Under The Silver Lake

Owl In Hand

Under The Silver Lake
USA 2017 Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Vendian Entertainment

Sometimes you come across a great movie in the least expected way. Now, I loved It Follows (reviewed here) and for a while I was waiting for a couple of things to happen... one was a sequel to this outstanding horror movie (I still can’t believe they’ve not turned it into a franchise yet) and also, to see whatever the next film by the writer/director of It Follows, David Robert Mitchell, happened to be. After a while I gave up on either option though and, I have to say, Under The Silver Lake didn’t even come onto my radar until a day or two ago (at time of writing).

You see, I love movie scores and the composer of the score to It Follows, a guy called Disasterpeace, also scored this movie. However, it wasn’t until I was reading the second volume of J. Blake Fichera’s Scored To Death books, which features interviews with a whole bunch of horror movie composers, that I realised both the director and composer had worked on another film together after that. So I immediately had to take a look at it and, around about 20 minutes in, I had to pause the movie so I could order the last cheap copy of the soundtrack CD on Ebay, because I already liked the music so much.

Now Under The Silver Lake is not a 'horror movie' but it’s a significant puzzle of a movie. I might liken it to the works of British director Peter Greenaway in some ways, not in terms of the visual or audio style but in terms of the mystery at the heart of the story and the... well, the resolution or lack of, as such. I would perhaps best describe this as a paranoid conspiracy movie set in modern times and highlighting contemporary themes and attitudes but viewed through a 1940s film noir sensibility.

Also, if you’re heavily into movies, you will find an awful lot of references to various works in film history from homages to Marilyn Monroe’s scenes from her unfinished movie Something’s Got To Give through to various Hitchcock thrillers and so on. Certainly, the hook of the movie is something which borrows liberally from a more formulaic style of movie making. Now, I’m determined not to spoil the film with any key revelations here because, more than most films, it trades on the sense of intrigue set up by the characters and situations which play out in some truly brain twisting ways on screen.

What I will say is that the lead protagonist Sam, is played by Andrew Garfield, who is nicely seen holding a Spider-Man comic in one scene (a role which he played in two previous films and will be reprising at the end of the year...assuming the post-pandemic cinema release schedules remain unchanged). He meets a girl by the swimming pool in his apartment building one night while he’s fulfilling the same role as the James Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (a poster among many old movies posters up in his apartment) and becomes obsessed with her... more so when, the next day, Sarah (played by Riley Keough) disappears and may, or may not, have been burned to death in a car along with a missing billionaire.

From this point on, the film becomes an intriguing and very strangely shot fairground ride as Sam tries to find out what has happened to Sarah, as the film details his adventures which involve secret symbols, secret codes, a local comic book guy who produces a fanzine style comic book of the neighbourhood called “Under The Silver Lake”, a mythical naked lady Night Owl serial killer and...lots of other stuff which I won’t mention here.

The film is very well shot with slow zooms and camera movements on long shots which suck you into the movie in the way that lots of old movies used to but, few modern ones seldom do... at least using this particular aesthetic. There are even some nice, black and white animated segments which play out pieces of the comic book whenever somebody reads it.

The Hitchcock references continue with a shot of his grave stone in one sequence, a Vertigo shot where the camera is zoomed/pulled (you know, the one Spielberg later used in Jaws) and this goes for a lot of the music too, which I suspect is influenced in some of the scenes here by the great Bernard Herrmann. Indeed, a wordless and extended sequence where Sam follows three girls across town with just music is absolutely a stand in for the scene near the start of Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak’s character and Disasterpeace’s score in this sequence certainly gives off the same kind of vibe. Which is nice (and, as I said, had me reaching for ebay).

And that’s it... I’ve gone as far as I can without giving things away. The film is definitely ‘not safe for work’ as they say, in that there’s a lot of female nudity (absolutely not complaining about this) and even a couple of extremely gory scenes too, perhaps made more shocking because they aren’t occurring in a horror movie but something which is using the syntax of historic movies from a time where such violence would not be shown on screen (we’re talking almost Cronenbergian levels here, in a couple of scenes). And it’s a great movie. The ending gives us some sense of awkward resolution while, at the same time, probably leaving us with more questions than we might like. In that way, I suspect it’s a little like Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, which is another film which I believe won’t reward multiple viewings with anything like a clue as to what certain aspects of the movie were about (and which is all the richer for it). Still, I was totally captivated by Under The Silver Lake in the very best way and I would certainly recommend it to anyone with a love of cinema and an appreciation for the history of the art. And I’ll just leave it at that. 

78/52

Shower Power

78/52
2017 USA Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
UK cinema release print.

78/52 is an unusual documentary in that it spends an hour and a half examining what is, after all, a scene which last less than a minute in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... the (in)famous shower scene. Of course, the power and initial shock (on first viewing) of this sequence more than justifies the importance and influence it has had on cinema history and modern pop culture but... well, if anything I could have done with a slightly longer movie on the subject (but I’ll come to why I think that in a minute or two).

The film is certainly interesting and the writer/director Alexandre O. Philippe has obviously put in a lot of time and effort piecing together small pieces of footage from a wealth of interesting people from both behind and in front of the camera... giving us a kind of collective ‘expert witness’ of the quality and visceral effectiveness of this effective short sequence. This includes some interesting little moments from Janet Leigh’s body double, who spent a lot of the time filming the scene... her body is in the majority of the short scene, which took seven days to film. Basically, if you see any shots without her face in clear view in the shower scene in Psycho (including the dead body in the clean up following the murder), you’re almost certainly looking at actress/model Marli Renfro, playing the part of the ‘cut down before her time’ character of Marion Crane.

And there are some interesting nuggets to be found during the vivisection of the sequence, some of which I actually didn’t know and some of which are, if you watch the film, self evident. For example, the awkward cut back one last time to the shower head in the pan away from Marion’s body before you get to the money is picked up on by one of the people being interviewed and then explained by another as a mistake in that it was later found that Janet Leigh had taken a visible breath. So that moment had to be eviscerated from the movie as quickly as Norman Bate’s knife made short work of the red herring of a character whose demise is depicted in the scene in question.

