Modern life is increasingly difficult for Harry Lehman (John Turturro), whose lifelong pickpocketing career doesn’t yield the same profits it used to in the present year of 2026, where everyone’s money is digital and their consumer electronics are easily trackable and difficult to fleece. Estranged from his daughter Kelly (Tatiana Maslany), he spends his days on the streets and in the subways trying to get together enough money to cover medical expenses for his comatose second wife, Rose. When he manages to lift a set of keys off of a young punk named Dylan (Will Price, who plays Tim Robinson’s son on The Chair Company) driving a classic car, he empties out a duffel with some cash and a USB drive, which he recognizes as a computer gadget but doesn’t know anything else about. When his regular fence Ben (Steve Buscemi) plugs it into the pawn shop’s computer, neither of the old men understand that they’ve managed to tip off the drive’s owner to their location or that they’ve got their hands on a crypto wallet worth close to a million dollars. By the time Dylan shows up to Ben’s shop and ransacks it looking for the crypto drive, it’s already been hawked to Ben’s counterpart in Chinatown, forcing Harry to go on a trek to get it back before Dylan, who turns out to be the scion of a mafia family, kills Rose.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is an elegy for a lost era and a lost city, which it telegraphs from its opening moments, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” It also feels as if it’s drawing inspiration from the 1974 film Harry and Tonto (down to the main character’s name), which was also about a New Yorker experiencing late in life alienation from the city that had been his home for his entire life, and whose situation leads him to a single, meaningful encounter with his estranged daughter. While Art Carney’s Harry goes on an emotionally uplifting journey where we join him in finding a place in a changing world, Pickpocket is a much more bittersweet narrative, as we know from the moment that Ben reveals that Dylan’s family is connected to organized crime that Turturro’s Harry’s days are numbered. Everywhere he goes, Harry Lehman encounters others of his generation who are unable to keep up with the times. His friendly-but-antagonistic relationship with soon-to-retire detective Allen Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) is marked by a mutual respect, but Warren has also been relegated to a basement desk because he “can’t be retrained” for cybercrime; Ben is useless with computers and requires assistance from his granddaughter Eve (Victoria Moroles) for anything more advanced than checking his emails; the crime boss who is Dylan’s grandmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) expresses the same hesitancy about crypto currency as Harry does for cell phones, and is ultimately right to be concerned. The world of crime that they all know and can contemplate, theft on a scale from petty to grand, no longer exists.
The key difference between Dylan and Harry is that for the former, crime is a business. At one point, Dylan complains that his family doesn’t respect that he’s trying to bring them into the twenty-first century by lamenting that they can’t send him off to an Ivy League school and then get annoyed that he’s committed to “first concepts.” For the latter, crime is a way of life. Harry doesn’t moralize his way of “earning” a living, he just does the only thing that he knows how to do, acting as part of a larger economic ecosystem. Dylan is established early on as a fad chaser, as he orders a drink because he was inspired by an influencer and ends up hating it. As the bartender says, nine thousand likes on the video he saw does not translate to nine thousand people trying the drink. This scene also establishes something important about how the two men approach their business; Dylan is loud, flashy, and trendy, and only gets away with what he does because of his family connections, while Harry’s entire mode of being revolves around being unnoticed, quiet, and unassuming, and his line of work ultimately cost him his family. Neither is a particularly good way to live, but it ends up proving easier for an old dog to learn a couple of new tricks than it is for a young buck to learn not to run his mouth; if Dylan hadn’t been so concerned with showing off his smart watch and all of its features to Harry, then Harry would never have had the small victory that he does in the end. Although this could lead to the film feeling too reactionary in a “it’s the children who are wrong” way, the narrative smartly balances Dylan’s arrogance by including both Ben’s aforementioned granddaughter and a young pickpocket that Harry catches in the middle of a lift and briefly mentors.
Turturro is quite good here, although this is such an undemanding role that an actor of his talent could sleepwalk through it (which Curtis does in her single scene). The film goes out of its way to show you that Harry is very talented at what he does. Lock-picking, palm-greasing, and wallet-lifting come to him as easily as breathing; it’s just that those skills aren’t relevant in a more modern world. As such, the film also feels like a comment on the decline of the power of labor in the modern age. Turturro is fun even if he’s not being challenged as an artist, and he and Buscemi have an easy natural chemistry that ensure the film is worth checking out just to see the two of them spend some time together, if nothing else. If one had to choose between Buscemi’s performances in Wild Horse Nine and Pickpocket, his nomination for best supporting actor should be for this one. I’ll admit to some bias because I adore her, but Maslany is the real standout for me here. She fulfills the same role that Ellen Burstyn did in Harry and Tonto as the daughter that our main character has let down too many times. The dialogue is rote and a little trite—”I go to a real job [for my family],” “My family doesn’t get bologna sandwiches from a food bank while I’m waiting for a bond ticket,” etc.—but Maslany is magnificent and wrings pathos from the tired tropes anyway because she’s just that good.
Carefully riding the line between conservative movies that your dad would like because old salts get the upper hand over young upstarts and a lo-fi heist picture, this is one to check out, although it’s not going to be one that you need to rush out to theaters to see on the big screen.
There’s a woman with whom I attended school who had the misfortune of enduring multiple childhood brain tumors. She was still quite smart, and although she was severely awkward, this was a magnet school, so she wasn’t that much weirder than the institutional average. I did figure she’d grow out of that like most people do, but when we reconnected years later, she was still stuck in a state of emotional immaturity. Although the reasons for her inability to connect with others on the same level were recognizably clinical, it wasn’t difficult to see how those without knowledge of her past would sometimes find her company off-putting, and as fellow Louisiana expats in Texas, I unsuccessfully tried to integrate her into my friend group. She departed for parts unknown during the first year of COVID, and when I think about her now what I remember most was how uncanny she looked when she smiled. Her brain simply didn’t produce neurochemicals in a typical way, and as such she didn’t naturally smile or frown; these facial movements were clearly practiced in a mirror to better fit in, and witnessing a smile that never reaches the eyes can be unnerving. Elizabeth Holmes is the same, but my high school classmate didn’t commit mass fraud and negligence (that I know of).
You Can See Everything is directed by Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Primetime) and Nathan Fielder, a graduate of one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades. Following on the success of his Comedy Central TV series Nathan for You, which was at once both a Bar Rescue/Kitchen Nightmares style “save the floundering business” reality show and a satirization of the same featuring Nathan concocting outlandish schemes, Fielder went to Showtime and HBO, where he conceived The Curse and The Rehearsal, respectively. Both are two of the most fascinating and bizarre pieces of art of this century, blending surreality, human interest stories, and psychological manipulation. As time goes on, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell where the lines lie between Fielder the person, Fielder the documentarian, and Fielder the subject. If Fielder ever became as notorious as Holmes and a Dropout-style TV series were made about him, and (even less likely) he ever dropped his public persona (if that’s even what it is), I can conceive of how he might respond to the question of how he felt about it the way that Holmes allegedly did when asked about Amanda Seyfried: “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
That quotation bears significant relevance on You Can See Everything, as it seems to be the one issue that Holmes is hung up on, and it is admittedly a potential key to her entire puzzling deal. Holmes makes a great number of claims about herself, many of them spurious at best: that she was never in tech for the money and was always altruistic in her desire to make medical testing more widely available, that she doesn’t feel that she did anything wrong, that she has never lied in her adult life. They cannot possibly be objectively true, but could this possibly be her truth? Is she simply delusional? At a pivotal juncture in the film’s first half, Holmes’s partner Billy Evans tries to make the case that Holmes’s contemporaneous claims of what the Theranos machine “can” do during her girlboss heyday wasn’t an attempt at deception but part of a larger fundamental gap between how Holmes thinks/speaks and how everyone else interprets her. To that end, Fielder shows the couple the classic Abbot & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine, and observes Holmes, who seems to laugh not because she finds something funny, but because she’s conditioned herself to laugh when others are laughing. When questioned, she can’t identify what is funny about the routine, and Nathan has to spell out for her that the joke is that a player has the unlikely surname of “Who.” When is she pretending—when she says that to her there was no difference between verbalizing “Theranos can do X, Y, and Z” and “At some point in the future Theranos could theoretically do X, Y, and Z,” or when she misses the point of the most famous comic banter of all time? Is it all just playing a character she created? I can’t conceive of why Elizabeth Holmes and her husband would think that Fielder would be the ideal person to document her final weeks before going to federal prison; it makes no sense. But I can see why Fielder would take the job.
