Yes, EC, the artistry of that scene with Arbogast, actually the entire (roughly) first third of Psycho is for my money far better than the first third of SoTL. There's some real "precision movement" in the film that the later picture doesn't have; an uncluttered and yet very specific quality that had pretty much vanished from the face of the earth in the thirty years between Psycho and SoTL.
The offbeat aspects of the major players in each film is strangely similar even as the players are themselves quite different. Scott Glenn, I think it's fair to say, was a better actor than John Gavin. Jodie Foster, while strong and confident, didn't quite blow me away as Clarice as she did so many other admirers of the film. There's competence in her work, but she's always been not quite master class in my book. Nearer to high journeyman.
Anthony Hopkins dang near owns the movie. He was unlike the other Anthony but for the first name and the "pluralized" last English name (not sure what, in singular form, a hopkin or a perkin is, but no matter). I'd say he's not as good as Perkins in the movie. His lines, while smart and clever, not close to the level of what Perkins was given. Also, he appeared at times to be aiming for flamboyance, a dash and dazzle, if you will, and I don't think he quite pulled if off, good as he was. He's also hammy at times. Perkins never was, as he played it straight from start to finish and WAS Norman Bates all the way. Hopkins seemed to be having a rip-roaring old time as Hannibal.
Ted Levine gave what may, sadly , be the performance of his career. I know he's still active and can do other things, but as with Richard Widmark, whom I always knew whose obituary, when it came, would reference, first, how he achieved fame on screen when he pushed an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs (shades of Psycho here, huh?), and then everything else, Levine's obituary will start with mentioning his astonishing, almost too real for a mainstream movie performance as Buffalo Bill.
Levine is rather the "forgotten man" of SoTL. I mean, he's remembered but less by name than the character he portrays. In this he reminds me of cult horror icon Dwight Frye,--the Buffalo Bill of pre-Code Universal horrors,--no small accomplishment, that. Frye will always be the slavish, cackling, spider eating Renfield of the 1931 Dracula. SoTL has kind of two Normans,--Hannibal and just plain Bill--with the first the sane guy; even though he's a cannibal he's also, like Simon Oakland, a shrink (getting a bit surreal here, I admit) rather as Dracula has two creeps: big creep and little creep, SoTL has two weirdos, a more or less sane one and an off the charts madman from Hell.
Audiences loved Hopkins as Hannibal and to this day every time I see him in an interview when asked, as he invariably is, to go into Hannibal mode he does so with good humor, and the audience cheers and applauds like they're watching William Shatner at a Star Trek convention. Now THAT's weird, if you think about it. (Thankfully, The Exorcist's Linda Blair never became a real star, thus she wasn't called upon on TV talk shows to spin her head around, spew forth green vomit and say to Mike or Merv "you're mother fVcks the pope".) But back to Ted: he's real scary in his basement lair. He feels truly evil in all his scenes, making old world gentleman Bela Lugosi's Dracula look like Danny Kaye by comparison. This must have hurt Levine's career, far more so than Norman Bates hurt Perkins', as Perkins was still somewhat of a star attraction and got good parts.
Two very different movies, Psycho and SoTL, and yet so similar in so many ways. I think that the two headliner stars of the earlier film are far superior in their roles to Hopkins and Foster in the later picture, who were very good but not great. A word of praise for Janet Leigh's pitch perfect playing of Marion Crane in Psycho. I can't think of a single scene in SoTL in which Foster, like Leigh, probably the biggest actual star in the film, comes close to Leigh's sensual, honest yet crooked, loving and yet highly rational, capable of great empathy and yet insightful in ways Jodie Foster's character never really is. This isn't necessarily the fault of Foster, who did the best she could with what she was given, but it does show, in Leigh, just how brilliant she could be when given a real character to play.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Yes, EC, the artistry of that scene with Arbogast,
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Which, honestly, is worth somebody's study sometime. HOW did that shot come into being. Given the fact that other shots of the house in the film are more "fuzzy and matte-shot-ish," its almost as if something accidental happened here to perfect the crystal 3-D clarity of the shot and the precision of the composition. I think its day-for-night, at least, and the camera is farther back near the back of the motel, closer to the house. Balsam's walk is impeccable -- precise. And long enough to engender dread.
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actually the entire (roughly) first third of Psycho is for my money far better than the first third of SoTL. There's some real "precision movement" in the film that the later picture doesn't have; an uncluttered and yet very specific quality that had pretty much vanished from the face of the earth in the thirty years between Psycho and SoTL.
