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Torn Curtain (1966)

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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 Psycho and 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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie. 

That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.

All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.

Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.

Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead. 

The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Oscar (1966)

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This year’s Oscars statues were doled out earlier this week, and most of them found their way to deserving hands. There were a lot of great winners this year among a lot of great nominees, so there isn’t really anything major to complain about (depending on the fervor of your Stan Wars allegiance to Sinners or One Battle After Another). Personally, I enjoy the annual ritual of the ceremony, which provides one of the few remaining incentives for mainstream studios & audiences to pay attention to Real Movies for a few months before the marketing machine defaults back to Summer Blockbuster season. The secret to enjoying the ritual is to celebrate the instances where the awards happen to go to good movies, without fixating on the awards not going to your favorites. Getting hung up on Oscar snubs & losses is a quick path to madness, only advisable if your favorite pastime is getting mad, not watching movies. That said, I was amused by one particular Oscars “loss” this year, in the Best Lead Actor category. A couple months ago, the narrative was that Timothée Chalamet was a lock to win for his starring role in Marty Supreme, but the tide quickly shifted at the last minute to favor Michael B. Jordan instead, who ultimately won the statue for playing twin brothers in Sinners. It was a late-breaking upset widely celebrated for both its winner and its “loser,” since Chalamet had quickly become The Villain of this Oscars season, while Jordan is by all accounts a total mensch. Chalamet seemingly earned that 2026 Oscar Villain designation (despite having heavy competition in actual-villain Sean Penn) by allowing the youthful narcissistic brashness of his Marty Supreme character to bleed over into his real-life press circuit persona, turning off onlookers by playing a deviously ambitious brat for the cameras. None of this matters in any meaningful way, but it is funny how many of the jokes made during the ceremony were at Chalamet’s expense, and the crowd seemed ready to line up and take turns spanking his pasty behind with ping-pong paddles for the transgression of believing his own hype. It was even funnier watching him have to politely smile through it all, so we wouldn’t add “spoil sport” to his growing list of supposed offenses (alongside “ballet & opera hater” and “all-around fuckboy”).

All of this baseless speculation about Oscar narratives, Oscar villains, and dirty behind-the-scenes Oscar campaigns can feel like a decidedly modern phenomenon, specific to online discourse in a post-Weinstein movie industry. As evidenced by the 1966 industry melodrama The Oscar, however, those unseemly aspects of the Oscars season have been part of the ritual for over half a century now. Stephen Boyd stars as the dastardly Frankie Fane, a New York City gangster turned big-shot Hollywood actor, wholly made up for the source-material novel. The film starts at a 1960s Academy Awards ceremony where Frankie is expected to win for Best Lead Actor, despite being the obvious Villain of that season. We then flash back to his earlier years as a ruffian hustler on the opposite coast, making chump change as a carnival-barker promoter for his stripper girlfriend. In its first act, The Oscar operates mostly as a scumbag noir, characterizing Frankie as the kind of fast-talking tough guy sociopath James Cagney used to play several decades earlier. Then, it shifts into macho melodrama once Frankie is “discovered” by Hollywood types while threatening unsuspecting stage actors with a knife, seeing in him a sexy volatility that had made stars out of character actors like James Dean & Marlon Brando. Once Frankie goes to Hollywood, the movie becomes an All About Eve knockoff for meatheads, satisfying male audiences’ repressed desire for juicy gossip while distracting them with brutish delights like switchblades, bikini babes, strip shows, and fist fights. Frankie learns no lessons along the way. He burns every bridge he crosses, hustling his way to the very top in a series of professional backstabbing maneuvers, then works the press into crafting a pre-packaged Oscar narrative sure to win him the Best Lead Actor statue. In his own devious words, “I can’t rig the votes, but I can rig the emotions of the voters,” which still rings true to how most Oscars are “won” today. Only, Frankie has set himself up to be publicly humiliated by the end, since his fate lies in the hands of “a black-tied jury of his peers,” in an industry exclusively populated by people who hate his guts. He’s an asshole, everyone knows he’s an asshole, and it’s hard to pity an asshole.

It’s amusing to see a movie take the absurd pageantry of The Oscars so seriously, as if the stakes were life or death instead of the size of a nominated actor’s paycheck for their next role. The Oscar literally rolls out the red carpet to sell the prestige & grandeur of the event, going as far as to brag in its opening credits that it borrowed actual Oscar statues from The Academy instead of using props, treating them like celebrity guests. Legendary costume designer Edith Head also gets Celebrity Guest Star billing in the opening credits, appearing in a wordless cameo as herself in multiple scenes in the third act (alongside other infamous Hollywood Types like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper & 19-time Oscar host Bob Hope). Head, of course, also gets her more typical “Gowns by” credit, alongside a “Furs by” credit for famed furrier Frank Somper, which is how you know this is a classy affair. The recent Kino Lorber scan boasts some gorgeously garish color saturation, which again heightens the pageantry of this paperback novel adaptation miles above its station. The first half of the runtime is a go-nowhere crime story mostly consisting of sweaty men throwing punches to a swanky jazz soundtrack; the second half is a fish-out-of-water melodrama about a New York City street tough who can’t adjust his brash machismo to the more genteel schmoozing of the California cocktail set. Neither of those modes are especially compelling on their own, but they combine for an amusingly overwrought character study of The Oscar Villain as an archetype. Here we have a knuckle-dragging meathead with no sense of social tact, who can only get by on his movie-star handsome looks for so long before no one in his industry can stand to work with him any longer. By the time his rancid reputation catches up with him, he’s seething in his theatre chair on live TV while pretending to applaud a professional rival. He is a broken man at the rock-bottom end of an existential crisis, like Burt Lancaster at the end of The Swimmer, except the only tangible fallout of his humiliation is that he’ll have to pivot from movies to TV. I doubt that absurd scenario shares much resemblance to Timothée Chalamet’s brief, superficial arc as this year’s Oscars Villain, but it is funny to think about as the melodramatic extreme of that movie-industry cliché.

