#59: The Night Porter

The Night Porter, 1974, directed by Liliana Cavani, screenplay by Liliana Cavani, story by Barbara Alberti, Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, and Amedeo Pagani.

About halfway into The Night Porter, one character says (of therapuetic "trials," of which more later), "the more shock value they have, the more effect they have." This is advice that Liliana Cavani seems to have taken to heart. And The Night Porter certainly has shock value. But I don't think it has much effect.

The film is set in 1957 Vienna. Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia, a wealthy young woman touring Europe with her conductor husband.

As you can tell from her expression, all is not well. Following the logic of melodramas, the happy couple stop at a hotel where Lucia's former lover, Max (Dirk Bogarde), is working as a night porter. Scenes of high emotion and tension ensue.

The initial premise is actually very similar to Casablanca (of all the hotels in all the towns in all the world, Lucia had to walk into Max's). But if Rick could tell Ilse that they'd always have Paris, all Max can offer is Mauthausen. Here's their love at first sight, seen in flashback:

As we learn from the flashbacks, Max and Lucia had a sadomasochistic relationship while she was an inmate and he a warden; when they meet again, they pick up where they left off. This isn't a bad idea for a movie; as Roger Ebert noted:

I can imagine a serious film on this theme—on the psychological implications of shared guilt and the identification of the slave with the master—but "The Night Porter" isn't such a film.

The reason The Night Porter fails is that it is nearly completely lacking in details and characterization. The script treats its two leads so superficially that their actions seem meaningless. All we know about Lucia is that she was the daughter of a socialist and hence not necessarily Jewish, steering away from the more interesting relationship between Amon Goeth and Helen Hirsch in Schindler's List. Lucia rarely speaks throughout the film, and despite Charlotte Rampling's expressive face and eyes, we barely know her. We see a little bit more of Max, but despite Dirk Bogarde's best efforts, he doesn't add up to a complete person. At times, he is a tittering monster, the kind of man who gives his lover a severed head in a box because, as he later puts it (laughing as though he has just told an amusing story at a party), "I couldn't resist!"

But for a man willing to recount such flamboyant violence, Max also ruthlessly protects his past—he kills a collaborator who could tie him to Lucia. He lives under an assumed name in Austria, apparently planning to fade out into the sunset "hidden away like a church mouse." We're asked to take him seriously when he says that he works nights because "I have a sense of shame in the light." That's a little hard to square with the fact that he keeps his SS dress uniform hanging in his closet, armband and all:

The end result is a shambling cartoon whose behavior seems motivated only by whatever emotion the film is trying to provoke at any given moment. Again, you could make a serious movie about the mixture of shame and pride that an ex-Nazi ("officers of the finest corps of the Third Reich," as one character puts it) would feel. But this is not that movie. I hate to say it, but Apt Pupil has more moral seriousness.

The inconsistant and poorly drawn characters at the film's center would be enough to ruin The Night Porter. But I haven't even touched on the film's most ridiculous aspect. Max belongs to a sort of ex-Nazi support group that meets and holds mock trials for its members, presenting all the evidence and witnesses against them before burning the evidence and murdering the witnesses. Here's how one member describes their aim:

We must try to understand if we are victims of guilt complexes. If so, we must be freed of them.

I can buy the idea of a group of ex-Nazis dedicated to destroying all evidence that links them with their pasts. But only in the 70's could someone make a film that asks audiences to accept a Nazi Feelgoodery aimed at curing the century's greatest murderers of their neuroses.

But suspend disbelief and allow the filmmakers their Nazi support group. Now ask yourself: what would the leader of such a group look like? Remember, one of their goals is not to be publically denounced as Nazis. Furthermore, one of the leader's duties is sneaking documents out of the records of the War Crimes Commission and the War Documentation Center. So close your eyes and imagine the kind of anonymous-looking man who could easily smuggle original documents out of these places. Got it? Now take a look at Klaus:

Again, remember: The Night Porter wants us to take it seriously, even as it asks us to believe that a group of Nazis in hiding would be led by a man who looks like Colonel Klink. Lest you think I chose that still unfairly, here's Klaus again, wandering around 1957 Austria in an outfit from 1944 Berlin:

If Bogarde isn't meeting his eyes, I suspect it's so he can keep a straight face. And even if you forgive the scar, forgive the black leather jacket, forgive the fedora, forgive the monocle, consider this: Klaus can't even be bothered to wear the monocle in the same eye.

