Stoker

Someone must have been pissing in the DNA samples, because something has gone horribly wrong with this Shadow of a Doubt clone. If Stoker is supposed to evoke the Hitchcock classic, then it does so only as a Frankenstein-style re-creation, built out of spart parts left over from South Korean horror films and The Paperboy. Regardless, there are now two sociopathic Uncle Charlies stalking the corridors of cinematic history, and we must contend with Park Chan-Wook’s contribution to this proud tradition of avuncular terror. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Hitchcock and Park—making his North American feature debut here—but the contrast is illuminating. Shadow of a Doubt pours acids on the idylls of middle America; Stoker looks at the scarred remains and suggests everything is precisely as fucked up as it seems. Park et al. have arrived to point out that damaged loners and isolated eccentrics are kind of nutty, which is as dramatically satisfying as declaring a spade is a spade. The gulf between the two films is written in the faces of the men who play Uncle Charlie. When Joseph Cotten’s gentleman-killer smiles, he looks like he’s going to offer you a drink. When Matthew Goode smiles, he looks like he’s going to brain you with a rock.

Despite a few elegant visual touches here or there, Stoker only occasionally rises to the heights of coherence, while its stately pace and artful splatter veers ever closer to camp with each twist of the plot. For such grisly sex-and-murder mayhem, the film is surprisingly bloodless. The fault lies partly with Park’s smothering style and partly with the performances. Goode, as mentioned, is little more than a smirk in a sweater, while Mia Wasikowska (as India, Charlie’s equally deranged niece) is reduced to petulant sulking for much of the film. As for Nicole Kidman: future scholars will write of this film when discussing her camp-vamp phase, so I will defer to their expertise. However, what could any performer do with this ripe nonsense? Self-realization in the film is intimately twined with sex and violence, which amounts to masturbating in the shower after your uncle has killed your would-be rapist—with your father’s belt, I should note (wouldn’t want to lose any of the psychosexual nuances, after all). The film pushes so many buttons at once it smashes the remote. Even when the film gets it right, it gets it wrong. Yes, children do often reflect the madness of their families, but that doesn’t typically apply to distant relations you don’t even know exist. Or is strangling people with a leather belt some sort of hereditary condition now?

The Third Man

Whenever and however I finally pack it in—the smart money’s on decapitation by the side mirror of a passing city bus, by the way—can I have The Third Man played at my funeral in lieu of a eulogy? No, it doesn’t sum up my life in any meaningful way. I never smuggled penicillin in post-war Vienna, wrote dime-store westerns nor, save for several magical weeks one long-lost summer, played female lead in a Germanic powdered-wig farce.

But is there any greater film about the art of saying—or not saying—goodbye? How many tickets out of town do you need before you finally leave? How many times must you bury your best friend before he finally stays dead? Is there really any such thing as a foolproof coffin? Somehow, the dead always find a way to get out and sneak back into our lives. Spiritually, The Third Man is the ancestor of every zombie film ever made.

The dead may rise, but as Orson Welles via Harry Lime says, they were probably happier dead anyway. And looking at the scarred Vienna captured so masterfully by Carol Reed, he might be right. You might not be able to leave once you arrive—as Harry’s friend Holly so comically discovers—but you certainly wouldn’t want to return once you escaped, whether it be by train, plane, or hearse. This city is a broken place, the kind of place where morality is a form of betrayal and even the children are willing to sell you out to the lynch mob. It’s a paranoid place, enlivened only by the occasional black comedy of Graham Greene’s hardboiled dialogue, which is so flinty it strikes sparks (“You were born to be murdered,” one character quips, summing up the general mood quite nicely). Yet somewhere between the canted angles and the zither score—jaunty, romantic and entirely sinister—a strange alchemy takes place. Having your heart crushed by this film again and again is an altogether intoxicating experience.

