"The Trouble With Harry" (1955)

The Trouble With Harry (1955) opens with a white church steeple, rolling hills, and the blazing autumn colors of a peaceful Vermont town.

So, naturally, I was on the edge of my seat.

Whenever you see an idyllic little town in a Hitchcock film, you can be certain of one thing: whatever gentle exterior we've seen will, by the end of the picture, be stripped away to reveal something dark and evil lurking beneath.

Strangely, though, Harry doesn't really deliver in this respect. Yes, the film has a macabre humor to it - after all, the trouble with Harry is that he's dead - but the film seems to spend its time dipping its toe in the water rather than diving in. Although the name of the film is catchy and humorous, it can't have helped a troubled film to have the word "trouble" right in the title.

My viewing experience of the film was unusual; I watched the film in two parts. On the first day, I got through about 45 minutes of it. I finished the movie the following evening.

The strange thing is (other than the inherent strangeness of the film itself) that I had two totally different reactions on Night #1 and Night #2. The first night, I was sleepy and didn't laugh a single time during the first 45 minutes. But on the second night, I was glued to the screen.

This leaves a few possibilities:

1. I was tired the first night and alert the second night, meaning that for me, this was a film that required a special level of alertness to enjoy.

Or

2. The film may actually pick up after the first 45 minutes; maybe that's when it gets funny. It will be hard to say anything definitively with only one viewing.

Or

Some combination of these two things?

Whatever my individual viewing experience was, it's no secret that this is an incredibly unusual film, both as a Hitchcock film and as a film made in 1955. British humo(u)r - and Hitchcock's own eccentric sense of humor - attempt to subvert Hollywood's typically brash, obvious comedy, though not without a few difficulties.

For me, the main problem was that a modern audience brings their familiarity with Hitchcock's work as the "master of suspense" to what he intended to be more of a comedy. Additionally, the film doesn't ever really make its intentions clear - what are we supposed to care about here? - and has a major issue with pacing.

If anything, this film is worth watching to witness Shirley MacLaine's screen debut playing Jennifer Rogers, whose husband has just been killed and who couldn't be more bored by the whole thing. It's also worth watching as an interesting meditation on humor in Hitchcock and to see him do a very different kind of film.

Summary: Watch Hitchcock experiment on American audiences by attempting a film with a more subtle humor, but expect to confront some troubling aspects of The Trouble With Harry (1955).

Theory Response: Shared Paragraph

For Film Theory Through the Senses class, my Theory Response argued that, despite their differences, Bazin and Vertov both find exciting potential in the possibilities of film and treat the medium with an awed, even spiritual, reverence.

I'm choosing to share this paragraph in which I related what Vertov's theory would think of the recent film Listen to Me Marlon (2015).

Here is the paragraph:

Another clip, which we have not seen in class but is nonetheless relevant, is one from the new documentary on Marlon Brando called Listen to Me Marlon (2015), released last year as a film which edits together countless hours of archival interviews with the actor so as to create the illusion that Marlon Brando is narrating the story of his own life while corresponding archival footage is being screened. In one particular moment in the film, Brando tells the story of how he visited an island nearby Tahiti where he was filming Mutiny on the Bounty. In this clip, much like the rest of the film, different instances of Brando talking about his experiences on the island play over the footage captured candidly of the actor. For Vertov, Listen to Me Marlon would also be a form of triumph because the filmmaker uses montage to assemble different parts of Brando’s life into a coherent narrative; Vertov praises this very idea when he says that one of the camera’s unique abilities is to allow filmmakers to be the “organisers of visible life” (262) which leads to the ability to create, through cinema and, especially, through montage, “a fresh perception of the world” (260). The ability to form a narrative from different parts of someone’s life – in essence, remixing these fragments to create a new idea - is the very idea that Vertov is describing when he discusses the cinema-eye as “a constructor” (260).

Bibliography:

Listen to Me Marlon. Dir. Stevan Riley. Perf. Marlon Brando. Cutler Productions, Passion Pictures, 2015. Film.