There is also a great little moment where the relevance of the painting that Norman Bates (played in Psycho by Anthony Perkins) moves out of the way to reveal the ‘spy hole’ is explained, in terms of both its relevance in the world of art but also its purpose in its placement in the film. I won’t go into it here because... you know... you can watch the film and find out for yourself but, basically, the voyeur is removing a famous interpretaion of a voyeuristic scene to be a participant in the very act that the painting is depicting. And this is all very interesting and revealing, to be fair.

That being said, I did find the documentary to be lacking in many ways, too.

For instance, the long list of people included, most of them extremely briefly, like Mick Garris, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich... are people you would trust to make an observation on this movie but there are others in here who, while very enthusiastic, well... you have to wonder what warranted their inclusion. Presumably, for instance, Elijah Wood is here mostly to comment on the acting in the parlour scene (which is also discussed here) since he’s played a notable psycho or two on screen himself (such as in the recent remake of Maniac or as Kevin in Sin City). Some of the others, however, you have to wonder about.

The biggest problem with the people interviewed, however, is that most of them have such a limited amount of screen time that I would have liked to have seen and heard more from all of them and I reckon the film could have done with being another half an hour longer, in all honesty.

Another fairly large problem with the movie are the re-enactments of certain scenes in Psycho which make you wonder why the director bothered with that when he could have just tracked in scenes from the original. Similarly, the film has a lovely string soundtrack by Jon Hegel (which I really wish was on CD so I could listen to it out of context) and it’s playing over everything, including clips from Psycho and... well you just have to wonder why they chose to go with an original score for this when Bernard Herrmann’s powerful score to Psycho, which the score to 78/52 is obviously trying to invoke in some way, was surely available. I also think that Bernard Herrmann’s astonishing contribution to the film could have been covered a little more in depth, especially since the story of Hitchcock’s insistence that the shower scene needed no music on it until Herrmann proved him wrong is nowhere in evidence in this documentary.

Another thing which is absent here is the very obvious ‘elephant in the room’ of the fact that, as far as I can tell from sorting out various bits of second hand testimony and evidence in books and interviews over the years, Hitchcock didn’t actually direct the shower scene himself but, instead, left it up to the scene’s designer, Saul Bass (one of my hero’s). Now there seems to be a lot of contrary evidence to both support and disregard the claims of both Hitchcock and Bass that they directed the scene and this film doesn’t mention this to weigh in on either version of events. It simply ignores it although, to be fair, it does take a little time to show a few of the many gazillions of story boards that Bass designed for his shoot... I know who I believe but I guess that’s an argument for a different time, especially since, as I said, the auteurial ownership of the scene does not come up in this piece. In fact, it would also have been nice to see the original shower scene actually played out before us in one piece as a reminder of the visceral power of it too, it seems to me. It’s surely been a while since a lot of movie goers watched Psycho.

Another thing which might have been made clearer... and I don’t remember it coming up in the film itself although it might have been so quick that I somehow missed it, is the reason for the title of this film. Apparently, according to the IMDB, it’s because the short scene under scrutiny here, is made up of 78 different camera set ups and 52 edits... which could have done with a little clarification, I think. I suspect some people are going to be walking away from the screenings on this one puzzled about it.

Something else which would have been nice to have been touched upon, since Marli Renfro, the cover girl of the September 1960 Playboy bunny girl, was on hand... was the mysterious and bizarre story of her apparent murder and the confusion of a killer who actually murdered the wrong ‘girl in the shower’ stand in... or some such. I actually don’t know the ins and outs of that story myself (the book on the subject is in one of my many ‘to be read’ piles) but it seems like it might be, at the very least, of passing relevance here. 

All in all, I quite enjoyed certain parts of 78/52, such as the sequence showing the stabbing of different kinds of melons to establish the perfect sound of a knife passing through human flesh and it was nice to hear Jamie Lee Curtis’s own thoughts on her mother’s demise in the scene in question. It’s something which fans of the movie should probably take a look at sometime but I did come out of the cinema feeling fairly unsatisfied with the production. On the other hand, it did provoke some discussion between me and a friend who I saw it with in the pub afterwards... so that was a good thing. This won’t be making any of my top ten lists this year but, as I say, if you are a Hitchcock or Psycho fan, then you might want to give this one a go.

Mystery in White

Snow Stopper

Mystery in White
by J. Jefferson Farjeon 
British Library Crime Classics 
ISBN: 978-0712357708

I first became aware of Mystery In White sometime last Christmas, when one of the people I follow on Twitter posted a link which took me to an article where Waterstones, among others, were expressing astonishment that this relatively obscure novel (in terms of today’s writing celebrities), written in 1937 and reprinted fairly recently, was actually outselling a lot of modern writers and giving them all a run for their money. I don’t know why Mystery In White has been so successful decades after the writer died but, I’m guessing, it’s partly to do with the attractive cover illustration of an old steam train trapped in the snow at night and partly the inclusion of the strap line beneath the title proclaiming it to be “A Christmas Crime Story”. It’s nice to read something relatively Christmassy at this time of year and so I made a mental note to order a copy when that time came around again... so I could check it out this year.

In terms of the kind of book it is... well I’ve read a fair few books written around this time but they mostly tend to be either American adventure stories like the Doc Savage yarns or something like The Saint stories by Leslie Charteris. Mostly blood and thunder action with extremely witty dialogue and a fast, often globe-hopping, pace to them. Mystery In White is nothing like that in its genetic make-up, although it is very well written. If anything, it brings to mind the work of famous British crime writer Agatha Christie in that it’s a nice, gentle read with the set up and solving of the puzzle at hand taking the place of any action, for the most part. My understanding is that Farjeon himself was once a household name in mysteries while he was alive (one of his books was even inspiration for a Hitchcock thriller) but he seems to have slipped away from the limelight in the decades since then, it looks like to me.