I was fortunate enough to go into this film without being spoiled by some of the more unusual metatextual jumps that it eventually makes. There are elemental, recurring ideas in Fielder’s work that, in retrospect, I should have expected, but even if you guess he’s going to do some Rehearsal-esque stuff, I would not have guessed who he was going to involve in his scheme. It leads to some of the film’s best material, especially as the surprise star of the second half manages to embody what you would expect from a more standard documentary treatment, balancing empathy for Holmes against recrimination for her, and when Nathan starts to become a little too charmed by Holmes, it’s this person who sees through it. One could criticize the film (or Fielder through it, as the man and the text are inextricably intertwined) for being too empathetic for Holmes at certain points, as You Can See Everything isn’t really about her; it’s about Evans, which we should have known from the beginning since it’s his image that we open on. Holmes departs the movie at the halfway point to begin her term in federal prison in Bryan, Texas, at which point we jump ahead two years to where we find Evans firmly ensconced in tech bro culture in Austin: operating out of a WeWork, shooting automatic rifles at the weapons range, and creating deepfakes of his incarcerated partner while various reptiles slither and slip about the room.
Holmes and Evans are a match made in hell. She trusts him fully and completely, and he is a control freak who can’t even let her scramble eggs without intervening. He makes deals on her behalf (maybe), has taken over Holmes’s online presence by providing proof of his power of attorney over her to Twitter, and accepts the nonconsensual generation of AI porn of Holmes as an inevitability that he chooses to profit off of. Despite all of this, he and Holmes seem to remain completely simpatico, up to and including describing their love for one another with the same faux-poetic narrative. It’s bizarre. Is everyone just playing characters that they’ve created? Is anyone real, ever?
I’m not sure what You Can See Everything is—documentary of a criminal, confession of a voyeur, character study of a master manipulator (or two?), or docufiction of a woman with no sense of reality. It’s both earnest and detached; it’s damning, and sometimes surprisingly sweet. For now, I’ll settle for “utterly engrossing.”
For ten seasons, across both NBC and CBS, Alfred Hitchcock hosted 361 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with the final three seasons billed as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as the show’s time slot was extended. This was an anthology series that, in the director’s own words in the introduction to the sixth season premiere, told “homey little stories of an unusual nature,” often about “crime as practiced by ordinary people, like the people next door.” For the most part, I would describe each episode as a two-act play with a twist (two twists if you’re lucky), with about three cast members and two sets, not counting the opening and closing segments with Hitchcock himself. Over the course of my many years on this earth, I’ve probably seen most of the half hour episodes; Hour was not as widely syndicated, although I have seen it pop up from time to time on MeTV late at night, since that channel usually programs an hour long block of Presents anyway. As you can imagine, there are only so many stories that can be told in this format, and many of them start to run together—I can’t tell you how many of them revolve around a nephew with debts learning he’s set to inherit some money and coming up with a murderous scheme—but there are still a lot of original ideas and concepts. Hitchcock’s onscreen involvement in every episode, as he introduces and closes out each one, led many to believe that he was very involved behind the scenes, but this wasn’t really the case. Over the decade it was on air, Hitchcock directed a total of eighteen episodes, and like the show as a whole, they run the gamut from awful to excellent. I rewatched them all to see which ones would be worth recommending to fans of his work in the lead-up to my ranking of his features, and for each, I’ve also recommended a film from his catalog that best pairs with the episode, for thematic, casting, or narrative reasons.
“Revenge” – 3.5 stars
Season One, Episode One, aired October 2, 1955
Synopsis: The premiere episode. Ralph Meeker (who would later appear in The Night Stalker alongside Psycho alum Simon Oakland) plays a man who comes home one day to discover that his provocative new wife, played by Vera Miles, has been sexually assaulted. The police offer little help or reassurance, so the couple leaves the area. Husband slays the man his wife points out as her attacker, only for her to point to another man and make the same claim, clearly traumatized to the point that she sees her assailant in every man.
Pairing: The Vera Miles connection might lend itself to pairing this with Psycho, but there’s a later episode that’s better suited; as such, the “Vera Miles has a breakdown” element is best reflected in The Wrong Man.
“Breakdown” – 4 stars
Season One, Episode Seven, aired November 13, 1955
Synopsis: Joseph Cotten (who had previously collaborated with Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and Under Capricorn) portrays a callous business executive who finds himself paralyzed but completely conscious following a car accident. Originally unmoved and even disgusted by an employee’s tearful reaction to being laid off, the man is only able to alert the morgue attendant that he is alive by shedding a tear, after several unfortunate things happen to his presumed-dead body.
Pairing: I’d joke that this one would pair well with Under Capricorn, as Cotten is only slightly less wooden here as an apparent corpse than he is in that stinker, but I cannot recommend that film in good conscience, or even in jest. Instead, I’ll provide a “Further Reading” instead and direct you to the audio version of Stephen King’s short story “Autopsy Room Four,” which references this episode and is very well narrated by Oliver Platt.
“The Case of Mr. Pelham” – 1 star
Season One, Episode Ten, aired December 4, 1955
Synopsis: Feels more like a (boring) Twilight Zone than an episode of AHP, as this is more of an existential story of terror with a seemingly supernatural twist. Tom Ewell (the titular Mr. Pelham) finds that everywhere he goes, people tell him that he just left, and that he was a good hang. Pelham eventually starts wearing an outlandish tie to differentiate him from his doppelganger, only for no one to believe him because he would never wear such a thing. Can you hear the sad trombone noise?
Pairing:Vertigo, given the overall theme of double identity.
“Back for Christmas” – 3 stars
Season One, Episode Twenty-Three, aired March 4, 1956
Synopsis: British Herbert Carpenter (John Williams) and his overly fussy wife Hermione (Isobel Elsom) promise their friends they’ll be back from America for the holidays, but then Herbert kills her and buries her in the basement he has been excavating under the guise of digging himself a wine cellar. Stateside, he establishes a cover story about the two separating and prepares to settle into a new life, until he receives a letter indicating that his wife has hired someone to finish the wine cellar as a Christmas gift while he’s away; the discovery of her body now inevitable.
Pairing: With Dial M for Murder, where Williams plays the magnetic detective rather than the killer.
“Wet Saturday” – 3.5 stars
Season Two, Episode One, aired September 30, 1956
Synopsis: Mr. Princey (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) is a well-to-do patriarch whose daughter has just slain the local schoolmaster in a fit of rage because he’s marrying someone else. Luckily, John Williams stumbles into the house at just the right time to be framed for it, comically.
Pairing: With Rope, where Hardwicke gets a strong turn as the father of the victim rather than the perpetrator.
“Mr. Blanchard’s Secret” – 1.5 stars
Season Two, Episode Thirteen, aired December 23, 1956
Synopsis: Amateur mystery writer Babs Fenton (Mary Scott) annoys the hell out of her long-suffering husband when she concludes that their neighbor has murdered his wife. Her insistence on creating bizarre fictions about the neighbors continues even after she meets the (living) Mrs. Blanchard. One of the more frustrating episodes: the comedy isn’t funny, and the mystery, such as it is, has no real resolution.
