For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two different films that share the same title and director: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and its loose remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
This month’s Classic Movies and Late Night oddities line-up at The Prytania has been, without question, the best run of repertory programming I’ve ever seen in New Orleans. Even with the caveat that I came of age during the AMC Palaces’ total decimation of the city’s indie cinema scene, the wealth of classic horror titles on their October docket feels like an all-time great moment in local theatrical exhibition: Psycho, The Shining, The Craft, The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, Scream, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Dracula’s Daughter, Beetlejuice,The Black Cat, The Exorcist, The Creeping Flesh, Theatre of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors, and their regular midnight reruns of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s such a staggering assemblage that I had to be choosy about which screenings to make time for, especially since The Broad was screening some of my favorite oddball horror sequels on the other side of town: Halloween III, A Nightmare on Elm Street III, and Friday the 13th Part VIII, all choice selections. What a time to be unalive! Maybe it’s a little silly, then, that I treated The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Bell, Book and Candle as high-priority, can’t-miss viewing while I skipped out on a few screenings of classics I already know & love. Bell, Book and Candle is a fluffy major-studio romcom about a lovelorn witch, establishing the 1950s middle ground between its 40s equivalent I Married a Witch and its 60s equivalent Bewitched. It’s not an electrifying watch, but it is a cozy one, providing the same witchy-but-not-scary seasonal viewing most modern audiences find in Hocus Pocus instead. While it feels a little puny in comparison to some of the all-time classics it shared a marquee with this month, its exhibition was more of a special occasion in some ways, since it has weirdly spotty home-video distribution right now, available only on Tubi or on DVD through the New Orleans Public Library. More importantly, it fit in nicely with the usual programming of The Prytania’s Classic Movies slot, due to its unlikely connection to Alfred Hitchcock.
Part of the reason this month’s classic horror line-up at The Prytania feels so refreshingly adventurous is because the single-screen landmark usually only has the space in their schedule for a couple well-worn, widely beloved classics – more TCM (Turner Classic Movies) than TCM (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). It’s still the most dependable repertory venue in the city, though, and over the years I’ve come to associate it with Hitchcock’s catalog in particular, since the director seemed to be a personal favorite of late proprietor Rene Brunet, Jr. I’ve seen a good handful of Hitchcock titles for the very first time by attending The Prytania on Sunday mornings:To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Saboteur, Rope,Suspicion, Stage Fright, and Frenzy, to name them all. Unfortunately, Hitchcock did not direct his own witchy love-spell romcom for The Prytania to program this month (they opted for Psycho instead), but Bell, Book and Candle does share some incidental similarities to his most critically lauded work. It’s essentially the cutesy, witchy B-side to Vertigo. Both films feature Kim Novak putting Jimmy Stewart under a spell while his jilted, more socially appropriate love interest works out her romantic frustration by furiously painting on canvas alone in her apartment. Novak’s given more to do here than play Stewart’s object of desire, since she initially holds all the (magical) power in their relationship and the vulnerability of their romance puts her in danger instead of him. In either case, she is treated as a kind of fetish object by the camera. Here, she’s so performatively feminine that she’s basically feline, as indicated by the onscreen credit for the costumer who provided her furs. There’s also an intense, Tarantino-esque focus on her bare feet, which is presented as a witchy character quirk but becomes outrageously obsessive by the time we linger on them slipping in & out of high heels. The difference is that in Bell, Book and Candle she’s an aspirational figure for a lovelorn audience, while in Vertigo she’s a collectible figurine for an obsessive Stewart (and his directorial counterpart).
