These Are the Damned (1963)

***^½
Country: UK
Director: Joseph Losey

Black leather, black leather
Smash smash smash
Black leather, black leather
Crash crash crash
Black leather, black leather
Kill kill kill
I got that feeling
Black leather rock

So goes the song chanted by a group of leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding British Teddy Boys at the beginning of Joseph Losey's astonishingly bizarre film These Are the Damned, released in April as part of the Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films collection. Part romance, part thriller, part teen alienation picture, part nuclear age angst movie, part government conspiracy paranoia, part science fiction—the film synthesizes elements from all these genres into a unique form that defies categorization. It does, however, plainly show what David Thomson identifies as Losey's defining trait as a director—his blending of the apparently contradictory qualities of "subtlety" and "hysteria."

The movie opens with an American tourist, Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), guide book in hand, being brazenly picked up on the street in the southern English coastal town of Weymouth by a young woman, Joan (Shirley Anne Field). It turns out she is acting as bait to lure gullible male tourists into being robbed by a gang of motorcycle thugs led by her sadistic brother, King (Oliver Reed). When the bloodied Simon is taken to a hotel by a couple of friendly strangers (who are actually military officers in civilian clothing) to recover, he meets their colleague Bernard (Alexander Knox, like Losey a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who relocated to Britain), a scientist working with them on a top-secret government research project, and Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors), the Swedish sculptor who is possibly Bernard's former lover and who has rented his cottage, The Bird House, located next to the research center, for the summer season.

Later as Simon, recovered from the attack, leaves Weymouth in his boat, he reconnects with Joan, now fleeing from the possessive brother who seems to have an unhealthy obsession with her sex life. ("You think I'll let a man put his filthy hands on you?" King angrily asks after she admits her attraction to Simon.) Pursued by the brother and his gang, Joan takes off with Simon in his yacht and the two begin an affair. When they are followed by the gang and forced to hide out, Joan directs him to the secluded Bird House. Soon all these characters—Simon, Joan, King, Freya, and Bernard—meet up again and become involved in the top-secret government project, which involves psychological experiments on a group of decidedly spooky children. When the two lovers realize the children are being held against their will, they determine to help the children escape.

These Are the Damned was distributed by Columbia but was a Hammer production, and it shows, especially in the lurid and rather misleading publicity for the movie, clearly intended to capitalize on the success of Village of the Damned (1960). Like many Hammer horror films, especially those with a modern setting, it deals with outsiders who find themselves enmeshed in the peculiar goings-on in a strange place where they have just arrived. But just as Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho, Losey subverts audience expectations by turning a predictable genre on its head, in this case by transforming what at first seems an odd but basically conventional Hammer thriller—two lovers on the run from a pack of predatory monsters—into a movie about repressed incestuous impulses, fear of nuclear destruction, distrust of government, the inhumanity of scientific research, existential angst, and the social disintegration of the modern world.

One thing that distinguishes These Are the Damned from typical Hammer fare is the attention paid to the visual element of the film. It is the haunting look Losey creates for the movie that gives the film its thematic gravity and visual urgency. That this is going to be no ordinary Hammer horror film is apparent from the opening shots. The first thing we see is a static, picture postcard view of the sun-drenched southern English coast in high summer, the gently curving cliffs receding to the horizon, crowned by lush meadows, with waves breaking languidly at their base. After a few moments the camera pans to the right, and when it stops we now are looking at the edge of the clifftop stretching horizontally across the CinemaScope screen, a group of grotesque post-modern sculptures silhouetted against the blank sea and sky. These are the sculptures of Freya arrayed outside The Bird House, and most seem to be either monstrous, gargoyle-like birds (she refers to one of her works in this style as "my graveyard bird") or misshapen human forms that resemble nothing so much as the anguished victims at Pompeii.

Such strong visual contrasts are found throughout These Are the Damned. The traditional streets of Weymouth typified by the clock tower where Simon first meets Joan, with its unicorn statue and large plaque of Queen Victoria, contrast vividly with the fortified, ultra-modern research facility where Bernard conducts his experiments on the children, with its array of high-tech gadgetry used to spy on the children and its walls decorated with semi-abstract paintings whose dominant mood is of dread and alienation. The open-air scenes of sea, sky, and meadows and The Bird House, built right into the cliff so that its whitewashed walls and grass-covered roof seem almost a natural extension of the landscape, form striking counterpoints to the futuristic underground dormitory excavated deep in the cliff face where the children live, deprived not only of natural light and air, but of any direct human contact except with one another.

This is a movie whose details of plot and production design cumulatively relay an atmosphere of hopelessness, a movie that shows the futility of any attempt to escape by the people trapped in the bleak world it depicts. Bernard, the representative of order (government) and knowledge (science), decries the "senseless violence" of youth culture yet has no qualms about subjecting the children in his experiments to psychological cruelty. He regretfully accepts the inevitability of nuclear war and the destruction of the human race while at the same time coldly sanctioning the deaths of those who oppose his scientific aims and even committing murder himself. The ultimate irony of the film is that those individuals with the most humanity are in the end destroyed by those with the least humanity, who justify their actions as a means of ensuring the survival of humankind after a nuclear holocaust. One of the most weirdly entertaining movies of the Cold War is also one of the darkest, most disturbing, and most cynically anti-authoritarian of that anxiety-ridden time.

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Two by Michael Powell

"There is not a British director with as many worthwhile films to his credit as Michael Powell."

—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004)

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951)

Generally speaking, I'm not a great fan of opera. Because of the inherently realistic nature of movies, with the camera's ability to bring the viewer close to the action, the very things that make me wary of opera—its slow pacing, rather static dramatics, and high level of artifice—would seem to make it a difficult art form to turn into a real motion picture rather than just a recording of a stage performance. Yet I have seen two filmed operas that succeeded brilliantly as real movies. Franco Zeffirelli took a completely realistic approach with Verdi's La Traviata (1983), filming it like a real drama taking place in real locations. Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute (1975) as a performance of Mozart's opera that includes both backstage and audience scenes. Both approaches worked beautifully.

The great Michael Powell, one of the most visually creative of all film directors, chose to film Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann with little attempt at realism. What he did instead was to use the full range of cinematic effects—and his mastery of those effects was astounding—to turn the opera into a highly stylized example of pure cinema. One reason the movie succeeds so well is that the opera itself is ideally suited to such an approach. For one thing, it is divided into three discrete episodes, which immediately solves the problem of lagging pace. The movie is nearly 2 hours 20 minutes long yet certainly doesn't feel like it. And the three episodes, each based on a bizarre tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann of a supernatural encounter with an otherwordly woman by the poet himself, seem to call for a non-realistic approach to emphasize their eerie nature.