Pairing: The episode is clearly a parodic homage to Rear Window, which this would pair well with, but I would recommend avoiding this entry altogether. Mary Scott appeared in three other episodes of the series, all of which are top tier: “Crackpot,” directed by TV stalwart John Meredyth Lucas and featuring a genuinely frightening performance from Robert Emhardt; “Safety for the Witness,” directed by Norman Lloyd and starring Art Carney; and “The Diplomatic Corpse,” directed by Paul Henreid (Dead Ringer) and starring Peter Lorre. Any one of them is a better time than “Mr. Blanchard’s Secret.”
“One More Mile to Go” – 5 stars
Season Two, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 7, 1957
Synopsis: David Wayne (who starred in the 1951 Americanization of Fritz Lang’s M and portrayed the Mad Hatter on the Adam West Batman series) who impulsively kills his wife; his attempts to get rid of the body are hampered by a broken tail light and an overly helpful motorcycle cop. Possibly the best episode of the series, the first half is entirely without dialogue and relies solely on the image for suspense. The clearest demonstration of Hitchcock using the series as a proving ground for things he would include in later films, as the movie presages Psycho in many ways.
Season Three, Episode Three, aired October 20, 1957
Synopsis: Stars Vincent Price as an expert homicide detective who keeps a memento from each of his great cases on display, reserving the center spot for “the perfect crime.” He receives a visit from a defense attorney (James Gregory) who claims he can prove that Price sent an innocent man to the electric chair. It’s fine if you want to see a fun Price performance in an otherwise boring package, but you don’t need this episode for that; we have it in abundance elsewhere.
Pairing:Rebecca, although not for any thematic reasons. Price kills the attorney and uses his remains to create a ceramic vase, with Hitch’s closing narration performing its standard censor-addressing concerns by saying that the crime was discovered when a charwoman knocked the piece over, and cites this as the reason why cleaning women are always breaking vases. That a piece of the late Mrs. de Winter’s ceramic decor was broken (and a housekeeper blamed) is a plot element in Rebecca. I admit this is a stretch, but my other nomination was Marnie based solely on the fact that James Gregory appeared in the original series Star Trek episode “Dagger of the Mind” and that Marnie actress Mariette Hartley was in “All Our Yesterdays,” which is even more belabored.
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – 5 stars
Season Three, Episode Twenty-Eight, aired April 13, 1958
Synopsis: Pregnant Mary Maloney (Barbara Bel Geddes) is in a state of shock when her policeman husband comes home and tells her he intends to leave her. She knocks him out with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks it; when the police come to investigate, they eat the murder weapon. This is perhaps the most well known episode of the show; when the series came to TV Land when I was a young teenager, there was a weekend long marathon that began not with the premiere, but with “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The narrative is also well known because the short story, written by Raold Dahl, is frequently anthologized. An absolute master work from start to finish.
Pairing: Bel Geddes’s only Hitchcock film was Vertigo and that’s already taken, as is Rope, the other big “evidence in plain sight” narrative from the director. Given the dearth of Hitchcock/Bel Geddes feature content, I’d instead recommend that you just do a marathon of all four AHP episodes she appeared in, although I would place them in a different order than release date (and only this one was directed by Hitchcock). Start with the Arthur Hiller-directed “The Morning of the Bride” from season four, a kind of Bluebeard story in which Bel Geddes learns an awful truth about her new husband, then watch “Slaughter.” Follow that up with “The Foghorn” from season three, based on the Gertrude Atherton short story, and close out with “Sybilla” from season six, directed by Ida Lupino.
“Dip in the Pool” – 4 stars
Season Three, Episode Thirty-Five, aired June 1, 1958
Synopsis: Hitch’s second Roald Dahl adaptation. Keenan Wynn (Dr. Strangelove) plays boorish American William Botibol who is on a cruise with his wife to a tightly budgeted European tour. He learns from stock broker Renshaw (Philip Bourneuf) about a shipboard lottery that revolves around the daily distance the ship travels and wagers too much when he believes he has insider information. When he’s poised to lose it all, he resolves to juke the odds by “accidentally” falling off of the ship so that it has to stop and retrieve him. Unfortunately, he makes the wrong choice of eyewitness. Fay Wray has a minor role as Renshaw’s wife. Doreen Lang plays the woman whose nurse disbelieves her about Botibol going overboard; one wishes she had been similarly disbelieved when she falsely identified Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man. (She’s also the hysterical woman in the diner in The Birds.)
Pairing: Pair with Lifeboat for a fully on-the-seas adventure.
“Poison” – 4.5 stars
Season Four, Episode One, aired October 5, 1958
Synopsis: Another Roald Dahl adaptation, this time of a story that served as an allegory about the venomous effect the Raj had on India. The episode opens on James Donald as Harry Pope, a man paralyzed with fear when Timber Woods (Wendell Corey, who played Jimmy Stewart’s cop buddy in Rear Window) arrives to find him in bed, claiming that there is a venomous krait snake asleep on his chest, beneath the sheets. Effectively tense as Woods menaces the helpless, sweaty Pope, who is shot in glorious chiaroscuro, even though the conflict itself is less than satisfactory.
Season Four, Episode Twenty-Nine, aired May 3, 1959
Synopsis: John Williams is a retired detective who has arranged to gaslight a suspect in a murder he could never solve, who happens to be the old AHP archetype of the nephew who killed his rich aunt. On the anniversary of her death, the detective gathers a few friends and makes the nephew believe he is witnessing his aunt’s ghost, but after he confesses, the actress hired to play her arrives, implying the ghost was real. Conceptually fun, but the spectral element drags on in order to reach the minimum run time.
Pairing:Family Plot, which also involves some phoney paranormal phenomena that may be more real than believed.
“Arthur” – 3.5 stars
Season Five, Episode One, aired September 27, 1959
Synopsis: New Zealand poultry farmer Arthur (The Manchurian Candidate himself Laurence Harvey) addresses the audience directly and tells us about how he murdered his ex-fiance (frequent “Poe Cycle” Roger Corman collaborator Hazel Court) when she tried to come back to him after a failed marriage. Slyly funny, especially with Harvey camping it up and breaking the fourth wall. Improves in the second half once the cat-and-mouse games with the police begin.
Pairing: With The Birds, given Hazel Court’s unfortunate fate.
“The Crystal Trench” – 1.5 stars
Season Five, Episode Two, aired October 4, 1959
Synopsis: A story of wasted obsession: Mark Cavendish (James Donald) spends decades waiting for a woman (Patricia Owens, The Fly) whose husband dies on a mountain climbing expedition and who resolves to wait forty years until his body emerges from the ice. When it finally does, Mark discovers a locket around the corpse’s neck, which contains a photo of a different woman. Conceptually interesting and traffics in Hitchcock’s frequent theme of fixations, but the overwrought dialogue about “preserving the roses of summer” paired with a preposterous plot make for a late-in-the-game miss.
Synopsis: Mrs. Bixby (Audrey Meadows, aka “Straight to the moon” Alice from The Honeymooners) gets dumped by the retired colonel with whom she’s been having an affair while claiming to visit her elderly aunt. As a parting gift, he gives her a mink coat that she’ll never be able to explain to her husband; she schemes to pawn the coat temporarily and pretend to find the ticket for it in a cab. Her husband goes to claim it and comes back with a cheap stole, and Mrs. Bixby spots her coat on Dr. Bixby’s secretary.
Pairing: With Marnie, as the scheme Mrs. Bixby concocts reminds one of Marnie’s complex plans to hide the money that she’s stolen.
“The Horseplayer” – 4 stars
Season Six, Episode 22, aired March 14, 1961
Synopsis: Father Amion (Claude Rains)’s church’s roof needs extensive repair. Parishioner Sheridan is on a winning streak at the horse races and attributes his success to his newfound interest in prayer, and shows his appreciation when the collection basket comes around. Amion resists the temptation to follow Sheridan’s lead for a time but finally makes a bet himself, leading to a crisis of faith. Admonished by the bishop, he is told to pray that his horse will not win; the prayer is answered, but in an unlikely way. Cinematically on par with the director’s film work, elevated by Rains’s performance.
