Volume 11 - Rope and the Privilege of Murder

When you're having an Alfred Hitchcock Month!, as we currently are, there are certain topics you have to bring up. Women, suspense, mystery, and humor are certainly among them. But, in most situations, you can't talk about Hitchcock without talking about murder. I haven't done the math on this topic, but I think it's entirely possible that all of Alfred Hitchcock's films have some kind of murder going on, even if sometimes it's a murder of crows. (We'll get to that one of these weeks, I promise.)

While more than a handful of Hitchcock's films are built around a murder, there's one particular Hitchcock film that stands out because the entire film is devoted to a bunch of people, in one room, where a murder has just happened. It's not a mystery who did the killing, and why the murder happened is spelled out pretty neatly for us early on. If you're thinking that this doesn't seem like the formula for a Hitchcock thriller, you're right. And that's one reason why the film we're about to talk about stands out as one of the director's most interesting projects.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Rope

1948, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

If Hitchcock's films were a line of toys, Rope is one of the ones that would have been sent to the island of misfit toys. It has a lot of the things we often expect from his films - murder, intrigue, a marvelous James Stewart performance - but it's certainly his most contained film. I don't mean that in regard to its themes, I mean that the action is literally contained in one room. Even Rear Window spends more time outside than this one does, and that's the movie where Mr. Stewart is confined to a wheelchair.

Rope opens in a dark New York City apartment with the murder of David Kentley, strangled to death with a length of rope by two of his college classmates, Brandon and Phillip. The two killers aren't the type of characters you'd expect to find as the killers in an Alfred Hitchcock film, they're simply two Harvard educated guys who thought murder could be an art. They're also obviously gay lovers, though the film never mentions this, which is one more reason Rope felt like such an outlier when it was released in 1948. Several theaters banned the film, not because of the murder, but because of the implied homosexuality.

Brandon and Phillip become the focal point of the film from the first frame, and they're two of Hitchcock's most vibrant characters, but for very different reasons. Brandon, played by John Dall, is smug and confident, laughing off the murder because it was so perfect.

"Nobody commits a murder just for the experiment of committing it. Nobody except us."

Brandon's glee is countered by Phillip, played by Farley Granger, who immediately regrets the couple's decision and begins to assume the worst. Phillip has a good reason to be concerned, because the second part of their plan involves hosting a dinner that night, in the apartment, with David's body resting as peacefully as possible in the chest from which dinner will be served. The guests for this dinner party include David's parents, David's girlfriend, another classmate, and Rupert Cadell (Stewart), the headmaster from school who gave Brandon the idea that murder could be justified in the right situation.

If this one-setting dinner party sounds like a stage play, that's because it originally was. And Hitchcock, eager to experiment while making his first color film, worked meticulously to frame the film as a play. Running at almost real time - there's a little bit of speeding up time during the evening to keep the film at a crisp 80 minutes - Hitchcock managed to shoot the film in a series of 4-10 minute takes, concealing the cuts as well as possible to make it appear that the camera never stops rolling inside the apartment.

Much like the camera, the conversation at the dinner party never seems to stop either. Brandon and Phillip allow their guests some time to talk about simple things, like books and movies - including a humorous sequence where Stewart attempts to talk about movie stars like James Mason and Cary Grant with the two female guests - but eventually the topic of murder finds its way into the conversation.

It's at this moment that Stewart gets to shine as only he can, preaching the idea that murder should be used for personal gain by certain enlightened individuals as the other guests in the room wonder if they should laugh at his idea or fear him. Brandon, still riding the high of finally testing this theory, leaps at the opportunity to guide the discussion, and his back and forth with Rupert leads the conversation to a rather abrupt end when David's father - who still expects his son to show up at this party - becomes shocked by the implications of it.

"Who is to decide if a human being is inferior, and therefore a suitable victim for murder?"

