Welcome to Episode #275 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of lesser-seen giallo flicks, starting with 1974’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974).
24:30 The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) 45:48 The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) 55:15 What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) 1:13:34 Footprints on the Moon (1975)
At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.
When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.
Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.
When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.
What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.
One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.
This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.
This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.
Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.
I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.
What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.
The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.
(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)
The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.
Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.
Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.
When we discussed the two Men Who Knew Too Much, Brandon and I commiserated that the updated 1950s version starring James Stewart could not hold a candle to the original Peter Lorre-centered film, but he posited that one could list off Alfred Hitchcock’s three other collaborations with Stewart—Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo—and confidently call them the director’s masterworks without that being much of a hot take. Rear Window was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and I immediately fell in love with it. Through viewings of several others, it remained at the top of that list, until sometime in my late teens I fell head over heels for Notorious. I hadn’t revisited it in a very long time, possibly because I became too familiar with it, but after returning to the well after such a long absence, the water is even sweeter than I remembered.
L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Stewart) is a WWII vet and photographer who is in the sixth of seven weeks of recuperation after a daring shot at a racetrack that resulted in a broken leg. He is attended every day by wisecracking insurance nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), who encourages him to settle down with his fashionista girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) before she finds someone better than him. Accustomed to a faster pace of living, Jeff fears that Lisa would be ill-equipped for a life of adventure with him in the often dangerous places that he finds himself on assignment, while Lisa hopes that, as he’s getting older, he’ll be willing to take a more stationary position with his magazine in New York, where they can be together. His only entertainment during his medical imprisonment is voyeuristically observing the neighbors whose windows face the same courtyard as his: Miss Hearing Aid, a sculptor; Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to find a good man; Miss Torso, a dancer; the songwriter, who can’t seem to get his latest composition just right; and two married couples, one with a little dog that they let down into the courtyard with a basket and the other composed of a supposedly invalid wife and the salesman husband (Raymond Burr) who supports her. When he believes that he has witnessed a murder in one of the apartments, Lisa and Stella become his sidekicks in determining if one of his neighbors is a murderer, or if his mind has gotten so bored in his semi-isolation that it’s begun to play tricks on him.
This is an all-time classic for a reason. Although he struggled with the contradictions of his character in Rope, Stewart shines in this performance, as Jeff is a character who’s rough around the edges and a bit of a jerk, but with whom we remain nonetheless empathetic and sympathetic. At this point in his relationship with Lisa, they are explicitly chaste, as Jeff’s cast has immobilized him in more ways than one, and one gets the feeling that without being able to be intimate with one another and mistake passion for love, he’s come to realize that he doesn’t feel like he and Lisa are actually all that compatible. Unconsciously, he’s pushing her away and making up excuses for why, drawing barriers between them in the form of their class differences (she “belongs to the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue” while he lives in Greenwich Village with the other poor, starving artists) and trying to warn her away from joining him in his life of wandering by making it seem unsuitable to her. It isn’t until he sees that she gets the same thrills that he does when they leave a note for the possible murderer to see their reaction that he actually sees her and realizes that they could have a potential future together. Since he only comes to this realization when he sees how she could fit into his life, combined with the fact that he doesn’t cry out for help or try to distract the killer when Lisa falls into their clutches, one could find him difficult to like, and it only really works with Stewart in the role. What I see in that scene is that his realization of his helplessness paralyzes him far more than being injured did, and for the first time he has some concept that a life of adventure could actually be dangerous to her, in reality and not just as a fiction to keep them apart, and understands that he’d rather be with her than not.