Pairing: With I Confess!, which also follows a priest struggling to navigate his spiritual and personal needs.
“Bang! You’re Dead” – 5 stars
Season Seven, Episode Two, aired October 17, 1961
Synopsis: Most like The Wrong Man in that this episode takes the form of an “issue” picture. Billy Mumy’s uncle comes to visit and leaves his revolver laying about carelessly, where the cowboy-obsessed little boy finds it and carries it with him all over town, pointing the gun at passersby who play along with him, completely unaware that they’re staring down the barrel of a real deadly weapon. It’s fantastically tense, with a standout sequence where the boy follows the family’s domestic help Cleo (Juanita Moore of Imitation of Life fame) with the gun in first person perspective. Haunting!
Pairing: With Sabotage, for the real and present danger to a child.
“I Saw the Whole Thing” – 2.5 stars
Season Eight (now The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), Episode Four, aired October 11, 1962
Synopsis: On the day following a hit and run accident, Michael Barnes (John Forsythe, thankfully much less obnoxious here than in The Trouble With Harry) goes to a police station and tells the officer on duty that it was his car that was involved. Five eyewitnesses claim the car never stopped before colliding with a motorcycle, and Barnes fears that if his wife learns about the trial she will miscarry, for the third time. Like most episodes of Hour that I have seen, the plot is a bit belabored; by the end of the scene in which Barnes has broken down the testimony of the first witness called to the stand, you already know that you’re going to have to watch this same thing happen four more times. The twist (that it was Barnes’s wife driving) is fine, and a concise version of this story in half an hour on Presents would likely have been quite good. I may have simply been out of patience by the time we got here, but this is a forgettable hour of television.
Pairing: With Murder!, Hitch’s first film to include elements of the courtroom drama.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how wonderfully bizarre it is that Yorgos Lanthimos is now an award-winning, crowd-pleasing auteur célèbre, when just a few years ago he was considered one of cinema’s cruelest basement-dwelling freaks. No one was watching Lanthimos’s sociopathic incest thriller Dogtooth and thinking, yes, this man will soon be nominated for major-category Oscars on an annual basis. Recent titles like The Favourite, Poor Things, and Bugonia have earned the Greek filmmaker enough of a cultural foothold that his influence is starting to show in other directors’ work, though, whereas earlier efforts like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer were so singular in their distanced, self-delighted cruelty that they were peerless to the point of feeling otherworldly. Signaling this new paradigm, the fairy-tale romcom Wicker is loudly & proudly Lanthimosian in its tone: playing flat, affectless human cruelty for farcical humor in a way that’s unmistakably indebted to the director’s signature style. It’s also a much cozier, gentler picture than anything Lanthimos has ever directed himself, repurposing his alien viewpoint on everyday social rituals for something that can be sincerely, sweetly romantic.
In genre terms, Wicker is a monsterfucker romcom. Olivia Colman stars as a medieval fisherwoman who’s shunned from everyday social rituals by the younger, prettier women in her village who don’t reek of fish. Annoyed by her designated role as the town spinster & punchline, she commissions a magically gifted basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to weave her a husband of her own whom she can parade about town to spite her many nemeses. The basket salesman over-delivers on the deal, crafting her the most handsome, devoted, virile husband the village has ever seen, as voiced & embodied by Alexander Skarsgård under a layer of interwoven prosthetics. The unlikely interspecies newlyweds canoodle, fuck, and promenade in such a cartoonishly loving fashion that it drives their fellow villagers mad with jealousy, none more so than the queen-bitch tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki). The ads for Wicker sell it as a ribald sex comedy, but it’s ultimately much sweeter and more restrained than all that, functioning more as a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale than as sincere erotica. Plenty of fan fiction is already being written on the subject, though, I’m sure, as Skarsgård’s basket man makes for the perfect himbo arm candy no matter what material he’s made of.
To Wicker‘s credit, it doesn’t borrow Lanthimos’s dry humor just for the sake of it; it serves a clear thematic purpose. Lanthimos’s movies always have a way of examining everyday social rituals from a distanced perspective that makes them look absurdly arbitrary, whether they be the rituals of familial life in Dogtooth or the rituals of romantic courtship in The Lobster or the rituals of office-work hierarchy in Kinds of Kindness or so on. For its part, Wicker takes a distanced, outsider look at the rituals of a traditional marriage and finds them as inhumanly arbitrary & absurd as any uncanny behavior in a proper Lanthimos film. It portrays marriage as a never-ending series of self-imposed social rituals, with the small European village where it’s set having developed its own variations on marital traditions that stray only a few steps away from the ongoing absurdity of modern social behavior. Instead of a bride being marked as her husband’s property with a shiny wedding ring, she is ceremonially collared with a giant ornate shackle that clamps around her throat. Instead of tossing a bouquet to expectant maidens, she distributes wicker eggs that explode into puffs of colored powder, à la gender-reveal announcement parties. Instead of the husband enjoying one final night of sexual freedom before marriage at the local strip bar, he is costumed with a strap-on carrot that’s ceremonially eaten by a goat, signifying his loss of manhood. It’s all very silly, and none of it is entirely foreign to the way we actually celebrate modern weddings.
Things get a little more serious inside the wicker man & stinky fisherwoman household, where the more private, routine rituals of married life are portrayed as natural & worthwhile. Colman & Skarsgård’s physically mismatched lovers are sincerely, demonstrably affectionate towards each other, which is a difficult sentiment to come by in a proper Lanthimos film. Most of the dramatic crises that arise are a result of outsiders’ petty jealousy for their mutual affection, while everyone else’s marriages appear to be primarily practical unions in commerce & sexual reproduction. This is a town where everyone’s personhood is defined by their occupation, after all, known only by names like Fisherwoman, Butcher, Butcher’s Wife, Tailor, Tailor’s Wife, and so on. Even Skarsgård’s wicker husband is eventually known by the name Fisherfucker, since sexually pleasing his wife appears to be his most productive daily endeavor. If the movie has any recognizable value of its own outside its extension of Lanthimosian anthropology to a new social ritual, it’s all in the convincingly magical quality of that wicker Fisherfucker’s screen presence, which is just as mesmerizing to the viewer as it is to his fellow villagers. He’s an incredible creature-feature specimen, mixing practical prosthetic applications with post-production touchups that allow specks of sunlight to shine through his sexy wicker body. He is also, quite literally, perfect husband material, and the core of the movie’s heart & humor rests in the way pointless societal pressures fuck that perfect scenario up for his loving wife.
Although my journey through the Alfred Hitchcock oeuvre has not been strictly linear or chronological, I decided to save his final film for my final review. It’s a pretty good one to go out on, even if I have to disagree with Roger Ebert, who wrote in his review of Family Plot that “it’s a delight for two contradictory reasons: because it’s pure Hitchcock, with its meticulous construction and attention to detail, and because it’s something new for Hitchcock—a macabre comedy.” He’s wrong on the latter account because this wasn’t the director’s first foray into overt comedy, as the disastrous The Trouble With Harry had premiered two decades earlier, and with regards to the former, there’s nothing about it that’s quintessentially Hitchcock. It’s a good movie, but it’s also one that feels like it could have been helmed by virtually anyone.