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Well one of the great pleasures in watching Psycho is to FEEL that precision. The actors move almost like dancers, the shots were assembled with a near-mathematical rhythm.
I fear Jonathan Demme came to SOTL with no such simplicity in his artist's head; he had other effects to try out(Lecter facing Clarice in the chamber) and, unfortunately, a fair amount of FBI HQ set-up to film for awhile(Scott Glenn is compelling, but Foster's other young FBI friends aren't very interesting.)
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
The offbeat aspects of the major players in each film is strangely similar even as the players are themselves quite different. Scott Glenn, I think it's fair to say, was a better actor than John Gavin.
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Yes. Poor John Gavin. He seems to have sought a standard hunky leading man career in Hollywood(as a Rock Hudson clone, I might add, he had Hudson's agent), and ended up endlessly studied for his work in Psycho, and, to a lesser extent, Spartacus. I get the feeling he wished he wasn't in such important, often-viewed today movies. Gavin had a funny quote: "If I knew they would be classics when I made them, I would have paid more attention to what went on for my memories." But John, c'mon -- Hitchcock and Kubrick and Douglas and Olivier?
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Jodie Foster, while strong and confident, didn't quite blow me away as Clarice as she did so many other admirers of the film. There's competence in her work, but she's always been not quite master class in my book. Nearer to high journeyman.
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Yes, I've always felt the Jodie Foster performance in Lambs was a bit mannered. She takes an understandable take on the character -- she's terrified of Lecter, but will fight her fears to engage with him -- and never really abandons that one note(a tremulous voice with a Southern accent, a look of continual humiliation being fought.) Its a performance that rather calls attention to itself. But her character is very good, a role model to be sure.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Anthony Hopkins dang near owns the movie. He was unlike the other Anthony but for the first name and the "pluralized" last English name (not sure what, in singular form, a hopkin or a perkin is, but no matter).
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Ha. Its one of those great little "Hollywood coincidences" that Anthony Hopkins and Anthony Perkins had such near-same names. Hopkins was announced AS Anthony Perkins when he won some minor award for SOTL and said from the stage: "I should have come up wrapped in a shower curtain."
Why, its almost as weird as Kathy BATES winning for her psycho in Misery the year before(and Bates said she'd gotten Norman Bates taunts all her life.)
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I'd say he's not as good as Perkins in the movie. His lines, while smart and clever, not close to the level of what Perkins was given.
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True. Also, Hopkins had been around a LONG time when he made SOTL. He wasn't such a fresh surprise as Perkins was as Bates. Hopkins had already played a Psycho in Magic(1978) and some other villains as well, I think.
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Also, he appeared at times to be aiming for flamboyance, a dash and dazzle, if you will, and I don't think he quite pulled if off, good as he was. He's also hammy at times.
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Yes, he was. The role was kind of written that way.
But I will say this: Brian Cox work as Lecter in "Manhunter" (1986) can be viewed on YouTube and you can see Cox doing Lecter in a "dull and serious mode." Its good work, but with no flamboyance whatsoever. Hopkins figured out, I think, that Lecter needed to be bigger than life...and he gave us that great bit where after his famous "I ate his liver with fava beans and a Chianti" line.. he sucks through his mouth as if finishing the last piece of liver. GROSS...after all that erudition.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
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Perkins never was, as he played it straight from start to finish and WAS Norman Bates all the way.
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Hitchcock in 1960 perhaps didn't have the latitude to let his psycho be played TOO wild. (He got that chance in Frenzy with Bob Rusk.) And the strategy is to keep Norman Bates seeming "nice and normal" as possible at all times...with Mother seeping through only occasionally(usually in cold rages when Marion and Arbogast say bad things about Mother.)
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Hopkins seemed to be having a rip-roaring old time as Hannibal.
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Well, that tyrant doc who runs the asylum introduces him as a man who eats people and once bit the tongue off of a nurse "without his pulse rate increasing at all." Lecter is set up as a horrific bad guy from the get go; Norman Bates, nope.
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What Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter share (other than Ebert's contention that they are "hard wired to kill") is the maintainence of SOMETHING that forces us to like them despite ourselves.
With Norman, its his politeness and how he seems so put upon by the investigators that invade the Bates Motel. He's only trying to protect his mother.