More academic critics than I have spilled a great deal of ink over the film’s use of Jeff as the audience surrogate, as his viewpoints into his neighbors’ lives are metaphorically like us watching the movie. There’s also been a great deal of writing about the film’s sexual connotations, especially with regards to the prurience of voyeurism and the phallic nature of Jeff’s telescopic lens. One thing that I haven’t seen discussed is the way that each of the vignettes that Jeff observes has only a partial, fragmented view of the participants, to which he ascribes narratives that he has essentially made up, without realizing that they are all reflective of him. Miss Hearing Aid is nosey, just as he is, as demonstrated when she gets into Mr. Thorwald’s business about how much he’s watering his plants, and when she is frustrated by Miss Torso’s loud music and footfalls, she turns her hearing aid down, just as Jeff tunes out what he doesn’t want to hear. The songwriter is a frustrated artist who is blocked creatively while Jeff is a photographer temporarily caged, and Miss Lonelyhearts is a reflection of what Lisa could become if Jeff continues to waste her youth without commitment; Lonelyhearts changes her mind about overdosing when the songwriter finishes his piece and the two of them listen to it together, in perfect time for Jeff and Lisa to (maybe) commit to one another fully. Miss Torso’s similarities to Lisa are textual, as there is a conversation between Lisa and Jeff one night when she has a few men in her apartment and Jeff compares the two directly, only for Lisa to declare that the woman across the way is “juggling wolves” and that she doesn’t love any of her suitors. When Jeff asks her how she knows, she says “You said it’s just like my apartment, didn’t you?” This proves true in the end, when the dancer’s beloved, a short nerd named Stanley, returns from the war and she takes him passionately into her arms, just as Lisa, who could do a lot better than grumpy old Jeff, really does love her flawed man. It also leaves the open question of which of the couples the two will end up like: the happy newlyweds (whose cracks start to appear in the end), the unhappy Thornwalds (with their one bedbound party), or the dog-owning couple, who only seem to need one another. That’s left for the viewer to ponder.
Every performance here is delightful. Thelma Ritter really shines as the take-no-guff nurse with sharp instincts. One of my favorite jokes in the picture is when she’s trying to advise Jeff, who still sees himself as the young flyboy in a photo taken while he was in the service, that he needs to marry the glamorous, youthful Lisa before it’s too late. She does so in the middle of massaging the gray-haired forty-six year old and calling him “young” also, presumably facetiously. Grace Kelly (25 at the time) looks just about as beautiful as a human being possibly can as she lounges around in gorgeous fashions and gets excited about breaking and entering, and she’s a delight. The limited setting for this one also means a limited main cast, as only five characters ever pass through Jeff’s apartment, where all of the film takes place, although the extended cast does a lot with the little pieces of their lives that we get to see, and the fact that this whole thing was done on a soundstage is also unbelievable. The complexity of it all looks so simple, and it’s pure movie magic. Rear Window is a top-tier Hitchcock and a classic picture in its own right.
Attention, Swampflix readers in the Austin area! Our very own Mark “Boomer” Redmond has programmed a series of free public screenings celebrating Nicole Kidman’s horror & thriller work all this month at Barrett’s Too.
Check out the schedule below, with the following programming note: the Dead Calm screening originally scheduled for October 2 has been moved to Friday, November 6 due to rain.
This one’s going to be difficult to discuss without giving away too much, given the nature of the film itself and the misleading marketing campaign that has led up to its release. For anyone who has heard that Digger is a musical and hoped that was true, I must disappoint you, but the amount of work that has gone into preventing the real shape of this film from being known before you enter the theater is roughly the same as what went into disguising that the recent film adaptation of Mean Girlswas a musical. This bait-and-switch marketing technique obviously hasn’t resulted in the Digger landing for everyone, given that it is currently doing worse in the critical rankings than the latest Coleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, but I’m also going to have to talk around the things that really make it work in order for you to know if it’s going to be worth your time.