Just look into those eyes and try to resist. Any pair of eyes will do, for this is a film of faces. There are the famous ones, of course: Holly’s face (Joseph Cotton), weary and stupefied at the discovery of his friend’s crimes; or Anna’s (Valli), buried in her hands, tears rolling down her cheek as she clutches at the ghost in her heart. And when the shadows peel back, Harry’s face, carrying that simple, bemused smile at all of this misery. But there are also the faces of the people of Vienna, wizened and worn by years of war and hunger and terror. Reed returns to these faces repeatedly, punctuating scenes with their accusing eyes—the conscience of the film. Sad faces. Angry faces. Confused, numbed, stricken faces. “Look at yourself,” Anna says to Holly, “They have a name for faces like that.”

Er, is it Harry? At one point, Anna accidentally refers to Holly by his missing friend’s name, excusing her mistake with another insult. “Holly—what a silly name.” Not that Holly fares any better with names, constantly referring to the British officer Halloway as Hallohan (“I’m not Irish,” the man sniffs in reply). Is it a sign of the fundamental dishonesty of the place that no one seems able to master the simple act of direct reference? Or is the fact that no one seems to have bothered to learn any else’s name merely another side effect of the carelessness with which these people treat each other? If I don’t care whether you live or die, do I really care however the hell you pronounce “Winkel”?

That callousness informs the film from Harry’s rationalization of his crimes right down to that immortal final shot where Anna refuses to grant Holly the small comfort of acknowledgement, never mind forgiveness. She just walks down a lane that seemingly stretches into infinity, finally stepping out of sight behind the camera, where a better—if surely less beautiful—world must exist. She says not a word, allowing the headless trees and falling leaves to speak for her. But what use is goodbye? That’s why this film would serve as such a fine eulogy. When the time comes to truly part, irrevocably and eternally separate, the word means nothing. So no goodbyes, please. Give me a good movie and that’ll be enough. Just don’t forget to seal that coffin tight.

Under Capricorn

Under Capricorn has always had a tough time finding a place in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not fitting in with the psychological thrillers or high-spirited adventures for which he is best known. Even Rope—his 1948 murder drama employing a comparable long-take style of filming—has been granted more attention as a “problem picture,” while most people prefer to politely overlook the supposed failure of Under Capricorn.

To be fair, Under Capricorn is actually an easy film to pass by based on description alone. A period romance set in 1830s Australia as directed by Alfred Hitchcock: was anyone clamoring for this? As subject matter, this is pretty suspect terrain for any director (19th century Australia hardly seems ripe for weepy dramas filled with flouncy dresses and embroidered hankies and all that), but for someone as acidic as Hitchcock a disastrous outcome seems a foregone conclusion.

But the lure of this film proved too much for me and I had to give in, regardless of the dubious concept and seemingly ill-conceived marriage of subject and director (but then again, ill-conceived marriages are Hitchcock’s normal terrain, aren’t they?). Luckily, the film can be downloaded from Archive.org’s mammoth collection of public domain films, and in a decent quality version no less (although you can watch it in streaming video at the bottom of this post, I recommend downloading the 1.3 gigabyte MP4 file, which is of a higher quality). No harm in trying something for free, right?

As I discovered, Under Capricorn is far better than its reputation would lead one to believe. Even if it doesn’t possess the queasy, obsessive power of something like Vertigo, the film is so masterfully conceived and executed that it stands with the best of Hitchcock’s work. The genteel tone of the film at first feels peculiar for a director so fond of the perverse and violent in human nature, but there is a powerful tale of poisoned passion buried within the restrained romantic anguish. The pitfalls of marriage are a running theme that reoccurs throughout Hitchcock’s films—sometimes as the main subject, and sometimes as a side gag, but almost always present in some form. Under Capricorn proves to be one of his definitive depictions of marital hell.

The film begins with Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), cousin to the newly appointed governor of the colony, landing in Australia in the hopes of making some sort of fortune for himself. Opportunity comes in the form of Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), a local landowner and man of wealth who approaches Adare with a business proposition. Flusky invites the newcomer to a dinner party at his mansion, and a rather tense evening ensues: the wives of all of the other guests are conspicuously absent, as is Lady Henrietta, Flusky’s own wife, until she suddenly appears, drunk and confused and in bare feet.