Brandon backs away from saying too much at this point, but he continues to push the envelope as the night goes on, particularly when he brings the rope that was used as a murder weapon back into the film. The viewer knows that he's taunting the guests and especially focused on Rupert, who he obviously respects and may even have feelings for (the original play implies that Rupert also had homosexual relations with one of the killers, but this is muted in the film). Brandon is kind of an ancestor to those overly talkative villains we're used to seeing in super hero and James Bond films, seemingly wanting not only to get away with a crime but have his crime understood by the people who could stop him. Dall shines as he does this, and Hitchcock's choice to pair him and Stewart against Granger's crescendo into drunken anger throughout the evening creates a intriguing game of cat and mouse as we watch to see if Brandon and Phillip's perfect plan will go off as they intended.

It's sad that the controversy that was most notable about the film upon release was its homosexual overtones, because the philosophical debate about murder and where it can rank on the scale of right and wrong is really the most interesting thing about Rope. There aren't a lot of films - especially films from the 1940s - that are willing to sit on the screen and debate whether or not murder is a good idea or not. It wasn't a comfortable topic then - Stewart even said after the fact that he wished he hadn't made the film - but today it still feels like one of the most fresh topics in any Hitchcock film. The script handles the debate expertly - even though it clearly guides us to understand the wrong in Brandon and Phillip's action - and Stewart's work in the final sequence is among the best he ever did. If you know anything about James Stewart (I think he's the greatest actor that's ever lived, but that's a debate for another day), that's a big accomplishment.

The problem with Rope - that's a very good problem to have - is that it's that misfit in both Hitchcock's filmography and in cinematic history. There are not enough films like this; films that are willing to challenge the viewer to think differently about macabre topics. Which made finding a double feature partner for Rope one of the more difficult decisions I've made since I started the Double Feature Picture Show. Here are a few of the things I considered:

• Murder is the centerpiece of Rope, and murder needs to be a topic of debate in the film we're pairing it with. But we don't want a movie that's just about murder for the sake of murder, we need something that focuses on not just why the murder is happening but why the murder matters in the film's world.
• As I've already said, Rope makes it pretty clear that we shouldn't sympathize with its killers, even though poor Phillip really does seem like he knows from minute one that he's made a huge mistake. Despite that, Rope still tries to keep us thinking about whether or not the murder could be justified. That's a theme that not a lot of movies are willing to attempt, so I want something that follows that lead.
• I thought long and hard about the real time(ish) and one-setting aspects of Rope, but they don't really work with a lot of films. I love the technical gimmicks at the center of Rope, but I'm willing to abandon them in favor of a film that manages to convey some of the same themes.
• The idea of murder as an "art" that only the gifted should be able to perform is a common theme in a lot of movies - especially when it comes to serial killers and sociopaths - but it's the romantic attachment to that art that Brandon shows throughout Rope that really sells this film's approach toward justified murder.

And it's that last point, where I started thinking about characters in film who murdered because they believed they had the right to do so, that led me to a film that's very different than Rope, but very committed to the same idea that some murders...well, they just have to happen.

Frailty

2001, Directed by Bill Paxton

Rope took us into the minds of two murderers, one giddy about the opportunity he has been given and one repentful. Frailty, the 2001 directorial debut by legendary character actor Bill Paxton, also gives us multiple murderers who have varying levels of commitment to the actions they are a part of. Like Rope, the motivation for these actions is clearly vocalized by one character, but the reasons for killing, the amount of killing, and the actions of the killer are all handled very differently in this religion-based horror feature.

Matthew McConaughey - in that awkward phase between his early career success and his rise to Oscar status in the 2010s - stars alongside Paxton, playing the adult version of Fenton Meiks, a man who walks into an FBI office late one night to tell an FBI agent (Powers Boothe, an acceptable substitute for the late James Stewart) the story of how his father and recently-deceased brother lived as "The God's Hand Killer" in a rural part of Texas. 

As a cold and beaten down Fenton relays his tale to the agent, we spend most of the film in flashbacks to his childhood, where Fenton and his brother Adam watch their father (Paxton) change from a simple life as a mechanic to a motivated serial killer who wants his boys to help with a series of murders. Why on earth does this man decide he needs to kill a list of people who he's never met? 