That's not a reversed negative; both coats are buttoned left-over-right and the lettering in the background is correct. Worse yet, Klaus isn't even the campiest Nazi. That title goes to Bert, who as a young man danced ballet for the amusement of the SS:

If you still think the movie has any link with reality, ask yourself, what exactly is happening in this scene? Where is this empty room, where ballet is performed under SS banners and a photo of Himmler? Exactly how many Nazis would spend their afternoon this way? Leaving that for the moment, here's how Bert avoids attention in Vienna in 1957:

Yes, that's a diamond-encrusted "B" on his cravat. And judging from the costume and hair, it's more likely to stand for "Bela" than "Bert."

You could read the Nazi sections of the film as intentionally overblown, a counterpart to the more nuanced relationship between Max and Lucia, but the centerpiece of the movie, a flashback of Lucia performing a Marlene Dietrich song in an SS cap ("Wenn Ich Mir Was Wünschen Dürfte,"), is just as unbelievable:

This is probably the best staged scene in the film. But the emphasis is on staged: what is this room? Why is one man wearing a top hat, and another a mask? Even Klaus shows up (his only appearance in the flashbacks), with a date that would have gotten him in trouble with his superiors:

Well, Cavani was hardly the first person to link the SS's death-obsession with sexual adventurism. But the film really has no interest in what's going on in any of its character's heads. The characters aren't living or breathing, they're cardboard cutouts. I have no intrinsic problem with cardboard Nazis: I love the Indiana Jones movies. And I have no intrinsic problem with movies about sadomasochism, or exploitative relationships; I love Lolita as a novel, even if I think both filmed versions have problems (and The Night Porter consciously evokes Lolita: Max repeatedly refers to Lucia as "my little girl," and dresses her in a pink frock). So what's wrong with The Night Porter? Susan Sontag has written very eloquently about sadomasochism and fascism, in a 1975 essay in the New York Review of books:

Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. "Fascism is theater," as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience. (Riefenstahl put it: "What is purely realistic, slice of life, what is average, quotidian, doesn't interest me." As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be "nice," as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged.

...

The rituals of domination and enslavement being more and more practiced, the art that is more and more devoted to rendering their themes, are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent society's tendency to turn every part of people's lives into a taste, a choice; to invite them to regard their very lives as a (life) style. In all societies up to now, sex has mostly been an activity (something to do, without thinking about it). But once sex becomes a taste, it is perhaps already on its way to becoming a self-conscious form of theater, which is what sadomasochism is about: a form of gratification that is both violent and indirect, very mental.

Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

Cavani knows the shock value of this "master scenario." But she evokes it so carelessly, and with so little interest in her film's characters, that the end result is not just exploitative, but boring. The Night Porter conflates the after-the-fact, theatrical embrace of Nazi symbols with their historical reality. Bert and Klaus (and Max) are a modern-day sadomasochist's version of Nazis, cartoonishly evil, props in a staged ritual of domination and submission. They're not characters; they're costumes. And yet Cavani wants us to take them so damn seriously.

Randoms:

• Despite The Night Porter's flaws, I should note that Liliana Cavani went on to direct the excellent film adaptation of Ripley's Game. It never got a theatrical release but is available on DVD.
  
  
• My girlfriend pointed out that Max's predatory use of a handheld camera is reminiscent of Peeping Tom. The shots of Max filming were actually the best of the flashbacks, I thought—although I don't give the camera the same primeval power that Michael Powell did, I do think that the camera and spotlight work very well to make Max genuinely frightening here.
  
  
• The historical inaccuracies in The Night Porter are too numerous to list (and not surprising, given its cartoon Nazis). But just to start, the War Documentation Center is in Amsterdam, not Vienna, and it would have been difficult for Max to have worked in Hungary, where there were no concentration camps.