Moira Shearer as the automaton Olympia

In the three tales, Hoffmann first falls in love with a life-sized mechanical doll named Olympia (brilliantly danced and played by Moira Shearer of The Red Shoes) in Paris. Next he travels to Venice, where he is bewitched by Giulietta, minion of the demonic Dapertutto and collector of souls for him. Finally he sails to an isolated Greek island where Antonia, a gifted singer who loves him, lives under a deadly curse that she is hypnotized into fulfilling by the sinister Dr. Miracle. Appearing to great effect as the villain in all three episodes is Robert Helpmann, who makes a strong impression in all four of his guises. (He also appears as Hoffmann's nemesis Lindorf in the framing episodes at the beginning and end of the film.)

The movie combines ballet and singing; there is no spoken dialogue, and the libretto is in English. The physical action within the frame may at times be stately, but Powell has a firm grasp of the purposeful use of stillness as a counterpoint to motion. On the visual level he never allows the film to stop moving, continuously engaging the viewer's eye with his hypnotic and constantly shifting images, created through the inventive use of his entire cinematic bag of tricks—set decoration, costumes, makeup, camera placement and movement, editing, color, and special effects. At the same time, he uses these elements to emphasize and enhance the dream-like quality of the tales. The result is an eye-popping, almost hallucinatory phantasmagoria that makes Fellini's most extravagant exercises, like those in Juliet of the Spirits, seem restrained.

The only real complaint I have is that the third tale is dramatically and cinematically a bit less compelling than the first two, although it does make up for this by leading into a dazzling finale. In the Powell-Pressburger canon, The Tales of Hoffmann is not as well known as their masterpieces of the 1940s. This is unfair. It is one of their strongest, most daring, and most memorable movies and a must not only for fans of the great Powell-Pressburger team, but also for anyone interested in ballet, opera, or cinema as an art form.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946)

As I write this I've just finished watching A Matter of Life and Death (original US title: Stairway to Heaven), and I just can't praise this movie enough. Powell's greatest movies, of which this is one, show his astonishing skill and creativity in presenting the story in the most strikingly visual terms possible. His command of the language of film easily equals, and possibly even exceeds, Alfred Hitchcock's. Like Hitchcock, he was fascinated by the technical challenges of expressing moments of heightened sensation through filmic means and habitually punctuated his movies with mind-bogglingly original and glorious set pieces that linger with the viewer as eidetic memories long after the movie has ended.

Powell's amazing visual creativity is on full display in his movies with the most unconventional subjects—movies like The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, Peeping Tom, and this one, the first to showcase the real extent of his cinematic imagination. A Matter of Life and Death, released in late 1946, the year after the end of World War II, is saturated with a sense of the collective and personal loss caused by that war. The movie's response to that melancholy is an almost desperately mystical optimism that with the aid of the transcendent power of the cinema, Britain can somehow exorcise the grief of the war and heal its wounded national psyche.

This hope is expressed through the story of Peter Carter (David Niven, who has never been better), an airman who miraculously survives a suicidal jump into the sea without a parachute from a flaming Lancaster bomber off the coast of England on May 2, 1945, just days before the war in Europe ended. Before he bails out, Carter has a brief conversation on his radio with a stranger, a young American woman named June (Kim Hunter) working as a radio operator at an air base in England. After washing up on shore and finding he is alive, he wanders toward the base and immediately meets June riding home on her bicycle that morning after her shift has ended. The two instantly fall in love. The only problem is that his survival is the result of a heavenly error, and an emissary is sent to retrieve him. But Peter refuses to go, insisting on an appeal in a heavenly court of justice, where he will argue that because his love for June has negated the heavenly edict that he must die, he must be returned to life.

The plot is constructed in a fascinatingly ambiguous way: Are all these supernatural events really happening, or are they actually elaborate visual and auditory hallucinations caused by a head injury Peter received two years earlier? Is the climactic sequence of the movie really a trial in heaven to determine if Peter will live or die, or is this a hallucination occurring under anaesthesia while Peter is undergoing neurosurgery that will determine if he lives or dies? As in the best fantasy movies predicated on ambiguity, and specifically on the ambiguity between the subjective and the objective interpretation of events, the plot functions simultaneously on both levels without any apparent contradiction. Near the end of the movie, when the neurosurgeon removes his surgical mask and his true identity is revealed, it is a stunning revelation that underscores vividly this fundamental ambiguity between the real and the imaginary and the film's seamless blending of the two.

Is it all just a dream? The heavenly court observes the operation

The exceedingly clever plot (I have only hinted at its many twists and turns) is only part of the movie's fascination, though. What really makes the film so memorable is the inspired visual ideas Powell devises to show us these events. From the moment the film opens, with a view of the cosmos ("This is the universe," the narrator says as the film begins. "Big, isn't it?") that gradually reduces itself to Niven in the cockpit of that flaming bomber, we know we are in for a unique experience. And when Peter comes to on the beach and encounters a naked young goatherd playing a flute, we know this is a movie where something unexpectedly weird and mythic might happen at any moment. The film is crammed with similarly imaginative sequences based on the creative use of sets (that stairway to heaven is unforgettable, as indeed are all the sets for the afterlife), lighting, photography, and editing. The sequence in the camera obscura of the village doctor, played by Powell stalwart Roger Livesy (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going), is especially noteworthy. Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff's use of tricks like stop-motion, slow motion, double exposure, reverse motion, back projection, matted images, and alternation between black-and-white and Technicolor constitutes a virtual catalogue of pre-CGI special effects.

Peter encounters the goatherd on the beach

Powell and his collaborator Emeric Pressburger wrote the original screenplay, which seems influenced by three notable fantasy movies of the early 1940s. It resembles Here Comes Mr. Jordan in its use of a heavenly error to drive the fantasy elements of the plot. But here the situation is reversed and instead of being taken before his time like Robert Montgomery in that movie, Peter is inadvertently left behind. Powell's film is also reminiscent of both The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), which I wrote about recently, and Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943) in its idea of the protagonist pleading his case in a supernatural hearing that will determine his fate. The details of the fantastic plot of A Matter of Life and Death and their visualization on the screen are so conceptually intertwined that to watch the movie is to journey into the mind and imagination of one of the greatest geniuses of cinema.