Novak plays Gillian Holroyd—a powerful young witch making waves on the Manhattan occult scene—whose loneliness & boredom at the top fixates her on the unsuspecting, nonmagical book publisher Shepherd Henderson, played by Stewart. She’s careful to only share her powers with those she trusts: a bumbling hipster brother who’s smoked one too many jazz cigarettes (Jack Lemon, auditioning for his career-making part in Some Like It Hot), a kooky upstairs aunt (Elsa “Bride of Frankenstein” Lanchester), and the fellow witches & warlocks who drown martinis and talk shop at the magical dive bar The Zodiac Club. Falling for her new neighbor and enchanting him to ditch his uptight fiancée is what unravels her usually careful approach to witchcraft, both because he’s a publisher who’s threatening to expose her coven with an upcoming book titled Magic in Manhattan and because falling in love means that she’ll lose her magical powers, according to The Rules. Outside a couple scenes in which Novak and her witchy family (including the actress’s real-life pet Siamese cat) cast spells in her lavish apartment, there isn’t much genuine horror imagery in Bell, Book and Candle. It’s just as much a precursor to Sex and the City as it is a precursor to Bewitched, with most of the central drama resulting from the witch’s disastrous, Carrie Bradshaw style attempts to “have it all” while living in The Big City. It’s all very light, cozy, and unrushed, with only a couple jokes about the coven’s “Un-American activities” and what possible insults “witch” might rhyme with registering as anything especially risqué. Still, it was wonderful to see on the big screen for the first time with a giggling crowd, and it was a wonderful middle ground between this month’s run of classic-horror obscurities at The Prytania and their Classic Movies series’ usual TCM-friendly fare.
While I’m fixating on Bell, Book and Candle‘s appropriateness as seasonal programming, I do want to note that it resonated with me as more of a Christmas movie than a Halloween one, despite all of its thematic & aesthetic focus on witchcraft. Much of the early stretch of the film is set during Christmas rituals, including a Christmas Eve get-together at The Zodiac Club and Novak trading presents with her family around a modernist “tree” sculpture. Halloween and Christmas both have cultural significance as liminal stretches of the calendar when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, so it makes just as much sense to me that this story about a young witch in love would be set during Yule as it would during Samhain. It also makes sense to me that its Christmastime setting would be forgotten when choosing seasonal programming, especially as memories of the film get muddled with its better-remembered predecessor I Married a Witch. Speaking personally, I’m grateful that I got to catch Bell, Book and Candle on the big screen for my first viewing, but I am mentally filing it away as a Christmas movie for future revisits. As a life-long Scrooge, I’m always desperate for lightly spooky Yuletide movies that aren’t so saccharine they rot your teeth, while witchy Halloween movies are already more than plentiful.
Mark Waters is a wonderfully talented (if occasionally inconsistent) comedic director, but something I would never accuse his best-known works like Mean Girls & House of Yes of being is subtle or delicate. Waters works in broad strokes. His jokes can be pointedly satirical & smartly written, but they’re delivered in the loud, brash cadence of a mainstream comedy, not the hushed tones of dry wit. That’s why it seemed jarring that Waters would build a flighty modern romcom starring Monica Potter & Freddie Prinze Jr. around something as tightly controlled and quietly sophisticated as a Hitchcock thriller. Waters didn’t seek to upend just any old Hitchcock thriller, either. He built his delirious romcom around the basic concept of Rear Window, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. It might be tempting to think of that romcom, Head Over Heels, as an act of cinematic blasphemy, a disrespectful transgression that drags down one of the Hollywood greats to the level of a Zoolander-style fashion world satire that indulges in such less-refined pleasures as shit jokes and oggling Freddie Prinze Jr.’s rock hard abs. The truth is, though, that Waters was not at all perverting a refined work of stone-faced seriousness, but rather exposing the Hitchcock classic for what it truly is: a stealth comedy in a thriller’s disguise.
Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation as a filmmaker is difficult for me to contextualize. It took a long while for the director to be recognized as the master that he is, since he often chose to work in the trashy trenches of genre cinema, mainly with thrillers. I grew up in a world where Hitchcock was already a respected name, so it’s difficult to conceive that high art thriller works Psycho& The Birds were initially considered by some critics to be tawdry, gimmick-heavy works of populism. Rear Window is a great, distilled example of the meticulous visual mastery that eventually earned Hitchcock his deserved respect. It finds him working with big Hollywood budgets & stars (you don’t get much more Hollywood than James Stewart & Grace Kelly), delivering a beautiful, Technicolor-rich mystery thriller where every image feels tightly controlled & meticulously planned. The sets of Rear Window have a proto-Wes Anderson dollhouse quality to them. The lavishness of the costume design tops even Douglas Sirk productions like All That Heaven Allows. Not a single hair feels out of place and each mechanical piece of the plot moves along like clockwork, even though the film’s star, Stewart, is supposed to convey a pathetic, disheveled state with his broken leg & unwashed body. With all of the film’s intricate visual design, complex plotting, and trick photography innovation at the inevitable climax, it’s easy to see Rear Window only as a gorgeous middle ground between a populist thriller & a high brow art film. The truth is, though, that the movie also slyly functions as a morose comedy. It never approaches the broadness if its 00s romcom counterpart, but it can still be openly silly all the same.