With Lecter, it is the creeping feeling that he really LIKES Clarice, and will likely never feel like eating her. He forces that creep Miggs to swallow his own tongue for insulting Clarice, and he tells her at the end that he won't come for her. He LIKES Clarice. Its a fatherly thing(despite Thomas Harris' later awful decision to make them lovers -- WRONG) and we like Lecter BECAUSE he likes her. Even as he is eating other people and wearing their faces.
And keep in mind, when Lecter heads off to "have an old friend for dinner' at the film's end, he is also out to kill the tyrant who was CLARICEs enemy, and who tried to set Clarice up for danger.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Ted Levine gave what may, sadly , be the performance of his career.
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What's interesting about both Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon/Manhunter is that Lecter is the "side psycho" to a plot about the hunt for a "psycho at large." The Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon; Buffalo Bill, here. We've had two Tooth Fairies(Tom Noonan, Ralph Fiennes) but it looks like we will have only one Buffalo Bill.
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I know he's still active and can do other things,
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He has played "sympathetic boss cops" in Monk and elsewhere; oddly, he's played a lot of good guys since playing Bill...maybe to try to avoid the Widmark thing.
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but as with Richard Widmark, whom I always knew whose obituary, when it came, would reference, first, how he achieved fame on screen when he pushed an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs (shades of Psycho here, huh?),
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Yes, that old lady down the staircase seemed to stand as THE moment of screen violence before Psycho. And hey: it involves and old lady and a staircase. You might say that Hitchcock turned the tables here, with the Arbogast murder.
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and then everything else, Levine's obituary will start with mentioning his astonishing, almost too real for a mainstream movie performance as Buffalo Bill.
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Helluva a performance , focused, I felt, on that thick, clotted voice he uses -- he seems dullish, almost mentally backward, but he proves more smart than he seems. And entirely mad.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Levine is rather the "forgotten man" of SoTL. I mean, he's remembered but less by name than the character he portrays. In this he reminds me of cult horror icon Dwight Frye,--the Buffalo Bill of pre-Code Universal horrors,--no small accomplishment, that. Frye will always be the slavish, cackling, spider eating Renfield of the 1931 Dracula. SoTL has kind of two Normans,--Hannibal and just plain Bill--with the first the sane guy; even though he's a cannibal he's also, like Simon Oakland, a shrink (getting a bit surreal here, I admit) rather as Dracula has two creeps: big creep and little creep, SoTL has two weirdos, a more or less sane one and an off the charts madman from Hell.
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Yes, there is that. Its rather as if the FBI figures they should use their brilliant psychologist psycho(Lecter) as a "snobbish overseer" of the more guardian variety supercreeps out there.
In Red Dragon, BTW, the imprisoned Lecter sided WITH The Tooth Fairy, smuggling messages to him in an effort to direct the Tooth Fairy to kill the FBI man who had caught Lecter. Lecter hates the FBI man in Red Dragon; rather likes the FBI woman in SOTL. I suppose this made Lecter more sympathetic in the more famous film.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Audiences loved Hopkins as Hannibal and to this day every time I see him in an interview when asked, as he invariably is, to go into Hannibal mode he does so with good humor, and the audience cheers and applauds like they're watching William Shatner at a Star Trek convention. Now THAT's weird, if you think about it.
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Well, Hopkins did his time as a serious, Shakespearan actor. And recall one of his early great roles was in The Elephant Man. I think he's just tickled to get to pull Lecter out for a run. Why let OTHER impressionists do it.
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(Thankfully, The Exorcist's Linda Blair never became a real star, thus she wasn't called upon on TV talk shows to spin her head around, spew forth green vomit and say to Mike or Merv "you're mother fVcks the pope".)
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Ha, ha, ha. I always used to worry about Linda Blair's career and life, but she seems to have survived. She was a "trendy" movie actress who didn't really have much longevity on screen, but doesn't seem to have fallen into poverty or drugs that I know of.
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But back to Ted: he's real scary in his basement lair. He feels truly evil in all his scenes, making old world gentleman Bela Lugosi's Dracula look like Danny Kaye by comparison. This must have hurt Levine's career, far more so than Norman Bates hurt Perkins', as Perkins was still somewhat of a star attraction and got good parts.
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Well, I would say that Levine at least managed to play sympathetic cops enough to beat back some of the Bill thing. As for Perkins, because we don't really see him kill anybody in Psycho, and because he is so charming and handsome...he got to keep his career. Even a FEW romantic parts after Psycho. Looks will out.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Two very different movies, Psycho and SoTL, and yet so similar in so many ways.
