effects — Hal Needham was a rebel. Directing? “There is no magic to it, you know. All you have to do is look through the camera and see if it’s got the lens on it that you want. . . I don’t really think it’s that tough.” Cinematography? “We’re not doing Gone with the Wind or Fiddler on the Roof. It’s action/comedy. . .don’t give me none of this artsy-fartsy stuff, just shoot the film.” Expensive locations? “I like to get outside whenever I can. I think it gives a film energy to be outside. . . and beauty.”

And so Smokey and the Bandit was made fast and loose, outside, on a low budget. In Reynolds’ words, they worked “lightning quick,” with first-time director Needham “reigning over crew and camera with instincts that made him, in my humble opinion, the best action director in the business.” The entire film was shot on location in the South. “We moved all over Georgia. . . It was a screwy chase picture, but Hal’s fun, outlaw, hell-bent-sensibility made it sparkle.” (more…)

The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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