On at least some level, as the trailers have indicated, “Tom Cruise is Digger,” aka Digger Rockwell, the third generation of a family of oil tycoons. He lives in a house filled with corpses, surrounded by stuffed and mounted fauna, fowl, and fish; one shot finds him standing between two mirrors that are each framed by dozens of sets of deer antlers, so that there is only Digger Rockwell and death into infinity. The only living thing that he cares for is a dying cat named Maggie, whom he is continuing to try to keep alive despite her thirty-year life span clearly having led her to a place of misery. In an establishing character moment, he sends away the world’s leading veterinarian despite the man’s honesty because he would rather deal with someone whose fear of disappointing Digger is greater than their intelligence. Just before his half-sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) is set to announce the establishment of her subset company to the greater Rockwell oil empire, a clean energy initiative, a Rockwell Inc. drilling facility in Greenland explodes due to a buildup of methane, resulting in imminent disaster for most of Europe. This results in the gathering of Digger’s long-ignored climate safety scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the United States President (John Goodman), and his various attendant prayer warriors and warhawks to discuss what has to happen next, Dr. Strangelove style. But this is only one level of the narrative and must necessarily be the only one that I’ll address in this review, since it’s the only one indicated by the marketing.
Digger is as funny as it is knowing; it is a version of Don’t Look Up where the satire actually works, one that understands that it is useless to turn the monsters who have created the world that we live in now and in which our children will live shorter lives than we will into figures of ridicule and mockery, but also that there is value in doing so even if it can change nothing. The demonstrably evil people who currently pull the strings of government are cancer-riddled, destructive, morally incomprehensible ghouls, and we are largely impotent to stop them from killing us. Even when they are gone, when all the wealth that they’ve amassed still doesn’t stop them from dying because death is inevitable, when they are beyond the reach of justice, the only thing that we will have is our ability to laugh at them, to turn the thieves of our future into clowns for us to mock and belittle for their small mindedness, arrogance, and ignorance. It is a very small thing, and laughing at the dead ghouls who stole the future isn’t going to change our material conditions, but when it is all that we have, we must nonetheless laugh, because if we don’t then we have nothing.
It’s often said that it is impossible for Tom Cruise to completely disappear into a role. No matter how hard you try, you are never watching Ethan Hunt or Frank Mackey or Lestat de Lioncourt; you are watching Tom Cruise. Although that argument has lessened in recent years, especially after his all-out charm campaign around the time of Tropic Thunder, this is perhaps the role that is so unlike the man’s public image (and looks, thanks to prosthetics, sufficiently different from him) that he’s able to give a layered performance without reminding you that this is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Sandra Hüller is unfortunately given little to do, but it’s always good to see her. John Goodman gets a lot of mileage out of playing an incompetent president clinging to life and willing to destroy the whole world for no reason other than his vanity, but really, this is Cruise’s film. There was a lot of mockery online about the “his whole career has led to this” trailer that was produced for the film, but this is one of his all-time great performances, up there with Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky.
Digger is currently a new release, so I won’t reveal any more about it, other than to say that it quickly shot up to being one of my favorite films of the year, based on its comedy alone. It’s not one that requires you run out to experience it on the big screen, although there are definitely visuals that will reward you if you do; you can wait for streaming (and you might have to, if you don’t act soon). You’ll laugh however you see it, and the laughter will feel both impotent and uplifting.
What’s the most punk movie ever made? I have no idea how to quantify that, but 1982’s Burst City might be the movie with the most punks in it, which is close enough to earn the superlative. The final half-hour of Gakuryū Ishii’s microbudget sci-fi whatsit is absolutely flooded with punks — some playing themselves, some playing businessmen, some playing futuristic super-cops. The lead-up to that concluding spectacle has no discernible narrative structure to it, but the climax plays like a large-scale battlefield sequence from a studio-produced war epic with hundreds of costumed extras. Only, in this case, everyone onscreen is from the same underground 80s Japanese punk scene, including the underpaid and overworked weirdos operating the super-8mm cameras in that subculture warzone. The never-ending sequence feels genuinely dangerous, to the point where it’s a miracle there are no reports that any extras died on set. It’s just an endless stream of Japanese punk rockers belligerently screaming and throwing their bodies at each other while explosions go off in the background and the band plays on & on like a buzzsaw with a taped-down trigger.