In the end, all I can really say about this movie is watch it and marvel at the way it suggests simultaneously the ineffable, vast, and timeless mysteries of existence and a specific story about a small group of people experiencing very human emotions in a situation clearly delimited in time and space. A Matter of Life and Death is more than merely worthwhile: It is an essential masterpiece that will kindle the ardor of anyone who loves movies.
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A Small Dark Masterwork

The British film director Michael Powell (1905-1990)—who not only directed but also wrote and produced many of his films, often in collaboration with his professional partner, Emeric Pressburger—was one of the giants of British cinema. His best known, and arguably greatest, works were produced in the 1940's and constitute a truly impressive list, including The Thief of Baghdad, The 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. At the end of the decade, Powell and Pressburger made a less well-known movie, The Small Back Room (1949), released last year in a newly restored Criterion edition, that is a fitting companion piece to those earlier masterpieces.

The Small Back Room is very different from the best-known films that immediately preceded it, which are often thought to represent the typical Michael Powell movie. With the exception of I Know Where I'm Going, these are elaborately mounted, technically dazzling, large-scale Technicolor productions that pushed the artistic limits of studio film making of the time. The Small Back Room is none of these things. Filmed in black-and-white and without major stars, it concentrates not on large themes and visual spectacle like its immediate predecessors but on characters, character psychology, and personal relationships.

Set in London in 1943, the movie is based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, a British author who wrote seventeen novels published between 1934-1967, as well as more than a dozen screenplays. The main character is Sammy Rice (David Farrar), whose prosthetic foot has kept him from active military service. He works instead as a researcher in an obscure government munitions laboratory situated in the small back room of the title. Sammy also has a problem with alcohol—he is a recovered alcoholic—and a huge problem with his attitude toward life. He is a frustrated and embittered man whose personality is dominated by negativity and self-pity. a brooding, self-destructive person whom others tolerate out of a combination of sympathy for his very real problems and admiration for his professional ability.

Sammy is conducting a clandestine affair with the secretary of his research unit, Susan (Kathleen Byron, who gave a memorable if a trifle overwrought performance as the mad nun in Powell's Black Narcissus), who lives in the flat across the hall from his own. Susan genuinely seems to love Sammy, tolerating his negativity and moodiness with equanimity. Besides Susan, the one thing that keeps Sammy going is a real interest in his research work. But even that is fraught with problems, mostly the result of bureaucratic regulations, inter-departmental in-fighting, and the ignorance of those in charge about the nature and value of the work his unit is doing.

In a very funny sequence, a fatuous government minister (Robert Morley, in an uncredited cameo) who clearly has no grasp of the work being done by Sammy and his colleagues pays a flying visit to the lab. Knowing the minister's lack of any real knowledge of, or even interest in, their work, the group devise a flashy demonstration that is almost like a magic show, with fire and smoke to dazzle him. The demonstration fizzles, but the minister is so uninterested that it doesn't even faze him. Instead he sits down at a calculating machine—to him a real novelty—and proceeds to perform simple arithmetic problems, like a child playing with a toy, before flitting on his way. In another, more serious sequence, Sammy attends a meeting to evaluate a new artillery gun and is caught in a conflict between the military, who don't like the new weapon based on their tests of it, and the accountants, who do favor it based strictly on a statistical analysis of its design specifications. He sympathizes with the military's practical objections to the gun but realizes he can't afford to alienate the bureaucrats if he wants them to continue funding his research unit.

Sammy does find one assignment that intrigues him, when an army Captain, Dick Stewart (Michael Gough), consults him about a new type of bomb being dropped by the Germans. Innocuous-looking, like a Thermos flask, it has been killing children who pick it up not realizing what it is. Sammy arranges for the Captain to contact him the next time one is found so he can examine it and analyze its detonating mechanism. This element of the story is used as a device to provide continuity. It opens the movie, recurs at a couple of key points in the middle, and provides the movie with its masterly concluding sequence.

The movie has an episodic structure, moving back and forth between Sammy's work, his love life, the problem of the new type of bomb, and his struggles with alcoholism and what today would be recognized as clinical depression. If the film has a weakness, it is this episodic structure. which tends to fragment the movie's momentum by giving its plot a rather fluctuating rhythm. But at the same time, this structure also provides opportunities for Powell to create several brilliant set pieces that clearly show what a cinematic genius he was.

Actually, this sense of disconnection between bravura moments and the more low-key sections that link them is to some degree characteristic of most of Powell's movies; it's just that in this one it's especially apparent. As the film moves from one spectacular sequence to another, the lulls in-between are just a little more obvious than in most of Powell's movies. And these sequences of heightened artistry seem on occasion a bit overdone, just a little more fancy than absolutely necessary. For example, when Sammy attends the test of that new artillery gun "on the Salisbury Plain," Powell uses Stonehenge as a backdrop for the tests, as though he felt constrained to increase the visual drama in a sequence that might have been just as effective without the distraction of unneeded embellishment. (IMDb claims that these scenes were actually filmed at Stonehenge. I may be wrong, but to me it has a slightly unreal look to it, the stones a bit too smoothly worn and the color a bit too even, and the stones seem to lack substance, as though they're made of something lighter than rock, like those fiberglass boulders you see at Disneyland.)

Taken separately, however, several sequences in the movie achieve genuine tour-de-force status. Two sequences set in a night club (night clubs seemed to be a staple of movies of the 1940's, especially ones with noirish overtones, as this one sometimes has) that Sammy and Susan go to are impressive for their elaborate set decoration, jazz music, staging, and photography. In the second one especially the elegant setting and frenetic jazz music provide a superb counterpoint to the heated quarrel that Sammy and Susan are having. In another great sequence, Sammy falls off the wagon and gets drunk in a pub filled with soldiers of all nations. His drunken row with the bartender, who refuses to serve him any more, and his aggressive behavior toward the other people in the pub are dramatic indeed and show just how hostile and obnoxious Sammy can be at his worst.

In another sequence—visually, the most striking of the movie—Sammy has an attack of severe anxiety when Susan fails to show up at his flat for a planned rendezvous and again ends up getting drunk. The sequence begins with what seems a nod to The Lost Weekend, with Sammy attempting to resist the temptation to drink, then becoming more and more agitated, and finally giving in and getting so drunk that he smashes up the flat and begins hallucinating.