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Well, one feels a bit like a Universal horror movie, and the other plays a lot like a policier with scientific technque. So they don't really match up as a matter of tone.
Where they DO match up is in the creation of two great "sympathetic villains" who proved very fascinating in their classic films -- and very exploitable in sequels and series.
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I think that the two headliner stars of the earlier film are far superior in their roles to Hopkins and Foster in the later picture, who were very good but not great.
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Well, Perkins and Leigh were in the greatest roles they'd ever play, for the greatest director they'd ever work for(yeah, I know they also worked for Welles, but Hitchcock knew story and promotion.) And let's face it: Jack Nicholson COULD have played Lecter. Anthony Perkins made Norman Bates his own.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
A word of praise for Janet Leigh's pitch perfect playing of Marion Crane in Psycho. I can't think of a single scene in SoTL in which Foster, like Leigh, probably the biggest actual star in the film, comes close to Leigh's sensual, honest yet crooked, loving and yet highly rational, capable of great empathy and yet insightful in ways Jodie Foster's character never really is. This isn't necessarily the fault of Foster, who did the best she could with what she was given, but it does show, in Leigh, just how brilliant she could be when given a real character to play
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Well, Leigh came from a tradition of glamour and had played the sexpot(Touch of Evil, The Vikings.) Foster -- for reasons we seem to know now about her personal life-- really never went for the sensual (except in that movie where she gets raped.) Leigh as Marion Crane at once showed off her sensuality(with Gavin in the hotel room, in the shower scene) and repressed it in certain ways(her dowdy dressuit on the road; her quietude in the parlor with Norman Bates.)
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SOTL got all the nominations and Oscar wins that Psycho could not in 1960, but Psycho stands not only as the first one there...but as the more galvanic movie memory. Those 78/52 seconds and shots in the shower scene are something so dominating of movie history that the SOTL equivalent -- Lecter killing the cops in his cell and escaping -- just feels a bit pedestrian in comparison.
Both great movies...but one's a little greater.
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telegonus (728)
7 years ago
A late return and not a lot of time at this ungoldly hour:
Psycho and SoTL also share a certain (for American movies) Movie Of The Year qualities, something very few horror or "shock" movies have. King Kong is another. The 1973 The Exorcist's a maybe. It was a late in the year release, very much of the Watergate era; its appeal hasn't held up.
Then one of our faves, Jaws. Definitely THE movie to see in 1975, though before I saw it I would personally have chosen Nashville, which I caught in a sneak preview. Alas, Jaws blew the Altman film out of the water.
As to Psycho being greater than SoTL, total agreement. It's more artistic, Alfred Hitchcock had more power over the film and how it was made than Jonathan Demme did with SoTL, though I'm not sure whether Demme would have, without restraints, made as great a film, much as I rather doubt that Jaws would have turned out as well as it did had Steven Spielberg "owned" Universal (that would come later, LOL!),. At the time he was for all intents and purposes a contract director.
Perkins and Hopkins are near equal in talent as I see it, with the former able to do things the latter can't and vice versa. Tony has or had in his youth a little boy lost quality that l've never seen in Hopkins even when he was young. However Hopkins has a gravitas, an authority, on screen, that Perkins lacked, as in I can see Hopkins as if not Sherlock Holmes any number of other British detectives of fiction; while for the life of me I can't imagine Perkins as Philo Vance or Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe or Michael Shayne,--certainly not the "famously plump" Nero Wolfe.
Yes, Jodie Foster has an actorish (actressish?) quality that undercuts everything I've seen her in, and I do think she's good. There are suspension of disbelief issues that I have with her, as with many actors who "grew up in Hollywood", from Elizabeth Taylor to Roddy McDowall. They all seem to lack a groundedness (sic) in the real world; understandably, I suppose.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
A late return and not a lot of time at this ungoldly hour:
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A welcome return and I reply at a more reasonable hour...
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Psycho and SoTL also share a certain (for American movies) Movie Of The Year qualities,
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Its perhaps "the expected curmudgeon" of me to mourn the LOSS of a "Movie of the Year." It seems like there was a time when we knew what they were : The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars. They were called "blockbusters," and while today ANY given summer has a LOT of blockbusters(movies that can gross 500 million to a billiion worldwide)...today's blockbusters are rather preordained. Supes, Bats, Spidey, The Avengers. Its all rather expected and as on time as a subway train.