The majority of the action in this one, for example, takes place in a snowed-in house, filled up entirely with people who are strangers to each other. Some of these people we are following right from the start of the story, as a group of passengers are stranded on a train in the heavy blizzard which gives the book its title and decide to go off looking for the next stop. However, the conditions are so bad that, instead, they stumble into a house, fully stocked with laid out tables of food and beds... but with a mystery laying in its heart. There is also evidence of something more sinister going on as these people are joined by various characters over the course of the novel, which takes place entirely during Christmas Eve and then into a few hours of Christmas Day.

The first thing which hit me about the book... and which won my trust even on page one... was the writer’s interesting, sometimes poetic, turn of phrase. He takes a page or so setting up the raging, unstoppable blizzard which has hit Britain and which is crucial to the set up of the story. For example, he starts off saying...

“On the 22nd it was still snowing. Snowballs flew, snowmen grew”.

...which I really liked... enough to note it on my iPhone for later use. He then continues, on the very same page, to picture for the reader the absolute unstoppable onslaught of the weather in terms thusly...

“It grew beyond the boundaries of local interest. By the 23rd it was news. By the 24th it was a nuisance.”

This is great stuff. He’s able to conjure up the worsening weather conditions of his fiction and the collected national attitude towards it in just a few short sentences... an economic use of words to set a scene if ever I saw one. He also, it turns out, has a very good grasp of things otherworldly... both the explainable and unexplainable, as it happens.

For instance, one of the characters is taken ill fairly early on in the novel and, when we visit him at a later point in the story, this person has gone into a dream state delirium which the writer conjures up most assuredly. He does this using very clear and concise descriptions of the dream, as it plays out in the young man’s head, which are extraordinary in their vivid mixture of logic coupled with a sense of the absurd. This is a really good handle on the kind of nonsense one stumbles upon in dreams, of course. The utter believability and ‘matter-of-factness’ of the internal workings of the thoughts bounding around the character’s head in this sequence lend it some weight and are definitely something that anybody who’s had a half remembered or waking dream will be able to identify with absolutely. I was very impressed with this little moment in the novel.

That’s the ‘explainable’ other wordly phenomena I was talking about but as to the other... well there’s a strong shot of the supernatural poured into the pages of this novel, that’s for sure. The main male protagonist, who takes on the role of the 'would-be detective' in the situation our small group of people find themselves in, is an ageing parapsychologist, of sorts. Applying logic and reason to strange phenomena while embracing the idea of spirits and ghosts wholeheartedly. Farjeon, it has to be said, weaves this supernatural element into the story and it somehow becomes ravelled into the mystery of the house and the death of the occupants (all stumbled upon after the fact rather than observed first hand by the reader or, it has to be said, many of the characters). There are several moments in the course of the novel where you might find yourself wondering if you are reading just a mystery or a ghost story but... well, for one thing, I don’t want to spoil the story for you and tell you where the tale takes you and, two, due to one particular element in the story which I don’t think is adequately covered by any explanations in the denouement of the tale, I’m still not a hundred percent sure myself. Let’s just say that it’s a pleasant blend of elements from both the mystery story and gothic literature (just a smattering) and I’ll leave you to discover the rest on your own.

Another interesting thing about this novel, and I was especially surprised by this coming from the pen of a male writer in the 1930s, was the strength of mind and resilience of the female characters, all of whom come across as fiercely independent whilst not sacrificing their femininity for the usual male traits exhibited often when women are pushed into the foreground of a piece of art... be it literature, painting or movie making. For instance, look at these words from the sister of one of the male protagonists to a showgirl, both of whom were in the train from the outset of the story...

“My dear, you and I are what are popularly known as ‘the women’ - we’re not to know things! David and I nearly had a row about it.”

This is cool stuff for a novel released in 1937 and although strong supporting characters like Pat Savage (Doc Savage’s cousin) were cropping up in novels around this time, there’s something about those two sentences that really push home the concept of the roots of the problems which give rise to the legacy of modern feminism, I reckon. It’s another example of the concise nature of this writer’s text that he’s able to sum it up so succinctly with so few words... which seems to be a hallmark of Farjeon’s prose, if this story is anything to judge it by.

At the end of the day, Mystery In White is, in fact, nothing much more than a cosy little, supernatural tinted murder mystery which has the novelty value of taking place over the 24th and 25th December and, in this particular case, also has the advantage of being extremely well written by a writer who knows how to conjure up moods and atmospheres with a modicum of raw materials. It’s light reading, for sure, but it is extremely comforting to go back to this kind of more simplistic and, perhaps, more clever form of writing and I suspect that this last element has a lot to do with its recent success in sales too. Word of mouth still carries a lot of clout these days... even if it’s done through social media. If you like the odd, very English mystery story and you want something which is comfortable and not too challenging in its style and content, then Mystery in White is a good thing to be reading over Christmas. I think I might try to find a Christmas mystery to read in the countdown to the pinnacle of the season again in subsequent years... thanks to this novel giving me a taste of possible things to come.

Sisters (aka Blood Sisters)

De Palma, Sans Cheese

Sisters (aka Blood Sisters)
1973 USA 
Directed by Brian De Palma
Arrow BluRay Region B/DVD Region 2 Dual Edition

Warning: Spoilers stabbing you 
repeatedly as you bleed out on the floor...

The early part of the 1970s was the last big hurrah for American movies. You had Brian DePalma’s contemporaries, The New Hollywood Mavericks (as I think they were labelled back then) making their important, breakthrough films around this kind of time, give or take a few years. Directors such as Scorcese (Mean Streets), Spielberg (Jaws), Lucas (American Graffiti) and Coppola (The Godfather)... this was a big creative push which ushered in a brief but potent renaissance in American film making with lots of works by these directors having a lasting impact and influence on both American and International film. A legacy which is still being plundered to this day.