#58: Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom, 1960, directed by Michael Powell, screenplay by Leo Marks.

I can't remember who said it, but here's a bit of career advice. If you've never directed a film, you're supposed to accept any piece of crap directing job you can get, just to get your name on a feature film, any film. Once you've convinced someone to put you behind the camera, even if that camera is filming How To Stuff A Wild Bikini, you're a director, and every other job is just arguing over your fee. One of the reasons this is good advice is that career-killing movies are very, very rare. Try it: how many can you name? Heaven's Gate slowed Michael Cimino down but it didn't stop him. Kevin Costner not only worked after Waterworld, he worked after The Postman. The only honest-to-God "last movie you'll ever make" film I can think of is Ishtar. That, and Peeping Tom. Here's Michael Powell in one of the last happy moments of his career, at the premiere:

Powell is on the left; to the right are screenwriter Leo Marks¹, star Karl Böhm, and actress Pamela Green. They may as well have been sailing off on the Titanic. Here's how Böhm described the evening in an interview for A Very British Psycho, a documentary about Leo Marks that's included on the disc. I've kept his German syntax intact:

The first time when I remember I saw it when I came to London for the official opening. What then happened I can never forget in my life. There were some very famous people invited as honorable guests, and Mickey Powell and myself, we stood outside in the foyer, and um, when the film finished there was an absolute deadly silence and we stood there and the doors opened and first at the doors were the honorable guests, the guests of honor were there. And then they came down, and they walked towards us, and suddenly they turned to the left, and they went outside even without looking at us—without shaking hands, oh well forget it, but they weren't even looking at us, as if everything would be stinking what's down there. (?) We were speechless, we looked at each other, we waited till somebody at least would comment, but nothing.

It was the reception Bialystock and Bloom dreamed of. Powell was less thrilled, however, and it was more or less the end of his career. Critical reception of the movie was sensationally vitriolic and spiteful. The Observer's C. A. Lejeune went so far as to leave out any of the actors' names, writing instead, "I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture." Most of the reviewers seem personally disappointed in Michael Powell (who, with Emeric Pressburger, had directed a number of less seedy films, including The Red Shoes). I was reminded of Tibor Fischer's line about Yellow Dog: "It's like your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." After a thorough shellacking in the press, Peeping Tom was pulled from distribution and more or less disappeared. Michael Powell finished the movie he had begun shooting while Peeping Tom was in post, then fled to Australia, where he worked mostly in television.

So why did people hate Peeping Tom so much? And what's it doing in the Criterion Collection now? The first shot provides a pretty good clue:

Yep, this is one of those movies that implicates the audience for enjoying watching bad things happen on screen. Karl Böem plays the Peeping Tom of the title, a nice young man named Mark Lewis. We only see him behaving like a typical Peeping Tom a few times, though, looking through the ground-floor windows of his house (he has lodgers):

But Mark doesn't really like watching things with his own eyes. His real passion is for recorded experience. Specifically, the recorded experience of women's deaths. In addition to his day job as a focus puller and his sideline as a pinup photographer, he has a third part-time job: making snuff films for his own enjoyment. Here he is in his private screening room, rising from his chair as one of his movies (and, perhaps, its director) reaches a climax:

If this looks unpleasant and sordid, it is. And make no mistake about it: Mark's world is not the seedy-yet-glamorous one that you sometimes see in films set in and around pornography. Here, for example, is Mark's employer for his nude photo shoots, showing a customer a book of "views," as he calls them:

The actor's name is Bartlett Mullins; his rosy-cheeked priggishness sucks all the allure out of a room pretty quickly. The customer, by the way, is Miles Malleson, a character actor who was known by 1960 for playing absent minded, doddering old men, usually in comedies. In other words, the epitome of a"kindly old man." Here's how he appears just seconds later:

I used the Fischer line about a beloved uncle masturbating in a schoolyard advisedly. In fact, his raptures are interrupted when a schoolgirl comes into the shop—he carries out his book of pornography (he buys the whole lot of pictures), neatly wrapped in a brown paper bag labeled "EDUCATIONAL BOOKS." Now there's a character the audience doesn't mind being identified with!

