Look Who's Looking

So you think getting separated from your conjoined twin will solve all your problems. It's just the beginning for Danielle in Brian De Palma's 1972 film Sisters. As is so often the case with De Palma's early films, it's soaked with Hitchcock references. In this case, he puts Hitchcock plot points, compositions, and music into a blender and sees what sticks. Critics have then straightened it all out into a statement on voyeurism and women. But I mainly got the feeling as I was watching that De Palma was following a path dictated by whim. Which wasn't a bad idea.

My two favourite things about the movie are Margot Kidder and Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann's score is just lovely. Of course.

Kidder plays Danielle, a French Canadian model who used to be joined at the hip (literally) to her sister. She puts on the most adorable French accent. My ear can't judge its accuracy but it's so cute.

We're introduced to her as the star of a candid camera show in which she pretends to be a blind woman who starts undressing in front of Phillip (Lisle Wilson), who doesn't know he's being filmed. This short segment presents us with a hall of mirrors of voyeurism already. We don't know at first we're watching Danielle consentually undressing for an audience. We don't know that Phillip's voyeurism is exposed to an audience he hadn't yet consented to.

After the show, Phillip and Danielle go out on a date, their pretext for beginning a relationship on nice, subtly perverted ground.

The film becomes about a murder and, as in Psycho, we switch protagonists to a new character, Grace (Jennifer Salt). She's a reporter whom the cops dislike and don't believe when she says she saw a murder across the street. We have voyeurism, points of view, and the debatable validity of perspective.

The last act of the film isn't as interesting but still good. I do wish De Palma had managed to stay with Danielle more, I enjoyed observing her.

Sisters is available on The Criterion Channel.

What Mind Breaks Away

Just how split can a personality really be? 1945's Hangover Square is a film noir about a man in a Jekyll and Hyde dilemma. Most of the time he's a respectable, prominent composer but sometimes he's a serial strangler, though he retains no memories of his crimes. This is an exceptionally good example of the fine point to which noir sharpened questions of free will and fate.

Laird Cregar plays George Harvey Bone, an excellent name for a noir protagonist and Cregar is perfectly cast. An enormous man with big facial features, he usually played villains. Here he was finally able to tackle something more morally complicated. His threatening physical presence adds weight (pardon the pun) to questions about his innocence. It was his final role before his death from a heart attack at just 31 years old.

We meet him staggering home after one of his lapses of memory during which we see him murdering a shop owner. He goes home to his fiancee, Barbara (Faye Marlowe), who knows about his memory lapses and commiserates with him, eager to help him solve the problem. She's beautiful and rich, too. Packaged with her extraordinary depth of sympathy, there's no reason in world Bone would take interest in another woman. And yet . . .

An exquisitely sleazy Linda Darnell walks into his life playing a small time musical hall singer called Netta. She sees Bone as her chance for the big time and starts buttering him up. George doesn't seem to have the will to resist her. He starts blowing off Barbara so he can spend time being played for a chump by Netta.

But he doesn't just blow Barbara off. When he tells Barbara he can't go with her to see a performance by the philharmonic, he goes to Netta and asks her if she'd go with him to that same philharmonic performance. He knows Barbara will be there with her father. Why would he set himself up this way? We don't find out because Netta blows him off.

All through this he behaves with an air of perfect sincerity, like he really believes he's an innocent man with blameless intentions. Which isn't so different from Dr. Jekyll, really. Anyone reading Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is likely to notice that Jekyll isn't the good man, he's the restrained man.

But Hangover Square takes another interesting turn when it really becomes about Bone's passion as a composer. This is especially effective because the film has an especially effective score from Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann composed the concerto that Bone finds himself obsessively needing to perform in the film's climax.

This is a really good choice because the music is a lot more interesting than Barbara. Instead of Bone being torn between a desire for Netta and Barbara, he's really torn between his muse and his lust. For those of us who know real artistic achievement requires discipline as well as passion, this is a pretty good story.

George Sanders has a small role as a Scotland Yard psychiatrist trying to help Bone and he's really good, turning what might have been a pretty dry "expert" role into something more interesting. And there's a really good use of Guy Fawkes Day as Bone encounters some kids in hodgepodge masks that are nothing like the uniform V for Vendetta masks most of the world knows to-day.

Of course the visual is another small piece of the film's rumination on persona and the amount of responsibility Bone has for his actions. Joseph LaShelle works up some marvellously gloomy, ghoulish cinematography, too. This is a great one.

Hangover Square is available on The Criterion Channel.

Too Much Gold

One thing Westerns tend to have that other genres usually don't are scenes of characters ruminating in the wilderness, seemingly shooting the breeze with topics not directly related to the plot but which can have fascinating thematic resonance. In 1954's Garden of Evil, two of the male characters spend so much time pontificating about their one female travelling companion it inevitably reveals more about them than it does about her. Sometimes the dialogue just feels odd and overwrought and I'm not sure some of the strange results were intended. But Henry Hathaway directs some wonderful vistas in Cinemascope and every line seems more significant when delivered the film's three great stars; Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward, and Richard Widmark.

