Targets

Screen Hole
Screenplay

Targets
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
USA 1968
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Minor spoilers.

I’ve been wanting to catch up to Targets for a great many years and then, bizarrely, two turn up on Blu Ray in the same year. I’ve plumped for the one put out by the British Film Institute (which a friend gave to me for Christmas) over the Criterion edition because I understand it’s a slightly better version than its US counterpart.

Targets is the great director Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature, which he wrote with his then wife Polly Platt and also, uncredited, the late, great Sam Fuller. Bogdanovich was very much a protege of the ‘Roger Corman school of film-making’ and Corman let him make this one if he included 20 minutes of footage of Karloff from his own film, The Terror, 20 minutes of new Karloff footage and the rest of new non-Karloff footage. Karloff, riddled by ill health but working quite a bit at the end of his career, only had one more year to live himself, but he liked the script for this so much that he did three extra days unpaid, which allowed for him to be in the film's finale too (he was originally going to be killed off half way through the story). It’s often cited by many, not least by Karloff, as his last film but he did make another five before he died (although some of the Mexican ones that he did were not released until 1971).

You can see why Karloff liked this one. Not only is it a well written piece that has an atmosphere probably unlike a lot of what was being produced back in 1969, but he also gets to play a role somewhat similar to himself (although not in attitude, as Karloff loved making movies and was never out of work). He plays a version of himself here, though, Byron Orlok, who is very much a down on his heels, ageing horror icon who has had enough of the movies he’s been making (such as The Terror) and, after the film’s opening where he’s watching it in the screening room with the director (an extended role for Bogdanovich himself, who does really great as an actor in this, it has to be said), he announces his retirement and, indeed, a lot of the film concerns people trying to get him to not do that. He eventually gets persuaded into going to give a talk (where he’ll announce his retirement) at the drive-in premiere of the film on the following night.

Meanwhile, Tim O'Kelly plays a perfectly normal looking guy but... he’s a gun nutter. The old ‘right to bear arms’ rubbish which is still, unbelievably, in the American constitution enables this person to suddenly go off the deep end, in his own muffled way... he kills his wife, his mother and then goes on a killing spree. Ending up at the drive-in screening at which Orlock is going to talk to the crowd, picking off people in their cars by shooting through a hole in the screen. The two strands of the film slightly overlap at the start, where this character has Orlock in his sights when he is testing out a rifle he buys in a gun shop across the road from the film company... but the two strands go their separate ways, cross cutting until they come together at the end in a really wonderful scene where Karloff confronts the gunman near the end of the picture. I have to say, the ending didn’t go at all like I expected it to and... wow.

It’s a great film and a wonderful debut from the legendary director. Because of various similar shooting instances and massacres, not to mention assassinations, around the time of the film’s release, Paramount only released eight prints out into the wild and so it did very little box office at the time. All I can say is, I’m glad it’s being properly re-evaluated now because, well I’m a bit hit and miss with Bogdanovich myself but this one is definitely a solid hit for me.

I loved the slow pacing and the ‘unnecessary to the story’ details and footage, really reminding the audience nowadays of the sheer artistry of the American films back then, before directors in the US became obsessive about making every shot count towards a story beat. I also loved the muted colour palette in some scenes, juxtaposed to other settings of brighter tones when the two stories rub up against one another. For instance, a shot inside the sniper’s muted urban house with his family is suddenly cut against Karloff and his PA (played by the lovely Nancy Hsueh) in a restaurant where all the walls are brightly lit on jarring green and yellow, vertical stripes. The sound design is great too, doing that thing of dialling back or bleeding out and in when needed to highlight certain things, almost an expressionistic approach to the audio element.

Also, the film has no score, the only music being diegetic and the only actual ‘film score’ being heard in the sequences where The Terror is being screened... which is great because, in the fraught and suspenseful final act, when Karloff goes to confront O’Kelly, the score of that movie emphasises the on screen action of Targets nicely. A beautiful juxtaposition where the diegetic source stands in for the non-diegetic element which is missing.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Targets other than, Karloff is absolutely sensational in this and it’s no wonder that, in a memorable monologue half way through the film, which he did in one take, the cast and crew started applauding him as soon as the director called “cut”. This is a film I will definitely be coming back to and the new BFI release has plenty of good looking extras for me to explore when I do. A sensational picture, not to be missed.

