Burl reviews Foreign Correspondent! (1940)

 

By the turning of the windmill, it’s Burl, here with a bit of Hitchcockery for you! Ha ha, this is Hitch in actionman mode, making a big old wartime crowd-pleaser with plenty of derring-do and get-‘er-done sentiment! It’s not the most finely-crafted picture old Alfred ever made, nor his most suspenseful, nor his most rollicking, but there’s a case to be made that, alongside North By Northwest, it’s the one that most effectively combines all these qualities! Ha ha, and the name of the movie is Foreign Correspondent!

It’s set in a very specific period of time, which I always appreciate in a movie! The thunderclouds of war have spread across Europe, and just about everybody knows it’s coming – and there are some shadowy figures, it seems, who want to hurry it along! But before we meet them, we are introduced to Johnny Jones, the putative hero of the picture, a Big Apple newsman who is the right guy to go find out what’s up in Europe, figures his editor, because (and the cop-phobic Hitch loved this no doubt) he once beat up a policeman!

It seems Hitch wanted Gary Cooper for the role, but he got Joel McCrea from Sullivan’s Travels and Ride the High Country! This disappointed the director, who found McCrea too affable; and you can certainly see why he’d want Coop for a two-fisted role like this! Maybe the fact that they were each known by nicknames made up of the first half of their surnames was an extra attraction to Cooper for the portly filmmaker, but who knows! Anyway, I like McCrea – his affability gives a lightness to the picture that helps keep it aloft, and he’s able to get serious when he needs to, as in the Thing From Another World-style coda!

It’s late August of 1939, and you know what that means - Nazis are about to make their move! When Johnny Jones arrives in England, he finds a dyspeptic colleague played by the great Robert Benchley (who also wrote some of the dialogue, or at least his own); the leader of some kind of peace party, Stephen Fisher, played by Herbert Marshall from The Fly; and Fisher’s beautiful daughter Carol, essayed by Laraine Day from The Story of Dr. Wassell! Malarkey of some kind is going on, and things only get weirder after a diplomat called Van Meer, who is instrumental in whatever chance there may be to stave off the Germans and whom Johnny is supposed to interview, gets himself shot in the face in a surprisingly brutal moment!

Johnny also meets the real hero of the picture, or at least I thought so, a debonair newshound called Scott ffolliott (and yes, ha ha, they address the lower-case double Fs), played by the marvelous George Sanders, whom we recall from Doomwatch and Endless Night, and from his own pithy suicide note! ffolliett is a real cool customer, an adventuresman who, it seemed to me, had as much of Hitchcock’s attention as the hero! After the famous windmill scene – well, relatively famous, probably cracking the top ten or twelve of famous Hitch scenes – and Van Meer has mysteriously returned, still played by Albert Bassermann from Alraune, Johnny is hot on the trail of the story, and so naturally it’s time for the movie to hang with ffolliett for a while! Yes, ha ha, it seems for a while that ffolliett (a relation to ffolkes, no doubt!) is the new hero of the movie, and one is not unhappy to have him!

There’s some great stuff here! Edmund Gwenn from Them! and The Trouble With Harry pops up as a hitman who maybe was a bit past his prime! And there are some terrific mugs in the margins, like Mr. Krug, played by Eduardo Cianelli from Strange Cargo, who tortures poor Van Meer with hot jazz music! The special effects and sets are simply top notch, and the plane-crash climax is a corker!

You can tell Hitch wasn’t too interested in the specifics of the peace process or the ginned up McGuffin here – ha ha, as McGuffins go, this is one of the director’s most transparently immaterial! It’s a weird mix of ripped-from-the-headlines reality and the sort of picture they were making in the lead-up to the war, where the evil country would remain pointedly unnamed, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding any kind of intercontinental rile-up! I suppose that’s because history marched on as the picture was being written and prepared, and all of Fisher’s mournful references to “his country” were left over from prewar days!

It’s a chaotic movie, but all of a setpiece by the end, ha ha! I’ve seen it a couple of times now, and it sure does hold up! The plotting is maybe not completely thought through everywhere, but it’s got it where it counts! I give Foreign Correspondent three and a half phonographs!

Burl reviews North By Northwest! (1959)

 

Hi, I’m Roger Thornhill! Ha ha, no, I’m Burl, but I feel like Roger Thornhill after my recent viewing of North By Northwest! Yes, it’s a comfy old favourite, a highly rewatchable thrill-omedy-omance, and always pretty fun! There’s not much more to it than that, other than some romantic scenes that go on a bit too long for young new viewers of Hitchcock; but by garr it’s a pleasantly airy jaunt! It feels a bit silly to review it, because everyone’s seen it and everyone more or less likes it!