Vertov, Dziga. "Film Directors: A Revolution." 2011. Critical Visions in Film Theory. Ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 257-62. Print.

"Spellbound" (1945)

Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) is everything I have ever wanted a Hitchcock film to be.

My intial reaction was that I'd discovered my new favorite Hitchcock film, but when I think of the other contender - and Hitchcock's true masterpiece - Psycho (1960), I know I'm fooling myself to think that anything else could ever really take that top spot. There's just something about Norman Bates.

But Spellbound has to be, without a shadow of a doubt (a little Hitchcock humor), my other favorite Hitchcock film. I adore it.

It's a love story about a girl who can't help but fall in love with a man who may be a murderer. The theme of the illogical nature of love, and how that can be dangerous when you've got a murderer on the loose, is one of my favorite issues to see cinema investigate. Both the 1947 and 2010 versions of Brighton Rock and Plein Soleil (1960) all deal with this very issue - and are some of my favorites.

When it comes to love, what strange psychological process do we undergo that makes us completely abandon sense? Spellbound depicts this process via Ingrid Bergman's character, who we see transform from clinical doctor to obsessed lover. And, admittedly, it wouldn't be hard to fall in love with the young, handsome Gregory Peck.

Speaking of him, is nobody else totally freaked out by how much Gregory Peck looks like Anthony Perkins?? I wasn’t sure if I was terrified of Gregory Peck as this disturbed - and lovable - would-be murderer, or terrified of him because he looks so much like Anthony Perkins in his role in Psycho.

Was I just bringing all of my emotional baggage from that film to this one? Was that fear just echoes of Anthony Perkins's haunting performance being transferred onto Gregory Peck? Is this all just the film's psuedo-psychoanalysis rubbing off on me?

Then there's the score (thank you, Miklós Rózsa). Click the video below of Spellbound's title sequence to immediately understand what I mean:

Hitchcock films are notorious (a little more Hitchcock humor) for their brilliant music, but the score of Spellbound captures the film's essence perfectly. Right from the film's first moments - over that glorious title sequence of bare branches and leaves swirling in the wind - the score is sweeping and breath-taking, a kind of dark, bewitched (in the Sinatra sense of the word) love story, all right in the sound. Nothing has even happened yet and already I feel like I'm in the middle of some gorgeous drama.

Essentially, Spellbound is a love story as well as a psychological thriller. I know there's been a lot of hooey about the inaccurate representation of psychology methods in the film, but I'm on Hitchcock's side: it's only a movie. For me, the same rule applies here as in science-fiction: the film world is not anchored in the logic of the real. Besides, this isn't just your usual psychological trhiller. In Spellbound, psychology is treated with a kind of otherworldly reverence, almost like magic, making the title even more fitting.

There are so many great lines about the dizzying logic of love. The way Ingrid Bergman says "I couldn't feel this way toward a man who was bad, who had committed murder. I couldn't feel this pain for someone who was evil." How Gregory Peck tells Ingrid "I think you're quire mad. You're much crazier than I, to do all this for a creature without a name." And when Michael Checkhov, as Dr. Alexander Brulov, exclaims to Ingrid: "We are speaking of a schizophrenic, and not a valentine!" Hitchcock's dark humor would find it hilarious how easy it is, when we are in love, to get the two confused.

There's all sorts of other brilliant Hitchcock motifs to be found here. Eye glasses motifs, the centrality of the kissing scene, the idea of masks, and a really incredible scene involving a razor. The chaos world is definitely at work in Spellbound. The film looks at love as a psychological problem. There's even chaos in what it means to be human. Hitchcock uses the film to poke fun at the idea that humanity is so full of chaos that we need psychoanalysis simply to find out, as Dr. Brulov says, "what the devil you're trying to say to yourself."

Summary: Spellbound: You've got a twisted psychological thriller combined with a gorgeous romance by the brilliant Alfred Hitchcock. I'm smitten.