DePalma was no exception, of course, making great movies like this and Dressed To Kill, both of which owe a huge debt to Hitchcock’s Psycho and, of course, De Palma’s Obsession (a film which is quite reminiscent of Vertigo in some ways). Sisters is pretty much my favourite Brian De Palma movie. It comes from that great point in his career when he was experimenting with recycling Hitchcock tropes and motifs and then mixing them in with the kind of visual sensibility found in Italian giallo movies of that era.

Sisters tells the story of Dominique and Danielle (one living, one dead and both played by Margot Kidder) and it’s very much like Psycho in the fact that it starts out with a main protagonist, Philip (played by Lisle Wilson) who, like Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s seminal slasher, disappears from the narrative in a very sudden and brutal manner, once he’s been established for a while as the main lead. Philip is introduced, along with Danielle, as an unknowing participant in a TV game show called Peeping Toms. De Palma has always been considered a bit of a voyeuristic director due, I suspect, to the laid back and casual observational style of the kind of camerawork he employs in his movies. Slow, static or sometimes swooping along a track, it takes in everything and doesn’t necessarily stay with any one character for the bulk of his movies and Sisters is certainly no exception. So when we start off with a scene which is a “set up” for a voyeuristic dilemma, followed by the audience in the studio watching that, followed by us, the audience, watching that TV show presenting that footage... we get a whole voyeurism within voyeurism within voyeurism thing in the very first few minutes of this movie... just in case anybody was maybe missing one of De Palma’s key preoccupations at this point.

So let’s talk about blood and death.

The infamous “Birthday Cake” stab scene, where Philip has brought a cake back to Danielle’s apartment for her and her “sister”, who he heard talking through the wall earlier (not realising that Margot Kidder’s character was, without her even knowing it, talking to herself), is both shocking in its sudden opening slash (even if you are savvy enough to be expecting it on your first viewing) and, even by today’s standards, quite shockingly intense in both its brutality and its duration. After Philip is initially stabbed twice in a crossing blow at the top of one of his legs, near the groin, this is followed by a stab through the mouth which takes most of his left cheek out. As Dominique, brought into play in Danielle’s mind from the trauma of her sexual encounter with Philip from the night before,  drops the knife, which is sent spinning... she is clearly suffering from some kind of schizophrenic fit. All the while, Philip is very slowly crawling across the apartment floor towards the knife, expending all his energy on just trying to stay alive and not “bleed out” without a fight. When Dominique/Danielle notices this, though, she flings herself on him and starts stabbing him repeatedly in the back before spinning the knife away again. The twitching Phillip finally dies trying to write help on the window in his own blood... a murder which is witnessed, Rear Window style, by Jennifer Salt playing Grace Collier, the person who will take over the rest of the movie as the lead protagonist.

As we see the end and then aftermath and clean up of the murder from both her point of view and from the viewpoint of Danielle and her ex-husband, Emil, played by William Finley, we are introduced to what is a very early example of De Palma’s split screen technique. Of course, split screen was nothing new, but DePalma does use it a lot in his films to do things like, in this case, totally set up the character of Grace Collier via a feed of her newspaper columns, summing up her stance on life, while also getting the murder clean up out of the way simultaneously. He also uses it to build suspense, such as when Grace and the police narrowly miss Emil in a series of corridors, shown from two angles, as he escapes with the murder weapon and the bloody rags. Even at this early stage of his career, De Palma showed himself to be a master at this kind of thing.

Actually, the use of the split screen technique in this movie is very apt to push the concept of “doubling” and schizophrenia here and De Palma makes full use of this throughout. For instance, in one shot during this sequence, Danielle is looking at herself in a bathroom cabinet mirror on the left hand half of the screen... but the cabinet is made up of two doors and there is a split right down the centre of her face, which is a big visual clue thrown in the face of the audience about what is really going on here... the two characters inhabiting the mind of one body. Also, this means you basically have a split screen (the double doors) within a split screen, which is also visually interesting... this is all good stuff.

The other notable thing about the first murder sequence and, indeed, the whole movie, is Bernard Herrmanns absolute powerhouse scoring. The stab scene has already been visually pre-empted when Philip is getting the writing on the cake iced in a bakery and the angle at which the hands doing the icing makes it look very much like a knife stabbing downwards, as the lady behind the counter oozes the pinky red icing onto the white surface. It’s a phenomenal shot and Herrmann scores this with a child like motif which is reused in the immediate prelude to Margot Kidders stab-frenzy freak out, just before Herrmann segues into full on, in yer face, stab music mixed with weird moog synthesiser sounds, rivalling his earlier, more famous stab music for Hitchcock’s Psycho. I remember musicologist Royal S. Brown noting in an interview once, on a documentary about Herrmann, that the child like melody of the cake theme is replaced with an antagonistic childrens game melody “Nyah nyah nah, nyah nyah!” and this becomes very clear when you think about it. And, of course, this links in perfectly with the tone of the naive and child-like Danielle as compared to the aggressive mindset of the Dominique half of her brain.

There’s a lot going on in this movie and there are some great scenes which all involve the fact that Dominique and Danielle were siamese twins... until something happened and they had to be separated. There’s a very potentially confusing flashback scene which echoes the history of Margot Kidder’s role but it also doubles as a dream sequence for the Grace Collier character, who projects herself into the sequence by being Dominique in the shots. This is because Collier’s mind has, by this point, been rendered easy to manipulate and also provides De Palma with a great sequence, as well as a good conclusion for the camera in that she carries a certain memento of her experiences locked in her brain once the film is concluded. After the flashback/dream sequence plays out, we are then treated to a scene where Emil explains verbally the real history of the characters, in case there’s any confusion with the fact that Daniellle was indeed becoming Dominique at certain parts of the movie. This helps things considerably if you are still wondering how she can’t be two people and how she changed from one set of clothes from another and back again without changing her original “laying on the floor” position during the transition. I’m wondering if Emil’s explanation was either added on after the preview (or at studio insistence) or, maybe if the script originally concluded differently from the version presented in the final cut.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter. The film kind of has three end scenes which give closure and conclusion to Emil, Danielle and Dominique but which also leaves things quite potently inconclusive in terms of both Grace Collier and the private detective she hired, who has “followed the sofa” in which Philip’s body has been stashed. It’s one of De Palma’s better endings, I feel, and Herrmann’s music is a considerable aid to getting the sinister sense of things “not quite at rest” across to the audience by this point.

