Hitchcock's Rear Window

With Oscar night right around the corner, movies have been on my mind, and last week I happened upon a particular episode of the fabulous podcast Filmspotting, in which co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pitted Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window against his 1958 film, Vertigo. The former has long been in my top three movies of all-time (along with Avalon and Cinema Paradiso), and after watching it last spring for maybe the 20th time, I determined that it was conclusively my favorite film. I was curious to see where Adam and Josh would land on these two films, especially given that Vertigo has long been touted as one of the top two or three movies of all-time on many lists. I needn’t have worried. A few minutes in, I learned that Josh’s default answer for his favorite film has been Rear Window for quite a while.

Not that I needed the validation. I first saw the film at summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, where my fellow music nerds and I would gather in the cafeteria at night to watch movies. Rear Window and Psycho were on the docket that summer, and from that point on, I was all in. For the next half a decade or so it was all Hitchcock, all the time. I rented every movie I could find (oddly, the nearby Sentry grocery store had virtually all of Hitchcock’s 1950s films available for rental on VHS), borrowed several books from the local library (eventually purchasing the wonderful book of filmmaker François Truffaut’s interviews of Hitchcock), and eventually used my newfound knowledge to write a paper for Mrs. Kossoris’s senior English composition class. I was kind of a Hitchcock bully for a while, subjecting many friends to a movie rental night of a subpar film (Topaz and Torn Curtain come to mind) after likely forcing the critical decision at the video rental store.

My enthusiasm for Hitchcock films has been tempered only somewhat since my teenage years, mostly because I started with the best. Rear Window was the first one I saw, and it is indeed his masterpiece. Others have been a hell of a lot of fun: The Lady Vanishes, Lifeboat, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho – but nothing rises to the same level of Rear Window, not even Vertigo. That film is wonderful for its creepiness, its pacing, its dreamlike atmosphere and swirling score, not to mention the superb acting of Jimmy Stewart yet again, but there are more holes in Vertigo’s plot than there are in a Chinese checkers board. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes required when watching film, and I love Vertigo, but I never finish the movie feeling entirely satisfied, similar to how I feel after purchasing a new car and wondering if I’ve been taken by the sales guy.

With Rear Window, the only lingering feelings are those of pure delight. When I first viewed the film in 1984, I was positively captivated by Grace Kelly, enthralled with the comedic banter between her, Stewart and the amazing Thelma Ritter, and stressed out beyond belief at the film’s climax. Unfortunately, suspense can’t really be easily duplicated after multiple viewings, and though I may no longer fear for Lisa Fremont’s life when she’s caught in Lars Thorwald’s apartment, Hitchcock’s deft direction and the smart dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes keeps this movie from getting stale even after several viewings. Hayes may not be a household name – I had to look it up for this blog – but he hit the ball out of the park on this one, not just for its entertainment value, but for its larger themes of voyeurism, isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be a neighbor, issues that sadly feel as on-point today as they likely did in 1954.

Other films I’ve seen have knocked me off my feet for a variety of reasons: Broadcast News, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, Beginners, High Fidelity, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Witness for the Prosecution, The Big Short, Charade, Parasite, Holiday, Amadeus, Schindler’s List, Elf, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Searching for Sugarman, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Get Out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roman Holiday, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I Tonya, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wall*E, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tar, Finding Nemo, Fiddler on the Roof, Long Shot, Michael Clayton, Magnolia, The Great Escape, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense…

But if I had only one film to live with for the rest of my life (not counting trilogies and the like), Rear Window is tops for me.

Now, onto the 2024 Oscars!

The Film, Avalon

If pressed to name my favorite movie of all time, I’ll either answer Rear Window, Hitchock’s 1954 suspense thriller, or Avalon, Barry Levinson’s 1990 family biopic. The latter barely registered at the box office when it was released during my final semester of college, but its absence from Best Picture contention a few months later was – in my mind – a glaring omission. I thought it was cinematic perfection, the very reason we have “the movies.” It’s also the kind of film that is no longer made. But back in 1990, Levinson, riding high after his Oscar win for Rain Main two years earlier, was largely given free rein to write and direct whatever he wished, and drawing from his own childhood, he struck gold with Avalon, a tale about the fragmentation of the family – and perhaps of society itself – after the rise of television and suburbia.