Because he was chosen by God to dispose of people who aren't people. They're demons.

Dad (his name is never spoken by his children, so that's all we have to go with) spends a lot of the movie explaining what is going on to his sons, and most of the film' s drama comes as young Fenton (Matt O'Leary) struggles with the fact that his father and younger brother (Jeremy Sumpter) believe that they are serving God by murdering people they've never met before. The two child actors do a fine job and carry most of the film, while Paxton manages to make Dad a brutal man who is surprisingly tender and straightforward with his sons.

Things start to get weird as Frailty goes on, because some of Dad's predictions are incredibly accurate. Adult Fenton explains this away to the FBI agent by saying "Sometimes, the truth defies reason," and that's about the best explanation we can get for why the father and sons seem to be able to carry out kidnappings and murders with little to no resistance. Dad and the young Adam are convinced that God is protecting the family and sending them everything they need to complete their crimes - including a now iconic axe with the name Otis carved into it - and one of the coolest things about Frailty is how it manages to sell this concept to the viewer.

Rope was a film about two killers with very little room for error, but Frailty flips that concept on its edge as everything just seems to go right for these killers. It's ridiculous to think that what this father is telling his sons is true, but Paxton and screenwriter Brent Hanley (who has, shockingly, never written another feature) do a wonderful job of keeping us guessing as the film goes on. I might have said too much about the plot already - seeing this with no knowledge of what it was about back when it played in theaters is still one of the great shockers of my cinematic life - but even if you haven't seen it and you're starting to make guesses about the film as I write this, I'm willing to bet you'll probably be wrong.

Frailty and Rope are both movies that are best experienced by open minded viewers who know little about them and are ready to get philosophical. This means that I've possibly made viewing them less enjoyable by talking as much as I have so far - way to go, Michael - but I'm pretty excited by just how unique this pair of films are together. One film is about murder that's justified by intellect or class, and the other is about murder that's justified by dedication and belief. You could even re-title them as Liberal Murder Story and Conservative Murder Story, as these are obviously killers on two different ends of the spectrum in American society.

In Rope, Brandon explains away his indifference toward his action by saying "Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary, average man - the inferior man - because he needs them." He might as well have been talking directly about Dad from Frailty, because there's no reason this man kills anyone without his belief in good and evil. This isn't a shock - religion has probably been the cause of more deaths than anything else - but it does perfectly explain the difference between why he's killing and why Dad is killing.

While introducing an episode of his own show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Master of Suspense once quipped "I think everyone enjoys a nice murder...provided he is not the victim." That's a nice way of reminding us that murder is going to happen and if you're on the receiving end it doesn't matter if a killer is Harvard educated or an auto mechanic. Both of these films spend very little time humanizing their victims - but we're not here to enjoy their work anyway. These are two films about getting away with murder and why murder can happen for reasons you might not expect. Hitchcock made enough money selling murder that he could confidently remind us that murder is a completely nonpartisan affair, and I think he'd appreciate the opposing approaches to killing that exist in these two films.

So, if you're ever feeling particularly morbid and want to sit down and see some people from different walks of life commit murders for some unique reasons, this might just be the double feature for you. I hope you don't get too morbid and too inspired by them, but if you do - just know that I also wouldn't enjoy being the victim.

Volume 9 - Rebecca and the Haunted House of Hitchcock

We're heading into our third month here, and I'm starting to feel confident I won't just up and abandon all five of you that are reading this. Confidence is addictive, and I'm thinking the next step in our young friendship can be only one thing - a themed month of posts.

What kind of theme are we talking about? Well, I'm glad you asked. There's one man who casts the biggest shadow over cinema history in my eyes, and I feel like he's a guy who deserves at least a month's worth of posts about some of his films. That man is Alfred Hitchcock. Thus, September will be henceforth known as.....

Alfred Hitchcock Month! 

I know, it's simple. But it's effective. And the exclamation point gives it a nice kick.