There’s another story I remember about Herrmann’s score for this film, again from a documentary of some kind, or possibly a biography, and it revolves around his amazing Main Title cue, which is a variation of the stab music which later surfaces in the movie. I think I recall hearing that De Palma had originally asked for a quieter prelude rather than the blood and thunder that Herrmann delivered here. Herrmann said to him something along the lines of... “Hitchcock can get away with nothing really happening in the first half an hour or so because the audience knows something terrible is going to happen. You are not yet as famous as Hitchcock, so they need to know something terrible is going to happen from the opening title music.” That’s not the exact words, I couldn’t find it on the internet... but that’s the gist of it and, for that particular stage of De Palma’s career... I reckon Herrmann was right. The opening titles/stab music in Sisters is one of the most blistering score cues in the history of film music. It’s kinda funny because I use it for the ring tone on my iPhone and my dog always barks when he hears a phone ringing... the upshot of that in terms of watching this excellent new blu-ray version from Arrow was that, every time someone gets stabbed in Sisters, my dog barks at me. Oh well.

There was apparently a remake of this film a few years ago but I can’t bring myself to watch a retread of something which holds such a high place of esteem in my celluloid loving heart. The original Sisters is an absolutely classic example of one of the best American thrillers, before the hack and slash craze had quite got going in the US and, certainly, far more superior to some of the slashers that came after it. If you like this period in American cinema history and you want to see a really entertaining movie with some smart camerawork and some really excellent music, then you probably should add this new dual blu-ray/dvd edition from Arrow to your list. I haven’t watched any of the extras yet but, like the Criterion edition before it, it looks like it’s got some nice stuff on there and it’s not all just recycled from the Criterion DVD, from what I could tell. Definitely have a stab at this one, if you have the inclination.

The BFI/Sight And Sound 100

Great Expectations

The BFI/Sight And Sound 100

A few weeks back, when the British Film Institute’s Sight And Sound magazine made public the results of it’s “once every ten years” poll of, and I quote, “The Greatest Films Of All Time”, there was a much greater backlash from people about the choices that were on the list than I remember ever hearing about before in my spell of being a regular, yearly subscriber. My understanding was that the “en masse”  link clicking to the site after the list was officially “released” caused a lot of trouble for the BFI servers and, kind of, broke them for a while (something I read at Ain’t It Cool News before I’d even tried the clickety-link myself). This was followed, from what I saw of the celluloid battlefield that took place digitally on the internet during the aftermath, was a fairly large, almost collective condemnation of the list by a great number of people. Maybe it’s just the crazy kinds of people I follow. ;-)

I first started subscribing to Sight & Sound magazine around about 23 years ago, so I’ve now seen three of these polls published in fresh issues of the magazine over the years... but there’s never been the technology in place to reach these levels of audience figures before. There could, in fact, be various reasons for this “en masse” criticism of this decades list, but I suspect the biggest problem this year is that the reporting and subsequent reaction to this has been so much more easier and all encompassing than it has for previous lists (not that many would see that as a problem, of course). You have the reactions to the list hitting you from all the social media sites and blogs on the internet, which is one factor in the incredible “buzz” on this year’s poll... but there’s also the fact that the list itself was now freely available to anyone with a web connection... and not just confined to us poor, traditional souls who dutifully renew our yearly subscription charges or buy the magazine over-the-counter.

What this meant was that, for a couple of weeks, the internet became full of people running to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress and Blogger to air their opinions and generally make the most silliest comments about the list they could think of which ranged from complaints as to why their favourite films weren’t on the list, accusatory questions as to why the “bunch of academics” who had contributed to the list were watching such “old timey” films like Vertigo and Citizen Kane rather than “newer stuff” and, for me the capper, why isn’t Roger Corman’s Deathrace 2000 (reviewed here) at the number one spot. I promise you I’m not making that one up... I saw someone tweeting it.

So I thought I’d like to take a stab at defending the 2012 BFI/Sight & Sound List from some of the sillier criticisms and maybe get people to think a little bit about why some of those same films are up there on these lists, decade after decade. Also, I’d like to take the opportunity to air my own little criticism of the list because, although I prefer Vertigo as a movie over Citizen Kane (although I’d happily be watching either), it throws up the question of when and why does a personal favourite film suddenly become, in one person’s eyes, a “great” movie. I love Vertigo to bits but there’s no way, I feel, that it should be placed above Citizen Kane. More on that later, though.

If I hate one thing about late 20th and early 21st Century magazine and blog writing it’s the popularisation of the “list article”. When people first started doing them they used to be quaint and addictive and people could have fun with them... but then everyone and their dog started doing them. The downside on these kinds of articles is that they’re damned easy to write and they’ve become, for the most part, just a lazy summation of personal opinion in an easy to swallow format. I even did one myself on here once (see here) and I can’t deny the popularity of these articles and their power to garner more readers (as the BFI web server found out too late, I fear... although I’m sure they’ll benefit greatly from the popularity). It probably won’t be the last one I do because I, too, want readers, just like the next blog waiting in line, but I try not to make a habit of concocting them like some websites seem to do. Lists are pretty impossible to compile honestly anyway... and the fact that they’re based solely on the subjectivity of the writer (in the case of non-voted lists) means that not many people are going to agree with it 100%... which is often the point when a thoughtful list comes to light, to provoke discussion.