-Brandon Ledet

Good Luck to You, Dick Avery

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The COVID-era two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a little self-conscious & stagebound, but it’s also an admirably thoughtful, vulnerable drama for adults.  Despite its obvious production limitations—mostly isolated to two actors verbally sparring in a single hotel room—it feels substantial enough to make you wonder why the Disney subsidiary Searchlight dumped it directly into the Hulu stream instead of giving it a proper theatrical push.  Maybe it’s because it’s the rare Nancy Meyers/Nora Ephron style romcom that’s too saucy to watch with your mom, considering how lengthy & girthy its discussions of geriatric sexual pleasure can be.  Or maybe the star power of its sole household name, Emma Thompson, wasn’t bright enough to guarantee box office success in America (as opposed to the UK, where it has been in the Top 10 box office chart for weeks).  The movie wouldn’t be much without her, though, if it would exist at all.  Screenwriter Katy Brand wrote the main role with Thompson in mind, and the actor makes herself incredibly vulnerable for the part as a widow who hires a young, ripped sex worker (Daryl McCormack, the titular Leo Grande) to help her achieve her very first orgasm.  Thompson’s commitment & fearlessness in the part are unquestionable, but I do wonder what the film might’ve been like if the lead actor wasn’t so Movie Star beautiful.  I don’t want to say that her tightly wound neuroses about her aging body came across as phony, exactly, since low self-esteem can (and does) hit anyone & everyone.  I do think the movie plays it safe by hanging those neuroses off such a gorgeous, glamorous lead, though, even when she’s standing naked in the mirror, exposing all her body’s “flaws” for the audience’s scrutiny.

The reason I’m reluctant to call Thompson’s self-esteem struggle in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande “phony” is because I happened to watch a film this week that exemplifies exactly what phoniness would look like in that context.  The 1957 Stanley Donen rom-com Funny Face has a lot of glaring faults, not least of all the fact that it’s a musical with exactly one good song (“Think Pink”, a sequence I’ve already seen parodied beautifully in Derek Jarman’s arthouse whatsit The Garden).  It’s also packed with so much high-art Technicolor fashion photography—highlighting the artistry of costume designer Edith Head & couturier Hubert de Givenchy—that those faults hardly matter at all.  It’s a film built entirely on phoniness, most notably in the preposterous romance between Audrey Hepburn as a bookworm philosopher & the much older Fred Astaire as a Richard Avedon-type fashion photographer.  Astaire negs Hepburn throughout the film, mocking her academic interests in the philosophy of “Impracticalism” (a sentiment the movie shares) and, more dubiously, for her looks (a sentiment no one shares).  It’s presented as a preposterous prospect that the “mousy,” “boyish,” “Peter Pan”-like Hepburn could become a high-price fashion model. Even the title “Funny Face” is a reference to her “unconventional” attractiveness, when that exact face has since kept the dorm room poster industry afloat for over half a century.  Funny Face is enjoyable enough as a proto-Devil Wears Prada fantasy where an unfashionable bookworm accidentally falls upward to the top of the fashion industry (I’ll let you determine where Hepburn getting forcibly stripped out of her homely bookstore clothes by a room full of rabid fashion models fits in that fantasy), but it is unquestionably, 1000% phony, mostly because of who it cast in that central role as the “homely” academic-turned-model.

The age-gap intimacy of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is much more authentic than the Old Hollywood phoniness of Funny Face.  Thompson’s lonely widow is only unattractive in her own mind, where she beats herself up as a hideous troll & a “seedy old pervert” who needs to pay for satisfying sex.  Her by-the-hour lover is shown to be similarly self-conscious, despite being a younger, gym-bodied smokeshow.  Before & during each of their hotel room trysts, the two main players are shown primping themselves in separate mirrors, nervous about how their physical bodies will be perceived by their sex partners.  I just still think there’s something weirdly cautious about casting someone as glamorous as Thompson in that central role.  Just as Hepburn did not have anything that could be reasonably called “a funny face”, Thompson meets a high Movie Industry beauty standard that prevents her from coming across as an everyday everywoman.  Surely, part of the point of Good Luck to You Leo Grande is about how badly she needs to climb out of her own head, since most of her paid-sex sessions qualify more as talk therapy than they do physical intimacy.  I just wonder if the film might’ve had more impact if someone less remarkable had been cast in Thompson’s role, someone the average audience could more closely relate to.  Considering how shallow the distribution already was for the film even with a movie star at the helm, though, it’s unlikely that it would’ve ever made it past the festival circuit under those conditions.  And, hey, Thompson is a talented actor who can carry a scene with ease, so it’s probably for the best that it was written with her in mind.

As a quick aside, I want to note that phoniness isn’t an automatic dealbreaker.  These two movies are hardly comparable, but I will admit that I’m much more likely to rewatch the glaringly flawed, intensely phony Funny Face in the future than I am to revisit the small-stakes, intimate authenticity of Good Luck to You Leo Grande.  For all of Funny Face‘s faults, watching Hepburn pose in all those gorgeous Givenchy outfits around Paris reaches momentary heights that no raw, vulnerable intimacy Thompson achieves in that closed-off hotel room set ever could.  Hollywood fantasy is a powerful drug, and I’m apparently willing to put up with a lot of phoniness to chase that high.

-Brandon Ledet