But surely the embarrassing nastiness of the business end of pornography doesn't extend to the women themselves, you're saying, and to some extent, you're right. After all, one of the models is played by Pamela Green, a real-life fifties pinup. And it's true, she's easy to look at:

Of course, one of the first things she says to Mark during her photo shoot is, "Fix it so the bruises don't show." Worse yet is the other model, there for her first nude shoot:

Lovely. Until she turns, revealing a spectacular harelip:

Well, as she tells Mark, "You needn't photograph my face." It's not hard to see why viewers responded passionately to a film that insists, again and again, on punishing the audience for the act of watching. Powell needs the world of Peeping Tom to be this disturbing and degraded, however, because Mark Lewis isn't the movie's villain. There's no tough-but-noble cop on his trail, as in most serial killer movies. Here's our hero at his most noble and troubled:

For the film to work, you have to believe that Mark was produced by his environment. He's the opposite of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in every way; shy, poorly spoken, sweet in a painfully awkward way. Hitchcock did a similar thing with Norman Bates in Psycho the same year, but with a crucial difference: we don't know Norman's a killer till later in the film (or we wouldn't, if we were seeing the film for the first time in 1960). The first scenes of Peeping Tom, on the other hand, show Mark murdering a prostitute, filming the murder, watching the film, and then filming her body as police carry it out of her apartment. So making Mark sympathetic is a little more... challenging. Powell succeeds at this because of the fumbling romance between Mark and Helen Stephens, his downstairs lodger, played by Anna Massey.

Helen is a bit of a wallflower in a way that is appealing to Mark. Although she is having a birthday party when we first see her, for the rest of the film she is almost always seen alone with her blind, alcoholic mother. As one would expect in a movie where seeing is almost always a predatory act, the mother is the movie's moral center, able to sense that something is terribly wrong with Mark. Yet she can't tell precisely what Mark's sickness is, even when she sneaks into one of his private screenings. She urges him to get help, which he seeks from a psychiatrist assisting the police investigation of one of his killings. But psychatrists are the problem, not the solution; as we see in some old home movies, Mark's scopophilia (or scoptophilia, as one of the film's psychiatrists incorrectly calls it) was deliberately induced by his father in the interests of science. Mark, it seems, was his father's test subject for at a study on fear that spanned at least six volumes:

When psychiatry is as predatory as pornography, and pornography as predatory as filmmaking, there's not much hope for a happy ending. Helen's dreams of a life with Mark (she plans to collaborate with him on a children's book called "The Magic Camera) amount to a sick joke about her naïveté. Mark has his own magic camera, and it's not suitable for children.

As you can tell, the film is filled with gallows humor and jokes about the movie industry. Mark is working on a movie called The Walls Are Closing In, and if you look at the incompetent director's chair (and are familiar with the Boy Scouts), you can spot Powell having a joke at his own expense:

It's not "Vivian Darkbloom," but it'll do. The film-within-a-film stars a difficult redheaded ingenue who is completely unable to act, constantly infuriating the director. Powell, of course, famously didn't get along with Moira Shearer, another redhead, during the filming of The Red Shoes. But apparently having an airheaded actress as Shearer's stand-in wasn't exquisite enough a revenge. Powell actually casts the real Moira Shearer as the film actress's actual stand-in, a woman edging past her prime who dreams of stardom while technicians adjust the lighting for the real actress.

If that weren't enough, he has Mark kill her. The sequences surrounding her murder and its aftermath are the movie's best, in my opinion: we see her death through the viewfinder of Mark's camera, as in earlier sequences:

This is intercut with normal footage of her as the scene reaches its conclusion:

Later, we see Mark developing his footage:

Finally, in my single favorite shot in the film, Shearer's face turns into something ghostly as Mark stands in the path of his movie's projection:

So does the movie hang together? In my opinion, not completely. Powell has two goals here that aren't entirely complementary. He wants to make a critique of the act of looking, but he's stuck with some of the conventions of serial killer movies. Doing both requires giving Mark's camera more power than I think it possesses. Towards the end of the film, Mark knocks out a window of his apartment to film the police storming his building (he is, as he tells a coworker, making a documentary about the police investigation into his hobbies). Well and good—but when one policeman tells the other "It's only a camera," it strains belief to have the other respond, "Only?" Powell may give the camera this kind of totemic power, and Mark certainly does. But policemen do not, and Powell overreaches here. Of course, it's impossible to give directors too much godlike power when your audience is other directors, and I think this is why Peeping Tom was championed by Scorcese and Coppola as a lost masterpiece. It's not—but it is very, very good.