My roommate Mark and I had seen a preview for the film on TV, and we decided to devote a weekday evening to watch it at the theater near the capital in Madison, Wisconsin. The addition of a couple of young women – one of whom was transporting us to and from the movie – initiated a mild debate about which film to see: Avalon or Welcome Home, Roxy Charmichael. The latter wasn’t without merit: the poster offered an enticing Winona Ryder dressed in a hot pink dress, revealing quite a lot of leg, but cooler heads prevailed, i.e., Mark and I had made our decision and we weren’t budging, a dangerous position given the potential ridicule we might have garnered if the movie was a dud. Fortunately, by film’s end, all four of us were either suppressing tears, or – in the case of one of the women we were with – outright blubbering. It was one of those movies that struck a chord, with its themes of family, loss, and legacy.

No less important than the film itself was the haunting score by Randy Newman, which, although nominated, didn’t earn Newman his first Oscar win, however deserved (he could have just as easily won for his score for Awakenings that year, but that wasn’t nominated, and his first Academy Award win wouldn’t occur for another eleven years). The music from Avalon stayed with me for months afterward, actually waking me from dreams, all without the aid of additional viewings. I’d heard the score once, and my subconscious remembered it. It was that good. 

I didn’t see the movie again until the fall of 1992, when I recorded a VHS tape it off of cable, and I purchased the soundtrack on CD around the same time, eventually transcribing some of the themes from the score into a “piano highlights” piece that I still have. Nearly thirty years later, while shopping at a record store in Columbus, Ohio, my son came across a vinyl copy of the soundtrack, and I came to learn that Reprise Records released the record in 2020 as part of its “The Sound of Movies (…and Television!)” series, a noble endeavor for the movie/vinyl enthusiast. I now own Avalon on CD, DVD and vinyl, and the movie poster adorns my basement wall. I’ve seen in probably twenty times or so, and over the years I’ve enjoyed showing it to my children and a few friends who I felt might respond well to it.

In 2015, Levinson and Newman were interviewed about the film during its 25th anniversary, and it’s well worth a read if you’re a fan of the movie or the score, or both.

Here’s hoping the movie gets more recognition in retrospect than it did upon its release.

The Year of the Small Movie

If you like “small” films, 2020 was your year.  Next week the 93rd Academy Awards will take place – with people present, no less – celebrating the movies of 2020, a strange year in so many ways that it seems fitting that the film industry wasn’t exempt.  With theaters closed or sparsely attended in 2020, many movies were held back for release in 2021 or were released with little fanfare on streaming services.  I missed seeing previews – often the biggest indicator for me on what to see – and instead had to trust that I was getting wind of good films despite abbreviated or non-existent theatrical runs. Ultimately, I watched twenty-two movies released in 2020, including all eight Best Picture nominees, and while many of them were really good, the mood and feel of many of them were – for lack of a better word – “small.”  I was struck with a maddening desire to watch some honest-to-goodness plot-twisting Hollywood creations, words I never thought I’d utter. 

In 2018 when I saw The Florida Project, I was blown away.  I wrote then, “The Florida Project is one of those rare films that I gravitate toward – short on plot, long on characters and realistic slices of life.”  And while that’s still true, it turns out that if you watch a dozen Florida Project-type films in a row, suddenly small slices of life don’t seem so novel anymore.  In fact, they can seem downright infuriating.

In quick succession I watched Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, The Forty-Year Old Version, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Dig, Malcolm & Marie, Sound of Metal, Supernova, Nomadland, Minari, First Cow and The Father.  Goodness.  Some of those films are excellent – of these, I liked One Night in Miami and The Forty-Year Old Version best – but by the end of that run I was practically begging for a plot.  A development.  A murder.  Something!  Something more than two guys surreptitiously milking a cow!  Too much of a good thing can in fact be too much of a good thing.

In the midst of all of these films, my wife and I also watched Promising Young Woman and Judas and the Black Messiah, and both of these nailed it.  Excellent films, and for us, a breath of fresh air to kick off the dust of our plotless movie run.  Sadly, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and The Forty-Year Old Version garnered no Oscar nominations, and One Night In Miami was ignored for Best Picture and Director.  That’s the way these awards shows always go.

But when reviewing this year’s films to last year’s, it seems like a lifetime ago when we were cheering on Parasite, Ford V Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (plus Uncut Gems and Knives Out), a better batch of films than this year’s, in my opinion.  I’m holding out hope that the 94th Academy Awards will celebrate a terrific set of movies both small and large.

