Montreal Journal: Sexe D'Or

St Jacques Street (formerly St. James Street), l910

Alfred Hitchcock set I Confess starring Montgomery Clift as the priest, in the capital of the province of Quebec, Quebec City, but the setting could have been the largest city of the province, Montreal. It didn’t turn out to be one of his most touted movies but Hitchcock captured a certain Quebecois feeling that Montreal still exudes despite the erstwhile torch of cosmopolitanism carried by the airport named after Pierre Trudeau. You remember the famed prime minister with the disco wife, Maggie who liked to dance without her underpants. As you drive in you still are impressed by the dirty weathered brick buildings that capture the underbelly of the urban landscape. The great boxer Arturo Gatti (who married a stripper and whose supposed suicide still remains a matter of debate) came from Montreal. Mordecai Richler, the local Philip Roth, wrote about the Jews of Montreal in St. Urbain’s Horseman and other books (St. Urbain Street is like London’s Golders Green). And speaking of strippers, Montreal is famous for its all nude lap dancers and nothing captures the phenomenon more starkly than a sign which reads Sexe d’Or, Pub Bare as you pass signs for the Rue Sherbrooke and Rue St Jacques on the way to Centre Ville. Old Montreal with its gilt edged office buildings and cobblestone streets is reminiscent of Manhattan’s Soho or Tribeca in the way it domesticates the age of the l9th century robber baron. The vintage Hotel Le St. James still is an oasis of personalized luxury whose room service carts come with their own hot and cold boxes. But the little bejeweled piece of Victoriana has been virtually swallowed up by the surrounding skyscrapers which block the view of monuments like Mount Royal and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It may be a case of survival of the fittest, but who is the survivor who the fittest remains to be seen.

Rear Window

Should artists be called on to solve murders? In the classic romantic conception, the artist is an outsider, a wounded soul whose recompense is the pleasure of creation. While others live their lives, the artistic personality derives pleasure from recording it. Everything is gris for the mill. What’s painful for others is merely a diary entry and if beauty is truth as the poet says, then artists who are natural voyeurs and whose one degree of separation confers on them a certain objectivity surely make good detectives. This is the case for L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) in Rear Window, which is one of today’s offerings in the current Hitchcock retrospective at Film Forum. "Jeff" is a photojournalist who’s been put out of commission by a broken leg. The injury sets up the story line, but we are given hints that the wound is symbolic of something more profound that has always sidelined him. Now with his ability to get around impaired, he has nothing to do but look out his window at the lives of others. Urban settings are filled with windows that are like televisions screens, but it’s as if Jeff were on an acid trip watching reality TV. Jeff's fiancé Lisa (Grace Kelly) whose only problem is that she’s everything a man could possibly want (she arrives with lobster from “21”)recedes before him as he becomes captivated by a pair of newlyweds, who are constantly pulling down their shades and a Miss Lonelyheart (Judith Evelyn), a lonely young woman who serves candlelit dinners to imaginary male callers. Rear Window takes place during a New York Heat wave and we even have a couple sleeping out on their fire escape with an alarm clock. Among the cast of characters is a convalescing woman (Irene Winston) and her husband Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) who chops her into little pieces. Stella (Thelma Ritter) the nurse sent by Jeff's insurance company is there to help him with his leg, but she’s really the resident shrink. In a Greek tragedy she’d have been the seer. “We’ve become a race of peeping toms,” she tells Jeff. “People ought to go out of each other’s house and look in.” Significantly many of the people who Jeff is spying on are suffering from a complementary disorder They’re exhibitionists to his voyeur. Jeff shares his Greenwich Village courtyard (which resembles bohemian redoubts like Patchin Place, the home of both E.E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes) with Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) a ballerina who parades around in her underwear, a temperamental musician (Ross Bagdasian) who drunkenly swipes his scores off his keyboard and a sunbathing sculptress. Besides manifesting opposing spectrums of the same pathology Jeff and his subjects, at least initially, are united in the pursuit of art at the expense of life, which may account for the fact that though the courtyard is reminiscent of the Village, it also exudes the artificiality of a stage set. Rear Window like North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train, is a thriller that’s also a romantic comedy and there's something almost Shakespearean about the way it flips so effortlessly from tragedy to comedy, from hi to lo. The problems Jeff and his esthetically inclined friends have with life are resolved faster than you can ask, who done it?