Phony psychic Blanche (Barbara Harris) makes her living using information that her cab driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) digs up about her clients. As the film opens, she’s just landed a potential whale; elderly spinster and sole heir to a great fortune Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) has asked Blanche to find her long-lost nephew, an illegitimate child that she forced her sister to give up for adoption to avoid scandal some forty years prior. Rainbird hopes the younger woman’s psychic prowess will avert the kind of attention that private eyes and newspaper announcements would stir up. As the pair of con-artist lovebirds depart her mansion, they almost run over a woman in a long overcoat and sunglasses (Karen Black); we later learn her name is Fran, and the story follows her for a time as she strides into a police station and accepts delivery of a ransom in the form of a gigantic diamond. Without speaking a word, she directs a waiting helicopter pilot to the location where a kidnapped businessman is awaiting rescue, and she absconds with the brains of the operation, a seemingly respectable jeweler named Arthur Adamson (William Devane). George does some great amateur gumshoe work and eventually tracks down the missing Rainbird heir, who was adopted under the name Edward Shoebridge, only to learn that the man supposedly died in a fire in 1950 alongside his adoptive parents, but there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
The production of this film was troubled. Initially, Hitchcock hired Anthony Shaffer to pen the screenplay. Shaffer was on a run of hits at the time, having drafted Hitch’s Frenzyand the stellar Laurence Olivier/Michael Caine two-hander Sleuth, both released in 1972, and had followed those up with 1973’s The Wicker Man and Murder on the Orient Express, which was the first of four Hercule Poirot adaptations he would write over the course of fifteen years (including Death on the Nile). Allegedly, while Shaffer was out of the country on holiday, his agent made excessive demands of the production, which led Hitch to instead enlist Ernest Lehman, who had collaborated with the director seventeen years earlier on North by Northwest. Hitchcock’s health was in decline at the time, and he suffered a heart attack that required the surgical implantation of a pacemaker in late 1974, but in later interviews, Lehman remarked that the man was already diminished even before this, such that he stated that during early story meetings he no longer wanted “to do creative battle with this legendary and physically weakened man.” Behind-the-scenes material found on the movie’s DVD also indicate that Hitchcock was growing so exhausted with the production that he began to cut certain corners, and it does, unfortunately, show. Some driving scenes are so poorly composited that you can actually see the light of streetlamps through an actor’s face. The film’s big set piece, in which Blanche and George barely escape from a sabotaged car before the saboteur abandons all subtlety and starts to chase them down, is a combination of the opening drunk driving scene and the later cropduster attack sequence from North by Northwest but fails to be as exciting as either part of the earlier film. Of further detriment is the supposed comedy of the scenes where Blanche is doing her schtick; it isn’t funny, and lands with a thud.
There are still high marks here, though. After decades of working with John Williams, whom I have to identify every time I write about him as “the actor, not the composer,” Hitchcock does finally collaborate with John Williams the composer, fresh off of the previous year’s Jaws. In an interview on the DVD, Williams recalls meeting with Hitchcock and working on a particular scene in which Arthur is visited by one of his accomplices, a murder-happy mechanic named Maloney (Ed Lauter), who slips out of the window when Arthur is called away by detectives seeking information about the ransom diamond. Hitchcock directed Williams to have the music stop as the camera moves to the open window, so that the silence conveys his absence, and Williams recounts the anecdote in a way that denotes fondness and awe. It’s sweet, and the soundtrack that Williams composed is a good one, especially in the comedy sequences that work. The best of these is probably Blanche’s attempts to find “A. Adamson,” who might be the supposedly dead Edward Shoebridge (e.g. the Rainbird nephew). Comedy ensues as she goes through the phone book and first meets a woman, then a Black man, then a man who is too young (and a twin to boot) before finally arriving at the jewelry store. It’s a fun bit, and effective at getting the audience to relax a bit before the thriller elements kick into high gear, as Arthur and Fran drug her and lock her in their basement cell when she comes knocking, assuming that she’s there to blackmail them for a portion of the profit from their kidnapping schemes.
Narratively, this is something of a cozy mystery, which appealed to me greatly as a longtime Murder, She Wrote fan. When Blanche isn’t being one of the more annoying Hitchcock protagonists, she and George have a very fun dynamic as an investigative team. She takes information that he gathers and works it into her fortune telling sessions to prompt Julia Rainbird to remember certain details that George can then trace down. George himself is a likeable everyman detective and demonstrates a shrewd wit, like when he notices that despite sharing a death date, Edward Shoebridge’s headstone at the titular family plot is of a different material than his adoptive parents’. The film is perhaps overreliant on narrative coincidence. It’s a neat trick for George to nearly hit Fran with his car early on and then have the camera follow her, and it’s also convenient that Adamson happens to be Edward Shoebridge/Baby Boy Rainbird. That George tracks down the clergyman who baptized Edward and that said parson is now an archbishop who happens to be Fran and Arthur’s next kidnapping victim is perhaps a bridge too far, especially given that George arrives to meet him at the same time that the kidnapping is actually taking place, in front of an entire congregation, no less!
It’s forgivable though, given that this still works as a cohesive narrative despite the failing health of its director. It’s a relatively high note to go out on, and one gets the feeling that Hitch knew this was going to be his last hurrah by the time the film wrapped. At least he sent us off with a wink and a smile.
In my copy of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller appendix, there is an undated rating of 2/10 in the margins for Marnie. I have only the faintest recollection of catching Marnie on TCM when I was a teenager, and the way that Brode writes about the film in his negative blurb is provocative, so I must admit that at some point in the past, I saw this (in whole or in part), was bored and/or offended by it, and graded it poorly. On rewatch as an adult, although there are moments where Marnie fails, it’s also much more interesting and well-considered than I (half-)remembered.
Marnie opens on a dark-haired woman whom we only see from behind as she makes her way down a train station’s departure line. Elsewhere, business owner Mr. Strutt (Martin Gabel) opens his safe and realizes that “Marion Holland,” the pretty brunette with nice legs whom he hired despite her lack of references, has made off with nearly $10K in cash (about $108K in 2026). He complains about this to publishing magnate Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), for whom he handles accounting, and reminds Mark that he met “Marion” at an office party. The dark-haired woman from the opening washes the dye out of her hair and inspects her newly blonde look in the mirror; this is Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a compulsive kleptomaniac and pathological liar. She returns to Baltimore to visit her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), in the latter’s skid row home, where Marnie expresses great envy over her mother’s attention to a neighborhood girl named Jessie, whom the older woman treats with affection that she never showed to Marnie. On to her next con job, Marnie applies to the Rutland publishing house under the name “Mary Taylor,” where Mark instantly recognizes her, but he directs the manager to hire her anyway. Once she’s under his employ, Mark courts “Mary” despite the antagonistic relationship between her and Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker), the widow of Mark’s deceased brother who is also in love with Mark, while he patiently waits for the day when Marnie will steal from him so that he can blackmail her into marrying him.
There’s one big misstep in Marnie, and it’s the fact that Mark sexually assaults the title character on their honeymoon cruise. This is apparently something that happened in the novel on which the film was based, and screenwriter Evan Hunter (best known to most by his pen name Ed McBain), who had previously written The Birds, objected so strongly to transliterating that into his script that he was ultimately let go from the project. Stating that all sympathy for Mark would be lost afterward, he insisted upon omitting the sequence and was replaced for his trouble by Jay Presson Allen, who received full screenwriting credit despite Hunter’s work, making this the only Hitchcock film to be credited to a woman screenwriter. Allen would later go on to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay twice, with one of those nominations coming for her penning of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and she also penned Deathtrap and did an uncredited rewrite on Copycat. She had no problem adhering to Hitchcock’s vision, up to and including the rape scene, although it is possible that we owe her a debt of gratitude for handling it with subtlety and grace, as it occurs entirely offscreen and only in implication. Still, when people talk about Alfred Hitchcock as a man who “hated” and “terrorized” women, this is probably the movie that codified that idea best.