It’s a curious warm-up for Psycho, ha ha! Our main character, played by the one and only Cary Grant, is a happy-go-lucky Madison Avenue man who gets mistaken for a government spy called George Kaplan! Immediately he is wrapped in a web of intrigue: kidnapped and assaulted with a gun and a car and a bourbon by nefarious bad guy James Mason, whom we know from ffolkes and Bigger Than Life; his dapper, Smithers-type minion Martin Landau, an actor we recollect from his appearance in Without Warning; and two sinister, hatched-faced sub-minions! Poor perplexed Thornhill is soon accused of a United Nations murder, and he flees to Chicago on a cross-country train! On board he meets an almost psychotically flirtatious blonde beauty played by Eva Marie Saint from The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, whose extreme willingness to shelter an accused murderer arouses only mild additional bewilderment in Thornhill!

Leo G. Carroll from Tarantula is meanwhile a government spymaster who knows what’s going on, but is initially pleased to hear that Thornhill is believed to be Kaplan, who is not a real person but a fictional CIA confabulation! Ha ha, I think the movie could have waited on this revelation and presented it as a twist going into the third act, instead of revealing it in the first, but that’s just one Burl’s opinion! Anyway, with crop duster cornfield chases and hotel room duplicities and the finale in that fantastic modern house apparently perched near the top of Mount Rushmore, we barely notice!

Ha ha, there is so much window dressing to love about this movie - the great Saul Bass titles, the fantastic Bernard Herrman score, the clever Ernest Lehman script, and of course Hitch’s confident direction and the suspense scenes he pulls off with typical wizardry - that we don’t quite mind realizing later that it’s pretty much all window dressing! However, aside from the romantic longeurs mentioned earlier, it’s a top-flight Hollywood entertainment, attractive and shiny, gripping and funny; and when it’s over, it’s over - ha ha, until the next time! It’s far from my favourite Hitchcock picture, but it’s like a gooseberry you keep under your armpit: always there for you! I give North By Northwest three complaints of dan-druff!

Burl reviews The Birds! (1963)

 

Cheep-cheep and bad birdseed, it’s Burl, here to Hitch your wagon to a new review, ha ha! Today I want to review a movie I’ve seen many times, but always enjoy; and ha ha, you know, though it’s not perfect, I think it just keeps getting better! It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s tale of avian disturbance, The Birds!

I think you all know the story: birds attack, nobody knows why! But it’s also a people story, with flighty (ha ha!) San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren from Marnie, acting like a complete maniac and following handsome lawyer Rod Taylor, whom we remember from The Time Machine, up the coast to Bodega Bay in order to teach him a lesson by gifting a pair of lovebirds to his little sister! Ha ha, yes, her plan is as insane as it sounds! She sort of reminds me of Marion Crane and her little pile of cash in Psycho!

Up in Bodega Bay, Melanie rents a boat from none other than Doodles Weaver from The Errand Boy! It seems that Rod Taylor, playing the rather smug Mitch Brenner, is up for the weekend visiting his mom Lydia, essayed by Jessica Tandy from Cocoon, and his little sister Cathy, a pubescent performance from Veronica Cartwright of The Witches of Eastwick! Meanwhile the local schoolmistress, Suzanne Pleshette from The Shaggy D.A., is obviously carrying a torch for Mitch, but lets Melanie rent a room for the night in her house anyway! Ha ha, they even become friends, after a fashion!

Given that Melanie has some growing up to do (but also has done some growing up previous to the opening moments of the story), and frosty old Lydia, the world’s primmest chicken farmer, has her own obvious if obscure son-related issues, and Pleshette’s character Annie Hayworth is jealous, sad, and stoic all at the same time, there’s plenty of soap opera material available here! But Hitch knows how to do all this stuff in his own way, and the drama and the bird attacks are somehow all of a piece!

And those bird attacks! Ha ha, this surely must have been a heck of a shoot, especially for old Hitch, who was afraid of birds! But the technical wizardry from such accomplished trick effect folks as Ub Iwerks and Albert Whitlock, and many others besides, still dazzles after all these years, and so the movie is a great pleasure to watch from a technical standpoint! It looks good too, except for the odd dud of a studio shot, ha ha!

There’s an artifice to the human element that the picture never really overcomes, but that really does get swept aside by the principal element, as underlined by the title itself: The Birds! Those flappers and squawkers and beakéd beasts really do their stuff, ha ha, and as a result the movie is a grand entertainment in the way only Hitchcock could create! They peck out eyes, they go after old folks and children, they bust through doors and swoop down chimneys and blow up gas stations, and if I were to list all the ways in which this picture is superior to Beaks: The Movie, we’d be here all day! Ha ha! I give The Birds three and a half old lady berets!