Powell goes all out to portray the nightmarish, surrealistic qualities of this hallucinatory state, using bizarre camera angles and arranging objects in the frame to produce extreme foreshortening of perspective and distortion of scale. At one point the camera is placed quite low, looking up at a huge bottle of whiskey that appears about three times the size of Sammy and looms over him as if it is about to crush him. The background detail in the frame is stylized, the whole illuminated by what Powell calls "Caligari lighting" (a reference to the 1920 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). In the commentary that accompanies the DVD, the cinematographer, Christopher Challis, explains that the scene, which ostensibly takes place in Sammy's flat, was actually done on a different set, with Sammy and the bottle filmed separately then joined in a matte composition to get them in the frame together. Challis praises Powell for his "visual sense" and for having such a thorough knowledge of lighting and photography that he could describe in detail what he needed his cinematographer to do to get the exact visual effects he wanted.

The film's conclusion, a more than 15-minute long sequence, is another thrilling tour-de-force. Two of the mysterious German bombs have been found on Chesil Beach on the south coast, where Sammy is summoned. When he arrives, he finds that Capt. Stewart has been killed trying to defuse the first bomb, and that he will have to work alone to figure out the detonating mechanism on the remaining bomb. Chesil Beach is an eight-mile long stretch of what the British call shingle, large pieces of unstable gravel, and a worse site for trying to work on something as dangerously sensitive to movement as an unexploded bomb cannot be imagined. Powell has said that it was this scene in the book and the prospect of filming it on Chesil Beach (his own idea—in the book, the setting is an ordinary sandy beach) that first attracted him to the project.

Powell uses all of his considerable narrative and visual resources to create a lengthy nail-biter of a sequence so tense that it had me squirming the whole time. The stark beachfront setting—reduced to its essential elements of shoreline, sea, and sky—with Sammy separated in space from his colleagues, with whom he communicates via a radio microphone as he describes to them his actions, isolates and emphasizes the element of danger until it is the only thing in the movie. After Sammy reaches the bomb and drops to his hands and knees, much of the scene is filmed in tight close-up—his face, his hands, the bomb looming in the foreground almost like the whiskey bottle did earlier.

The mechanism turns out to be more complicated than Sammy anticipated. Just when he thinks he has disarmed the bomb, he discovers it has a second detonator, and the sequence is extended even longer. Knowing that Sammy cares so little for his life, that he is more interested in the engineering of the weapon than in his own safety, only emphasizes the risks he is taking, creating a sequence of nearly unbearable suspense.

This and the other sequences I have described constitute the highlights of the movie. But what really holds the movie together more than anything else is the character of Sammy and his portrayal by David Farrar. Sammy is a very modern character for the time, a self-centered and essentially unsympathetic (although not exactly unlikable) person, the kind of tortured character more often associated with the most bitter American films noirs of the era. Farrar conveys with absolute conviction and realism Sammy's self-loathing, his dissatisfaction with life, and his inability to relate on any intimate level to other human beings.

On the DVD, Powell comments almost regretfully that when he saw The Small Back Room years later at a retrospective of his movies, he found it a "cold" film. Given its subject matter and its main character, I don't see how the movie could have been otherwise and still have maintained its honesty. From today's perspective, the picture seems ahead of its time in its attitudes. That coldness that Powell spoke of—the resistance to using easy sentimentality to lighten the grimness of the movie that so often tempted his film-making contemporaries—is to me what makes the movie seem so fresh and still comprehensible in psychological terms to our more cynical modern sensibility.

This is a movie that despite falling just a bit short of Powell's very best work, nonetheless has many parts that are as good as anything he ever did, as well as a main character as original and compelling as any to be found in his canon. With such qualities, The Small Back Room deserves to be admired and enjoyed alongside Powell's other masterworks.
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Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have a website devoted to their work, powell-pressburger.org . Powell's widow and tireless advocate of his films is the three-time Oscar-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited nearly all the films of Martin Scorsese since Raging Bull. If you've never seen a Michael Powell movie, I would recommend starting with I Know Where I'm Going or The Red Shoes, which along with Peeping Tom (which I have also written about at The Movie Projector), are my favorite Michael Powell movies of the ones I've seen. Kathleen Byron died last January at the age of 88. Her final appearance was in the award-winning BBC mini-series Perfect Strangers (2001).

Brief Reviews

THE SET-UP (1949) * * * ½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened. Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality. The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) * * * *
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers. The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy. The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) * * ½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches. Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned. One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.

PYGMALION (1938) * * * *
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced. Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role. As Higgins attempts to transform her from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, she must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where she has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, played absolutely deadpan, she is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that her experience of a new lifestyle has so altered her that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this she does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.
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Pygmalion airs on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, March 8, at 4:00 a.m. Pacific time. Check local times.

Working Class Antihero

There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

—John Lennon, "Working Class Hero"

The democratization of the British armed forces during World War II, coupled with the class-leveling necessities of fighting Nazi Germany, was the beginning of the end of the deeply ingrained class system in Britain. This process was hastened by the election in 1945 of the first Labour government in years and the radical social policies that followed, including creation of the National Health Service, nationalization of major industries, and heavy taxation of the rich. During the late 1950's and early 60's, an attitude of anti-establishment contempt was expressed in literature by the Angry Young Man writers like John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, whose bitter young male protagonists rebelled against the twin constraints of conformity and the remnants of the class system.

In John Braine's 1957 Angry Young Man novel Room at the Top, the main character doesn't so much rebel as attempt to crash the socioeconomic and class barriers in an effort to make it to the Top. The movie version of the novel, released in 1959, is really a hybrid of grim social realism and tragic love story. It's a bit like the Paul Newman movies of the time, The Young Philadelphians (1959) and From the Terrace (1960), but substitutes harshly realistic working-class settings for the slickly photogenic surfaces of the Newman movies. In the American movies Newman is able through his talent and persistence to crash the barriers to success—the personification of the Great American Myth that with hard work anyone can succeed. Not so in the British version; here the young man must claw his way to success.

The young man is Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), an accountant who works for the local government in Warnley, a grim industrial town in the English Midlands, a few years after the end of the war. Early in the movie, when Joe stands at the window of his dreary bed-sitting room looking up at the hilltop neighborhood where the richest people in town live and tells a colleague from work that he will live there one day, he knows it will take more than hard work to get there. Ruthlessness and manipulation of others are the only means of self-advancement in this world of expectations limited by class identity.