Brandon outlined it best when writing up the “Bonus Features” guide to Notoriouswhen it was our Movie of the Month; starting out strong with Norma Bates in Psycho in 1960 and following that up with Jessica Tandy’s frigid mother of the love interest in The Birds, the 1960s were the decade where Hitchcock let his mother-hating flag fly. Although Bernice Edgar isn’t the main antagonist in Marnie (that would be either Lil or Mark, depending on how you look at it), she is the film’s primary villain, as it becomes clear that Marnie’s frigidity and intermittent outbursts stem from something that happened in her childhood. Although the film seems to be headed toward a conclusion where we learn that former sex worker Bernice also, um, “offered” Marnie to her clients, this is, thankfully, not the case. Ultimately, the root of Marnie’s psychological issues is more mundane, if no less violent. Instead of doing a single thing to address her daughter’s mental health when the girl blocks out the memory of the inciting event, Bernice justified said temporary amnesia as a gift from God, even though her own memory of the event makes her shrink at her own daughter’s touch, all while doting on neighborhood children. She even seems pleased to stoke her daughter’s resentment and jealousy, instead brushing neighbor girl Jessie’s hair while explicitly stating that she never did the same for Marnie. No wonder Marnie ended up the way that she did.
The opening half-hour promises a different kind of movie, centering on a master lady thief, that I would have liked to see Hitchcock try at some point in his career. What we end up with is an exploration of the dark side of sexuality through the lens of contemporary psychology. A year before this film was released, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act, and mere months after the film’s premier, an article was published in the September/October issue of Fact magazine that inspired the American Medical Association to establish the Goldwater Rule as part of the group’s medical ethics guidelines. Psychology was a pop phenomenon, and it’s no surprise that Hitchcock would want to capitalize on that, given that he was fascinated with the subject long before it was in vogue. Mark’s layman’s attempts to get to the root of Marnie’s issues are as effective as they are blunt, leading her to quip “You Freud, me Jane” at one point, and it’s not a flattering portrait of him. Hitchcock was probably wagering that Connery’s sex appeal would make it easier to stomach Mark’s most evil action, which it may have at the time, but given that Connery would later remorselessly admit to slapping women around, it’s a bit more difficult to stomach in a different way. It’s also implied that Marnie recognizes that Mark is truly trying to help her and is willing to let him, as she attempts to commit suicide the following morning by drowning herself in the ship’s pool rather than throwing herself overboard. Although she quips that “the idea was to kill [her]self, not feed the fishes,” it also reads as a statement that she wants to be saved. Ultimately, that makes Marnie a movie about something truly dark and twisted, and although it isn’t the con artist girlboss movie that it tricks you into thinking it will be, it’s still much more worthwhile than the film’s grimy sexpolitick would lead you to expect.
Brandon & I recently recorded a podcast episode about our major Alfred Hitchcock oversights; Brandon had never seen North by Northwest, and I had never seen Rebecca, but perhaps the greatest oversight on my part was that I had never seen Vertigo. Vertigo had a lukewarm reception upon release in 1958, but has in more recent decades been re-evaluated and come to be considered not only Hitch’s greatest film, but in the Sight & Sound poll for 2012, it was considered the greatest film of all time (the 2022 re-draft put Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels at number one). I’ve done some reading about the 2012 voting, and it seems there is some suspicion that several of the participants simply wanted to dethrone Citizen Kane from the number one spot and seemed to rally around Vertigo more for contrarian purposes than genuine belief that it’s the greatest film ever made. I didn’t go into this project with the expectation that I would compose a ranked list of Hitchcock’s work that would greatly upset the commonly accepted wisdom, but now having seen all but one of the director’s thriller films (I’m saving his final film, Family Plot, for last), I must put forward my most controversial opinion here; Vertigo is “merely” good, not exceptional.
The film opens with Detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) and a fellow police officer in the middle of a rooftop chase of a suspect. Scottie loses his footing and finds himself clinging to a gutter over a fatal drop into an alley. When his partner attempts to rescue him, the man slips himself and falls to his death. Sometime later, Scottie has retired from the force when he receives a request from college acquaintance Gavin Helster (Tom Helmore) to put his skills to use by following his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). Gavin does not suspect her of infidelity, but instead fears that she may come to some harm as the result of her connection to a long-dead woman named Carlotta Valdes, Madeleine’s great-grandmother who killed herself at the age of twenty-six, the same age Madeleine now is. As Scottie follows her around, he learns that Madeleine occasionally seems to enter a fugue state where she takes flowers to Carlotta’s grave, spends hours staring at a portrait of the woman in a local museum, and even rents a room in the hotel that was once Carlotta’s house. Over time, Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, and after he rescues her from an apparent suicide attempt when she leaps into San Francisco Bay, she seems to reciprocate these feelings. Madeleine’s apparent haunting/possession by Carlotta seems to be hurtling toward a tragic end, but when something unthinkable does happen, that’s only the beginning of many more twists and turns.
I can see why this is as popular as it is. Like Psycho, Spellbound, and Marnie, Vertigo reflects Hitchcock’s fascination with contemporary psychology, even if the science was very Freudian and of its time. It’s also the only Hitchcock thriller that, at least for a time, presents itself as being a more traditional, supernaturally-influenced horror story, as the presumably skeptical audience is led to wonder whether Madeleine is, in fact, being possessed by her great-grandmother’s ghost. Other than the possibly preternatural link that Young Charlie and Uncle Charlie share in Shadow of a Doubt, this is the only Hitchcock thriller that contains that element, and even though there is a logical explanation for what happens, I understand the appeal that the plot line holds. If Kim Novak is your cup of tea, then you’re in luck, as the film spends long periods of time gazing at her or at a painting of her; I don’t personally find her performance here to be very strong, and learning that Hitch wanted either Vera Miles or Eva Marie Saint for the role makes a lot more sense. Arguably this is the point, as her tabula rasa nature allows Scottie to obsess over her without anything pesky like a personality getting in the way (presumably the only reason that he doesn’t go for the available, lively, spunky, adorable Midge), so I can make an allowance for it, but imagining either Miles or Saint in the role is frustrating, since I can only see either of them improving my personal absorption in the narrative. Stewart’s character here is largely indistinguishable, personality-wise, from Jeff in Rear Window, which is well within his wheelhouse, even if it feels like he’s doing an impression of himself rather than really trying to make Scottie feel real.
If one were to judge the film on its visual merits alone, it’s virtually peerless and its reputation is unassailable. The film is definitively one of the director’s most beautiful; Helster’s office is one of the most sumptuous sets I’ve ever seen, and it’s not a surprise that Hitchcock was so taken with it that he had his own real life office redecorated to imitate it. Ernie’s Restaurant is likewise a gorgeous locale, with crimson damask wallpaper and matching carpeting that make one feel as if they are looking at the interior of a heart, all that red making Madeleine’s green dress stand out all the more. In the scene where Scottie follows Madeleine to a floral shop, the way that the bounty of flowers frames the grey-suited Madeleine is simply gorgeous, and the reverse shot of her reflected in a mirrored door as Scottie peers out from a gap is one of the best compositions of Hitchcock’s career. There are excellent counter-compositions as well, as we move from the rundown McKittrick Hotel, which still retains all of its dark, ornate woodwork and its now-faded wallpaper, to Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)’s modern apartment with her drawing desk and cluttered supplies and artworks, then to the beautifully appointed Argosy Bookstore. Exterior shots capture some of the best American architectural feats of the early twentieth century as we visit the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (where Carlotta’s painting is kept), spend some time on the Presidio marveling at the Golden Gate Bridge, and gaze at the distant Coit Tower Madeleine uses as a landmark to retrace her steps back to Scottie’s home. We even spend some time in a forest of sequoia trees, and the effect is magical, and there’s not a single window in the film that doesn’t feature a gorgeous view of San Francisco. Every frame is perfect, and I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre, perfect acid-dream nightmare sequence that Scottie has at roughly the 2/3rds mark, which is a perfect piece of cinema unto itself.