Sometime in either the late seventies or early eighties, in my early teens, I decided to do a top 20 favourite films list and I think this demonstrates the intransigent and changeable nature of these kinds of dubious attractions. As I started writing down a list of all my special favourite movies I couldn’t live without, it started growing extremely long. After an hour or so I realised I’d written down over 700 “absolute favourite” films and was still going strong. I gave up on it there and then as a waste of my time and never looked back when it came to making lists... even the list of my top 30 favourite movies on the right hand side of this column and down a bit was questionable as soon as it went live. How could I, I thought to myself, write down all those movies in my top 30 without even putting one of my all time favourites, It’s A Wonderful Life, somewhere on there?

This incident from my formative years serves to demonstrate two things when it comes to compiling lists. One is that a person can keep going on for pages and pages, whittling down to a number of favourites that are always going to be too long a list for people to comfortably look at and consider anyway. Secondly, of course, since this list I made as a kid was a snapshot of my mind at the time, it’s unlikely that all the same titles would come up again... especially with all the fantastic toot that’s being released on DVD and other home video formats since I first tried to compile one. It’s a changing landscape and so not much use to anyone as more than a quick summary of someone’s mind at the time of writing.

Of course, the regular one-poll-per-decade approach adopted by Sight & Sound for its lists means that the editors are, at least, acknowledging the constantly shifting tide which represents the celluloid battlefield, as the tastes and range of the nearly 1000 critics who got their personal top tens to the magazine before their deadline (846 critics, this year, to be precise) is changed by constant exposure to new (to them) celluloid masterpieces. It also, one would hope, means it’s forcing those same critics to distinguish as to what they think a great film is, as opposed to their favourite on-screen entertainments. I think that this is a very important distinction to make and, in my opinion, a critic should not base a review they write solely on whether they like a film or not, but rather on the various technical skills and criteria met or exceeded by a film too. This should help bring a certain amount of balance and credibility to a review and will hopefully instill enough trust in a reader to use the review in the best possible way... whatever that use may be to a specific reader. I personally, for instance, sometimes recommend films on this blog to readers which I didn’t personally enjoy. However, I make it clear if I don’t like a film and try my best to convey, when I am having a good day and am skilled enough to do so, the difference between my gut-reaction to a film and the technical merits of it. Just because I didn’t like, doesn’t mean to say it isn’t worth watching.

So lets have a look at a couple of the backlash complaints I’ve seen about the list and figure out if they have a valid point or not.

Why aren’t “my” favourite films on the list?
Well, to be fair, you weren’t asked to supply a list were you? Well yeah, alright, some of you reading this might have been but ultimately, just because your “personal” favourites aren’t on there... it doesn’t in any way invalidate the films that made it to the top 100. This list wasn’t compiled by voting from a selection of nominations, don’t forget. That would then give you all the problems of a person or a team of people limiting you to a specific selection of movies that they think are worthy. It’s just not the case here, thankfully (or I wouldn’t even be giving this list the time of day, quite frankly). What you have here is various critics (and also directors) sending in their lists and the frequency of films appearing repeatedly generating a score for that film... at least that’s my understanding of it.


Why are all these old-timey films like Citizen Kane and Vertigo on the list?
Seriously? Old timey? The art form of the motion picture has only been  around for a little over 100 years. Some of you might reach that age before dying if you’re lucky (or unfortunate, depending on your view). Criticising the age of a movie is stupid on all kinds of levels, not to mention the fact that the age of a film doesn’t in any way play a factor in the quality of the final product. Unless, perhaps, you just like themes and trends which are fashionable to you right now on the silver screen, and damn anything you’re not personally in tune with. Is that it? Well... if that’s the case then I do feel sorry for you but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it because you’re obviously not really into the art of film. Go eat your popcorn.

As far as the people polled for this survey go... nobody has told all these people to put films like Citizen Kane and Vertigo on their list. They love these movies, and rightly so (because they’re damned good movies), but they also (one hopes) admire them on a technical level and feel inspired by them to the point where they believe this makes them among the greatest movies out there. And these people all come from different walks of life here... it’s not like they’re all in the same club or something. People respond to art in a very personal manner (on some levels) and these kinds of movies, the ones that have made it into the poll, are well loved and well watched pinnacles of motion picture history. So the obvious question I’d have to ask any of the people making these kinds of criticisms here are... “Have you actually seen these movies? If not, try watching one before complaining. You’re in for a treat.”

Okay... so now that’s off my chest, I’d like to just like to say something about Citizen Kane, since people seem to be so incredulous and non-understanding as to why it would even be on the list in the first place, let alone dominating the top spot for all but two of those “once a decade polls” (the first poll and the most recent one where Vertigo broke its winning streak and knocked it off the top spot). Citizen Kane is a great film. It might not entertain a certain segment of the population but, even if it doesn’t, it still has to be acknowledged as a great film. The reason for this is that there is so much “hidden ingenuity” to be found lying just beneath the surface, that one can’t help but applaud the technical brilliance of just what is going on here.

For example, there are shots in this where the camera goes places where a camera just couldn’t go... especially when this movie was made. Parts of a set or model were designed to break away once the camera eye had passed them so the operator could keep going past a place where the “real world” would not let him go.

Or, as another example, what about that shot where Welles is sitting in the office typing and in the background, opposite Welles and watching from afar, is Joseph Cotton... and both are in sharp focus. Oh sure. A great example of a deep focus lens being used to keep everything nice and crisp right? Wrong! A deep focus lens wouldn’t be able to handle that shot... at least not then it couldn’t. So what did they do... yeah, they ran a matte split mask and spliced two shots together so it looks like one shot. And the majority of viewers, myself included, wouldn’t even notice it was two seperate bits of footage spliced together. Good grief people! They were inventing stuff just to get the shots in the way they wanted them. And when they weren’t inventing them...

