Tarantino, Hitchcock, Psycho -- the 50's through the 90s
There's a thread about Tarantino(QT) and his new book but it is getting too long and compressed. So I thought I would start a new thread in a different context. Hitchcock and Psycho are part of it, and I think QT should get some points for putting some arguments in discussion, and stimulating thought.
I'll start here:
QT finds "the 50s and the 80s" to be the worst decades for movies -- before this one(the 2020s.)
He doesn't elaborate too much -- one ends up getting the gist and I suppose it goes like this(my opinion as much as QTs):
The 20s and the 30's : "Pre-code" til about 1934, the movies could be more sexy and salacious back then.
The 30's: OK in QT's book
The 40's: OK in QT's book(perhaps because of postwar noir?)
The 50's: Bad in QT's book(too "tame," run by Technicolor epics and musicals out to battle TV; perhaps too overseen by The Church.)
The 60's: Old Hollywood peaking at the beginning(Psycho, The Apartment, Liberty Valance), New Hollywood booming at the end(Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Wild Bunch.)
The 70s: That Golden Golden Age.
The 80s: Lucas/Spielberg. TV executives take over. (And something else, see below.)
The 90s: Indies arrive in a big way -- Harvey Weinstein(!) and QT and Soderbergh and Kevin Smith. And(says me) the greatest decade for crime and thrillers ever.
STOP.
Some elaborations, but only about SOME of those decades.
I'll start with the 50's. QT so hates that decade for its tameness, and yet: that was HITCHCOCK's biggest decade, with a caveat -- to fully get Hitchcock's incredible run of movies, you have to skip Stage Fright in 1950, start in 1951(with Strangers on a Train) and then roll on through to two movies from the EARLY SIXTIES: Psycho and The Birds.
If one confines Hitchcock's run to "just the fifties," it is missing its climax, so to speak.
Critic Richard Corliss wrote a piece - in 1973 -- on how Psycho was his favorite movie. He wrote (paraphrased) "Its as if the old pudgy possum (Hitchcock) spent the entire fifties making tame, mild little mystery thrillers so he could hammer everybody hard with this historic bloody shocker in 1960." Fair enough - -and true enough.
Psycho in its own weird way almost "invalidated" all the 50's Hitchcock greats that came before it. SUDDENLY, they all DID look tame and twee. The Man Who Knew Too Much,with Jimmy Stewart in his tourist hat and Doris Day in her matronly butch haircut and boxy suit -- looked ANCIENT (never mind that it had the great Albert Hall set-piece and a stylish, brutal knife murder.)
And yet, Hitchcock even in the fifties alone delivered nothing but the goods: classics that weren't hits(Vertigo), hits that weren't classics(Dial M) hits that WERE classics(Rear Window, Strangers on a Train.)
Moreover, Hitchcock sure got away with a lot in those "tame fifties." I think he single-handledly rebuked QT's theory. Consider:
Strangers on a Train: Guy's slutty wife Miriam goes on a date with TWO men, while pregnant from ANOTHER man, allowing herself to be picked up by YET ANOTHER man(Bruno)...who strangles her to death.
I Confess: A priest accused of murder. An affair.
Dial M: A very violent central murder scene in which Grace Kelly is practically raped while being strangled but manages to stab her erstwhile killer. Moreover, Kelly is an " adulteress" who will get her boyfriend in the end.
Rear Window: Raymond Burr chops his wife into pieces, carries her body parts to the East River in suitcases and hides her head in a flower garden and then his bedroom closet(nothing shown, all imagined, still: CREEPY.) Meanwhile: Miss Torso does some real gymnastic dancing in very little clothing.
To Catch a Thief: A lot of sexual repartee tween Grant and Kelly -- and those FIREWORKS.
The Trouble With Harry: A dead body becomes a thing of comedy..a bit sacreligious...and doesn't he smell? MORE sexual repartee and John Forsythe introducing himself to Shirley MacLaine thus: "I'd like to paint you in the nude."
The Man Who Knew Too Much: The terror of the kidnapping of a child(and a shot of a strangling rope being prepared to kill him.) A VERY violent stab to a victim's back(he continues walking on, trying to get the knife out of his back like a man trying to scratch an itch.)
The Wrong Man: Minimal sex(Vera Miles at the beginning), no violence, but the terrifying reality of being falsely accused, of losing your money, of losing your SANITY.
Vertigo: A man heavily kisses the wife of another man --that's sex in a Hitchcock movie. (He sees the wife naked, too.) Tragic ending and "hero" who pretty much goes insane.
North by Northwest: MORE sexual repartee(on a train.) And the biggest action in a thriller ever to that date -- all the way to Mount Rushmore. An early take on the "Evil CIA."
CONT