The narrative has a lot of potential, but it falls apart under scrutiny. Spoilers (for a nearly seventy-year-old film) through the end of this paragraph. The twist that the “Madeleine” Scottie has followed for so much of the film is really a woman named Judy Barton whom Helster hired to play the role of Madeleine while his wife is away in the country, so that Scottie can witness her slowly deteriorating mental state and testify to it, is a solid one. Knowing that Scottie’s acrophobia will prevent him from following “Madeleine” to the top of a tower in an old Spanish mission, Helster is already there, and he throws the real Madeleine’s already murdered corpse from the top, seemingly committing the perfect crime. Things start to fall apart when Scottie sees Judy some time later and begins to court her in an attempt to recreate “Madeleine” without realizing that they are the same woman, which stretches the bounds of credulity a bit too far. The mystery is decently maintained until the moment that the audience learns what Helster did, as it carries that same maybe-supernatural element through since it appears that Madeleine has a doppelganger, but once we learn the truth about Judy, the film plods along for far too long before it reaches its conclusion. To relate this to Hitchcock’s famous discussion about the tension that is created by telling the audience that there is a bomb under a table and how that tension is diffused the moment that the bomb goes off, this is like telling us that the bomb under the table has already been defused, with half an hour left to go. The sequence of events also leads to audience confusion as well; Scottie witnesses “Madeleine’s” death, then attends the coroner’s inquest, then has the nightmare sequence that seems to render him catatonic when Midge leaves him in a recovery facility, then immediately cuts to Scottie walking down the street, where he thinks he sees Madeleine. Watching this, I had to ask my viewing companion: “Wait a second, when did he recover?” before I decided to just go with it. Since I was in that state of mind, it didn’t even occur to me that Scottie wasn’t aware that Judy was Madeleine until he has his epiphanic moment when she puts on Madeleine/Carlotta’s necklace.
I’m sorry to say that I was largely disappointed in Vertigo. I understand the appeal, and I even understand the acclaim, but I was left fairly cold by the film overall. It’s a visual feast, but the narrative is convoluted in a way that’s more frustrating than fun and the performances are merely adequate. I did appreciate that the reveal explains some things about Helster’s performance. In his initial meeting with Scottie, he jumps straight to the “It’s not what you think” explanation of his hiring of the man to follow his wife without waiting for Scottie to react to the initial overture, which makes sense in retrospect given that he had likely rehearsed the monologue to death. It also explains some of his dialogue choices from the coroner’s inquest, but it doesn’t gel with his other poor line deliveries in other scenes. The effectiveness of Kim Novak’s performance will vary from person to person depending upon how much one is willing to accept that her monotony is intentional. In doing some light research about the film, I can see that it has been the subject of great academic criticism, and I can understand that as well, since this is a very mood-oriented piece and thus gives itself over to style over substance in a way that invites dissection. I’ve also seen that there are a great number of people who argue that the film is an extended dream sequence, in whole or in part, beginning either in the wake of the animated dream sequence, immediately following the first bell tower scene, or (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge style) all the way back at the five-minute mark when Scottie is dangling from a gutter. I don’t usually think too highly of any flavor of extratextual “it was all a dream” explanation, but I have to admit that I might adopt that belief for myself, as it does improve the text for me as an audience member, at least this time (and it would explain why we spend so much of this film watching Scottie slooooowly drive from place to place). Maybe I was simply too excited for this one, and the movie itself was never going to be able to live up to my expectations. It’s still a good picture, just not (for me) a great one.
In discussions about my upcoming plans to rank all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, I’ve mentioned the number “forty” several times, but that’s because I am simply not that interested in his non-thriller films. Even among those that theoretically count as thrillers as a secondary genre, like the comedy The Trouble With Harry and the period piece melodrama Under Capricorn, those have turned out to be the ones that I like least of all. There are about a dozen inarguably non-thrillers that Hitch directed, mostly in his early career, and as such, the 1966 release of Torn Curtain was a landmark, as it was the director’s fiftieth film. Ultimately, it was one that really only pleased the studio due to its financial success, as contemporary audiences and critics as well as the stars and the director himself weren’t terribly pleased with it.
Torn Curtain opens aboard a passenger ship experiencing heating problems while traversing the European fjords, bearing several dozen scientists to Copenhagen for a physics conference. At lunch, two people are conspicuously absent: Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his assistant and fiancée, Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), as they are canoodling together in his cabin, where they make pillow talk about his recent departure from D.C. following the ending of funding for an anti-missile program in which he was involved. Armstrong receives a radiogram that he conspicuously denies is for him, only to later retrieve it from the ship’s radio room. There, he runs into East German physicist Gerhard (Hansjörg Felmy), who was expecting to have a lunch date with Sarah. Upon arrival in Denmark, Sarah takes it upon herself to retrieve a book that is being held for Armstrong at a nearby shop, and Gerhard tags along. Later, alone, Armstrong decodes a passage in the book that directs him to make contact with someone or something calling themself Pi (as in π). Growing more suspicious as to why Armstrong tried to keep her from joining him on this trip, Sarah watches as he retrieves a ticket from a concierge that he claims is for a quick side trip to Stockholm. When she learns that he is actually going to East Berlin, she follows him and boards the same plane, arriving alongside him behind the Iron Curtain just in time to watch him publicly defect to the Soviet Union.
Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers in the lead up to (Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes), during (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat), and immediately following (Notorious) WWII are all explicitly political. For the most part, his Cold War era spy features, of which there are only four, are not. The Stewart/Day version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was the first espionage thriller since Notorious a decade earlier, foregoes any real inspection of the foreign “other” that made the Peter Lorre version a much more exciting film. Other than a line from Leo G. Carroll’s professor character in North by Northwest in which he tells Cary Grant, “War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one,” the film is politically vague. Hitch’s output in the back half of his career shows that he wasn’t terribly interested in cloak-and-dagger flicks anymore, and cared even less about politicizing them; if anything, one could argue that the “spying on one’s neighbor” politics of Rear Window are more politically conscious than his two 1950s espionage pictures. That changed in the 60s. By 1965, Eon Productions had released four James Bond films: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball, and all of them had been inspired in some way by North by Northwest. With a fifth Bond on the horizon, Hitchcock took two attempts at making his own version: 1966’s Torn Curtain and Topaz, the latter of which would premiere in 1967, the same year as You Only Live Twice.
Topaz is fine, if a little overlong, and it’s more clearly evocative of the Bond format; the main character is a career spy, has a lot of gadgets, and has sexual encounters with morally dubious women on both sides. Torn Curtain is a better film because it adheres more closely to Hitchcock’s strengths: strong character work, an “everyman” protagonist, an appropriate level of comic relief, the occasional breathtakingly gorgeous shot composition, and multiple scenes of excellent tension. Unfortunately, it also features some of the director’s late-career shortcomings, notably some lazy shortcuts with some visuals. The most unconvincing is a scene in Copenhagen where Armstrong and Sarah are at an outdoor cafe where he behaves like a total ass in an attempt to get her to stop following him (and thus avoid potentially being trapped in East Germany for the rest of her life). Inexplicably, the sequence is shot not on location or even on a soundstage, but with Andrews and Newman sitting across from each other at a table while the street, the restaurant, and the other patrons are rear-projected behind them.