It's something of a challenge to opine on Hitchcock's filmography these days - people have been writing about him for about 90 years, the takes aren't exactly fresh - so I'm going to be taking a few leaps of faith as I put together five double features involving the Master of Suspense. This week's leap might be the biggest, so stay with me here. I promise I'll try to make sense.

With no further ado (except for the ado I'm about to type), let's kick things off with Hitchcock's first American film.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Rebecca

1940, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

As a fan of all things Hitchcock, it's absolutely crazy to know that Rebecca is the only film directed by the man that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And it's especially surprising that the movie is as good as it is (Spoiler alert: I think it's very good) when you consider the relationship between Hitchcock, who was new to America, and the man he was working for - legendary Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. Many accounts of the film's production tell of their squabbles over various aspects of the film, ranging from Hitch's filming techniques to the adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel. People who first met Hitchcock through his later works might watch Rebecca and quickly realize that his signature style is at times muddled by the relationship with his producer, not to mention the strict Hays Code held over films of this era. The relationship between Selznick and Hitchcock did contribute to a couple of films that are relatively clunky compared to the director's other works, but thankfully Rebecca is not one of them.

For those unfamiliar, Rebecca is not the story of a woman named Rebecca. In fact, the woman at the center of the film - an innocent youngster (Joan Fontaine) who becomes the bride of the sophisticated Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) - has no name. Never once does a character in the film refer to her by name (kind of like Roddy Piper in They Live, but we'll save that for another double feature). They do, however, spend plenty of time talking about Rebecca, Maxim's deceased first wife. Those familiar with Hitchcock's standoffish attitude toward actresses might assume this rudeness toward the living lead character was his doing, but in fact the nameless lead character comes right out of Du Maurier's novel.

The second Mrs. De Winter, as she is often referred to, meets Maxim in the South of France, just as he appears to be contemplating suicide on the edge of a cliff. Instead of taking this as a sign that he's a bit tortured, she ends up in a whirlwind romance with him. She thinks he's marvelous, he thinks she's a cute child. When she nearly has to leave, he proposes with a super romantic "I'm asking you to marry me me, you little fool!" If it seems like their relationship is a little possessive, that's a shared byproduct of both the source novel and on set tensions. Olivier was upset that his then girlfriend, Vivien Leigh, didn't get the part over Fontaine, so he took his frustrations out on her. Hitchcock, who always thought anything he could use to build tension was worth a try, decided the best approach to this would be to tell Fontaine that everyone else on set hated her too. 

It seems ridiculous that this is how a major Hollywood picture - Selznick saw Rebecca as his first attempt to top the success he had in 1939 with Gone With The Wind - would function, but I guess that's how you put the "drama" in melodrama. Rebecca needed Olivier to be a bit angry as the widower who hasn't shaken off his past, and it needed Fontaine to be timid and frightened by her sudden ascent from paid traveling companion to wife living in a grand estate. Maybe the producer and director didn't go about getting that out of the actors in the right way, but they definitely got it out of them.

No disrespect to the leads - or Judith Anderson, who we'll get to in a minute - but the real star of Rebecca is Manderley, the estate that is Maxim and his new bride's home. The house itself was a miniature (Selznick couldn't find a location that suited his tastes), but it looms large over the entire movie. The opening narration by Fontaine is still one of the most haunting introductions ever put on film, setting the mood for the picture and foreshadowing things to come.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter...for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers...and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me."

If you haven't guessed by now, Manderley is haunted. It's not haunted in the traditional horror movie way, but it is haunted by memories of Rebecca. Everything Maxim's new bride tries to do in the house is met by not-so-subtle reminders that Rebecca did things differently or that Rebecca was "the most beautiful creature I ever saw" or that everyone in the house "simply adored Rebecca." The girl is already facing a big change in her life, and now everyone that meets her is comparing her to this ghost that's just hanging out in a giant bedroom in the off limits wing of the house.