From the moment he first sees Susan Brown (Heather Sears), the virginal young daughter of the most powerful man in town, Joe is convinced that she is the way out of the dead-end, working-class life that seems to be his destiny. The difference in class between the two, however, seems to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle to Joe's aspirations. Susan's family are appalled at his pursuit of her, especially her snobbish mother. Susan's boyfriend, an ex-officer, seems to turn up every time Joe tries to get Susan alone, constantly taunting Joe's working-class background by calling him "Sergeant" and ribbing him for having been a prisoner of war. Even Joe's friends warn him off his plans by repeating the message of "stick to your own kind."

One sequence that graphically underscores the way class prejudice stands between Joe and Susan takes place at a formal banquet that Joe attends, even though he knows he will be out of place there. He boldly walks up to the table where Susan, her boy friend, her parents, and some of their powerful friends are sitting and introduces himself. Here he is treated with cold formality and condescension. As soon as he speaks, the jarring contrast between his working-class regional accent and the educated, received speech of those seated at the table is apparent. They don't invite him to sit but keep him standing as they interrogate him about his connections to the upper-class residents of the town where he grew up. As they are well aware, he knows none of these people. The intent of their conversation is to politely humiliate Joe by reminding him of his position on the social scale.

In another powerful sequence, Joe travels to the town where he grew up when he unexpectedly receives a job offer from the owner of the factory where his father worked, and we get a vivid picture of Joe's origins. There he stays with the aunt and uncle he lived with after his parents were killed in an air raid. These are resolutely working-class people who unquestioningly accept their social position and urge Joe not to set his sights too high. Their small terraced house is a depressing place, with its drab, stained walls and few pieces of cheap furniture. The town itself is another gloomy landscape of factories and mills. When Joe finds that the job offer is the result of Susan's father using his connections to try to separate Joe and his daughter—another example of the power of the Old Boy Network—he turns down the job and returns to Warnley.

One of the places Joe pursues Susan to is the local amateur dramatic society, where he believes he stands a good chance of getting her alone. It is at a rehearsal there that he meets an unhappily married older woman, Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), and before long begins an affair with her. Alice and Joe slowly develop the kind of intimate emotional connection he could never have with the sweet but immature and inexperienced Susan. Alice becomes Joe's confidante and soon becomes aware of his nearly obsessive ambition and his desire to use Susan as the means of fulfilling it. She recognizes that the source of his obsession is class insecurity and advises him several times just to "be yourself."

The movie's attitude towards sex is surprisingly adult for the time and made the movie a subject of controversy when it was released. Joe and Alice regularly meet in her friend's flat for trysts. And Joe finally manages to seduce Susan in a memorably staged and filmed sequence at a boathouse by the river, after which Susan is all girlish enthusiasm while Joe seems to experience a major letdown after finally getting what he has been after for so long. Joe's emotions are now in turmoil. Both Susan and Alice are in love with him, but the fact that he is more drawn to Alice's maturity and her understanding of his emotional needs makes it look for a while as though he will abandon his scheme to marry Susan.

Two circumstances intervene to resolve his conflict. Alice's husband, a philandering businessman, refuses to divorce her (the divorce laws in Britain were at the time quite draconian), threatening to impoverish Alice and ruin Joe's career. Then when it turns out that Susan is pregnant, her father proposes that Joe marry her and accept a sinecure in his company, granting Joe everything he has been scheming for just as he has finally begun questioning whether he really wants it after all. Forced to choose between the two women, he reverts to his original values and makes the practical decision, choosing Susan and sacrificing Alice, with tragic results.

Harvey gives the performance of his career, and Signoret (who won an Oscar, surprisingly, over Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story) is magnificent as the sensitive, disillusioned older woman who still craves love. She is a version of Camille updated to the post-war world of materialism—she must accept rejection by her young lover so that he can chase his dreams of economic betterment—and Signoret's deeply moving balance of hope and resignation gives the movie its emotional center without pushing it into soap territory.

The black-and-white cinematography by Freddie Francis (winner of two Oscars and later director of many cheesy horror movies) is first-rate, capturing in crisp light-and-shadow the bleak factory towns and dingy interiors of the pubs, flats, and houses where much of the movie takes place. Between 1956 and 1999 he photographed some of the best-looking British and American movies of the time, including three for David Lynch. (Remember the black-and-white Gustave Doré-like look of The Elephant Man?). Just check out his credits on IMDb and be amazed at the visually striking movies he photographed. One especially memorable scene in Room at the Top occurs when Joe finally manages to get Susan alone for the first time, and in a very long take the camera follows him as he prowls through the local library pursuing her through and around the stacks.

The elegant direction of Jack Clayton is also first-rate. This was one of his earliest movies, and although his later career was uneven, he did go on to direct some excellent movies, including The Innocents (1961) and The Pumpkin Eater (1964). The performances of Deborah Kerr in the former (my favorite Kerr performance) and Anne Bancroft in the latter, along with Maggie Smith's performances in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1986) and the TV mini-series Memento Mori (1992), and Simone Signoret's in this movie should affirm his reputation as a superior director of actresses. And considering the authors of the source material of his best work—Henry James, Penelope Mortimer, Brian Moore, and Muriel Spark—he should be regarded as a notable literary interpreter. He has been criticized by Andrew Sarris as an impersonal director, but I'm not convinced that a director with a more distinctive style would have been as effective as Clayton with actresses of that caliber or as an adaptor of works by writers of that caliber.

If its style has less innovation and panache than the key films of the British New Wave of the early 1960's, Room at the Top—with its depiction of life in a dismal post-war English industrial town dominated by class divisions and conflicts—clearly presages those films. With its realistic probing of social and sexual issues, and its thoughtful exploration of materialism and status-worship in opposition to more humanistic values, it's an outstanding movie in its own right.
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Brief Reviews

