They’re Young, They’re in Love, and They Bore People

Johnny Depp fulfills a lifelong ambition by having his name printed laterally across the shaft of his penis.

Sometimes I wish I were just an ordinary audience member (not that I’m removed from that by anything other than conceit and a WordPress account), so I could look at Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES and just say “Blah… what a tedious film.” For in many ways that would be the correct response, and such is the film’s deadening aspect that one does wonder if any critical analysis can produce anything worthwhile from this flat spectacle.

Johnny Depp is John Dillinger, celebrity bank robber, who says things like “You can either be a live coward or a dead hero,” and “I like baseball, fast cars, whisky and you,” which is nice. But Depp is somewhat muted, the way he was in THE NINTH GATE: an actor dedicated to flamboyance, he’s at sea in Mann’s world of low-talking hard men. And Mann is at sea with the showbiz side of Dillinger. He’s a stranger to gusto.

Here’s one problem: how is this film different from HEAT? If you like HEAT, I guess you won’t care, but for me, both films are long, unexciting films about low-affect thugs who talk a lot about how professional they are, and then act like idiots. In HEAT, DeNiro decides to kill a guy who’s threatening him with exposure, so he attacks the guy very publicly in a car park, using only blunt instruments, such as his fists and wits. One of those situations where I always think, “If a witness shows up and spoils things, I’ll be annoyed. And if a witness doesn’t show up and spoil things, I’ll STILL be annoyed.”

A witness shows up. DeNiro stops kicking the guy, acts innocent (he doesn’t quite rolls his eyes up and hang his mouth open like Harpo Marx looking innocent, but it’s similar) and when the witness (I think maybe a COP CAR) drives off, he gets set to resume the beating, but his prey has somehow crawled off and vanished. Even though he was right there.

Christian Bale lost 63 pounds, and then put them on again, to play Special Agent Melvin Purvis.

In PUBLIC ENEMIES it’s the Bureau of Investigation guys who do the stupid stuff, disobeying direct orders and getting killed, repeatedly letting Dillinger go by — Christian Bayle’s college-boy agents let him down continuously. So he gets some veterans from Texas, and the ignores their advice. Dillinger escapes again. It’s one of these combat-hardened vets who actually plugs Dillinger at the end, and he’s one of the few good characters in the film: Stephen Lang is steely-eyed and magnetic, and his character is actually competent, amid an ocean of assholes.

Mann could have used the factual catalogue of blunders to poke fun of the formative FBI, or he could have used the scenes of torture and reckless trigger-happy public endangerment to condemn them, but he doesn’t seem to want to say anything. I felt like yelling through the film at him, using it as some kind of Hi-Def ear-trumpet, quoting Graham Crowden in IF… — “Do You Have An OPINION???”

All this might pass if the film had an appealing aesthetic, but I struggled, I really did, to find anything worthwhile about it. Mann has spoken about how he tested the digital cameras for a lark, and found that on film, his test scene looked like a movie set in the ’30s, whereas on digital it looked like he’d gone back in time and was IN the ’30s. Which sounds nice, but it doesn’t play that to me. To me it looks like a YouTube video in fancy dress. Digital has advanced to a point where you often need expertise to tell it from film, but Mann succeeds in making it look fuzzy and dead.

(Full disclosure: my local gigaplex, the Vue Ocean Terminal, underlights its projectors, has disfigured screens, and lets light spill onto the screen from the exit. So the film wasn’t looking its best. But I still think this is one that’ll look better on DVD.)

Mann juggles oddball angles looking up under machine guns at faces, uses handheld shots to create a sick-making motion blur whenever he can, and cuts things into what Roman Polanski has called “that fruit-salad style…” The art deco locations are often dazzling, but the camera is never in synch with their cool splendor.

The “great romance” aspect of the film, not really borne out by history, is shot dead execution-style by the limp playing of Depp and Marion Cotillard (all her concentration is going on not sound too French) and by Mann’s total disinterest in women, which also results in the pathetic wastage of Lilli Taylor. Since Mann, like Cotillard’s character, is completely unconcerned with any moral view of what Dillinger does for a living, you’d think he’d have more identification with her.

(Roger Corman, in BLOODY MAMA and THE ST VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE, both of which I saw recently, is likewise uninterested in preaching or taking sides, but he IS ripping the veil from off the American capitalist dream. You can’t accuse him of not having a point of view. All Mann has is a viewfinder, generally aimed up at somebody from under their armpit.)