Randoms:

• Leo Marks, who wrote the screenplay for Peeping Tom, led a more interesting life than any of his characters. He was perhaps the best British cryptographer not working at Bletchley Park during World War II, serving as spymaster for the SOE. One of his most noteworthy innovations was using original poems as keys for spies, rather than works that might be stumbled upon by German codebreakers. To this end, he actually wrote many of the poems they used; one, beginning "The life that I have/Is all that I have/And the life that I have/Is yours," became mildly famous in its own right. A Very British Psycho also gives him credit for inventing the one-time-pad, which is a somewhat dubious claim, given that Vernam and Mauborgne held the relevant patents before Marks's tenth birthday. His innovations in practical cryptography for undercover agents are undeniable, however. In any event, credit Marks's cryptographic background for the film's verbal playfulness.
  
  
• Scorcese, a fan of all things Michael Powell-related, had Marks give the Devil his voice in The Last Temptation of Christ.
  
  
• Peeping Tom features the first nudity in British cinema. Here's Pamela Green moments before Mark ends her life (offscreen):

Green was a real-life pinup model, and runs a website featuring some of her work from the fifties. The site also includes her recollections of the shooting of Peeping Tom. Of course, I only read her website for the articles.


• Michael Powell seems to have been quite determined to have as many looping self-referential traps in Peeping Tom as possible. He played Mark's cruel and exploitative father in the flashbacks. Here he is giving young Mark his first camera:

The young boy who Powell makes cry was played by his own son, and the corpse of his mother was convincingly played by his wife and son's mother. He's interviewed for A Very British Psycho, and seems remarkably untroubled by the experience. I'd be interested to know whether his apartment has a darkroom.

¹Actually, second from the left is Stuart Levy, Vice President of Anglo-Amalgamated, the film's production company; hat tip to Steve Crook of The Powell and Pressburger Appreciation Society for the correction. I am, as it turns out, half German and half Anglo-Amalgamated myself, so I should have known this...

#57: Charade

Charade, 1963, directed by Stanley Donen, screenplay by Peter Stone, story by Peter Stone and Mark Behm.

Studios and critics have alternated between celebrating and excoriating the Hollywood star system since Florence Lawrence first got her name in lights. For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to ignore the economic considerations of casting a star. This is really the only part of the whole thing that matters to studios, of course: casting someone who can open a movie is more important than finding a director or a script. As with everything else in Hollywood, the star system is all about mental real estate, shortcuts for the marketing department and so on. (And the only non-actor the unwashed masses remember is Steven Spielberg). But assume the battle is already won: the marketing department has ushered you at gunpoint to your seat and you're watching a movie with a star. When they appear on screen, whether it's Humphrey Bogart or Jim Carrey, you're seeing an amalgamation of the role that they're playing and their carefully designed persona. Don't get me started on the way stars protect their images to the detriment of playing interesting characters (see the differences between Skjoldbjærg and Nolan's versions of Insomnia for a vivid example). But sometimes filmmakers beat the system; if you know what you're doing, manipulating stars' images can be at least as interesting as debating whether or not Carrey or Cruise are worth 20 million.

Nobody understood this better than Alfred Hitchcock, who made some of the smartest casting decisions of any filmmaker. He's able to make Cary Grant an absolute bastard to Ingrid Bergman without losing our sympathy in Notorious because, well, he's Cary Grant. Jimmy Stewart's creepiness is a surprise every time in Vertigo, and although Anthony Perkins doesn't strike anyone as a young romantic lead anymore, that was his image until Hitchcock smashed it in Psycho. Shrewd manipulation of audience expectations of stars is one thing, and it's well represented throughout the Criterion Collection. But it wouldn't work at all if not for the vast body of movies that trade in on stars' personas without challenging them. That's where Charade fits in. Charade isn't a movie where stars play against type or where their personas are deconstructed. Rather, it's a giddy exercise in what William Goldman would call "stars as audiences want to see them." Appropriately enough, it looks a lot like a Hitchcock movie.