GUN CRAZY (1949) * * * ½
Film noir is one of my pet genres. I've been waiting years to see this one, a highly regarded work from the era when the genre reached its fullest expression, and it didn't disappoint me. Director Joseph H. Lewis spent years directing B-movies for various studios before gaining attention for a stylishly directed, noirish little thriller called My Name Is Julia Ross (1945). Gun Crazy was made the same year as Nicholas Ray's similar They Live by Night, and those two films were huge influences on Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which traces of each are plainly visible. Gun Crazy is a crime-spree movie, the story of a young man (John Dall) and woman (Peggy Cummins) who throw off all societal inhibitions and go on an anarchic binge of bank and payroll robberies. The thing that first brings them together is a clearly erotic obsession with guns. The thing that distinguishes them from each other is his refusal to use his gun to kill, and her barely controlled impulses to use her gun for violence against others. Once they start on their spree, there is no turning back, and there is little doubt that they are ultimately doomed. It's no wonder Gun Crazy was such an influence on early films of the French New Wave like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Godard's Breathless. The photography by Russell Harlan is full of striking visual flourishes including asymmetrical compositions and unconventional camera placement. The numerous scenes shot from the back seat of the getaway car create a perceptible sense of heightened realism, especially one very long, unbroken take of a robbery in the middle of the movie, where Cummins gets out of the car to distract a policeman. The film's atmospheric finale, on a small island in a reedy, fog-shrouded marsh, is a model of achieving maximum effect with minimal means. The British Cummins—with her Bonnie Parker beret, full, sensuous lips, snub nose, insolent expression, and slightly lock-jawed speech—is the epitome of the alluring femme fatale, and Dall, as the maladjusted but sensitive young sharpshooter in sexual thrall to her, expresses just the right amount of internal conflict over their actions. The screenplay, co-credited to Millard Kaufmann, was actually co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using Kaufmann as a front. Highly recommended to all devotees of film noir.

DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) * *
To make a truly terrible movie is not an easy thing to do. The movie must be intended to be taken seriously, made with reasonable care and an adequate budget, and involve respected and talented film artists. But for some reason, often a series of misguided artistic choices, it simply misses the mark completely, its only interest the mystery of how something with so much apparent potential turned out to be so dreadful. Duel in the Sun, a Western directed by King Vidor and written and produced by David O. Selznick, is spectacularly bad. Its every element self-consciously inflated, the film is paradoxically both boring (as a narrative experience) and fascinating (as an example of cinematic awfulness). The unrelenting bombast of the movie is obvious as soon as it starts, with a seemingly interminable section titled "Prelude" that consists of a frozen image of a reddish desert landscape with symphonic music playing over it, followed by another section titled "Overture," consisting of another frozen image of a desert landscape with more music and a pompous voice-over by Orson Welles. The gaudy opening sequence, which takes place in a gambling den, is so lavish in its over-the-top decadence that it resembles a scene in a Roman epic by Cecil B. de Mille. It's all downhill for the next two hours until the movie reaches its labored and improbable conclusion. So many normally capable performers (Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall) give such terrible performances in their one-dimensional roles that it must surely set a record of some kind. Only Walter Huston, chewing the scenery as a lascivious evangelist called The Sinkiller, seems to be having any fun. As the main character, a feral, sexually-charged, half-Caucasion, half-Mexican wench (there is no other word to describe her adequately), Jennifer Jones—with her absurd bronze makeup, wild, unkempt hair, lowcut peasant blouses, and bare feet—easily takes the bad acting prize in this marathon of terrible acting. Before Johnny Guitar, before Lonesome Cowboys, before Lust in the Dust, there was Duel in the Sun. If I had to use one word to sum up the overall effect of Duel in the Sun, that word would be camp (and not in the entertaining sense, because it is apparently wholly unintentional).

CROUPIER (1999) * * * ½
The British director Mike Hodges was in his late 60's when he made this film, but it doesn't seem like the work of a man of that age. The highly accomplished direction, unshowy and unfussy, is rightfully respectful of the taut, focused screenplay by Paul Mayersburg and has a hip sensibility that seems right in tune with the material. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a former croupier from South Africa now living in London, is a man at loose ends. Unemployed, he wants to be a writer but is not interested in the project his publisher proposes, a tale about soccer players with lots of sex. When his father calls from South Africa and says he has found Jack a job at a London casino, Jack accepts the offer because of the very large salary and because he immediately sees the job in terms of research for a novel about gamblers and gambling. The film has lots of philosophical voice-over narration by Jack about being a participant in events and at the same time a detached observer gathering material for his book. In these internal monologues Jack also ruminates on how gambling and odds permeate so much of life. Although adamant that he is not himself a gambler, he obsessively calculates the odds on his every action, seeing all of life as one gamble after another. Later an attractive woman (Alex Kingston) who comes to the casino fascinates Jack. When she says she is deeply in debt to dangerous people and proposes that Jack be the inside-man in a robbery of the casino, he reluctantly agrees. The movie is above all a character study and thus relies heavily on Owen's brilliant performance for its success. Looking leaner and hungrier than in Gosford Park or Children of Men, he makes Jack aloof but fascinating. Beneath a still, calm, nonreactive exterior, this is a complex man in constant thought, a silent internal observer and interpreter of external events. It is because Owen projects this aspect of Jack's character so thoroughly that the large amount of voice-over narration with its almost Dostoyevskian slant works so well. The movie builds to a tense outcome that results in several unexpected turns, an ending consistent with the film's theme that the outcome of a bet cannot be accurately predicted in advance and is by its nature the result of randomness.

ADAPTATION (2002) * * ½
In the late 1990's, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean wrote a series of articles about the Florida wild orchid collector John Laroche, published in 1998 as the book The Orchid Thief. For some reason the book, which is more a profile than a narrative, was bought for adaptation as a movie and assigned to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose sensibility would seem wholly unsuited to such a project. The resulting movie is a real curiosity. The first two-thirds are divided unevenly between two interwoven plots—Kaufmann's (Nicholas Cage) personal insecurities and his professional struggles writing the screenplay (the predominant thread), and a straight account of Orlean's (Meryl Streep) experiences with Laroche (Chris Cooper) while writing the book (the secondary thread). The latter plot line is fascinating. The other part, about Kaufmann, is not. As Kaufmann himself says of this narrative strategy, "It's self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic." Not content to transform the film into his own personal vanity project by making himself the main character, Kaufmann even gives himself an alter ego, a fictitious twin brother (also Cage). The most embarrassing scene in the movie: the one in which Kaufmann masturbates to a photo of Orlean on the dust jacket of the book. One can only wonder how anyone connected with this movie, having read the script, agreed to participate. The last third or so of Adaptation veers in an altogether different direction as a response to the suggestion of a screenwriting guru (Brian Cox) who advises Kaufmann to write a knockout "last act" to disguise the flaws of the rest of the film. This preposterous last act has Laroche deriving a psychoactive substance that looks like green cocaine from his orchids and mailing some to Streep, who snorts it, has a psychedelic experience, then rushes off to Florida for a tryst with Laroche. The Kaufmann brothers follow, and the movie becomes an outlandish crime thriller with Orlean and Laroche trying to murder the Kaufmanns. Adaptation received rave reviews from many critics as well as numerous nominations and awards from critics' groups, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. More than 50,000 users of IMDb give it a very high 7.8/10 rating. I can sum up my reaction to the movie in two words: pretentious rubbish. Nearly everything in it seems a contrived, attention-seeking stunt. If the acting weren't so good, I would give it an even lower rating.
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Psycho Killer Night on Turner Classic Movies

Is there anybody who hasn't seen Psycho (1960), the landmark shocker directed by Alfred Hitchcock? If not, it is being shown on the Turner Classic Movie channel on Saturday, October 25, at 5:00 p.m. (PDT). This is the movie that created a new genre, the slasher film, the movie that in one brilliant sequence—the infamous shower sequence that lasts less than three minutes and is composed of more than fifty different shots (the exact number is still being debated)—opened the door for filmmakers to depict violence more graphically and blurred the distinction between art and sensationalism. And in the conclusion, when the origins of Norman Bates's psychosis are explained by a pompous psychiatrist, erotic perversion became an acceptable subject for titillating escapist entertainment.