There aren’t multiple plot threads in Burst City so much as there are multiple character factions. The bulk of the cast is made up of leather-jacketed punks who play constant D.I.Y. shows at a warehouse venue called Live Spot 20000V (a name echoed by Ishii’s later title Electric Dragon 80000V). They actively resist taking on real work with local real estate developers or yakuza gangsters, declaring, “We’re too artistic to work for the likes of you!” Those corrupt, suited men do occasionally employ a few of the punk scenesters in BDSM sex work, though, even while forming “anti-punk resistance groups” that aim to eradicate them entirely. Meanwhile, roving gangs of post-apocalyptic Mad Max warriors seek refuge throughout a labyrinthian industrial wasteland, with the most clearly characterized duo among them seeking revenge for a slain brother. Politically, there’s a wide range of big-picture turmoil that Burst City‘s infinite cast of punk wastoids are rebelling against, most specifically in the threat that their home-turf music venue will soon be replaced by a nuclear power plant for capitalistic profits. For the most part, however, they seemingly just want to rock out, and they’re willing to crack a few hundred skulls as long as it keeps the amps plugged in.
In cyberpunk terms, Burst City offers half the cyber and twice the punk. It’s the kind of low budget, high style sci-fi that feels less imaginative of a possible future than it is documentary of its own contemporary arts scene. There is no plot development or dialogue exchange that’s given a fraction of the attention afforded its live performances from contemporary bands with names like The Rockers and The Battle Rockers. Before the production breaks down into full punks-vs-cops warfare, its clearest narrative progression is in a scene where a hardcore band rushes the stage, steals the equipment, and takes over the set from a first-wave punk act, demonstrating the early-80s aesthetic shift of punk rock music in real time. A lot of loving attention to detail is also paid to the crowd watching these bands from the pit, with the 8mm cameras on constant fashion watch as extras primp, smoke, and pose for their unseen audience. Ishii had originally planned to tell a much more traditional story in Burst City before the money ran out and he had to pivot from the original script to a much looser collection of narrative scraps, stitched together in hyperactive music-video collage. The result is not style over substance so much that its style is its substance, especially as a documentary glimpse of a regional punk scene being recorded the way it wanted to be seen — cool as fuck, stylish as hell.
Burst City‘s climactic punk warfare sequence is legendarily abrasive. As if the constant roar of electric guitars, motorcycle engines, and screaming leather freaks wasn’t already loud enough, the crowd starts setting off fireworks to invite in some extra noise, and the cops, in turn, start blowing the place up. It’s all belligerent, incoherent youth-culture rage, with more intent communicated by characters’ pained writing & screaming in the dirt than any written line of dialogue. Ishii & crew can hardly keep up with the chaos themselves, switching formats from color to black & white film stock to CCTV video feeds at a dizzying pace. At two full hours, its youth-culture belligerence is admittedly exhausting, but its concluding spectacle is still undeniably impressive on a technical level and undeniably punk.
Hey, New Orleans. The new John Wilson documentary The History of Concrete is currently playing at Canal Place, which is likely only exciting to you if you’re already a fan of John Wilson. Convincing the uninitiated to join you on a Friday night for a documentary about concrete would take a heroically persuasive sales pitch, but fans of the show How To with John Wilson already know to expect that this doc will hardly be about concrete at all. Yes, Wilson’s comedic HBO docuseries is surprisingly fixated on urban infrastructure, but each episode gradually proves to be more about the infinite variety of people who populate New York City than the building materials of the city itself. As Wilson’s first feature-length effort in this project, The History of Concrete is very much just an extended episode of How To. It starts off as a willfully naive, wandering exploration of the history & production of concrete, but it’s constantly on the hunt for one-of-a-kind interview subjects to profile along the way. Wilson edits & narrates his voyeuristic man-on-the-street journalism with the same wry, soft-spoken humor that he deploys on his television show, including all of your favorite well-timed vocal tics & throat clearings to liven up concrete’s otherwise absurdly dry history. You don’t have to already be a fan of the show to find the movie funny or poignant; every episode of How To is self-contained enough to work perfectly well on its own, this extended one included. You’re just unlikely to spend your precious free time after work going to see a documentary about concrete unless you already trust Wilson’s Muppet-like voice.