Like The 39 Steps, this movie is a mixture of thriller and romantic comedy. Stanley Donen was fortunate enough to get two of the most beautiful and beloved actors of their respective generations to play the romantic leads. Here they steal a moment together in the midst of chaos for a romantic meal:

As you can see, from the first frame, audiences wonder only one thing: how will these two lovebirds end up together? Ok, I apologize; that was ridiculous. Here's the real still:

With Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn on screen together, you don't really have to do too much to make a great movie, or at least a fun one. Donen has a serviceable plot, with more than the required number of turnarounds. Hepburn, unhappily married, returns home to find her husband was not the man he claimed to be. Furthermore, she discovers he has sold all her possessions and gotten himself killed while fleeing France by train. It seems that the couple's wealth (a) was stolen from the United States government as part of a World War II pact and (b) has disappeared completely. This puts Hepburn in kind of an awkward position, since the other people who helped her husband steal the money are convinced that she has it. Fortunately, Cary Grant shows up out of virtually nowhere to help her outwit her husband's former army buddies. And when it comes to outwitting, nobody was ever better than Grant. Although Hepburn hadn't played the kind of character she plays in this movie before, anyone who's seen Wait Until Dark knows she can do one hell of a resourceful-in-a-crisis damsel in distress. One can imagine making this movie and having both actors play against type. But I don't want to see that hypothetical movie as much as I want to see the two of them being funny and charming. Basically being, you know, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Charade is an ideal star vehicle for these two, drawing heavily from Hitchcock's movies (all the way back to The 39 Steps, as Charles Taylor has noted) for its particular mixture of genres. The trailer memorably categorizes Charade as something crafted in a blender:

The slight craziness of that image gives you a pretty good sense of the tone of the film. Donen was the director of Singin' in the Rain, which to me was always the best example of a film that works because of sheer over-the-top commitment. When Donald O'Connor starts singing "Make 'Em Laugh," it's not that funny. But nobody in the history of the human race has made it through the backflips that end that sequence without laughing; he's just so damn earnest about the whole thing. There's at least one sequence in Charade that has the same earnest goofiness, a bizarre set piece where Cary Grant takes a shower fully clothed.

It's not much of a gag but he sells it as wholeheartedly as Donald O'Connor (and I think there's an echo of Singin' In The Rain's raincoats in that Technicolor shower curtain). In fact, the scene could be lifted and set right in the middle of Singin' in the Rain and nobody would notice. But I invite you to find a place in Singin' in the Rain for the pre-credit shot in which we're introduced to Hepburn's husband:

The surprised expression and lacerations seem too grim for a Hitchcock movie. In fact, the violence in Charade is not really of a piece with the rest of the film, as early viewers noted. Bowsley Crowther's original review in the Times devotes five of nine paragraphs to warning about how sudden and grisly the violence in the film is (at times, he sounds as though he doesn't think his readers believe he's telling the truth: "I tell you, this lighthearted picture is full of such gruesome violence.") But although they seem at times to be from a different movie, for the most part, these scenes and sequences stand on their own as sick, funny set pieces. The highlight is Hepburn's husband's funeral: no one but the detective investigating his murder is there at first. But one by one, his army buddies show up, each trying in less and less subtle ways to verify that he is really dead. Here's James Coburn holding a mirror under his nose to see if it frosts:

This scene is a masterpiece of black humor and economy. Economy because it's your introduction to the villains of the movie, and roughly lets you rank their level of threat based on their behavior at the funeral. Black humor cause, well, you know, it's a funeral. The last to enter is George Kennedy, looking approximately ten feet tall:

