Month: September 2009

Note: This is #39 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

The Apartment is one of the few movies where I’m not quite sure why it’s on this list. I feel like I’m missing something.

It features Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter, a sad sack corporate drone for a New York insurance company who is never able to enjoy his cozy apartment because he has been bullied into making it available to his employer’s corporate executives so that they can invite ladies over for extramarital affairs. So most nights find Baxter standing morosely on the street underneath his own apartment window, seething and waiting until he can go home. He’s doing these favors mostly because he hopes that they will fast track him to a big promotion, but you also get the sense that he’s just a pushover and really going nowhere. Then comes along Fran Kubelik (Shirly McClain), the cute elevator girl (elevator girl? Oh, right, 1960) with whom Baxter becomes smitten. The only problem is that Miss Kubelik is herself smitten with the one of the other executives, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred McMurray), who starts inviting her back to Baxter’s place and stringing her along for a tryst.

Billed as a “romantic comedy” The Apartment seems kind of short on laughs. But the performances are good. Lemmon is good in the role and sells his whole lonely, frustrated bachelor role pretty well. And McClain is also good as Miss Kubelik, playing her not as a ditz but as a young woman who’s almost earned the right to call herself world-weary and jaded, but not quite. And there’s some neat commentary in there about the life of a wage slave owing everything to a slothful feudal lord. Both Baxter and Kubelik fawn over Mr. Sheldrake in their own way, and each are disappointed and unfulfilled by what they get out of it.

So the film has some nice character work and development, some good performances, and it’s cute. My wife watched this one with me, and she enjoyed it as well. It just doesn’t seem to me to be quite on the same level as some of the others that I’ve watched in this experiment.

Note: This is #38 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

For those of you who don’t yet know, the plot of Psycho starts with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a secretary who steals $40,000 from her employer so that she can elope with her boyfriend. Now you know! On her way to her new life a storm forces Marion to pull over for the night at a remote motel supposedly run by creepy dude Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his decrepit and homicidal mother. Things start to go badly as Norman tries to cover up his mother’s shower related crimes and put the inevitable investigators off the trail. Psycho is the last of the Alfred Hitchcock film on my list, and I found it to be one of the better ones. This despite the fact that I already knew the big twist about Norman Bates that gets revealed at the very end and the fact that I knew all about the iconic and shocking shower stabby stabby scene. It’s really Hershey’s chocolate syrup going down the drain!

But while the film’s intended effects were surely dulled by such familiarity, it didn’t detract from the fact that it was a genuinely creepy and suspenseful flick –basically an early example of the slasher genre. Perkins is genuinely creepy as Norman Bates and I appreciate Hitchcock’s decision to film in black and white despite the established popularity of color films because the stark lighting adds to the overall effect of many scenes. And I’m not sure what’s up with those birds, but there sure were a lot of them hanging around in the background of almost every scene.

So even though I enjoyed some of Hitchock’s other movies more than Psycho, this is one of those that I’d recommend to anyone not too squeamish to sit through it if for no other reason that to directly experience something very well done that has permeated popular culture. Sometimes it’s best just to see something at its source.

Note: This is #37 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

Well, that was epic. To boil it down, Ben-Hur tells the story of Judah Ben-Hur (Charton Heston), a contemporary of Jesus Christ who enjoyed the luxuries of the Roman Empire until he chooses to stand against the politics of his long-time Roman friend, Messala (Stephen Boyd). When Messala sees a chance to frame Ben-Hur for an attack on a local political official, he takes it and sentences his one-time friend to a shortened lifetime of slavery on a Roman war galley. Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are also imprisoned on the same charge. Obsessed with revenge, Ben-Hur vows to return and punish his enemy, and the balance of the movie sees him wrestling with both his circumstances and his hate. Though Christ only makes a few cameos in the movie, His influence is felt throughout the film, both in the religious reformations He is enacting and through the spiritual awakening that takes place in Ben-Hur simply on the basis of their brief contact.

Charlton Heston’s acting may have edged up against hammy more than a few times, but there are none the less several impressive things about Ben-Hur. The effort put into costumes and sets alone was pretty spectacular, easily on par with anything you’d see in modern movies like The Lord of the Rings. A few colloquialisms aside, the movie really looks like it’s taking place in its own world and gives you a sense of history. There’s also the famous chariot race scene where Ben-Hur and Messala have their final showdown in a contest that made me think, perhaps not coincidentally, of the “Greased Lightning” scene in Grease. Still, it’s a pretty fantastic sequence and I can see how audiences at the time were wowed by its scope and action.

So at 3 and a half hours long Ben-Hur isn’t something you’re likely to just pop in on a whim, but it’s really pretty good if you’re prepared for an epic set in another time and place.

Note: This is #36 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

The third the four Alfred Hitchcock movies on the list, I think I like North by Northwest the best (at the time of this writing I’ve already watched Psycho as well as Vertigo and Rear Window). This is probably because it’s got the most straight forward thriller-type plot and some pretty iconic scenes. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is high power executive who accidentally gets involved with some goons, some spies, some microfiche, a MacGuffin, and and Abraham Lincoln’s enormous nose. The main drama and intrigue comes from Thornhill’s trying to figure out the nature of the mess he’s gotten into when some henchmen kidnap him in a case of mistaken identity and repeatedly try to kill him. Thornhill turns out to be more resourceful than anyone might have guessed (himself included), but he has help in the form of a mysterious blond bombshell (Eva Marie Saint) who turns out to be more than she first appeared.

As I said, the plot if pretty engaging and it moves along quickly. It’s essentially a spy caper, only with Cary Gran’ts everyman character sitting in for your typical James Bond lead (well, “typical” from the vantage of 2009 if not 1959). It’s a fun story, even if it’s not as meaty as the other films I’ve sampled from Hitchcock’s library.

Note: This is #35 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

More Alfred Hitchcock. This time, in Vertigo, detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stuart) develops a fear of heights after a close call involving a fleeing criminal, a tricky jump, and a lot of gravity. After retiring from the police force, he’s hired to trail and old college friend’s wife (Kim Novak) because the friend thinks she is possessed by some dead spirit and doing some pretty weird stuff. Ferguson falls for the wife (of course!) and a deeper mystery begins to reveal itself, culminating in some very startled nuns with a lot of clean up to do.

That doesn’t sound like a very exciting summary, but really to say more about it would spoil things unnecessarily. Vertigo seems like a pretty good example of Hitchcock’s “twist” endings, but oddly enough the audience is deliberately made aware of the twist long before the main character is. I guess it’s interesting to see him work it out and be affected by it, but honestly I have to think that it would have been more effective to delay things a bit. I read once that Hitchcock once illustrated the concept of suspense by describing a scene where a family sitting down at the dining table rigged with a deadly bomb underneath. The audience sees the bomb, but the family on screen does not. That’s the kind of thing going on in the last quarter or so of Vertigo.

So overall I thought the film was okay, though honestly I didn’t find it all that suspenseful nor the plot that compelling and it was pretty long with stretches of slow pacing. What I did enjoy was just seeing Hitchcock’s film making style on display. It really does seem radically different from the other classic movies I’ve seen up to this point –much more dramatic camera angles, musical scores, lighting, and other effects. Plus we’re getting into some subject matter that’s more risque relative to what I’ve seen before –a man cavorting with a married woman and getting caught up in cold-blooded murder. It’s interesting to see the audience’s sensibilities change along with the film makers’ –or vice versa.