I was thumbing through an "Entertainment Weekly" and its "Big Summer Preview" and even those PR pushers seemed demoralized. Well, we got a 5th Pirates and a 5th Transformers and Despicable Me 3...they had to push the "Ms. John Wick"(Atomic Blonde) as "the big movie of July."
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Guardians of the Galaxy 2 "rises above" because, within its Marvel genre , it has been established as Star Warry, funny, well-cast and, well, its got some Blast from the Past Guest Stars in Sly Stallone and Kurt Russell. I intend to see it, and hopefully enjoy it but...it doesn't feel like the blockbusters of old. (And I realize: I'm not the intended audience, anyway.)
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mattjoes (53)
7 years ago
Its perhaps "the expected curmudgeon" of me to mourn the LOSS of a "Movie of the Year." It seems like there was a time when we knew what they were : The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars. They were called "blockbusters," and while today ANY given summer has a LOT of blockbusters(movies that can gross 500 million to a billiion worldwide)...today's blockbusters are rather preordained. Supes, Bats, Spidey, The Avengers. Its all rather expected and as on time as a subway train.
Yes! I was watching Tootsie some months ago, and while I didn't particularly care for it, I enjoyed reading afterwards it was the second highest-grossing film in the US in 1982. A romantic comedy. A. Romantic. Comedy. As I said, not crazy about it, but I relished the thought of a film of that genre being in the collective consciousness for a couple of months. And to think the year before, On Golden Pond, a film in which both stars were in their seventies, also held second place.
I just had a look at the lists of highest-grossers from 2010 to date. Mostly sci-fi, fantasy and animated films. There's nothing wrong with those genres, but more variety in the big blockbuster arena would be good!
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Yes! I was watching Tootsie some months ago, and while I didn't particularly care for it, I enjoyed reading afterwards it was the second highest-grossing film in the US in 1982. A romantic comedy. A. Romantic. Comedy.
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Incredible, isn't it. It was an Oscar favorite for nominations, too. Dustin Hoffman got a huge career boost and Sydney Pollack became a Star Director even bigger than before. It had a great script, and a great LARGE cast of comedy talent -- Bill Murray just playing a small but CONTINUOUS part was a bonus. But also Jessica Lange (Oscar winning), Dabney Coleman, Teri Garr, Charles Durning, and that guy who kept trying to kiss Hoffman with his tongue.
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As I said, not crazy about it, but I relished the thought of a film of that genre being in the collective consciousness for a couple of months.
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Yes. Animal House had clicked the same way...but that was for guys and college towns. Tootsie was, indeed, a romantic comedy (and a clue: my grandmother liked it.)
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And to think the year before, On Golden Pond, a film in which both stars were in their seventies, also held second place.
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THAT was considered a fluke even in '81. The combination of Fonda and Hepburn AND Jane Fonda...somehow about four generations of fans showed up.
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I just had a look at the lists of highest-grossers from 2010 to date. Mostly sci-fi, fantasy and animated films. There's nothing wrong with those genres, but more variety in the big blockbuster arena would be good!
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Well, the rut is the rut. Once these productions got worldwide distribution, they became rather automatic billion-dollar earners. Money goes into the making of them, but not much wit or thought.
We are stuck. But occasional surprises pop up.
I was going to say "Titanic," but OMG, that's 20 years ago!
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Psycho and SoTL also share a certain (for American movies) Movie Of The Year qualities, something very few horror or "shock" movies have.
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That remains particularly "weird" with regard to Psycho. Such a worldwide event...and yet such a sick, deeply frightening experience, seeped in Hitchcock's rather heavy formalism. But the shocks and screams were there, too -- it was FUN, demonstrably(funner still because it was so sick...and scary.)
And this: My favorite of the 50 or so 1960 reviews I've tracked down on Psycho was from the LA Herald Examiner, reporting on a first day's matinee theater filled with KIDS. All dropped off by their parents as if for a William Castle movie -- and screaming their heads off ("One child," reported the critic, " fell into the aisle.") To that extent, we must remember that Psycho is an "adult and shocking film" that evidently played to a lot of pre-teen and teen audiences in '60.
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King Kong is another.
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Certainly so. Doing double duty as "the first big monster movie"(after a silent "Lost World"?) -- the Jurassic Park of its time -- AND as a shocker. Not to mention its tragic, near tearjerking aspects(like Psycho and Jaws, Kong plays in a lot of genres at once.)