Thing about MM is, he has lots of ideas, but they generally work better in his head than on the screen: the jump-cuts in MANHUNTER, the long-lens confusion of LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Of course, nobody with Mann’s sense and budget could make this movie without hitting some good points: the phone-tapping room, a constellation of little glowing lights; and Dillinger’s last night with his girl, in a barren moonscape lit by chill morgue-rays — such moments suggest that a ’30s digital movie COULD look beautiful.

And Dillinger’s sly visit to the offices where his case is being investigated — which I assume to be at least partly poetic license, since we never see him tell anyone about it, so how would the screenwriters know it happened? — is a nicely mythic and romantic moment, like Dillinger’s last words… a few moments of this kind impress, late in the day.

Oh, there’s another impressive actor in the thing: Peter Gerety as Dillinger’s lawyer. I wonder if his dialogue in court is straight from the historical record, because he sure talks better than anybody else in this film. Maybe such able thesps as Billy Crudup, Stephen Dorff, Marion Cotillard and Giovanni Ribisi make such little impact because of the weedy dialogue, which is devoid of all period zing (in the zingiest slangiest era in American history!), stranding the cast in a neutral zone of slow, emphatic delivery. (I know pastiche is the last thing on Mann’s mind, but folks in ’30s flicks talk FAST, and that would be a wonderful thing to offer modern audiences.)

Got home and slung an authentic 1930s crime-flick, THE BEAST OF THE CITY, in the old Panasonic, and within minutes was exulting in lines like ~

Cop: Mind if I ask you some questions?
Jean Harlow: Sure, if you don’t ask them in Yiddish.

And ~

Jean Harlow (embracing cop): Are you going to reform me?

Cop: What for?

EVERY line in that film seemed to sparkle and crackle with lust, malice and wanton throwaway wit. By contrast, the verbiage emanating at snail-speed from the kissers of Mann’s barely-dramatis personae cuts about as much mustard as a hash-slinger with hooks for hands. See?

Still, Mann’s usual stumbling-block is music — I recall with rising nausea the synth-pop atrocities of MANHUNTER, the smorgasbord of ethnic stylings in THE INSIDER (”The most heterosexual movie ever made! It’s nothing but angry men shouting into HUGE PHONES!” – Ben Halligan) and the somnolent Tangerine Dream drones of THIEF. Here he does about as badly as you could do in a rich musical decade, but not half as badly as he normally does. The bluesy humming is actually quite nice, although it’s diluted with lots of other effects which don’t mesh into a whole, and every time the radio is on its Billie Holliday, which is fine but limited.

As in ALI, Man shows an interest in resurrecting history but never illuminates it. Dillinger appears to have escaped from prison in Indiana by carving a gun from a bar of soap, blackening it with shoe-polish, and holding up the guards. Woody Allen parodied this in his first film, TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, where Allen’s home-made side-arm dissolves into a lather during a rainstorm. But Mann includes the incident without explaining the fake gun at all. (An alternative theory, from cult author Robert Anton Wilson: Dillinger meditated real hard, and teleported out of his cell. I’d watch THAT movie. Twice!)

Likewise he shows a judge taunting J. Edgar Hoover for never actually arresting anyone, without showing the punchline, which is included in Larry Cohen’s THE PRIVATE FILES OF J EDGAR HOOVER: Hoover stage-managed an arrest and turned up to snap the cuffs into place, a troupe of tame news cameramen in tow. Mann exposes himself as a filmmaker with no sense of humour — or storytelling.

A closing title tells us that (predictably dead-eyed) Christian Bayle’s real-life character resigned from the Bureau a year after Dillinger’s death, and killed himself in 1960. And I wondered, why tell us that? The movie hasn’t done anything to explain such actions, we barely even know this guy, so what’s the point of telling us?

Socko

The latest edition of my column, The Forgotten, is online now at The Auteurs’ Notebook. William Wyler’s THE SHAKEDOWN. Check it!

Suspicious Minds

Well, I lied. This isn’t really close analysis, it’s random jottings sparked by odd moments and characters in one scene of SUSPICION. I do flatter myself that it’s not a scene many people have focussed on, if that’s any recompense.

My Dinner with Sedbusk:

The opening shot of the scene: in a manner quite typical of his style, Hitch creeps closer during the first half of the sequence. Rather than doing it with a slow track, however, he moves forward in a series of stationary shots.  This establishing shot is only good for some party chatter, since we’re really too far away to be satisfied with the view. Once we’ve got our bearings, and our curiosity builds about who’s in the scene, Hitch cuts to a closer angle, then a closer one still, as the dialogue proper commences.