If you are already a fan of How To with John Wilson, you might be worried about how the show’s format could sustain a 100-min runtime, nearly five-times longer than the usual episode length. Thankfully, The History of Concrete does a lot of that worrying for you; it’s just as much about the outlandishness of its own production as it is about urban construction materials. Wilson confesses early in the runtime that a major reason he stopped making How To episodes back in 2023 is that the show depleted his personal archive of digicam footage from public life in NYC. At a loss on how to start fresh without forcing his slice-of-urban-life observations into being instead of finding them naturally, he seeks out more traditional methods of feature-length commercial moviemaking. He learns narrative structure by attending a screenwriting workshop on how to successfully write & pitch a Hallmark Christmas movie, a course that is offered as a life raft for filmmakers who are struggling with the lack of sellable work in the industry’s current production dip. On the documentary-specific end, he discusses in voiceover how the only sellable subgenre in the current market is the “rockumentary”: fluff piece profiles of famous musicians that populate the splash page on every streaming service. His application of these industry lessons to his own work are, as you’d expect, ironic. When Wilson seeks out musician subjects to arbitrarily profile in his concrete doc, he’s exclusively drawn to no-name noise artists that he runs across in the D.I.Y. punk venues he frequents socially. He does eventually stumble onto a How To-worthy interview subject who works a double life as a liquor sales rep and the lead-musician in a dive-bar cover band, but that lonely, lost man’s screen persona does not exactly scream star appeal. He does offer Wilson an emotional core for the film’s narrative that can be edited into the vague shape of a Hallmark Christmas movie, but Wilson’s constant Zoom meetings with potential financiers don’t successfully convey the commercial potential of the project.
While Wilson continuously struggles to sell The History of Concrete to potential buyers in the industry, he immediately makes the clearest pitch to his audience yet about what makes his filmmaking style so compelling in the first place: documentation of mundane modern living while most other media is obsessed with recreating the past. Part of documenting the absurdity of everyday public life in New York City means that Wilson regularly runs across other, more robustly funded film crews. He’s at odds with the professional film & television projects that cross over onto his turf, not just financially but also philosophically. So many movies that film in the neighborhoods he frequents make an art project out of dressing the city up to look like its past historical self, instead of setting stories in those spaces as they look now. That’s what’s so quietly radical about the How To television show; it accurately captures the daily experience of modern city life, of meeting an infinite number of kind souls and unimaginable weirdos on public sidewalks and public transit from one task to the next. I even see my own specific city life reflected on the screen in the rare episodes where he attends construction-material conventions in New Orleans, including one for concrete. It’s oddly validating to see that mundane modernity treated with such wide-eyed reverence from John Wilson the character and with such barely-contained amusement from John Wilson the filmmaker. That’s especially true in The History of Concrete‘s case, since it offered the rare opportunity to laugh & react to urban life’s absurdism with a full theatrical audience instead of alone in my living room. It reminded me of going to see Downton Abbey movies in theaters in that way; Molesley’s colossal fuckups serving dinner to royalty weren’t any funnier in the movies than they were on the television, but they got much bigger gasps & laughs from a crowd that was happy to celebrate their favorite show together with likeminded nerds.