 Well... I’m not saying that every single dash of brilliance in this film was an original, technical innovation. There were some, but a lot of this stuff goes back to the days when D. W. Griffith was inventing (some say stealing) the DNA of cinematic syntax. The visual shorthand which everyone almost immediately picks up from their earliest days of watching films and which is forever branded into the braincells as the absolutely most instinctive way of decoding the moving visual image. You know what I’m talking about... stuff like two people individually framed, saying a line and then cutting to the other saying their line as a visual shorthand for two people having a conversation. It grew very quickly from there in terms of innovative and subtle manipulations of the human brain and a lot of it is to be found all in one place by 1941... and that place is Citizen Kane.

Every technique in the book, it seems like, was used for Citizen Kane and the movie is a summation, a showcase if you will, for all the brilliant ways of depicting a story through film that had ever been seen up until this point. And that’s why it’s so brilliant... it’s a text book of delights from which people can take inspiration and learn. It deserves every accolade it gets.

Which is why I’m kinda upset myself that Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) didn’t also make it into the top 100... preferably the top ten. Because, like Citizen Kane before it, Amelie also showcases the absolute state-of-the-art of the technical possibilities of its time and I would have thought that for this reason, it would have rated a bit higher in the general critical consciousness (if there is such a thing). Also, like Welles esteemed treasure, Amelie has some very innovative ideas in it which I’m not aware of being done before this film. One of them involves the way sound is used in two sequences a different points of the film which relies on the viewers subconscious memory of the audio sections of one point to make a hidden connection. And the other involves a visual echo of something which isn’t really happening. I don’t want to go into too much detail as I want to review the film on this blog someday, but I will point out that these innovations probably wouldn’t even be noticed by 95% of an audience who are there to be engrossed in a movie. They don’t deliberately draw attention to themselves in any way and are used purely as a way of moving the narrative forward... this is a brilliant way to use film. And, of course, there’s other more standard stuff going on with the CGI effects, of which there are a surprising amount in Amelie... not that many people realise it though. Things such as lamps being added and changed a different colour to balance the tone of a different, dominant colour in the scene. Object and props which could easily have been real, found items for a set but which were added in post production. Stuff like this shows a true mastery of the form and I think Amelie should be somewhere on that list... but that’s just me griping now. Although I’d like to think I’ve backed up my reasons somewhat.

And what of Vertigo? Well, as I said, I love it. It’s my favourite Hitchcock and, yes, it does have some great innovations in it. Like that kiss in Kim Novak’s hotel apartment near the end where they had to build a split set and put the camera on a turntable with the actors so the scene could completely change behind them as they kiss to a completely different environment and return through a full 360 degree pan. Or, of course, the famous shot in Jaws of Brody on the beach where the camera is pulled back from his face while simultaneously zooming in on it at the same speed the camera is being pulled back. That was invented for those wonderful, downward looking shots in the bell tower during the two climbs in Vertigo... actually done with a model set too, no less. So you would never had got that shot in films ike Jaws (and dozens of other movies) if Vertigo hadn’t done it first... I suspect.

So yeah, Vertigo should be on there but, should it be at number one? Well I could watch it all week (something I couldn’t do for Citizen Kane I suspect) but I have to admit that Welles opus is a much greater showcase of innovation and art than Hitchcock’s greatest masterpiece... although, as I said earlier... personally I prefer Vertigo, so I can’t be too upset that it’s now number one.

All in all, it’s not a bad list they’ve come up with. I look forward to the next one in the hopes that NIghts Of Cabiria will find a place above the Fellini movies that already appear on it. And it’s good to see, also, that 6 of those movies on the list were all scored by the same composer... my favourite composer, the remarkable Bernard Herrmann. Not only that but the top two films, Vertigo and Citizen Kane were both scored by him... so that’s something to shout out about. But the list also reflects his achievements at both ends of his career. Citizen Kane was the first actual film he scored... he was the regular composer for Welles’ Mercury Theatre radio show (including the mentioned conductor on the notorious War Of The Worlds transmission) and Welles brought him with him to Hollywoodland to work on the film with him. Similarly, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which is also in the list, was Herrmann’s last score. He died within hours of the final, extended recording session on the approach to Christmas 1975.

I’m grateful that Bernard Herrmann has been, quite serendipitously, honoured in this way. It makes the list something very special for me as a die hard Herrmann listener. This is a good list, the 2012 BFI/Sight & Sound List and, to paraphrase one Mr. Travis Bickle from the 32nd spot... “those were good choices.”

The BFI Sight & Sound Poll can be read here. 

Saul Bass A Life In Film and Design

Saul In The Mind

Saul Bass A Life In Film and Design

Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham

Laurence King Publishing. 

ISBN: 1856697525

Okay... this is another one of those articles which I’ve been putting off for a while because I am just in awe of the subject of the review.

Saul Bass is one of my heroes.

He’s right up there, for me, with Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, Philip K. Dick, Lester Dent, Kate Bush, Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith. 

And once, a long time ago in the troubled decade known mostly as “the 1980s”, I saw him give a two or three hour live show... and it was amazing.

I’d known his work before that of course. Everybody has come into contact, whether they know it or not, with some of his famous graphic design campaigns or logos. I personally knew I loved the title sequences he designed for Hitchcock’s Psycho and North By Northwest... so when I won one of only two free tickets from my College to go to a live lecture at the ICOGRADA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) show in London one morning, I was really curious as to why it was taking place in the ODEON cinema in Leicester Square and then, when I found out it was Saul Bass talking about his career (along with various breaks for projected footage of his works), I was over the moon.

I’d already seen, at that point, his one commercially released feature film, the sinister and unnerving Phase IV (reviewed here) and so I knew I was going to be in for one of the best experiences of my life. I wasn’t wrong. I discovered then, as the lecture commenced, a whole heap of the logos, symbols and design campaigns that Saul Bass had worked on. 

The famous distillation of the Bell Telephone symbol... a blue bell in a little circle? That was Bass. 