The living face of the house's intimidation toward her is that of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who happened to be Rebecca's closest confidant. Mrs. Danvers is played perfectly by Judith Anderson (I don't know who won the Oscar for Supporting Actress that year, but the voters must have got it wrong) and Hitchcock frames her as a constant reminder to the new bride that she is living in Rebecca's house. Hitchcock used Danvers the same way William Castle would later use characters in films like House on Haunted Hill, making her an unblinking character who seems to float from place to place. There are plenty of implications about Mrs. Danvers' relationship with the past Mrs. De Winter - implications that the Hays Code wouldn't let Hitchcock address - but her intentions toward the new bride are pretty obvious. She wants her gone from Manderley.

The second half of the film focuses on the deteriorating relationship between the still grieving Maxim and his new wife, who can't understand who or what she is supposed to be in this house. It's unfortunate that the film gets stuck in some mundane courtroom drama as it winds to a conclusion, but the house looms large over the finale. When we learn Rebecca's secret, we're reminded one last time that Manderley belonged to her, and that it always will.

Paranormal spirits may not be at work in this house, but the film's finale sends a message that echoes a passage from Fontaine's opening narration, confirming once and for all that this house is no longer a home.

"I looked upon a desolate shell...with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again. That much is certain."

Picking a double feature to go with Rebecca is a tall challenge. It's a 130 minute melodrama that can stand alone pretty well. But when I looked at the things I love about Rebecca, I started to think about how Hitchcock could have expanded on some of them in a different setting at a different time. So this week's double feature is less about what this film does, and more about what I'd loved to have seen the director do to build off of it later in his career. Here are some of the factors that played into this double feature pick.

• Hitch is known as a master of suspense, but very few of his films fit into the traditional definition of the horror genre. The ones that do - most notably Psycho and The Birds - are widely regarded as being among the best the genre has to offer. Sometimes I get a little greedy considering what it would have been like if the director dove into the genre a little more often.
• Hitchcock gained a lot of control over his films after his contract with Selznick ended in 1947, and also became more of a risk taker as he moved through the final couple of decades of his career. It's easy to wonder what a man of Hitchcock's mindset could have done with more time working after the Hays Code ended (it was replaced by the MPAA rating system in 1968 after being ignored for most of the 1960s) and filmmakers were given more freedom to tell riskier stories on screen.
• I mentioned similarities between Hitchcock and William Castle, possibly the two most larger than life showmen in genre cinema history. Hitchcock managed to make us feel the tension of a haunting inside Manderley, so I wonder what he could have done with a more traditional haunted house story.There would probably be some similarities with Castle's work, but I also think Hitchcock would have been willing to make a haunted house film that's a little darker and more adult-themed.
• Random tangent: Within Hitchcock's own filmography, the next closest thing to a haunted house film is obviously Psycho. Though very little of the film actually happens in the iconic house on the hill above the Bates Motel, it's still the place that Norman Bates' demons - most notably, Mother - call home. There's another way of telling that story that sure could have felt like a cross between Rebecca and a William Castle chiller, but most people would probably agree with me when I say the way Hitchcock handled Psycho worked out pretty darn well.

Now let's jump ahead 33 years, and take a look at how much different the world Hitchcock was making films in had become.

The Legend of Hell House

1973, Directed by John Hough

In 1972, Hitchcock released his next to last film, Frenzy. It was the first R rated film of his career, and it had enough on screen violence that Roger Ebert called it "Psycho without the shower curtain." For the time - and especially for the director, who was usually more playful with his murders - it was a brutal film about a rapist and killer on the loose in London. Films like Psycho and Marnie - a late career film in which Hitchcock featured an implied rape - had given us a taste for what Hitchcock could be willing to do after the pesky Hays Code was dead. But Frenzy was the first time he put the violence and deviance he'd always hinted at front and center in one of his films.

Which leads me to the film I think a Hitchcock haunted house film of the 1970s would have looked like - The Legend of Hell House. Released a year after Frenzy, it's a perverse and violent adaptation of Richard Matheson's Hell House that drew a PG rating despite a whole bunch of violence toward women and talk about orgies and a candy coating of pure dread that makes every minute of the picture a little bit more sinister than the last. Like Rebecca, many of the sexual elements of the novel had to be toned down for this film, yet the final product still manages to top off its horror setting with a tone that's pretty kinky for 1973.