This frame interests me because of the starring role given to a lampshade, which reminds me of DIAL M FOR MURDER. I’ve never seen it in 3D, but Comrade K, who has, points out the way the foreground lampshades loom out in a surprising fashion, creating a series of visual stepping stones. Hitch really does make a major feature of them, and once you’re aware of it they’re very strange.

Sedbusk: Isobel Sedbusk (Auriol Lee, in her only movie) is as much plot function as character, the crime writer who rigorously researches her books to the point where they can potentially be used as how-to guides by aspiring wife-murderers. Her names reminds me obscurely of Hitchcock’s, and her profession in popular fiction, coupled with her enthusiasm for true crime, makes me feel that she’s a Hitchcock stand-in. Interesting that he’d make her female: Hitch often claimed to identify most closely with his heroines. Also interesting that, if I read the scene correctly, she’s gay.

The other guests are the Aysgarths (Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant), Isobel’s brother Dr. Bertram Sedbusk, and this lady, who’s clearly typed as a lesbian (She’s wearing a suit and tie! Her hair is severe! She calls Cary “My dear chap,” as if she were some kind of wo-MAN) So what’s she doing here? Her chief relationship appears to be with Isobel, and they call each other Phil and Izzy, and Isobel says, “Do the wine would you, Phil?” as if they were co-hosts…

This little unconventionally conventional same-sex relationship is very nice and completely positive in tone. Cary Grant is the only character in the room who MIGHT be up to no good. It’s the nicest gay scene in Hitchcock. But my chief interest is in Hitch’’s imagining himself as a gay woman…

Phil is credited as “Phyllis Swinghurst,” another Hitchcockian construction of a name, and she’s played by Nondas Metcalf (extraordinary name!) in what appears to be only her second role, and her last. More information please!

The other charm is that it’s one of those typical Hitchcock scenes where nice people discuss murder over a meal. See SHADOW OF A DOUBT for the best example, and FRENZY for the queasiest. Here, Isobel (who has no Miss or Mrs to her name, it seems) holds forth on the CSI-style brilliance of modern 1940s forensics, aided by her brother –

Dr. Bertram Sedbusk is a rather figure, even if his story function is sinister. “Ah, arsenic,” he murmurs fondly over his chicken, when somebody mentions his favourite poison. Sedbusk’s slight accent appears to me an attempt at Scots, and I’m pretty sure he’s based on Sir Sydney Smith, a renowned professor of forensics at the University of Edinburgh, whose memoir, Mostly Murder, is an agreeably macabre trot through the recent history of British homicide, and certainly a volume Hitchcock would have poured over with great interest. One story tells of the discovery of two murdered children in a swamp, their bodies entirely transformed into a cheesy substance. Since this kind of decay was rare, Smith illegally took samples from the bodies: a head, two legs, an arm… smuggling them back to the University in his bag, causing some distress to his fellow passengers on the train, when the gorgonzolian aroma wafted forth. Only a year or so ago, a distant American relative of the murdered lads, researching her ancestry, came across this story and insisted on the burial of the preserved bits.

The murderer was the boys’ father, I believe, and he was publicly hanged.

The real purpose of this scene, so pleasingly decorated with interesting cameos, is to set-up the untraceable poison, an ordinary domestic substance which can cause instant death, and becomes undetectable within instants of entering the body. Of course, neither Bertram nor Isobel nor Hitchcock and his writers can reveal the identity of this substance: that would be irresponsible.

It’s not quite a McGuffin, this poison, but it has a lovely McGuffinly vagueness.

“Just carve them up like regular chickens!”

Footnote: the IMDb has actress Auriol Lee down as a descendant of Robert E Lee. I wonder if her car had a musical horn like his.

How to Seduce Joan Fontaine, #6400001 of 9,000,000,000

Call her “Monkeyface” and refer to her ucipital mapilary. Doesn’t sound like it would work, but it does. On the other hand, a warm glass of milk at bedtime sounds like a winner, but it’s best avoided, old bean, best avoided.