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story

Hedy’s Hoppers

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story
USA 2017
Directed by Alexandra Dean

Just a brief note of a review to give some praise to this film, which had a short theatrical release last year in the UK. Written and directed by Alexandra Dean, Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is a kind of love letter of a documentary to the once famous Hollywood star and is a culmination, it seems to me, of various people trying to redress the balance of a life once lived where a person's beauty and public personae was a blindfold to the true genius of the individual in question. It also reveals how the US government, it seems, cheated that star out of both reward and recognition for something which was secretly put to good use and which, when one looks at the benefits of just one of her achievements, has been a boon to mankind since the lady in question first put her mind to it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little.

This documentary starts at her beginning, shortly after Hedy’s birth as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 and highlights the things which helped shape her personality... such as her inventiveness being due to her admiration for her father, who meant a great deal to her. Also, it mentions her experimentation with the effects of her beauty on people and her frequent visits to a local photographer to take various shots of her... many of them ‘arty’ in nature (and by arty, perhaps I also mean revealing). Then the determined pitch to be in movies in her own country which, of course, built up to her infamous nudity and orgasm scenes in Ekstase (1933).

The film also documents her various marriages including her first, to a prince, which was so stifling that she eventually slipped a sleeping draft into one of the maid’s drinks, swiped her clothes and rode off into the night on her bike to avoid discovery as she exited that marriage and then tried to get into motion pictures... at first turning down Louis B. Mayer of MGM’s offer before then hopping onto his ship going back to Hollywood (along with a load of cheaply signed starlets going with him) and ensuring she got herself noticed enough by him that she could almost name any deal she wanted. The film also documents her decline in later years, as the hardworking Hollywood ethos of drugs to keep you awake and then make you sleep, such as what was being done to many of the workers to keep them going (famously, even child actors like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney), took their toll on her personality and her status as a single mother in the 1940s. Not an easy life to live.

And, of course, the film also makes much of her brilliant invention, co-created with composer George Antheil, where she came up with the idea of frequency hopping to stabilise the course of guided torpedos and stop them from being jammed. The military turned the patent down but evidence has since come to light that they were using these ideas on their stuff all the time and, when it was later followed up to get the patent back from the Navy, the word came through that it belonged to them and they could do what they liked with it because, technically, Lamarr was an ‘alien’. This shocking attitude towards somebody who was, by this point, a lady and patriot of America. Someone who had sold unbelievable millions of dollars in war bonds for the American government due to her appearances (something which a lot of movie stars were doing at the time).

The film is presented to us by various people giving commentaries... a few of them famous movie personalities themselves such as Diane Kruger and Mel Brooks. However, the majority of the interview clips are from relations of the lady, such as her son who the film focuses on quite a bit and, surprisingly for a film of this type, from the lady herself as a reporter, who is also in the film a lot, has unearthed a lost, taped interview he conducted with Hedy many decades before and which is used as a complement to the voice-over narrative on the film. So you do hear a lot of her, ‘in her own words’, so to speak, looking back over her life.

The film is pretty interesting and just about varied enough in its execution and enthusiasm not to get dull and to hold the interest throughout. Much is obviously made of her unique invention of ‘frequency hopping’, which is used as the basis for mobile phone technology, bluetooth, satellite navigation etc and all that stuff is really interesting. All that being said, though, we don’t get to hear about many of her other inventions throughout the documentary and I really wanted to know more... although I think the cooling cube which she thought of as a failure due to information she was unaware of about the difference in water between various states, was a pretty cool idea. I mean, she was so often coming up with stuff that her friend Howard Hughes set her up with a miniature version of his own laboratory when she thought up the concept of swept back wings to help make his planes go faster, after doing a bit of research on fish and birds (which is deftly illustrated in this film)... so it would be really nice to see what else she was dreaming up.

Jeremy Bullock and Keegan DeWitt’s score is a little like the music of Philip Glass in its approach and that’s not a bad thing... but everybody seems to be trying to sound like Glass or sometimes Nyman in their documentary movies these days and it seems a shame that this is the only kind of score we are getting for these kinds of things at the moment. That being said, you can’t fault it and I would have quickly plonked down the money for a CD of this thing, had one been available.

Well, I said this was a short review and I wasn’t lying. Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is extremely entertaining and informative, at least to the point where it whets your appetite and makes you want to go and read one of the books currently available about the lady. On the surface it would seem that this is not the most likely subject for a documentary movie but, once you step back and think about the import of Ms. Lamarr’s contribution and her legacy to the world we live in, it does make you stop and think how long it would have taken for somebody else to come up with the idea. Definitely worth a watch as this lady’s story deserves to be better known. 

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.