The connections between Rebecca and The Legend of Hell House as full films are pretty superficial, but there's something to be said for the Hell House of the title as a more vile version of Manderley. As four characters spend several days in the deserted house, we quickly realize there's a gender swap at the center of the house's power. The late Rebecca is replaced here by the unseen Emeric Belasco, a twisted millionaire who towered over the mansion and hosted depraved parties before disappearing after a massacre that took place in his house.

It might be unfair to draw a parallel between a fictional sadist and a real world director who was notorious for being cruel to actors and actresses, but I get the feeling Hitchcock would have had a lot of fun with a character like Belasco haunting one of his films. Much like Hitchcock, director John Hough (working from a screenplay adapted by Matheson himself) spends much of the film putting the female leads that walk into Hell House in stressful and vicious situations.

The first of these women is Florence Tanner, a spiritual medium played by Pamela Franklin. She's interested in the specific entities that are in the house, and ends up focusing her attention on what she believes is the ghost of Belasco's son, Daniel. She's a rather direct young woman, especially considering the situation she's walked into, and some of her optimistic and matter-of-fact reactions to things in the house remind us of some of the more innocent women in Hitchcock's canon, like Barbara Bel Geddes' Midge from Vertigo or his daughter Patricia's Barbara Morton in Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock often had mercy on characters like her, but at this point in his career he was breaking a lot of the rules he had once established.

The other female character featured in The Legend of Hell House is Ann Barrett, played by Gayle Hunnicutt, and she's the character Hitchcock really would have had fun with. She finds herself in the house simply because she's the devoted wife of the man in charge of the investigation, and the house quickly latches on to her. The only reasons for this that the film allows us to assume are a) she's a woman and b) she's sexually frustrated.

One of the film's most intense moments occurs when Ann, possessed by the primal spirits of the house, throws herself at the male character in the film who's not her husband. She grinds her teeth and sweats all over the screen and growls about how much fun it would be if the people in the house all - for lack of a better term - got freaky. And she's very convincing about it. Mrs. Danvers' character came with an implied sexual relation to Rebecca, but the portrayal of the possessed Ann here feels like a moment where all the rules that held Hitchcock back in 1940 have been thrown out the window and replaced by a moment of untethered lust.

The closest thing we have to the second Mrs. DeWinter here is physical medium Ben Fischer, played by the great Roddy McDowall. While the house physically torments the women that enter it, Fischer is the character whose sanity is most blatantly attacked by the house. Fischer is the sole survivor of a previous investigation at Hell House, and his psychic connection to it makes him an easy target. Ben and Florence are clearly more dangerous to Belasco and Hell House than the leader of the expedition, who just wants to wipe the house clean with a giant ghost vacuum machine (I'm pretty sure that's not the technical term, but it's what I'm going with), and Fischer's restrained approach while facing the house makes him the character in the film who needs to step up if he's going to make it out of Hell House alive.

It's hard to see Hitchcock spending as much time on the spiritual and scientific aspects of The Legend of Hell House as this film does; both of these themes were often bumped out of his work in the name of adventure and escapism. But The Legend of Hell House has such a playful psychology toward its characters that I really wish I could see what Hitchcock would have done with them near the end of his career. He might have made a more playful version of the film - perhaps sacrificing some of the dread for a more direct threat - but I think he would have enjoyed the similarities between this film's ending and the endings of Rebecca and Psycho, each of which feature a surprising revelation about the unseen force that haunts the film.

Like I said at the beginning - I'm taking a big leap of faith about my favorite director's approach to filmmaking with this double feature. But it makes sense that a man who once said "I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks" would've jumped at the opportunity to make a haunted house film that was more aggressive than a Selznick produced melodrama ever could be. Rebecca shows us how Hitchcock was able to make a novel about a second wife feel like a kind of haunted house story, and The Legend of Hell House makes me dream about what a purely Hitchcockian haunted house story could be. It might not be the double feature anyone expected, but if it's a choice that shocks you then I'm glad I could provide one too.