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The 1973 The Exorcist's a maybe. It was a late in the year release, very much of the Watergate era; its appeal hasn't held up.
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Funny thing: a lot of 70's blockbusters were programmed for Xmas: The Sting, The Exorcist, The Towering Inferno, King Kong '76. But Jaws pushed "the summer blockbuster" and Star Wars nailed it down.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
I remember this about The Exorcist: it was "paced" as a blockbuster by The Sting. They opened around the same Xmas week and came close to the same gross. I think the deal was this(in LA at least): The Exorcist played one LA theater with lines stretching for miles; The Sting was in a LOT of theaters(well, more than a few) and able to take in all that cash without the huge lines. It remains interesting that The Sting was the "nice" doppelganger to The Exorcist and that The Sting made ITS blockbuster dough on the strength of its two leads, its plot, and (a little bit) its Ragtime music.
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Then one of our faves, Jaws. Definitely THE movie to see in 1975,
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I recall, after seeing it (first matinee, first day), that I would go see other movies all summer long and they played the Jaws trailer before hand("In Our Adjacent Theater") and I wanted to go see it AGAIN.
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though before I saw it I would personally have chosen Nashville, which I caught in a sneak preview. Alas, Jaws blew the Altman film out of the water.
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Pauline Kael famously predicted that Nashville would be a blockbuster and was utterly flummoxed by Jaws. I suppose the issue was that Nashville was looking to be a "great early seventies film" -- and it came out too late in the decade.
The Godfather was huge in 1972(I waited in long lines to see it) and Star Wars was huge in 1977(ditto) but...
in 1997, Star Wars got a 20th Anniversary release and The Godfather got a 25th Anniversary release and famously...Star Wars made 100 million(or more) and Godfather did barely anything. "The message was clear": the Silver Era of the 70's was not just over...it wasn't even much cared about.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Sidebar: I often talk Frenzy on this board. Its from 1972 but its not my favorite of 1972...The Godfather was. Even as I waited in a long line to see The Godfather...I just walked in to see Frenzy. No wait at all. Still, Frenzy filled me with exhilaration in '72("Hitchcock's BACK!") and it took something as big as The Godfather(which I saw three times in '72) to overcome my "Hitchcock comeback rush."
And this: both The Godfather and Frenzy featured extended strangulation scenes(Luca Brasi, Brenda Blaney). Weird how things just sort of turn up at the same time.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
As to Psycho being greater than SoTL, total agreement.
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Its just the way it is...
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It's more artistic, Alfred Hitchcock had more power over the film and how it was made than Jonathan Demme did with SoTL, though I'm not sure whether Demme would have, without restraints, made as great a film, much as I rather doubt that Jaws would have turned out as well as it did had Steven Spielberg "owned" Universal (that would come later, LOL!),. At the time he was for all intents and purposes a contract director.
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That's a great point about Spielberg and Jaws. As with Coppola and The Godfather, these directors were under the gun and under threat of firing(well, Coppola was, Spielberg not so much.) They were being watched closely by studio bosses and had to "tow the line" even as they were creative men with great casts and scripts(well, The Godfather was great; Jaws was good.)
Famously, once these guys made zillions and had no studio interference, things changed. Coppola crashed and burned (Apoclypse Now was great, One from the Heart and Cotton Club broke him.). Spielberg became a studio owner who didn't have to listen to anybody, resulting, I think in a "Jurassic Park" that was a lot weaker in narrative than "Jaws."
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telegonus (728)
7 years ago
Yeah, things like those stranglings from 1972 are weird. In the early Sixties we had, it seems, one apocalyptic feeling serious black and white film after another from which one might have inferred that the world be be burnt to a cinder by the end of the decade. One gets that vibe even from films dominated by children, such as Lord Of The Flies and the Children/ Village Of The Damned pictures.
Had there ever been anything else like it? The early Depression era produced many grim pictures, whether crime or horror, things like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Wild Boys Of The Road; and yet from the same period came the Gold Diggers and Big Broadcasts, 42nd Street and Flying Down To Rio as well as such comedy faves as the Marx Brothers, Mae West, W.C. Fields and Lauren & Hardy.