The History of Concrete never closes the loop on how it secured its own funding. I suppose that’s a detail best left to its Wikipedia page. It does manage to incorporate preposterous, meaningless footage of big-name celebrities (names as incongruous as Kim Kardashian, DMX, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli), so maybe that helped. None of those stars have half the impact of Wilson’s more typical interview subjects, though, like the lonely liquor-ambassador musician or the guy whose Gum Busters business scrapes gum off concrete or the guy whose Dead Ink tattoo preservation business might hold the secret to where the real-life Chef Boyardee is buried. Then, there’s the actual concrete of the title, which overwhelms the film’s visual language with the cracked & patched grey infinity of urban landscapes. Sometimes, the documentary can be sincerely informative about concrete, especially when slipping behind the scenes of municipal infrastructure to interview city workers about the scarily short lifespan of the concrete buildings, bridges, and overpasses we use everyday. More often, it seeks out the absurd instances where we’ve intentionally become disconnected from the direct impact of concrete, like at speed-bricklaying competitions or at virtual-reality concrete pours inside convention center tech showcases. Mostly, it’s all just an excuse to walk around and observe the people who populate the concrete around us both as intimate interview subjects and as distanced bugs-in-a-jar specimens of modern urbanity. I don’t know how you sell that idea to an audience who’s not immediately interested, but apparently neither does John Wilson, and it’s a miracle he’s gotten this kind of work distributed to our televisions & movie theaters in the first place.
Strangers on a Train is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s truly great works. The larger body of his thriller work can be largely divided into two subgenres: domestic dramas and stories of international intrigue. The director’s recurring explorations of main characters who are wrongfully accused of something fall into both categories, with domestic “wrong man” thrillers dating all the way back to The Lodger and including other notable examples like Young and Innocent, Spellbound, and, naturally, The Wrong Man. It’s also one of his most frequently homaged and parodied works, with Throw Momma from the Train as the most triumphant example. It’s well worth noting that this might be because the narrative passed through two notable authors before it hit the screen, with the story coming from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol fame) and the screenplay featuring work from hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler, seven years after the man’s first script, for Double Indemnity, which he co-wrote with director Billy Wilder.
Guy Haines (Farley Granger, previously of Rope) is an amateur tennis star traveling by train to visit his estranged wife Miriam, who has become pregnant by one of her extramarital affairs, in order to give her the money that she demands in order to retain a lawyer for their divorce. En route, he encounters an eccentric, lazy manchild of privilege named Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), who recognizes him from both the sports and society pages of the newspapers, as Guy has been romantically linked to Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll), in addition to the notoriety of his sports career. Bruno reveals that he wants nothing more than to draw income from his trust fund but that his attempts at a life of leisure are continuously foiled by his father’s insistence that he work, if not for a living then at least to contribute something and learn the value of a dollar. Bruno guesses at the source of Guy’s agitation and suggests that the two of them “swap murders,” so that Bruno kills Miriam and Guy slays Mr. Antony, in the belief that no one will be able to make the connection. Disturbed, Guy laughs off the suggestion and its supposed cleverness, and gets off at his stop. When he arrives home to Metcalf, Miriam reveals that she’s also become aware of Anne Morton and now refuses to divorce Guy, and will instead force him to support her child by another man. Their row over this is very public, which causes trouble for Guy later after Bruno tracks down and strangles Miriam at a fairground. Despite constant police surveillance, Guy finds himself harassed by Bruno to uphold his end of their “bargain.”
Although many of Hitchcock’s films contain noir elements (Shadow of a Doubt and Foreign Correspondent immediately come to mind), never do they come through as clearly as they do in Strangers on a Train. That really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given Chandler’s involvement in the picture, as Double Indemnity is the codifying work for many of the elements of that genre. Even in his most beautiful and sumptuous B&W pictures, none of them are as gorgeously monochromatically chiaroscuro as Strangers is. That’s not the only genre convention at play here, either. While we talk about Psycho as the ur-slasher, some of the less lurid elements of the genre are taken from Strangers. One could almost draw a direct line from Bruno’s dark figure cast against the white marble steps of a D.C. government building as a frightened Guy makes his getaway in a cab to the ominous sight of Michael Myers stalking Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. There’s even a kind of killer’s P.O.V. shot on the carnival’s “smoochers’ island” when Bruno finds Miriam alone and his hands come into shot with Guy’s lighter. The film also contains one of the best spectacle setpieces in the Hitchcock canon while also remaining one of the most grounded, as it takes something as commonplace and ordinary as a carnival carousel and turns it into a giant, deadly machine. In typical Hitchcock fashion, this is not the fault of the film’s villain, but of incompetent police who fire a gun into a crowd and miraculously only manage to kill the carousel operator.