3 Books on Filmmakers

You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life.  It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution.  I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer.  Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years.  The book is also a lens into how films are made.  How?  Almost always painstakingly.  Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all.  Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed. 

Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born.  His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress.  Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time.  First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.”  Namely, maids and butlers.  I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.

If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios.  Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.

Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result).  Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy.  Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)

But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix.  But wait…there’s more!  You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life.  Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.

I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years.  If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking.  I wish he’d rectify this habit.  But hey, he writes better than I do!

I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.

Things to Watch, Read and Listen

Keeping track of TV shows, movies and books used to be a fairly easy task, but with today’s segmentation of markets and the sheer volume of media being produced (just looking at TV, there were approximately 495 scripted original series in 2018), relying on word-of-mouth has never been more important or more overwhelming.  Each time someone recommends a show or book or whatever to me, I text it to myself and compile a list that I keep near the TV, but I’ll never get to most the recommendations;  there’s simply too much out there to wrap one’s arms around.  I have a list of twenty shows to watch, fifty movies to view, fifteen books to read, twenty-five bands to listen to, and another half a dozen podcasts to explore.  This is in addition to the pile of unread books I already own and the podcasts I listen to regularly. 

In the spirit of offering more than you can handle, I thought I’d share just a few things I’ve come across lately that might be worth your time. 

WATCH

• The loss of romantic comedies from movie theaters has been lamented for some time, though apparently not enough for Hollywood studios to actually produce them.  But there is hope for the hopeless romantic.  Amazon has released Season 1 (8 episodes) of Modern Love, an anthology series based on a column in The New York Times, and has already renewed the series for another season.  I can’t vouch for all eight episodes, but the first two were excellent, with smart writing and directing, mostly by John Carney of Once and Sing Street.  The episodes clock in at under half an hour, which might almost be too snappy to tell compelling tales consistently, but so far so good.

• If you haven’t already checked out Ken Burns’s latest documentary Country Music on PBS, I urge you to do so.  Like all of his material, it requires a degree of dedication you might not be accustomed to – the series runs about sixteen hours – but it’s a rewarding ride.  I’m not much of a country fan, but I’ve learned a lot during the first four episodes, and with Spotify at my side, I’ve been able to explore many of the artists even further.  There’s something to be said for technology.

READ

• As if there weren’t enough music rabbit holes to fall into, Tom Breihan of Stereogum has embarked on the monumental task of listening to and writing about every #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 track hit from 1958 to the present.  Word-of-mouth failed me with this endeavor, because I just found out about it a month ago as a fluke, and Breihan is already into 1977, but that’s not a band place to start, as 1977-1982 is my sweet spot for music.  The first song I clicked on was Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light,” and I figured I’d read a few paragraphs about the track.  But no, Breihan writes extensively about each song, providing some history and context, offering links to other versions of the songs, and rating each song he covers, which makes this blog a little more thought-provoking than many.  When he mentioned how much he hates “Hotel California” the comments section went ballistic, but that to me is half the fun.  A great read.

LISTEN

Measured by time, I listen to podcasts more than any other medium – even music.  I have my usual suspects – WTF with Marc Maron, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Freakonomics, Radiolab – but here are two that I’ve added to my arsenal this year:

• Unspooled.  If you like movies, this is a fun podcast that covers one movie a week from the AFI list of Top 100 Films.  Hosted by actor Paul Scheer and critic Amy Nicholson, this weekly discussion has inspired me to fill in the gaps of some of my own viewing (my daughter Sarah has now watched 93 of the top 100 – I’m probably somewhere in the 60s). Paul and Amy are not the most eloquent speakers – I keep wanting them to live up to the standard that Siskel and Ebert set – but I like that they’re challenging the status quo and questioning whether the old boys club that supports mainly male-centric films from the 1970s needs to be upended (spoiler: it does).  They’ve also recommended some terrific books – most notably Making Movies by Sidney Lumet and Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder.  Both brilliant.

• My friend Michael Stoller has produced a podcast called My Blueprint, an exploration of various issues pertaining to growing as a human being.  These are snappy episodes of under ten minutes, and the few I’ve listened to so far are terrific.  Stoller doesn’t shy away from providing specific examples from his own life and touching on topics that affect all of us, and I walk away with just a little something to ponder as I go about my day.

So there you are!  Add them to the list so you can feel just as overwhelmed as I do!