But whether you watch Psycho again or not, be sure to catch two other movies being shown that same night that are essential complements to the Hitchcock film. At 12;45 a.m. (PDT), technically on October 26, TCM is showing schlockmeister William Castle's Homicidal (1961). Many believe that this film is a rip-off of Psycho made solely to capitalize on the success and notoriety of Hitchcock's film. In truth, Homicidal bears fewer resemblances to Psycho than some of Brian de Palma's later Hitchcock pastiches and is an immensely entertaining movie well worth watching in its own right.

The similarities to Psycho are clear, although in reality few of the elements that Homicidal emulates were completely innovative when Hitchcock used them, although admittedly he did so in more imaginative and more visually artful ways. Homicidal opens with an enigmatic sequence in which a mysterious young woman checks into a hotel and pays the bellman, a complete stranger, to marry her. At the end of the wedding ceremony, without warning or apparent motive she pulls out a knife, brutally stabs to death the justice of the peace who has just married her, and flees. She drives to the small town of Solvang, where she lives in a creepy, isolated mansion with an elderly woman who is wheelchair-bound and mute. She is in reality Emily, already the wife of a young man named Warren, who after many years in Denmark has just returned to his childhood home to claim the fortune he will shortly inherit. The paralyzed woman is Helga, Warren's childhood nurse who had accompanied him abroad and returned with him and his new wife.

The viewer is given to understand that Emily is a mentally disturbed homicidal maniac. While Warren is absent on business, she terrorizes and threatens the helpless Helga. Also menaced by her are Warren's half-sister Miriam and Miriam's pharmacist boyfriend. Before the movie's end the plot also includes the wanton vandalizing of Miriam's florist shop, her false implication in the murder of the justice of the peace, and a gruesome decapitation. At the end of the movie Warren and Miriam drive to the mansion. Warren goes into the house to confront his deranged wife while Miriam stays in the car. When he doesn't return, she decides to enter the house to look for him.

When Miriam hesitates at the door, Castle reveals his obligatory gimmick, in this case a "fright break," a short pause in which the audience is given time to reflect on the significance of what has happened in the movie and predict what will happen when she finally opens that door and enters. I will not disclose what happens when she goes inside except to say that the ending of the movie makes plain that nothing is what it seemed and leaves the viewer with a final ambiguity: Is the villain really a psychopath or just a greedy schemer trying to gain control of the fortune through an elaborate and clever conspiracy?

Homicidal has many things to recommend it. The movie makes excellent location use of Solvang, California, in its pre-Sideways days before it became a yuppie destination for wine tourists. In those days it was a kitschy, Disneylandish Danish-themed tourist village known for its ornamental windmill, Danish bakery, and Andersen's Pea Soup restaurant. The photography by the masterful Burnett Guffey (with two Oscars to his credit, for From Here to Eternity and Bonnie and Clyde) is first-rate. The performances by Jean Arless and Eugenie Leontovitch are outstanding, and television stalwarts Glenn Corbett and Patricia Breslin are well cast as the "normal" young couple drawn into the perverse situation. This is the best William Castle movie I've seen, successful both as sheer entertainment and as a comparison to the better-known Psycho.

If Homicidal predictably cannot match the level of artistry of Hitchcock's Psycho, it does come close to matching its hyped-up element of shock. In comparison, the great British director Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), which is being shown on TCM directly after Psycho at 7:00 p.m. (PDT), easily equals and possibly exceeds Psycho in both of these areas. This is the notorious film that when released so alienated critics with its perverse and sensational subject matter—child abuse, voyeurism, sexual fetishism, and serial murder—that it essentially ended the commercial career of a great film artist. The movie was rediscovered in the late 1970's when a group of admirers led by Martin Scorsese arranged for it to be shown at the 1979 New York Film Festival. Peeping Tom is, to put it briefly, a bona fide masterpiece and nothing like Powell's earlier, more dignified films such as Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes.

In the movie, Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, a studio cameraman who carries a home movie camera around with him and obsessively films aspects of his daily life. But he takes his activities much further than that, secretly filming not only the quotidian but also the unsavory and hidden aspects of life. At one point early in the movie he hires and films an attractive young woman who slowly turns her head to reveal a hideous disfigurement on one side of her face. But Mark's worst obsessions are even more shocking.

He gets his biggest kicks from compulsively repeating the same murderous scenario, from luring or hiring a woman to be filmed and then performing the same perverted ritual again and again. His camera mounted on a tripod, he moves in to film a tight close-up of his victim's face. As he approaches, he slowly raises the front leg of the tripod to an upright position. As the model realizes that she is about to be impaled on its deadly-sharp tip, her expression becomes one of terror. It is the capturing on film of this expression of the model's fear at the realization of her impending death, as well as the exact moment of her death, that is the object of Mark's prurient fetish. In a room in his childhood home, where he still lives, he archives these snuff films and rewatches them repeatedly. The phallic and erotic implications of the erect leg of the tripod and its penetration of the model are unmistakable, and critics and audiences of 1960 must have found these implications quite unsettling.

Unlike Hitchcock or Castle, Powell withholds none of this from the viewer. His object may be to shock, but after the first killing he is not interested in surprising or mystifying the viewer. Peeping Tom is from the beginning more of a case history than either Psycho or Homicidal. Later in the movie the origins of Mark's psychopathology are revealed. From childhood, Mark was the object of his twisted father's behavioral experiments, in which he clinically and dispassionately documented on film Mark's entire childhood and the psychological effects on the boy of this continuous surveillance.