Rear Window is an intense thriller about a disabled man who can only watch in horror as he pieces together the murder of a neighbor by her traveling salesman husband. It’s immediately jarring, then, that the movie opens with the most upbeat jazz music imaginable, almost as if its credits were leading into a 1950s sitcom. It’s not a direct, 1:1 comparison, but the upbeat club music that deliriously pulsates throughout Head Over Heels seems to echo that exact tonal clash. The Mark Waters romcom also echoes the way Rear Window builds comedy around friction between the sexes. Monica Potter’s openly spying on her hunky (and possibly murderous) neighbor and her various musings on how she can only find the worst men in NYC are basically just a gender-flipped version of James Stewart’s idle banter about how women are weak-willed nags & his casual gawking of a young ballerina who practices her routines in her skivvies across the courtyard. Hitchcock pokes subtle fun at his debilitated protagonist for being something of a pervert & a misogynist by making him physically impotent while two strong women (a nurse & a girlfriend) run circles around him, acting on suspicions he can only voice. The stakes of the central murder mystery are severe, much more severe than they are in the convoluted diamond heist plot of Head Over Heels, but Rear Window‘s tension is constantly eroded with dry, verbal wit and the occasional visual gag to the point where the whole movie almost feels like a subtle comedy that just happens to revolve around a murder mystery. It even concludes on a comedic gag, a whomp-whomp reveal of James Stewart’s second broken leg (and just when the first one was almost healed!).
Head Over Heels is certainly much broader in its humor than Rear Window and doesn’t even attempt to match its inspiration’s attention to visual craft, but I don’t think its reduction of the Hitchcock classic to the level of trope-laden romcom is at all blasphemous. Head Over Heels borrows the basic voyeuristically-witnessed murdered aspect of Rear Window‘s thriller plot as a launching point, but deviates from Hitchcock’s tightly-controlled tension-builder, contained entirely in a single apartment, by branching out all over NYC into various genres & tones. Although it’s a much more restrained, subtly humorous work, Hitchcock’s classic is a sort of tonal mashup in its own right, refusing to take its morbid subject matter entirely seriously, even when life & love are dangling on the line. I can’t speculate that the director would’ve enjoyed watching what Mark Waters did to one of his most revered works, but as he was no stranger to populist cinema & tonally inappropriate humor himself, Head Over Heels feels oddly at home with his prankster spirit, especially for a by the books romcom.
Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.
Where Call Northside 777 (1948) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 140 of the first edition hardback, Roger recalls meeting Chicago newspaperman Jack McPhaul, whose reporting inspired the events of the film. He recounts McPhaul’s anecdote of a photographer at a 1940s demonstration of an atom being split pitching the following preposterous photo spread: “I’ve got a great idea for a series of three photos for the top of page one. You puttin’ in the atom, splittin’it, and standin’ around looking at the pieces.”
What Ebert had to say in his review: Ebert never officially reviewed the film, but he does mention it in his essay “The Best Damn Job in the Whole Damn World,” a collection of thoughts on what it means to be a newspaperman. Again, he mentions meeting McPhaul, an opportunity he clearly considered to be an honor.
