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.

Giornale Pugliese VI: Train

 Drawing by Hallie Cohen

You meet an Argentinian couple on a train from Bari to Rome. It’s one of the high-speed trains that make the whole trip in approximately four hours. You start at the sleepy Bari station, where an impoverished beggar woman is urging a child barely capable of walking to panhandle. Poverty creates a certain discipline, and the child runs assiduously after the coins pitched in her direction, arousing both pity and respect. She chases after the money the way the pigeons scamper for crumbs in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. The couple on the train is almost dissolute looking, the woman bored and her companion unshaven, but they have a cultivated air. They are generous with information about the train’s stops, even though they’re not inhabitants of the country. You wonder if he knew Borges. Trains are a dominant means of transport in both Italy and France and play an enormous role in the way society conceives of itself—a way that is largely absent in America, where long-distance trains are curiosities whose breakdowns and eccentricities of schedule are a constant source of grousing among those who attempt to use them. Preston Sturges immortalized the train to Palm Beach in The Palm Beach Story, with its outrageously funny Ale and Quail Club scene. Then there’s that wonderful train carrying the innocent fugitive through the Scottish highlands in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. And of course there’s Strangers on a Train, based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. This Rome-bound train is not lacking romance or eccentricity, but it is all business, arriving at its terminus without fanfare only twenty minutes after its scheduled TOA of 6:15.