Having known Henrietta when he was a child, Adare is distressed by the current state of the woman: an alcoholic mess hiding from the world in Flusky’s mansion. Adare—with the consent of Flusky—begins the difficult process of restoring her self-confidence. And as the enthusiastic Adare brings Henrietta back to life, Flusky watches anxiously, at first with hope for his wife’s recovery and then with jealousy as he sees her grow closer to the charming young man.

However, the relationship between Flusky and his wife is more complicated than just another aging marriage on the rocks. Flusky is a former stable boy who eloped with the aristocratic Henrietta back in Ireland; he was convicted of murdering her brother and has spent the years since his release cultivating a life as a respectable, wealthy citizen. This is a marriage built on sudden passion and death, and the pair are linked in a complicity far stronger—albeit more painful—than anything Adare can offer to Henrietta. The couple remains dedicated to each other, and yet, under the burden of the past, they find themselves unable to love each other even as they acknowledge that they cannot live apart. The same love that nourishes poisons as well.

This sounds rather harrowing, but the cobbled-together colonial gentility of the film’s atmosphere forces restraint upon the extreme emotions running through the story. Hitchcock’s depiction of these characters is carefully observed and humane as he ruefully addresses their plight without condescension or moralizing. Telling the story primarily through a series of carefully constructed, elegant long takes, Hitchcock achieves something quite moving—even lyrical—out of the sex-death perversity that runs through so much of his work.

As I watched the film, I thought back to Rope quite often. Made in 1949, Under Capricorn is very much an extension of the methods employed in the earlier film, but with greater refinement and intelligence. Rope is largely a gimmick—a fun and often intriguing one, but a gimmick all the same. The conceit was to make a film in a single shot, even though less than 10 minutes of film could be contained on a single reel. In order to accommodate his desire to make the film at least appear that it was done in a single take, Hitchcock engaged in some elaborate staging tricks that allowed him to switch the film mid-scene unnoticed. Unfortunately, this required many awkward close-ups of people’s backs and other distracting attempts to blank out the image and allow for the reels to be changed. The technique constantly calls attention to itself and never really meshes with the material as a result. Rope is a marvel of staging and timing, but Hitchcock is too pre-occupied with playing games to pay much attention to the particulars of the story.

By contrast, Under Capricorn is a work of nuance and maturity. Hitchcock discards the vain conceit of the single-take film, but he retains the intricate staging and lengthy shots he had mastered in Rope, making the earlier film seem now like a warm-up for this more judicious and thoughtful follow-up. Instead of serving as a distracting, self-conscious experiment in style, the long takes of this film elegantly draw out the emotional tensions between the characters.

In one particularly fine scene, Charles is taking down a message from Henrietta to include in a letter to his sister Diana. Henrietta stands over him and dictates a letter that explains how much she appreciates everything Charles has done for her; the moment glows with warmth and mutual feeling. The camera drifts away from the pair and slowly pans over the empty room as Henrietta’s voice continues to speak softly, a lulling music for this serene image. The searching eye of the camera finally settles on Sam, back turned, walking away down the hall.

There’s a kind of suspense here, albeit not the type Hitchcock fans are typically accustomed to expecting of the master. The pan over the empty room builds up a sense of peace that is broken by the sight of Sam walking away, and that disruption in the mood creates a subtle yet ominous chill in the midst of this delicate moment. In a single visually eloquent shot, Hitchcock uses physical space and camera movement to convey Sam’s increasing emotional isolation.

The easiest dismissal of this film is that it is “talky,” an argument which might make sense when coming from a blind person, but which otherwise I have little patience for. Listen less and watch more. If the film seems too windy to you, then put it on mute, because you’re missing the point. The talk is purely illustrative. As is the case with many a great film, the dialogue elaborates the story without being absolutely essential to the telling. All of the real action in this film occurs on the visual level, and even if you never heard a word spoken, the basic emotional truth would still come through loud and clear.

The quiet elegance of the letter scene is typical of Under Capricorn, which prizes small gestures and glances and the expressive capabilities of staging and camera movement. The film cultivates a tone of ominous tranquility, which is perfect for relaying this tale of murderous, torrid passion entering the late stages of its decay. One could possibly mistake this entropy for a sort of peace—but only if you don’t look too closely.