To be fair, though, the game changer in Fifties Hollywood was television, and the major studios were giving up on making family oriented pictures,--Biblical and ancient epic pictures aside--and the counter-intuitive genius of Walt Disney & Company came to the rescue, first with such efforts as Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
By decade's end live action Disney product was becoming commonplace, especially in neighborhood theaters, so, after 1960. to counteract those apocalyptic pictures we got Pollyana, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Parent Trap, the Flubber pictures, Mary Poppins, et al, and many of these films (probably most, LOL!) outgrossed the more serious fare even as the critics didn't pay much attention to them. So maybe the yin has always been there to counterbalance the yang in American movies.
After all those uber-grim pictures of the first half of the Seventies things had to change. Much as I disliked those sci-fi and franchise type films that in effect replaced them they did offer some uplift (of a sort), often with a New Age "spiritual" twist. Then came the "new All-Americanism" of the Reagan era, also upbeat if too reactionary for my tastes.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Yeah, things like those stranglings from 1972 are weird.
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It occurs to me that The Godfather had two major strangling scenes -- Big Luca Brasi early on, and then the traitorous brother-in-law Carlo at the very end.
Each was strangled with a "garrote," which became identified as a "Mafia means of murder." I recall the blurb for the book of The Godfather: "They use guns, knives, axes, and garrotes to kill." That book blurb practically sold The Godfather as...Psycho. The horrific murders were the selling card(other than the sex...in the book.)
In each case, the strangling meant something. Luca Brasi was a huge man and you'd think they'd shoot to kill, but Sollozzo the Turk pinned Luca's hand to the bar with a knife(Coppola added this detail for the movie; Hagen earlier says "Sollozo is good with a knife.") and two men held Luca while a third did the strangling from behind. Thus did Luca Brasi prove "a hard man to kill."
Carlo getting strangled at the end, by Clemenza("Hello, Carlo") from behind in the car, with Carlo's shoes crashing out at us through the windshield -- is meant by Michael Corleone as the most savage execution he can request. And Michael stands by to watch the murder take place. Carlo helped get brother Sonny killed.
The "Godfather" stranglings were meant to show just how down and dirty these Mafia men could get. But the stranglings were of men, in the line of duty.
The extended strangling of Brenda Blaney in Frenzy took things to a more distressing level -- she was a woman, a total innocent, utterly "unspared" by her male killer...a man who(rather like Norman Bates before him) had conflated the act of sex with the act of killing.
Both The Godfather and Frenzy were rated "R," and part of their message was : violence would no longer be quick and easy and stylized. Came the 70s, we were making it real.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
In the early Sixties we had, it seems, one apocalyptic feeling serious black and white film after another from which one might have inferred that the world be be burnt to a cinder by the end of the decade.
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The nuclear era and the Cold War were upon us; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shown what an H-bomb could do.
I suppose filmmakers believed that On the Beach and the matched pair of Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove were necessary to confront all of us with the terrible situation we had brought on ourselves: man now had the power to destroy his world. And escalating saber-rattling could get us all killed.
My parents took me along to see Fail Safe AND Dr. Strangelove. I was getting the "duck and cover" drills at school. Oddly, ,enough, I wasn't scared...I just sort of figured if things DID end...it would be quick. One moment here, one moment gone. It was a weird way to grow up, I realize now. (And of course, it would not necessarily have BEEN quick...)
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One gets that vibe even from films dominated by children, such as Lord Of The Flies and the Children/ Village Of The Damned pictures.
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Children are such horrible people...mean, cruel, judgmental, demanding, ruthless. And yet we treat them so kindly. Hah.
I recall the lawyer's description of the Necktie Strangler and his ilk, in Frenzy: "Among people they can seem like adults, but they are really remain dangerous children."
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Had there ever been anything else like it? The early Depression era produced many grim pictures, whether crime or horror, things like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Wild Boys Of The Road; and yet from the same period came the Gold Diggers and Big Broadcasts, 42nd Street and Flying Down To Rio as well as such comedy faves as the Marx Brothers, Mae West, W.C. Fields and Lauren & Hardy.
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Well, it seems there was always a "split" in the movies between taking people out of their woes and examining their woes. Sometimes a really grim story can lift you up: The horrible life of a family on screen may make you feel better about your own woes: "Hey, I least I don't have it THAT bad."
