Climbing Mount Criterion XV
I caught Stanley Donen's Charade (#57) a few years back while staying at my parents' house, needing to escape San Francisco for a while. I spent a long day tuned to AMC (Gilda was also on the schedule that day, I think), and as much as I admired the colorfulness of the film and its shameless Hitchcock knock-offs, I remember it solely as a love letter to Cary Grant's handsomeness. If that line about there being absolutely nothing wrong with him seems cornball here, imagine trying to apply it to any actor working today. Hitchcock gets a more oblique and impressive homage in #58:
Film:
Peeping Tom (1960)
Director:
Michael Powell
I know Powell's work only from The Red Shoes, but nothing I know of Powell & Pressburger's output suggests that he was capable of this -- a genteel but probing suspense film about being mentally conditioned into madness. It's not perfect -- the closing voiceover after the fade to black is cheap b-movie horror stuff that makes the film end with a thud -- but Carl Boehm is careful to play his madman as a person who's worthy of an attempt at sympathy. And Anna Massey, as the earnest, romantic, somewhat mousy Helen, the neighbor downstairs who's eager to know him better, doesn't become a melodramatic weeper. Powell seemed to intuitively understand that tough characters are better at generating horror than weak-willed, pliable ones, and that toughness plays out perfectly when Mark (Boehm) is confronted by Helen's mother (Maxine Audley) -- a blind alcoholic, she still has a stubborn ferocity and presence in every scene she's in.
I'm certain that a thousand essays have been written about the act of gazing in the film, and how it might related to how we, as moviegoers, treat our viewing as something we do secretly, shamefully. People are forever looking furtively at things in Peeping Tom -- sneaking peeks at porny postcards, catching a film shoot unnoticed from a catwalk, turning on somebody else's projector to watch something she wasn't (and we weren't) meant to see. I imagine that watching it in a theater, you felt part of the conspiracy. On a screen at home, it can take on an eerie feeling too.
N.B.: My review of this film for Filmcritic.com is here.
Film:
Peeping Tom (1960)
Director:
Michael Powell
I know Powell's work only from The Red Shoes, but nothing I know of Powell & Pressburger's output suggests that he was capable of this -- a genteel but probing suspense film about being mentally conditioned into madness. It's not perfect -- the closing voiceover after the fade to black is cheap b-movie horror stuff that makes the film end with a thud -- but Carl Boehm is careful to play his madman as a person who's worthy of an attempt at sympathy. And Anna Massey, as the earnest, romantic, somewhat mousy Helen, the neighbor downstairs who's eager to know him better, doesn't become a melodramatic weeper. Powell seemed to intuitively understand that tough characters are better at generating horror than weak-willed, pliable ones, and that toughness plays out perfectly when Mark (Boehm) is confronted by Helen's mother (Maxine Audley) -- a blind alcoholic, she still has a stubborn ferocity and presence in every scene she's in.
I'm certain that a thousand essays have been written about the act of gazing in the film, and how it might related to how we, as moviegoers, treat our viewing as something we do secretly, shamefully. People are forever looking furtively at things in Peeping Tom -- sneaking peeks at porny postcards, catching a film shoot unnoticed from a catwalk, turning on somebody else's projector to watch something she wasn't (and we weren't) meant to see. I imagine that watching it in a theater, you felt part of the conspiracy. On a screen at home, it can take on an eerie feeling too.
N.B.: My review of this film for Filmcritic.com is here.
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