Cooper and Widmark play a couple of would-be prospectors named Hooker and Fiske. They end up stranded in a small Mexican town in a bar where a gorgeous young Rita Moreno is serenading the patrons.

Then Susan Hayward walks in as Leah Fuller, offering two thousand dollars for any man who'll come help her rescue her husband who's trapped in a collapsed mine shaft. Her husband's played by Hugh Marlowe in one of his many roles as the reasonably credible rival to the main male love interest, as he does in Night and the City and Way of a Gaucho. But there's some ambiguity in this film as to just who the main male love interest is.

Hooker and Fiske are both immediately suspicious of the high price Leah is willing the pay but she won't explain, saying something about how no price is too high for a human life. Finally the two men agree to accompany her along with two other men--Luke (Cameron Mitchell) and Vicente (Victor Manuel Mendoza). Kudos to the film for actually employing Hispanic actors as Mexicans and for the extensive use of Spanish--Cooper and Hayward both come off as fluent.

Luke is kind of a hothead and he's the first one to show intentions towards Leah. He tries to assault her one night when the group is camped out and Leah sneaks away to wreck the latest marker Vicente has left so he can find his way back to the mine at a future date. Luke corners her by a river and abruptly starts talking about how he's not doing this for the money, exuding nervous energy before grabbing her.

She gets away from him and goes back to the camp where the film's central scene occurs. It's not the climax of the plot but it seems to be the thematic nexus where the issues the story had been building to come the closest to crystallising and afterwards are digested by the context of future events and decisions. It's clear to Hooker what had happened from the look on Luke's face and the scream he heard from Leah. A fight ensues with a slightly mysterious conclusion. Hooker simultaneously attributes Luke's actions to being a killer and of being only a foolish young man. It's a very grey area that Cooper's gravitas compels the viewer to ponder--Luke is a dangerous guy but they do need all the help they can get. It's also unclear how much Luke's actions are due to a truly malicious nature or are due to him being a foolish young man who's been forced by circumstance to lead a life of violence.

Less clear is why Hooker tells Leah that she bears some blame. It's hard to see the logic even through the lens of 1950s patriarchy and her reply, "What do you think you're saying?" given in an indignant tone, delivered in a way by Hayward that's every bit equal to Cooper's gravitas, is far easier to identify with as a viewer than Hooker's unexplained logic. But it fits in with all the time Hooker and Fiske have spent talking about Leah instead of talking to her while they travelled.

Fiske seems an oddly superfluous character a lot of the time. I almost felt like there was some kind of contractual obligation for Richard Widmark to be included in the film. Mainly he seemed like he was functioning as a motivation for the otherwise taciturn Hooker to speak up--though Hooker never reveals much about himself. But the persistence of Fiske in offering opinions about women, with chestnuts like, "Don't believe anything a woman says but believe everything she sings," starts to feel strange, especially since Leah really doesn't do anything for much of the film except lead the men to her trapped husband.

Then, after things settle down following the fight with Luke, Fiske and Hooker have a really obtuse exchange that I can't for the life of me interpret as anything but Fiske coming on to Hooker.

FISKE: You see how it is? Now she's got you fighting for her honour. She's got you going unarmed against a gun in the hand of a man she turned into an idiot.

HOOKER: A boy.

FISKE: It was very heroic. I admired you enormously. I'm sure she did too. Some day, like Salome, she'll have you bringing her the head of that Vicente in a frying pan.

HOOKER: Or yours.

FISKE: No, no, not mine, Hooker. Mine belongs to you. And you know what they say.

HOOKER: What do they say?

FISKE: Two heads are better than one.

Did I hear that right? Did Fiske just offer to give head to Hooker? That might explain also why Fiske talks about women so much if his homosexuality is repressed.

But all the characters spend some time trashing each other--except Leah who continues to be blamed far more than she deserves. The title of the film, Garden of Evil, evokes the Garden of Eden so maybe Leah leading them to the gold mine is meant to be like Eve leading Adam to the apple. In the latter half of the film, she takes some pretty harsh accusations of manipulation out of greed but she acquits herself pretty well. For all the recriminations and self-interest that seems to be in the dialogue, though, it becomes a story about self-sacrifice and the anti-social behaviour on display seems to be the flip side of deep guilt. Susan Hayward's tenacious performance is crucial as she becomes a kind of wall against which the illusions of bitterness from the men crash and fall back from.

The movie has some great location shots and some of the best matte shots I've ever seen. And it has a good score from Bernard Herrmann.

Twitter Sonnet #1098

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