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
To be fair, though, the game changer in Fifties Hollywood was television, and the major studios were giving up on making family oriented pictures,--Biblical and ancient epic pictures aside--and the counter-intuitive genius of Walt Disney & Company came to the rescue, first with such efforts as Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
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Several trends happened at once , once TV came in. There was a rush to combat the b/w TV screen with Technicolor and VistaVision and Cinemascope. But eventually, in the 60s when color TVs were in many homes and TV shows were produced in color...the R rating was the way out. Sex, nudity, cussing and ultraviolence. You could only get THAT "at the movies."
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By decade's end live action Disney product was becoming commonplace, especially in neighborhood theaters, so, after 1960. to counteract those apocalyptic pictures we got Pollyana, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Parent Trap, the Flubber pictures, Mary Poppins, et al, and many of these films (probably most, LOL!) outgrossed the more serious fare even as the critics didn't pay much attention to them.
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Well, Uncle Walt figured out something real quick about the Post War Era: the Baby Boom had supplied a ready audience of kids, with parents inclined to (a) come with the kids to the theater and (b) vicariously become kids themselves again.
Disney dominated this market for a couple of decades...and then Lucas(Star Wars), Spielberg(ET), Pixar and Dreamworks took the model over. And Disney came back. There are STILL lots of kids and lots of adults who want to feel like kids.
On the one hand, it seems to me that Disney ran "parallel" to the grim adult films out there. But as we know, Disney could be pretty grim, too. Parents lost or kidnapped in Bambi and Dumbo; Boys turned into animals in Pinocchio. Pollyanna breaks her legs in a fall. And Mary Poppins leaves.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
So maybe the yin has always been there to counterbalance the yang in American movies.
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Around 1965, critic Dwight MacDonald asked, " How can both Psycho and The Sound of Music be huge hits? Are people schizophrenic, or do different fans take the field like offensive and defensive teams on a football team?"
The former, Mr. MacDonald. I like Psycho AND I like The Sound of Music. Hitchcock called it: both movies affected my emotions. Hitchcock said that was the root of all hits.
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After all those uber-grim pictures of the first half of the Seventies things had to change.
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There were some happy endings -- The Sting comes to mind -- but even American Graffiti ended on a sad note.
But 1974 went nuts. As George Lucas said "People came out of the theater feeling worse than when they came in."
That said, many of these films were very well-reviewed and praised for their uncompromising view of life(Chinatown, especially.)
But a whole lot of them(not Chinatown), did NOT make money and soon the makers of such films, and the studio execs who greenlighted such films, were out.
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Much as I disliked those sci-fi and franchise type films that in effect replaced them they did offer some uplift (of a sort), often with a New Age "spiritual" twist.
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"May the Force be with you" demonstrated, I think, a quest in human beings for something spiritual..if not religious.
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Then came the "new All-Americanism" of the Reagan era, also upbeat if too reactionary for my tastes
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Given that Hollywood has never been much of a Republican town(even when James Stewart and John Wayne worked there), I remember being surprised by the support given to Top Gun and Rambo with their militaristic themes. And remember: the Bad Guy in Ghostbusters is an EPA bureaucrat. Reagan's win seemed to buck up a certain type of movie being produced.
Not so in the Trump era.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Perkins and Hopkins are near equal in talent as I see it,
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Seems about right...though Hopkins got the Oscar(as I'm sure Perkins would have had Psycho been released even 20 years later...but that's impossible...)
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with the former able to do things the latter can't and vice versa. Tony has or had in his youth a little boy lost quality that l've never seen in Hopkins even when he was young. However Hopkins has a gravitas, an authority, on screen, that Perkins lacked,
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Though linked as Norman and Hannibal, the two actors were quite different.
I've been thinking about a grand sad irony I never thought of before:
Silence of the Lambs came out in 1991 and made Anthony Hopkins famous as a psycho. Hopkins won his Oscar in 1992.
Well, 1992 is the year that Anthony PERKINS...died.
Think about it. One era ends, another begins. And, sadly, we never got even a few years where the Two Anthonys could have stood side by side on a stage and compared psychos. Perkins died at a young 60; I assume Hopkins was in his fifties. They were near enough in age that had Perkins lived they could have been a "double act" on talk shows for years. Sigh...
And this: he was no longer really a star in 1991, but Anthony Perkins WAS working. And older.
Why, with more career clout, PERKINS could have played Hannibal Lecter...
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movieghoul (213)
7 years ago
Hopkins and Perkins are professionally linked by the fact that they played the shrink in Equus on Broadway back to back, and Perkins's notices were eqully good. (Actually, Hopkins wasn't the first to play the role, that was Alec McCowan in London.)
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