Burl reviews Psycho! (1960)

Ree-ree-ree-ree, from behind the shower curtain, it’s Mother! Ha ha, no, it’s actually just me, Burl! I’ll let you get a robe or a towel on, and then I’ll continue with my review of the fine Alfred Hitchcock picture Psycho! It’s a movie I first saw on that fateful evening many years ago when my friend Scott and I tried walking up the beach to a nearby town where Blood Beach was playing in the theatre! We didn’t make it – it was much too far, as it turned out – so we ended up watching Psycho on TV!

Ha ha, there’s not much point in reviewing such a picture in the traditional manner! We all know the plot, and we all know how gosh-darn good the movie is! I wouldn’t be the first one to suggest that possibly the coda, in which a glib psychiatrist played by Simon Oakland tries to explain Norman’s illness, was an ill-advised addition, and that the movie should have ended a little more suddenly to maintain its shocking mood in the post-viewing moments!

Nor will I be the first, ha ha, to express admiration for Anthony Perkins’ magnificent performance in the role of the looneyman Norman Bates! All the other performances are good too, from Janet Leigh to Martin Balsam to everyone else! Even that cop and the used car salesman are pretty solid! But Perkins is the movie’s legitimate great performance, and one of the best Hitchcock ever got out of an actor! And I certainly wouldn’t be the first to mention that before Psycho, the movies (Hollywood ones, anyway) had never before shown a toilet flushing on screen!

It occurred to me for the first time when I watched the movie most recently (I’ve seen it many times, ha ha!) how downright scary Janet Leigh’s situation is! She’s there in that motel, all by herself, with a raging madman stalking around outside in a stringy wig and an ugly dress! And you’ll say, “Ha ha, but of course, Burl, that’s the movie, isn’t it?” Sure, but have you ever taken a step back and thought about it in a realistic sort of a way? It’s terrifying!

My goodness, I’d love to go back in time and sit in on a screening of the picture with a big audience! They must have freaked out, especially of course during the shower scene! And I wonder how many people screamed when Mrs. Bates spun around in her chair, or gasped in amazement when the killer’s wig came off, in that marvelous penultimate scene! And then of course I’d sit around with Hitch and chat with him for a while about his career, and about new suspense stories he could film!

The old cliché about some movies just getting better and better each time you see it certainly applies to Psycho! It has more re-watching value even than that other fine Hitchcock picture Rear Window! I award it four unbelievably deep impressions in the bed!

Burl reviews Rear Window! (1954)

Hel-lo, it is I, Burl! Yes, I’m here to review an Alfred Hitchcock picture for you today, an old favourite of mine called Rear Window! Ha ha, when I was fifteen or so, I remember making a list of my all-time favourite movies! That list has changed since then, but I remember that The Wild Bunch was on there (and might still be), and also Stand By Me, which is still a pretty good movie, but nowhere near that list now; and of course Rear Window!

Well, now, ha ha, I can think of almost a half-dozen Hitchcock pictures alone that I think are better, but it’s still a movie I think is really wonderful! Of course you all know the story: Jimmy "Thunder Bay" Stewart, an action-man photographer, has broken his leg and is recuperating in his Greenwich Village apartment during a summer heat wave; he comes to believe that his grumpy neighbour across the courtyard, Raymond Burr, well-known from his role in Gorilla At Large, has murdered his wife! As best he can from the confines of his wheelchair, and with the help of girlfriend Grace Kelly and nurse Thelma Ritter, Stewart attempts to find the proof he needs to send Burr where Burr, as Perry Mason, has sent, or will have sent, so many others: down the river!

The movie all takes place in Stewart’s apartment of course: we are trapped there as much as he! Through his binoculars and telephoto lenses, we get an amusing and enormous look at the rich pageant of life across the courtyard: not just bickering and murder, but newlywed romance, desperate loneliness, creative apotheosis, straight-up sexiness, sculpting, and sleeping on the fire escape!

There’s a subplot about whether or not action-man Stewart can settle down enough to marry his socialite gal-pal, but this is just to add a little human interest or something! I found those parts a bit tiresome, and Stewart’s character comes off as a bit of a jerk during them! (I guess making Jimmy Stewart seem like a jerk is just another example of Hitchcock’s uncanny directorial powers, ha ha!) But the movie is so great in just about every other aspect that it was easy to endure!

No, it’s not my favourite Alfred Hitchcock picture (but what is: Psycho? Vertigo? Shadow of a Doubt? Strangers on a Train? All contenders!), but it’s close, and when you put together the great acting, the marvelous suspense, the hothouse atmosphere, the huge and wonderful set, the gorgeous photography and the purely cine-psychological conceit of it all, Rear Window easily earns three and a half smashed cameras, and I’m not sure it doesn’t deserve more! It’s a great movie!