Strangers on a Train

Coleridge famously scribbled “the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity” about Othello in his copy of Shakespeare’s works. Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) offers three propositions at the beginning of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which recently was exhibited as part of the Hitchcock retrospective at Film Forum: ”I’ve got a theory you should do everything before you die...My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer...Each fellow does the other person’s murder so there is nothing to connect them.” QED, the world is an evil place, courtesy of Raymond Chandler who wrote the brilliant script, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel. Bruno when you think about it is a character right out of the Elizabethan/Jacobean theater. Like Iago  he attempts to plant insidious notions in his innocent foil, a tennis star named, Guy Haines (Farley Granger). Strangers on a Train is a series of oppositions that verge on paradox. Miriam, Guy’s slutty unfaithful wife wears thick glasses and looks more like a librarian than a temptress. Her murder is foreshadowed by the screams coming from a so called Tunnel of Love. Bruno’s dotty mother is painting a horrific portrait of a saint (Francis in this case).  She shares a countervailingly pathological misperception of her son, i.e. that he's sweetness and light, when he's in fact horrifying. The one person who can provide an alibi for Guy, a tipsy professor of mathematics offers a definition of integration (“a function is given and the differential is obtained”) while defying moral calculus. By so skewering reality, the movie turns Bruno’s cynical hypothesis on its head. It's impossible to hide motive by the simple act of switching perpetrators, as Bruno suggests, since everyone and everything is, in fact, connected. And the reversals are almost symphonic.  The director makes his obligatory cameo appearance carrying a cello which is the counterpart to the music store that Miriam works in and in which she and Guy quarrel. Miriam's glasses reflect her own murder and again appear on the face of the innocent Barbara Morton, played incidentally by Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia who cheerfully mimics the murder plot when she says, “I still think it would be wonderful to have a man love you so much he would kill for you."  Bruno creates the sound of a bullet shot as he bursts the balloon or bubble of the young boy who is shooting at him with a fake pistol. Guy’s tennis match is paralleled with Bruno’s attempt to retrieve the incriminating lighter (Desdemona’s handkerchief). And lastly let’s not discountenance the homoerotic connection between Bruno and Guy, which continues to provide a pay day for psychoanalytic interpreters of the movie. A runaway carousel is the finale of Hitchcock’s apocalyptic battle between good and evil, and it’s a dazzling scene in which the dark forces of misunderstanding and enlightenment—a child’s screams of delight are countermanded by horrifying spectacle of a wooden horse leg turned into a weapon. The movie begins with a brilliant series of crosscuts, in which we see the shoes and luggage of the two antagonists before we actually meet them. Just as montage creates meaning in cinema, the fate of the film’s two strangers is sealed before they ever meet.

Dial M for Murder

The Hitchcock cameo appears early in Dial M for Murder, now being revived at Film Forum. The director appears in the photo of a smug Cambridge reunion table surrounded by his two villains. He looks dumbfounded and bemused at the same time. It’s a classic Hitchcock self-portrait and it deserves comment to the extent of how profoundly poker-faced he is, a male version of blind Lady Justice. Dial M was shot for 3-D which acts as metaphor for the post-war era in which the movie was shot. 3-D captured a world of profound reality, not the post-modernism of today where reality in fact feels like a stage play made into movie (which is what Dial M  actually was). One of the wonderful things about British whodunits going back to The Mousetrap is the presupposition of a rational universe. Rationalism is the father figure restoring the Great Chain of Being, that has been intermittently shaken up as in the strange doings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You couldn’t write a play like Dial M today or a movie adaptation of it with actors like Robert Cummings playing a writer of mysteries who falls in love with a British heiress (Grace Kelly), married to a cad (Ray Milland). The nature of the evil, so unambiguous and parsable, eludes the imagination in the sinkhole of bankrupt post-modernity. Hitchcock’s camera luxuriates in his wonderful upper crust settings and there are memorable cinematic sleights of hand that take place effortlessly in his confidence narrative world. For instance, as Milland and his counterpart plan out their crime, the camera hovers overhead. You don’t take note of the break from full frontal naturalism until the scene has passed. In this setting the props--a stocking, a key, a dial-up phone-- are free to become icons. Today’s inhabitant of London or New York is suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder and the gnarled characters that contemporary film directors and mystery writers create reflect an unfathomable evil that’s far removed from the crime that Hitchcock portrays in this delicious piece of nostalgia.

Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro recapitulates his iconic scene from Taxi Driver, where he fires on imagined enemies, in Raging Bull, where as Jake LaMotta at the end of his career, having lost everything, he stands alone in the dressing room of a theater reinventing himself as a monologist. Martin Scorsese, who has done for modern American film what the ancient Greeks did for drama, himself appears in the film, in a voyeuristic sequence that recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Hitchcock played cameo roles in all his films, and the score for Taxi Driver was composed by Bernard Hermann, who did the scores for Vertigo and Psycho. Taxi Driver’s ensemble—with Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Leonard Harris (playing the presidential candidate Charles Palantine) and Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster, playing the hooker/pimp team of Easy and Sport—is the ’70s equivalent of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Then there’s the New York of the ’70s, which is itself a character in the film. Remember the Belmore Cafeteria on 28th and Park Avenue South, The Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority, Variety Photo Plays on 14th and Third, Playland and Fascination on the deuce? And let’s not forget the guns: the .44 Magnum (making a guest appearance after an earlier performance in Dirty Harry), the .38 snub-nose, the .380 Walther, the .25 Colt automatic. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd ) says Travis reminds her of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics: “He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” The only thing missing in Scorsese’s masterpiece, which is currently in revival at Film Forum in a new 35mm restoration, is Deney Terrio’s Dance Fever, a glaring absence in a film that defies the categories of both truth and fiction. Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory, about an unstable taxi driver (Mel Gibson) obsessed with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is only one of many American films that would never have been made without Taxi Driver. In the case of Conspiracy Theory, however, the part got away from the actor playing the lead, and life ended up imitating art.

Head Trip

Inception is an old-fashioned head-trip. The Leonardo DiCaprio character is an extractor and implanter of ideas who is haunted by the suicide of his own wife. Parenthetically, one wonders if the story doesn’t owe something to another futuristic work—Tarkovsky’s Solaris (based on the Stanislav Lem novel), in which the central character is also haunted by the death of his wife. In the case of Inception, the wife’s presence is an unholy reminder of the idea of the unreality the De Caprio character had so successfully and tragically implanted in her. But the greatest question about Inception is how and why the film has become such a major hit. Unlike a lot of blockbusters, Inception is not easy to understand, and its varying themes, running the gamut from corporate espionage to questions of solipsism, dream structure and dream life, are not exactly the stuff of commercial film. Hitchcock’s Spellbound has some wonderful dream sequences, which were in fact storyboarded by Salvador Dali, but Inception offers more than just simple fragments and off-the-cuff musings. The understanding and manipulation of dreams is the palette from which the narrative is fashioned, though it might be argued that the attention to dream structure is superficial, owing, in the end, more to video games than to concerns with the relationship between sleeping and waking consciousness. But the film is fundamentally unsettling in the way it paints the mind’s vulnerability to suggestion. The original John Frankenheimer version of The Manchurian Candidate had a similar effect. However, cold war politics and torture effectively grounded it, creating a reassuring feeling of causality. Are audiences relating to Inception director Christopher Nolan’s vision of a purely subjective universe, in which the world outside the self partakes of little, if any, verifiable reality?

The Double

John Grimonprez’s film Double Take is based on a Jorge Luis Borges story, August 25, l983, which in turn is based on Dostoevsky’s The Double. In the Borges story, the narrator, who is 61, dreams himself into a future date when he, or his double, is 84 and on his deathbed. Alfred Hitchcock’s double, Ron Burrage, a waiter who worked at Claridge’s, plays a major role in the film. Double Take is deceptive since it’s not really about Hitchcock, but about the way he walked into the outline of his own image in the famed ‘50s series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The infamous Nixon-Krushchev debate at the American exposition in Moscow, the Bay of Pigs, and the image of a body falling from the World Trade Center, captured like a New Image painting, are also elements in this piece of meta cinema, along with cuts from The Birds, Folgers coffee commercials, which provided the commercial spots for  the Hitchcock TV series, and excerpts from the cold war thriller Topaz. Time and history drive the diegesis. There is l960, the year Borges’s short story takes place, 1963, the year The Birds was released and Kennedy was shot, and l980, the year Hitchcock died. The notion of the alter ego, which survives Hitchcock survives  in the form of the voice of Burrage and Mark Perry, who imitates his voice, is almost as haunting as Tippi Hedren’s recollection of being bitten by the birds that Hitchcock used for his film shoot. “If you meet your double, you should kill him,” Hitchcock is quoted as saying. Double Take is pure Borges. It will never be mistaken for Hitchcock.