That block colour version of the Quaker Oats guy that tagged their cereals and products for goodness knows how many decades? That was Bass.

That brilliant rendition of the old Warner Brothers logo that stripped the W right back to three, diagonally set curved stripes within a block lozenge shape? You remember that one, right? Pure Bass!

The famous airline liveries, the food lines, the company letterheads and product ranges. He very modestly and hurriedly skipped through it all at a rate of knotts during his lecture and, most endearingly, the guy was funny. He really knew how to entertain an audience. Seriously, he had me and the rest of the packed out cinema (and it was a big cinema back then, before it became a multiplex, I believe) laughing out loud at some of his brilliant stories.

And of course, there were the title sequences he’d designed for movies, some of which he projected for us (I loved his little story about how they couldn’t get the cats to fight over the titles of Walk On The Wild Side and so ended up doing everything through the juxtaposition of the edited shots)and the sequences in movies that he’d directed instead of the actual director, like the shower scene from Psycho and the racing sequences from Grand Prix (another great anecdote he told there about how panicked and unprepared he felt on his first day of shooting and the way he distracted the cast and crew to give him time to prepare was just so great to hear). Plus he showed us some of his much lauded documentary/information films... Why Man Creates. 

It was a truly entertaining session and, as importantly, it was an inspiration to me as a graphic designer to continue to imagine and create and think my way around to solutions in the most appropriate, but not always the most obvious, manner. Of course, all that inspiration was beaten out of me not very long after I started actually working as a graphic designer but, hey, at least I was aspiring to be like my hero, even if my work was destined to be whittled down to nothing by a “design-by-committee” attitude towards the job.

It’s always been a bit hard to come by any books on the work of Saul Bass. When I was in my next College, working on my degree, they had the one book on him that it was possible to get... I think the only book ever published on him which included his flat design work before now. It was a thin, soft back volume with some good samples of his work and it was called Saul Bass And Associates. However, it may have been the only book on him but it was written and printed in Japanese so... apart from the gorgeous samples there wasn’t much help on any biographical information at the time (I’ve never been good at languages).

Then, in 2004 at the Design Museum in London, they had what was supposed to be a major retrospective of Saul Bass’ work. To be honest, it wasn’t all that. I don’t think anyone could call it in any way an extensive collection of his work and I remember feeling a teensy bit disappointed by it.  "Less" definitely wasn’t "more" in this case but, there were some nice pieces on display there, including some rather wonderful film promo letterheads that I’d not seen before. 

An extra kick in the teeth, though, was that there was hardly anything “Bass” in the museum shop at all. Practically nothing in fact (not even a catalogue if I remember correctly). Of course, there were no books available on the designer in the shop (not even the chance to purchase that old Japanese edition to call my own) but there was... a strange thing. A promise of a book. 

There was a flyer promoting a massive book project of Saul’s work which was going to come in at something like a three figured retail price. The object of the flyer was to get people to send off a deposit on the price of the book so the production could be completed more quickly. I didn’t send my money in but I was licking my chops at the prospect of saving my money up for a book on “the master” for the estimated publication date in 2005. 

Needless to say the book never, to my knowledge, materialised.

Now I don’t know if this book, Saul Bass: A Life In Film and Design, started off as that other intended publication, but what I do know is this... it’s the only book to date which covers Bass in any great detail and it’s a labour of love for the writers and designers on the project, one of whom is his daughter Jennifer. 

It’s not just the “only real book” on the market celebrating Bass though... it’s also a great book. 

Really great. 

Absolutely filled to the brim with facts and many, many anecdotes (some of them just as I remember from Saul’s own mouth when I heard him tell them at the ICOGRADA all those decades ago). You get a real sense of the man and his work from those who knew and loved him and also, of course, absolutely gazillions of examples of his beautiful work, attractively reproduced in full colour.

The presented work is really useful too because, although it doesn’t go out of its way to highlight all the instances, you can work out where he re-used bits of old projects and reworked them for other jobs. Probably not consciously, is my guess, since he always approached his work with nothing but dedication and never short changed anyone. However, you can see the influences if you flick forward and back from the vast mountains of his output represented in this book. The way an old logo or letterhead, for example, may turn up as a similar element for his animated titles to It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or some such, is always interesting to see. Perhaps it’s simply the recognition of a stylistic continuity in his work over the years. Even so, it’s very interesting.

Another great thing about this book is that it doesn’t fail to make known the tremendous importance and design input of his wife, Elaine. Even before they started getting billing as Saul & Elaine Bass, they were a very tight collaborative team and this book makes no bones about the strength of her creative input into Saul’s work. This is something that’s quite important as they were pretty much a team for many decades and it’s another reason why this book is worth its considerable weight in a shiny, metallic substance.

Another thing it brings to light is, un-equivocally the last word about that in/famous shower scene in Psycho. Saul designed and directed it. Sure Hitchcock was on the set but my understanding is that he wasn’t doing too much directing at the time. I was all down to Mr. Bass when it came to it (my understanding is that Hitchcock was generally disappointed in Psycho and was going to cut it down to less than an hour in length for his TV show until he heard Bernard Herrmann’s influential score... suddenly Hitchcock’s publicity brain leapt into action).

Stuff like this definitively revealed is exactly what every fan of this amazing graphic designer’s work want’s to read and there were a few revelations on the directing front which are real jaw droppers. There’s also some very interesting stories about how he dealt with certain clients and dug his heels in on some issues. I wish his techniques would work for me where I do my job.

And there’s probably not too much more I can say about this book, I guess. It’s both a truly excellent read and a beautiful book to own and leave lying around so people can discover this talented designer for themselves. If you’re already a fan of his work, be it his flat art, his title sequences or his direction, you will not want to miss out on reading what is, to date, the most definitive and thorough, if not the only, real book on Bass. A truly epic tome you’ll want to pour through again and again... take a walk on the wild side and give it a go.