There’s a long history of celebrated newspapermen in celebrated films, from the William Randolph Hearst archetype of Citizen Kane to the Watergate investigation team of All the President’s Men to the recent Oscar-winning profile of Bostonian sex abuse scandal breakers in Spotlight. Roger Ebert was lucky to be born in a time, perhaps the end of a time, when print journalism was still a viable career and he knew it, proudly calling his occupation at The Chicago Sun-Times “the best damn job in the whole damn world.” Long before The Chicago Sun & The Chicago Times merged into a single paper, it had its own movie-worthy story of a newspaperman doing good. Besides boasting a general pride for his career path, Ebert was proud to have met/worked with Jack McPhaul, who he credited with penning the articles that inspired the “based on true events” drama Call Northside 777. The opening credits of Call Northside 777, however, state that the film is “based on an article by James P McGuire.” The truth is that both Chicagoan newspapermen were responsible for penning the articles that freed the wrongly convicted “Stop Me Before I Kill Again Killer” Joseph Majczek after 11 years of imprisonment for a crime he didn’t commit. Instead of playing the story like a group effort of an investigative team, however, Call Northside 777 sells its narrative as the efforts of one dedicated reporter’s “refusal to accept defeat,” presumably because it made for a better story.
Said amalgamation of McPhaul & McGuire is brought to life by none other than Old Hollywood mainstay Jimmy Stewart. Structurally speaking, Call Northside 777 isn’t too much to speak of in terms of innovation. It borrows a page from Citizen Kane in mixing newspaper reel stock footage & narration in with its narrative to establish a documentarian tone and attempts to construct the shadowy crime world aesthetic of a noir (except with a missing sense of urgency or moral ambiguity to its danger), but doesn’t do anything particularly inventive or memorable with either element. It’s the specificity of James Stewart’s lead performance as a skeptical-but-noble reporter, from his unmistakable vocal patters to his little-guy-vs-the-big-system demeanor, that makes the film a joy to watch. Although a 2010s audience wouldn’t likely be as familiar with the real-life events the film was based on as a 1940s audience would be, it’s still all too easy to guess how the story will turn out in the end (there wouldn’t be much of a plot if Macjzek were guilty). As so, the entertainment appeal of this non-mystery depends largely on Stewart’s performance, a burden he handles well. At first Stewart’s eternally exhausted newspaperman believes Majczek (or his fictionalized surrogate Wiecek) is guilty and only takes on the story because of a pushy newspaper editor & the prisoner’s sympathetic mother, who scrubs floors to earn money to investigate his long dead case. At first he’s reluctant to follow up on the supposed innocence of a man who I believes to be a cop killer, asking “Don’t I get time off for good behavior?” but he eventually unravels a story about drunk lawyers, faulty investigations, spineless judges, and Prohibition-era police department corruption that reveals Majczek/Wiecek to be a victim of the system. Stewart plays the part with a befuddled nobility only he could sell with such immense credibility and his efforts to free his articles’ star subject are likened to his wife’s hobby of slowly piecing together complicated jigsaw puzzles. It’s a methodical, frustrating process, but it’s rewarding when the picture finally comes together for the newspaperman & the wrongly convicted “cop killer.”
Besides Jimmy Stewart’s show-stealing performance Call Northisde 777 is mostly interesting for its historical curiosities. The first Hollywood production shot on location in Chicago, the film tried, when possible, to include actual locations from the real-life Mazcjek story to help establish its documentary tone. The inventor of the polygraph test, Leonard Keeler, plays himself & puts on a very extensive, detailed demonstration of his invention/methods. There’s also great attention paid to old fashion newspaper press machinery & the magic process of sending a photograph over a wire. For the most part, though, this 1940s non-noir is of interest for the way it captures an ancient Chicago, struggling to portray its immense, dangerous spirit, with its great fires, great violence, great corruption, and great newspapermen. Although Stewart’s noble sweetheart protagonist is an unmistakably decent guy, he still navigates an ancient journalism world built on lies, hard liquor, hard work, and cigar smoke. The true crime mystery thriller Call Northside 777 tries to sell isn’t particularly interesting or unique, but Stewart’s portrayal of noble newspaperman in an ignoble world is an easy emotional rallying point and it’s no wonder that meeting the man who helped inspire the character was a proud moment for Ebert, as McPhaul represented “the best damn job in the whole damn world” in what I’m sure the legendary critic considered the best damn city in the whole damn world.
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