This post is AKA ~

THINGS I READ OFF THE SCREEN IN “SUSPICION” ~

SUSPICION is a particularly intriguing Hitchcock because the movie is haunted by a mythical ur-text propagated by Hitchcock himself, a story centering on that Fatal Glass of Milk. To quote the Great Man ~

“The scene I wanted, but it was never shot, was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that’s been poisoned and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother: “Dear Mother, I’m desperately in love with him, but I don’t want to live because he’s a killer. Though I’d rather die, I think society should be protected from him.” Then, Cary Grant comes in with the fatal glass and she says, “Will you mail this letter to Mother for me, dear?” She drinks the  milk and dies. Fade out and fade in on one short shot: Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in.”

Leaving aside the logic of Fontaine’s suicide (I wonder if a court would convict a man of poisoning his wife if she drank the poison in full knowledge of what she was doing? I expect they would) which is tortuous but sound, and the question of whether Grant ought not to be acting the grieving widower, and whether he might consider that to be whistling about posting his late wife’s correspondence might be rather, well, suspicious, we have a sound ending that would, I think, be better than the one we’ve got, which was cobbled together out of reshoots, stand-ins, swapped-around sequences, and represents Hitch’s most troublesome last act until TOPAZ, decades later.

But the problem wasn’t anything to do with the ending Hitch describes above, taken from Francis Iles’s novel Before the Fact, which as he says he never shot, it was with the original ending filmed, in which Joan drinks the milk, then realises it’s NOT poisoned, goes to confront Cary Grant, and finds him preparing to kill himself, which is why he’d wanted that untraceable poison, which we’re going to hear all about later. By way of some prolix and unbelievable dialogue (Lubitsch’s right-hand man, Samson Raphaelson, wrote the script, but he wasn’t quite at home with this kind of material) Joan talks him round, and we have a quasi-happy ending. But one which preview audiences laughed off the screen until it fluttered, shredded, into the orchestra pit. Read all about this at The MacGuffin, where Bill Krohn has done an amazing job of excavating the full true story, or as much of it as the historical record preserves.

My remaining problem with SUSPICION, which I enjoy a lot but am left frustrated by, is an uncertainty in the handling, as if Hitchcock hadn’t quite abandoned his very first ending. From the opening scene  ~ beginning, wittily, as a radio play over black screen, until the train comes out of the dark and we get this John Tenniel composition ~

~ which also reminds me of LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, and then Cary Grant pays for his first-class upgrade with a stamp, saying “Write home to your mother!” to the conductor ~ and the regular talk of post offices, scenes in post offices ~ and Hitchcock’s cameo, posting a letter ~ a prominently positioned post box in the foreground of one scene ~ the ubiquity of notes and printed matter throughout, as seen in this blog post ~ the specter of the Royal Mail hangs over this film like a pall.

Also, there’s the phantom of REBECCA, with Fontaine’s character superficially quite similar, and rocky sea cliffs prominent in the story. Also Leo G Carroll popping in for a scene.

After the opening, in which both screenwriter Raphaelson and performer Archie Leach are on top form, delivering a very acceptable romantic comedy, augmented by Hitchcockian touches such as the way Fontain’s purse snaps crisply shut in ECU as she rejects Grant’s advances — a wonderfully smutty sexual reference to her virginal status — the thriller element comes into play, as Fontaine begins to imagine, on no real evidence, that her cash-strapped hubbie is planning the murder, first of his best friend Beaky (Dr. Watson himself, Nigel Bruce), then of herself.

The game of anagrams where Fontaine leaps to her first false conclusion is masterfully done, a grand old subjective freak-out in the classic silent Hitchcock manner, and this is the point where the idea of Fontaine as a fantasist comes into play most strongly. But Hitch also wants us to take her suspicions seriously, and so Grant behaves in a rather dark and moody manner at various times, in scenes shot in a way that makes it clear this isn’t Fontaine’s imagination. Grant always claimed he played the character as a rogue, not a heel, but several shots distinctly contradict this.

So I find the film increasingly schizoid — Fontaine is clearly over-imaginitive, but Grant is clearly suspicious in his behaviour, in a way that his final explanation doesn’t cover. Fiona finds the “happy” ending a bit sinister, and I’m inclined to agree. The post-production fiddling does show, and a feeling of discomfort remains. As intriguing as the “female Walter Mitty” idea is, I don’t find it wholly successful, and would certainly have preferred the original ending Hitch found in the book.

Now for some reasonably close analysis of one particular scene…

Naunton Wayne makes an understandable mistake.

“Sorry, old man, I thought this was the bathroom –”

Pause. Realisation.

“Extraordinary thing.”

From Carol Reed’s ’30s sexploitation shocker A GIRL MUST LIVE. More on this at a later time.