I love the expression on James Coburn's face—when even Coburn is unnerved, you know you're in trouble. Kennedy doesn't even sit down—just slams the door open, stalks to the front of the room, jabs a hatpin in the corpse's hand, verifies that he doesn't flinch, and stalks right back out. No respect for the dead, that man; not one to trust. But then the movie doesn't have much respect for the dead either: the other steady progression through the film is the increasingly Byzantine ways the villains are killed. Here, for example, is how James Coburn's body is discovered:

As someone who has always thought the "do not put a plastic bag on your baby's head, or your own, especially if you're planning on choking yourself" icons were hilarious, I wholeheartedly approve of this shot. (For reference only:

See? Hilarious!) It's not for nothing Charles Taylor compared the murders in this play with the illustrations in a Charles Addams book. And in fact, the murders are shown almost exclusively in static shots; you see the bodies but not the deaths themselves. This lends the whole proceeding a sort of ironic detachment; the corpses are punchlines.

Grant and Hepburn pick up on this tone—Taylor called their performances "high deadpan," which seems about right. They deliver impossible lines in a very stylized way, and your reaction to it will depend on whether or not you enjoy Grant and Hepburn's screen persona in other movies. Of course, it's difficult to imagine reading most of Peter Stone's script in any tone other than arch detachment—the dialogue has little to do with what actual people would say in the situations Grant and Hepburn find themselves. To pick just one example, Hepburn tells Walter Matthau's CIA agent, "Mr. Bartholomew, if you're trying to frighten me..." with an unphaseable expression, then changes to a scared rabbit look to finish the sentence, "you're doing a first-rate job!" I'd tip my hat to any actor who can give that line a method reading, but I wouldn't hire them for this film.

Charade is much more playful than Hitchcock's thriller-romances, at least in the lead actors' performances. Presumably the genre conventions were laid down well enough by 1963 for audiences to respond to a movie this self-aware. But while the movie feels breezily ahead of its time in many regards, Hepburn and Grant's romance seems to be taken from a 1930's romantic comedy, not a film from the sixties—or even the fifties or forties, as a comparison to North By Northwest or Notorious will quickly show). Partly this was because of Grant's fear that he would look ridiculous pursuing someone Hepburn's age; he required that their scenes be rewritten so that she pursues him exclusively. The problem is, one of the major engines of the plot is whether Grant is a threat to Hepburn. It's hard to give him the requisite air of sexual menace when he doesn't kiss Hepburn back, and then says, "Oh, no. The doctor said it was bad for my... thermostat." Suddenly we're back in Bringing Up Baby mode, which is fair enough, but pretty clearly separates Grant from the other villains. One thing about George Kennedy's character I didn't mention by way of illustration: he's missing an arm, and has a habit of attacking people with his prosthesis:

Yes, that's as much of a joke as Grant's thermostat line, but Kennedy's missing hand is a sick joke (and one it's fun to imagine trying to get into a major studio movie today), and the tones don't entirely gel.

But who really cares if Charade is a masterpiece where every frame comes together to create a perfect, unified whole? It's got Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, being charming, arch, and good looking. I love movies where the director carefully subverts a star's image as much as the next guy. But if you're going to appreciate that, it seems to me that you should also have some appreciation for the movies that cash in on that image in a relatively unironic fashion. Or to put it another way:

Randoms:

• The commentary track, with Peter Stone and Stanley Donen, is crawling with arguments. It was hard to tell whether Stone and Donen were just being crotchety or genuinely have some bad blood between them. Whichever it is, Stone hardly says anything that Donen doesn't contradict, even when it profits neither of them to argue. The best is a two minute fight over whether the French equivalent of Punch & Judy shows is called Guignol or Guignolet. Donen thinks it's Guignolet, Stone is of the Guignol camp. The confusion comes from the Théâtre du Vrai Guignolet:

The name of the theater nonwithstanding, Stone is right and Donen is wrong.


• It wasn't entirely fair of me to choose Grant's "thermostat" line as an example of his tone being out of synch with the rest of the film. That line wasn't in the screenplay, but Grant insisted that he have some "Cary Grant lines" and wrote that one himself. Thirty years later, Stone still laments it. Nevertheless, there are many other examples of Grant being goofy in ways that cut against his character's status as potential villain.
  