Rope and Rebeccaare usually thought of as Hitchcock’s major works in the queer canon, with Rope having been based on a play in which the characters were explicitly gay (toned down but still noticeable in the film) and Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers having an erotic fixation on the late Mrs. de Winter that drives her to burn down Manderley. It would be remiss to leave Strangers on a Train out of that discussion, however. In her later years, Highsmith was insistent that Tom Ripley was not written as a gay man (having reread the novel again earlier this year, I call B.S.) and that the queerness of her work was all subtextual. From what I can gather without getting my hands on her novel (I’m fourth in line with a hold on two copies that my library has), the Guy and Bruno equivalents therein have a relationship that is not unlike that of Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, with one fixated upon the other in a way that transcends their “bargain.” It’s strong enough that, in the book, Guy does go through with killing Bruno’s father, which dramatically changes the ending. I can’t be certain until I give it a read, but I think that I prefer this ending. Why, without it, we wouldn’t get that wonderfully tense scene of Bruno almost losing the evidence he intends to plant in a storm drain!
Ruth Roman is a bit of a cypher here as Guy’s love interest — serviceable, but not that interesting or exciting. However, her inclusion ensures that we get to spend some time with her precocious kid sister, Barbara (Alfred’s daughter, Patricia Hitchcock), who is a total delight. Whenever Bruno meets Barbara, her similar glasses to Miriam’s gives him a flashback to the murder, which almost results in him throttling a socialite at a government function, which is a great scene that calls back to the gorgeous double composition of Miriam’s murder, reflected in both lenses of her fallen glasses. This is one of the larger roles that Alfie gave Pat, and it makes a case that she could have been included more, but perhaps she was too gracious to take the easy nepo baby route to stardom, unlike others who shall remain nameless.
If you’re planning to make November Noirvember, make sure to put this one on your list.
What is there left to say about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I got into the franchise after the TV series had ended, but only just, in a roundabout manner. In short, there was a demo for the video game adaptation of the show on a disc that came with the Official XBox Magazine, the subscription to which was bundled with the system when I got it for my fifteenth birthday. This led to obtaining the movie on VHS at a flea market within the following year and finding the DVDs of the first few seasons at the GameStop on Essen Lane shortly thereafter, starting a lifelong love for the slayer and her pals. I’m currently in the midst of a rewatch of the show right now, and even under great duress I could not calculate the number of rewatches I’ve had. Normally, people who enjoy the show don’t care much for the movie (or vice versa), but I love them both; I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve watched this film any more than I could tell you how many times I’ve watched the show.
We get a brief intro set in “Europe” in “The Dark Ages” that establishes the lore that vampires walk among us and that the only one with the strength and skill to face them is a girl called to be the Slayer, who is guided in her craft by the Watcher. We cross-cut from the medieval Slayer lifting an ornate stake into the air to a pom-pom held aloft by airheaded cheerleader Buffy (Swanson). We find ourselves in Southern California in “The Lite Ages,” where Buffy and her clique are a softer version of the Heathers, whose only concerns are shopping, dances, boyfriends, and curfews. After a chance encounter with a couple of broke mechanics named Benny (David Arquette) and Pike (Luke Perry), Buffy meets Merrick (Donald Sutherland), who introduces himself as her Watcher and tells her of her destiny, much to her “eww.” Elsewhere, sensing that the Slayer has come into her powers, the elder vampire Lothos (Rutger Hauer) arrives in Los Angeles with his flunky Amilyn (Paul Reubens) in tow to begin rebuilding his vampire coven. Amilyn attacks Pike and Benny one night; Pike is rescued by Merrick, but Benny isn’t so lucky, showing up at Pike’s place the following night floating around and attempting to convince Pike to join him, Salem’s Lot style. Meanwhile, Buffy is convinced to accompany Merrick to a graveyard when he knows details of her dreams, which he reveals to be memories of past Slayers. When a vampire emerges from the ground, her instincts kick in and she defeats it with ease. The two begin training, with Merrick warning her that she must keep her identity a secret from the vampires, and Buffy also strikes up an unlikely romance with Pike. Finally being challenged by a father figure while also finding something to love in a man she would have previously been too vapid to consider because of his working class background, Buffy grows as a person without losing the things that make her unique, and it may be just enough to give her the edge over Lothos despite so many previous Slayers dying at his hands.