Mark, the victim of incessant voyeurism, has as an adult become a filmic voyeur himself. He displays many symptoms of autism—ritualistic or compulsive behavior and problems both with social skills and with communication. (At this time, autism was commonly believed to be the result of lack of affection in childhood, a theory since completely abandoned. Today autism is thought to have a genetic component, and Mark's father's treatment of him as an object rather than a person might be interpreted as an indication of autistic tendencies in the father as well.) His cinematic activities have become a substitute for life, for social interaction and sexuality. And he uses his camera to explore his own particular obsessions, fear and death.

The screenplay of Peeping Tom is much richer thematically than that of Psycho. In Psycho Norman Bates is clearly The Other, a scary freak to be feared by the viewer, not identified with. Peeping Tom, by contrast, forces the viewer to become complicit in Mark's activities: It requires that the viewer reconsider the implications of the act of moviewatching, for Mark's behavior is by extension the activity of the moviegoer carried to its furthest imaginable extreme. Mark's snuff films are both an escape from life and an attempt to explore some of its most incomprehensible mysteries, and isn't this exactly what the best movies do? To add another layer of complexity, Powell refuses to exempt the filmmaker from this self-examination. In the sequences that show home movies of Mark's father filming the young boy, the father is played by Powell himself.

At one point in Peeping Tom Mark and another employee of the film studio are sitting next to each other, waiting to be interviewed by the police in another room. Mark actually has his camera with him and tells his friend that he plans to film the interview. "Are you mad?" the colleague asks. "Yes," Mark answers, giggling nervously. "Do you think they'll notice?" The police might not notice right away. Mark is, after all, a boyish, reserved, and polite young man who seems eccentric but harmless. By this point the audience know differently but have likely developed an ambivalent attitude toward him, for Mark is himself a childhood victim of extreme psychological abuse and is driven by uncontrollable compulsions. Peeping Tom does what few movies have ever succeeded in doing, creating a sympathetic monster.

Be sure to catch the psycho killer triple feature—Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Homicidal—on Turner Classic Movies this Saturday. Psycho is a keeper, a movie to rewatch and savor, to marvel at its unforgettable set pieces that transcend the movie's rather lurid plot, to admire how skillfully Hitchcock manipulates audience response and stealthily insinuates his bizarre sense of humor into a basically grim situation. Homicidal is a movie that aspires to do nothing more than thrill and entertain while being viewed, and it does this quite successfully. Peeping Tom is a movie to ponder during and after watching, a work satisfyingly rich in thematic resonance, a self-referential exploration of the deeper meanings of the art of making movies and the act of watching them.

A Neglected Early Hitchcock Masterpiece

Two of Alfred Hitchcock's films made in Britain in the 1930's are universally recognized as masterpieces, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). For the latter movie Hitchcock received the Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Circle. During this period Hitchcock directed two other pictures that are also highly regarded, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Sabotage (1936), as well as several other lesser movies. But in 1937 he directed a film that to my mind is very nearly the equal of his two masterpieces of the period and which has never received the acclaim it deserves: Young and Innocent (originally released in the U.S. as The Girl Was Young).

In the movie, writer Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is falsely accused of murder. Tisdall saw the real killer but does not know who he is; he knows only that the man has a pronounced squint in one eye. During a court hearing in the small English town where he has been jailed, Tisdall manages to escape and hide in a car. The car happens to belong to Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped daughter in The Man Who Knew Too Much), the daughter of the local constable. Erica then proceeds to help the fugitive escape and hide out, at first unwillingly, and later willingly as her romantic attraction to him grows.

The rest of the movie consists of the basic plot that Hitchcock had already used at least once before, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and would continue to use several more times until it reached its apogee in North by Northwest. The innocent man must learn the truth and find the real culprit before the authorities, who are all the while pursuing him, capture him. If this happens, he will almost certainly be falsely convicted and jailed, for to everyone but the viewer all the evidence appears to indicate his guilt.

This basic plot was in truth merely an elaboration of the classic cinematic device that had been used to create suspense since the earliest silents and was based on the cross-cutting between parallel plots perfected by D. W. Griffith. There the cross-cutting was typically between the heroine in peril and the rescuer(s) racing to reach her. Will the villain succeed in achieving his evil intentions before the hero arrives? The device was used in everything from The Perils of Pauline style of melodrama—where the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks while the hero races a speeding train to save her—to more ambitious works like The Birth of a Nation. In this brilliant but egregiously racist landmark film, Lillian Gish risks suffering the "fate worse than death" (to the sexually repressed Victorian mentality of Griffith, rape) before the Klan, attired in their full regalia and mounted on racing horses, reach her.

As well as its basic plot, Young and Innocent contains many other elements that are staples of the Hitchcock movie. The director has a brief cameo as a reporter outside the court building. His macabre sense of humor is in full evidence during the dinner scene with Erica's family, where while dining, her teenaged brothers discuss in graphic detail a grisly murder.

The movie also contains two of the elaborate set pieces that are the high points of any of Hitchcock's works. The one that serves as the movie's finale is well known and rightly so. It is set in a night club where Tisdall and Erica have finally tracked the murderer. The police are closing in on the pair, who still have no idea exactly who the killer is. As the police arrive, a dance band in blackface begins to play, and the camera slowly moves in a lengthy crane shot towards the band and keeps on moving to an extremely tight close-up of the eyes of the drummer at the very rear of the band. Suddenly one of the drummer's eyes, surrounded by its outrageous blackface make-up, begins to twitch involuntarily, Erica sees it, and the hero is saved.

The other memorable set piece served as the template for a device that Hitchcock used again and again. In Young and Innocent the sequence takes place in an abandoned mine. Tisdall and Erica, accompanied by one of those ubiquitous tramps of 1930's British fiction, are in her car racing away from pursuers and drive into the derelict mine to elude them. Suddenly the ground begins to give way beneath the car, which rapidly begins sinking into a collapsing mineshaft. Tisdall and the tramp manage to escape, but Erica is trapped in the car.

By this time the car is below floor level and all that can be seen of Erica is her outstretched arm reaching for help. In another tight close-up, Tisdall's hand is seen reaching for Erica's and finally taking it and pulling her to safety an instant before the mineshaft collapses completely and the car plunges to the bottom of it. Hitchcock was to repeat this device—based on fear of heights and of falling—or a variation of it again and again in later films. He used it in Sabotage, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and (again reaching its apogee) in the conclusion of North by Northwest.

If you like Hitchcock and you've never seen Young and Innocent, by all means make a point of catching it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

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