  
• If you know me, you know that this part of the film was more or less wasted on me, but fashonistas should see this movie on the basis of Audrey Hepburn's clothes alone. The joke is that the movie opens with her husband leaving her destitute; all she has is in a few suitcases. But from those suitcases comes Givenchy, Givenchy, and Givenchy, one outfit after another. With the caveat that I know next to nothing about clothes, this was my favorite:

That's apparently what the well-dressed woman wore to lay on a pauper's cot and think pensively about their dire situation, circa 1963. Classic!


• This isn't a film with a lot of flashy camerawork. I did like the corpse-eye view of the morgue drawer closing on Hepburn's late husband, however:

It's a little self-conscious, particularly in a film that doesn't have Hitchcock-style camera movement anywhere else. But that mortician's face is so perfect from that angle (and there's a nice match cut to a hand closing a desk drawer in the next scene) that I find it hard to hold it against anyone.


• Henry Mancini's score for this is exceptionally cool, at least when it's in the opening-credits arrangement, with wood blocks and surf guitars, and not the Johnny Mercer ballad version. Those opening credits are also noteworthy for their epileptic-unfriendly animations and garish colors:

Yes, those animated flowers are rotating about once every three frames. The titles were done by Maurice Binder, who also designed all the Bond title sequences through License to Kill. Charade doesn't have any naked women as major features of the titles, however. Oh, and if you're wondering why there's a Johnny Mercer version of the title theme in the movie, it's so it could qualify for an Academy Award for "Best Song"—you have to have lyrics to be eligible. Charade was nominated, but lost (to the well-remembered and universally loved "Call Me Irresponsible," from Papa's Delicate Condition).


• Peter Stone wrote Charade as a screenplay at first, and when it was rejected by every studio, he rewrote it as a novel (and not a very good one, by his own admission). However, it was good enough to serialize in Redbook, which got him enough attention to sell the movie rights, then resell the original script as his "adaptation" of his own novel. Another illustration of the mental real estate principle there: an original screenplay is nothing, but if it's an adaptation, well, that's something else.
  
  
• And speaking of gaming the studios, Donen and Stone only touch on this briefly, but it seems that the film was set up at Fox, went into turnaround when Grant dropped out, was picked up by Universal, and then Grant came back, much to Universal's dismay. I'm not sure, but I think Donen (who produced) may have made a great deal of money by switching studios. Unfortunately, Variety's online archives don't go back far enough to see what the deal was.
  
  
• According to the IMDB, Charade is in the public domain because of a copyright screwup at Universal. This seems borne out by the number of different editions available on Amazon, but the Criterion DVD lists it as "Under exclusive license from Universal Studios Home Video, Inc. © 1963 Universal Pictures Company, Inc. & Stanley Donen Films, Inc., All rights reserved." A little research reveals that the controversy comes down to this frame:

(Click the image for an easier to read full-resolution version).

The copyright notice in Binder's title sequence does not include the copyright symbol, "©," which was apparently required by law until 1989 for a work to be copywritten. So for a long time, anyone who wanted to release a video or DVD of Charade just had to get their hands on a print and do a transfer. This doesn't mean it was ok to copy the official Universal DVD (under separate copyright as a derivative work), and I bet the studio wouldn't have been too happy if I'd walked up wanting to "borrow" the negatives for a few days. However, recently studios have been doing all they can to remove movies from the public domain through back-door legal arguments. In the case of Charade, Universal still owns the copyright on Mancini's score, and they've taken to enforcing this claim. So it seems that for all intents an purposes, is not in the public domain any longer. Too bad, because I had a nice four disc set planned for a fall 2007 release...


• I kind of enjoyed that misleading Matthau/Hepburn still at the beginning of this essay. So here's one more, a bit of a spoiler. This is the shot in which the mastermind behind the criminal plot is revealed, as he coldheartedly orders his henchmen to murder Hepburn:


Wait for it...



Wait for it...

One of these days I'm going to write an essay about one of these movies no one is likely to watch, and every last "fact" will be completely made up.