In writing about the film as a companion piece to All Cheerleaders Die, Brandon identified Buffy as “Cluelessbefore Clueless, if Clueless were a Hammer Horror,” and that’s spot on. Buffy, like Cher after her, is the perfect 90s heroine: an archetypically ditzy girl with seemingly nothing going on upstairs whose apparent vapidity and cluelessness obscure a kind heart and a healthy intelligence that simply doesn’t present in a traditional, measurable way. When given the chance to see beyond the rim of the literal and metaphorical valley, they demonstrate a wealth of character. Buffy’s relationship with Merrick is quite charming, especially in contrast to the apathetic neglect that her parents demonstrate, and Pike serves as a nice contrast to Buffy’s boyfriend Jeffrey, who, instead of defending Buffy against a sexist remark from one of his friends when he asks to “borrow” her, declines on the grounds that he’d “get her dirty.”
Although the film and the series are narratively aligned in the broad strokes (the events of the film are basically canon, with the one major change being that the film’s screenplay featured Buffy burning the gym down during her final fight, which was cut from the movie for budget reasons but treated as canonical in the show), they’re very different tonally. Buffy the series is funny, but it’s a supernatural drama first and foremost, with the comedy being an innate part of its charm but not what first comes to mind when one thinks about it. Buffy the film is a comedy from the ground up, starting with the gag that a Valley Girl with a name like “Buffy” might have a serious destiny, fated to slay the vampires that start to spring up all over Los Angeles. This gives the film the chance to tell jokes on several levels, from the lowbrow comedy Buffy cutting the hot dog that Benny uses as a phallus to mock her, to the more conceptual humor that arises from someone like Buffy having a special destiny, to the slapstick of Paul Reubens being staked and dying very, very slowly. One of my favorite jokes features the vapid teens trying to come up with a dance theme that’s socially aware, deciding on environmentalism but having trouble with landing it conceptually, coming up with the catchphrase “don’t tread on me” before realizing that you “kind of have to” tread on the earth. Later, the banner at the dance reads “Hug the World,” which is so comically meaningless that it’s hard not to snort. It’s good stuff all around.
It’s hard to watch the film now knowing how mentally unwell Swanson has become in recent years, not to mention that a film that’s barely thirty years old has also lost so many members of its cast, with Perry and Hauer passing in 2019, Reubens in 2023, and Donald Sutherland in 2024. I don’t think that any of them were defined by their roles in this film, all having greater success elsewhere, but I still think of Sutherland’s role in this when I picture him in my mind, and I may be the only person on earth who thinks about Amilyn before Pee-Wee Herman when Reubens is mentioned. Nonetheless, that’s not what makes this movie an unintentional period piece, as this is a perfect little time capsule of the 1990s, a snapshot of a time when “Buffy, the vampire slayer” was a conceptual novelty and not a far-reaching media empire (this year’s failed reboot notwithstanding). The film is full of cameos from actors who would go on to have a much bigger cultural footprint: Stephen Root as the principal of Hemery High, Hilary Swank as the scheming Heather Duke to Buffy’s (sweet) Heather Chandler, and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from babyfaced Ben Affleck as a member of a rival school’s basketball team. The best time to have seen this movie was when you were a kid or a teenager and you watched it three times a day for two weeks during summer vacation, but the second-best time to watch it is now.