To its credit, however, it also uses some of Hitch’s ideas from his other end-of-career films in the best possible way. I’ve fretted quite a lot about what the gratuitous, provocative, mean-spirited sexpolitick and violence of Frenzy(and to a lesser extent, Marnie) might imply about the man’s entire filmography, but this film perfectly combines the cheekiness of the underplayed sexuality in North by Northwest with the more liberal attitude toward sex (and violence) that Frenzy had. While the censor boards prevented him from showing Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climbing into bed together at the end of Northwest despite them explicitly being married by that point, this film opens with Newman and Andrews under the sheets (and a pile of coats) together. In the features on this film’s Blu-ray, they include and highlight an on-set production photo showing a bra lying in the open in a shot that doesn’t appear in the film, which is more suggestive than the director would have been able to get away with at an earlier point, and when Newman gets out of bed, he’s topless. In a reversal of the mainstream tendency for a film to ogle its female characters, Hitchcock also clearly understood Newman’s wide sex appeal, as he is slutting this man out. In addition to climbing out of bed with Andrews shirtless in the first scene, he’s shot head to toe in a shower in a Danish hotel with only a frosted shower curtain to leave something to the imagination, and Newman’s top comes off again in the back half in a doctor’s office to wake up anyone in the audience who might have started to zone out at that point. In contrast, although Andrews is gorgeous, the Edith Head costumes that she wears throughout are sharply tailored and fabulous, but also conservative in their coverage. (It’s also worth noting that the hairstyle she has here is not flattering; one assumes it’s her actual hair, still growing out from the short style she wore in the previous year’s The Sound of Music, but the two-toned highlights make her appear greying in a manner that ages her in such a way that you would believe it if someone told you that film and this one were a decade apart.)
The production was a mess behind the scenes. One of Hitchcock’s most famous quotes is that “Actors should be treated like cattle,” and Newman was a younger performer who had studied method performance at the Actor’s Studio. The director didn’t care for this, and is quoted as having responded to Newman’s question about what his motivation was in one scene by telling the actor “Your salary.” Hitchcock may have burned a bridge with longtime collaborator Bernard Herrmann, who composed several of his films, including Psychoand The Birds. All sources note that they “never worked together again,” but Hitch only made three more movies after this, one of them after Herrmann’s death, so it’s unclear how long-term that enmity might have been if either of them hadn’t been quite old at this point. Andrews’s sudden ascendancy to superstar meant that she was cast at the studio’s insistence, even though her brief window of availability also meant that the film had to be rushed into production despite Hitchcock not feeling that the script was ready. Of the experience, she has said that she took the opportunity because she wanted to work with the famous director, “and that’s what [she] got out of it,” since she “did not have to act in Torn Curtain. [She] merely went along for the ride.”
To be honest, all of these seams are apparent in the final product, but this is nonetheless a decently captivating motion picture, especially if you are someone familiar with Hitchcock’s work. Contemporary reviews criticized the film’s pacing, cited a disappointing second half once the twist becomes clear (especially so since, although Sarah believes Armstrong’s defection is in earnest, no one in the audience will), and criticized what they felt was an old-fashioned film. To that last point, they may not be wrong. As noted before, this was the man’s fiftieth feature, and he had been doing this for four decades; he was now in direct box office competition with two generations of directors who had been inspired by his work, while he was a 67-year-old man with only a few films left in him. Nevertheless, this might not be hitting it out of the park, but he’s still making it to second base. The most well-remembered scene finds Armstrong grappling to death with his Stasi tail, Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), in a farmhouse kitchen when Gromek tracks the supposed defector to a farm where he finds the π symbol scratched in the dirt. This is where the looser restrictions around violence in the 1960s work better than in Frenzy. Hitchcock wanted it to be clear that killing a man is difficult work, rather than the quick and easy slayings that James Bond dished out, and so the scene lasts a long time. The academic Armstrong is no match for the man, and it takes help from a farmer’s wife to take Gromek down, in a fight that involves a knife, a shovel, and a pot of cabbage soup.
It’s excellent stuff, but the sequence that stood out the most to me was one in which Armstrong and Sarah are escorted onto a bus full of other members of the secret π organization. The bus is a decoy that runs ten minutes ahead of schedule of the real bus that goes from Leipzig to East Berlin, and everyone aboard is a member of the resistance. It’s fantastically tense, as the audience first experiences relief when it seems like Sarah and Armstrong are finally en route to the next step in their homeward journey, then anxiety when they meet the first police barricade, then relief when they pass, then suspense when they encounter a second barricade, only to find that they now have to deal with army deserters who act as highwaymen. It’s a great ride. Once they get to East Berlin, they also find themselves assisted by a Polish expat, Countess Kuczynska (Lila Kedrova), who hopes to escape to America with their help, and she adds a lot of heart to the film. Despite her late arrival, she’s third billed, and it’s well deserved.
Time has not been kind to Torn Curtain, but its categorization as a lesser Hitchcock is largely undeserved. It doesn’t reach the director’s heights, but it’s also much more engaging and exciting than its reputation would indicate.
It’s 1973, and Salvador Allende is in the third year of his presidency of Chile as the first elected socialist leader, which, of course, western imperialists cannot abide. CIA operatives Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) and his mentor Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) have been living in the capital of Santiago for over a year, covertly working with the Chilean military in the lead up to the devastating coup that will overthrow Allende. Carlisle is a veteran of several previous U.S.-led destabilization campaigns both at home and abroad, about which he has no remorse despite his deeply ingrained Catholicism, although a recent cancer diagnosis has thrown him into something of an existential quandary in which he worries what awaits him in the afterlife. Either because of his advanced age or as the result of his constant self-medication with morphine, he’s become too loose-lipped for CIA bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi)’s liking, and he tasks Lee with ensuring that Carlisle doesn’t complete his meandering memoir, which could threaten their current disruption efforts and open up old wounds back home. Lee and Carlisle make their way to Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island) for a final vacation before Carlisle’s impending death, but their trip is complicated when Carlisle develops a soft spot for Monica (Mariana di Girolamo), a Chilean college student that the pair keeps running into over and over again, putting a face on the future victims of Augusto Pinochet’s coup.
There’s something troubling about Wild Horse Nine’s humanization of some truly monstrous people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a fun and entertaining watch. Carlisle is a friendless man whose adversarial responses to being corrected when he refers to things by their colonized names and whose careless, period-accurate usage of slurs ensure that we understand he is not someone we would like to know. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the extent to which the film traffics in developing empathy for him, as there were points in the film where it felt as if it was laundering the likeability of the racist uncle who darkens every family gathering by having him played so avuncularly by Malkovich. It’s an excellent, nuanced performance, and Carlisle’s fixation on his potential for damnation feels like the screenplay, like that of The Phoenician Scheme, took inspiration from a certain political figure’s own (well founded) doubts about the final destination for his eternal soul. If the film were to make that point of similarity more explicit or connected, I don’t think that this would be something stomachable, but Malkovich makes Carlisle such a fascinating figure that one has no choice but to overlook that. I’ve heard early buzz that this might garner a best actor nomination for Malkovich, and if it does, it would not only be well deserved, it also won’t be the only one in the feature. Parker Posey is third-billed in all of the film’s advertising despite only appearing in two scenes, but she makes a meal out of both of them, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her get a best supporting actress nomination this year for her appearance here. Rockwell also demonstrates a lot of pathos as well, with some excellent comedic timing mixed into a performance that effectively captures all the ways that he is caught between rocks and hard places.
Visually, Wild Horse Nine is sumptuous, with sprawling vistas that would feel right at home in a Rapa Nui tourism video. Cinematographer Ben Davis has a fairly mixed record; Hannibal Rising is one of the ugliest pictures that I’ve ever seen, his MCU work runs the gamut from Guardians of the Galaxy (good) to Eternals (awful), and it’s hard to imagine that the same man photographed The Banshees of Inisherin and Kraven the Hunter. Here, he’s operating at the top of his game as the camera captures gorgeous landscapes, handsome architectural profiles, and detailed, colorful period clothing all at once, and it’s a treat for the eyes. Longtime Coen Brothers collaborator Carter Burwell does excellent work with the music here, and the film cleverly follows up on a conversation in which Carlisle talks about the various national origins of cheeses and how every place that has been destabilized by American interference must settle for with Kraft slices by playing the most banal music on the radio (minus Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”) in Rapa Nui. After months of seeing this trailer, the jokes present therein didn’t work on viewing (the “Who were you talking to, your mom?” line from Carlisle landed with a particular thud), but there are plenty more to enjoy before the two hours are up. The narrative has plenty of twists and turns to propel that comedy along, and this is a strong showing for all involved.
