Don’t Try This at Home

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/03/24/dont-try-this-at-home/

Movies are a form of escapism. As such, they are filled with things that would never work in real life. In the first of what would turn out to be a trilogy of articles, Joe Queenan attempted to recreate scenes from several famous movies. Is it possible that Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen and Peter Bogdanovich have deceived us? Queenan answered the question for the first time in the October 1991 issue of Movieline magazine.

In the memorable opening sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the already fortyish James Stewart, playing a high-ranking detective in the San Francisco Police Department, leaps across an alleyway to a sharply sloping, tiled rooftop approximately five feet away while pursuing a criminal.

Immediately losing his grip, Stewart slips off the rooftop, and only escapes plunging to his death many stories below by securing a shaky hold on a rain spout. His flatfoot companion, seeing Stewart’s plight, abandons the rooftop chase, and comes to his aid. Gingerly clutching one of those flimsy roof tiles, the cop sticks out his hand, only to lose his own grip and fall to a horrible death, triggering Stewart’s subsequent vertigo for the remainder of the film.

Ever since I saw this movie at age 10, I have been troubled by this heart-stopping sequence. At first I thought that my problem was the absurd physical setup of the scene: When Stewart first leaps across the void, the gap between buildings is only around five feet, but when his cop buddy plunges to his death far below, the alleyway is clearly some 20 feet wide. Equally perplexing is Stewart’s dubious motivation for attempting such a dangerous acrobatic feat: Why would a middle-aged man who is hoping to be the next Police Commissioner of San Francisco risk his life attempting to collar some small-time hood?

But as I watched the movie for perhaps the 10th time recently, I realized that neither of these things were what really bothered me about the sequence. What bothered me was the doomed cop’s rescue attempt. Jesus, what on earth was this bozo thinking of? How could a 185-pound middleaged man leaning down from a sharply sloping roof, clinging to a chintzy ceramic tile, possibly think that he could haul another man of the same size and build to safety– with just one hand? Rarely in the history of cinema have viewers been subjected to such aerodynamic and hydraulic lunacy as Hitchcock serves up in Vertigo.

Which pretty much brings me to my central thesis: that movies all too often rely on scams, tricks, stunts, gambits, ploys, ruses or gags that are logically or physically impossible, and often both, and therefore no intelligent person should fashion a lifestyle based on things he has seen stars do in the movies. That would be dumb.

To illustrate my contention, I recently selected pivotal scenes from a dozen motion pictures and went out and made a real-life attempt to recreate them in the real world. Some of these scenes involve scams (Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc?), some involve sex (9 1/2 Weeks, When Harry Met Sally…), some involve feats requiring immense physical prowess (Vertigo), and some involve practical jokes (Bananas, Annie Hall). One film (Spellbound) required me to apply for a job, another (Dial M for Murder) to enlist a friend in a planned murder, a third (Pretty Woman) to seek out the services of a prostitute who would accompany me to a formal dinner at which I would discuss the hostile acquisition of my guest’s corporation. Almost without exception, my findings confirmed my original thesis: Things that work in the movies simply do not work in real life. So if you’re thinking of lending some glamour to your impossibly dreary existence by imitating things you’ve seen in the movies, think again.