MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Tarantino on Hitchcock's collab with Her...

Tarantino on Hitchcock's collab with Herrmann, Spielberg's with Williams, and so on.

posted a year ago by swanstep (2628)
55 replies | jump to latest

This week's Video Archive Podcast ep. is devoted to a single film: Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971). Here's the rough quote that's of interest:

There are some directors who have an alliance with a composer and that composer takes them to heights they could never have reached on their own. Those are magnificent marriages whether it's Hitchcock and Herrmann, De Palma and Pino Donnagio, Leone and Morricone, Spielberg and Williams. Other directors, however, make alliances with composers who are 'lesser than', that are not worthy of them, and their movies consequently never reach the heights they could have. E.g., George Miller allies himself with Queen's Brian May to score the Mad Max films. Those scores are corny and the films are good *in spite* of their corny music. Second example: Peckinpah allies himself with Jerry Fielding, none of whose stuff is at all memorable. Straw Dogs (which Tarantino nonetheless classifies as a masterpiece) would be much better with a score by Leone or maybe by a couple of others, but Fielding is a non-entity/disaster.

I think QT is right about all this, and feel that Michael Powell's alliance with Brian Easdale is another case in point. Peeping Tom could have been Psycho but with Easdale's horrid score of bonk-plonk piano it really never had a chance. You have to love Peeping Tom despite its score, and the same thing is true of their other collaborations. Easdale got an Oscar for his score for The Red Shoes but I think that's quite undeserved: while the film-making and the dancing are great, the music's just a placeholder and is shockingly unmemorable. The film would be better with some old Tchaikovsky dubbed in.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

This week's Video Archive Podcast ep. is devoted to a single film: Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971).

---

And so QT continues his newfound "main job" as critic/movie buff. It fits him well. Just wait another decade on that final film, guy.

---

Here's the rough quote that's of interest:
There are some directors who have an alliance with a composer and that composer takes them to heights they could never have reached on their own. Those are magnificent marriages

---

whether it's Hitchcock and Herrmann,

---

I think it must have really come to bug Hitchcock just HOW high Herrmann's music took the traditional Hitchcock film. Vertigo is as much Herrmann's achievement -- EQUALLY to Hitchocck's. Look no further than that near-end sequence where Novak emerges in the green light to kiss a desperate Stewart. How it looks and how the music SOUNDS ...fuse. Weirdly, its as if everything else -- the actors, the art direction, the script(no talk in this scene) -- has to bend to the overall greatness of Hitchocck AND Herrmann together.

And that happened again in NXNW(though not quite so much until the Mount Rushmore climax -- which wouldn't work without Herrmann) and yet AGAIN with Psycho(which turned scences into screams into milliions of dollars in those murder scenes.)

That Hitchcock fired Herrmann off of Torn Curtain remains Hitchcock's greatest sin(Tippi Hedren is levels down from that.) That Herrmann COULD HAVE scored every film from Torn Curtain through Family Plot(Herrmann died in 1975) remains Hitchcock's greatest career tragedy. Even these "weak films of decline"(less Frenzy) would have been better with Herrmann. Frenzy would have been greater still.

---

CONT
---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

De Palma and Pino Donnagio,

---

DePalma was rather forced into his collaboration with Donnagio. Herrman was set to score Carrie but died; DePalma heard Donnagio on some other movie and went with him, and made him "his guy" for quite a few movies , but I never felt that Donnagio had enough REAL thriller talent in him, his scores seemed too lightweight for the material.

And this: In the midst of all those Donnagio scores, DePalma allowed(or was forced to use?) a John Williams score on the big budget studio movie "The Fury." Its a great, thunderous, ever building, rather Herrmanesque credit theme and -- the best score on any DePalma picture. (Interesting about John Williams : in the 70's, he scored Spielberg and Lucas -- but he also scored Hitccock and DePalma.)

---

Leone and Morricone,


---

Absolutely. Those harmonicas, those flutes -- and a Good, Bad, Ugly motif as famous as the Psycho violins to get a joke going in ten seconds of reference somewhere else.

And yet: I think Ennio Morricone's greatest -- most involving -- score is to The Untouchables of 1987 BECAUSE most of it -- except for the staccato opening credit music with harmonica -- does NOT sound like Morricone. You get the stirring ""Charge of the Untouchables" on horseback which became the AFI Lifetime Achievement Theme; you get heartbreaking music for the death of a good guy; you get a baby's lullaby counterpointing a suspense shootout on a staircase...and you get that "trademark" Morricone harmonica at the beginning. You get it ALL in The Untouchables score.

--

CONT


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Spielberg and Williams.

---

Well, those guys will probably be the "all timers" of connected director and composer. Blake Edwards and Henry Mancini come close, but death ended that one(I think Mancini died first.)

The continued collaboration between Spielberg and Williams only puts further to SHAME what Hitchcock did to Herrmann -- and Hitchcock lived to see the beginnings of that collaboration: The Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters, and 1941 were all made while Hitch was alive.

I was heartened to read a few weeks ago that John Williams told Steven Spielberg -- in public -- that Williams plans to retire at 90 have now been...RESCINDED. Williams next score is for the next Indy Jones movie(with Harrison Ford at 80!) and this guy right here now feels as young as a toddler knowing that I might have that many more years of life and work ahead of me. Well, OK, those guys are rich with all the health that delivers(plus health care) but a man can dream?

Williams Jaws theme is just one notch below the Psycho murder violins in screen horror history..but I think his crowning achievement was ET. Just like Vertigo is not Vertigo without Herrmann's contribution; ET simply wouldn't work without Williams soaring heart-pulling music...especially in the final 60 seconds of the film.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I like to tell this story at my expense: when ET came out in the summer of 1982, I was swept up in the whole event status of the movie , saw it a couple of times, cried both times. (I never saw it as PURELY a kid's movie. Ever.) I bought the soundtrack album(a VHS was years away, the music would have to suffice) and I played the final sequence each morning while shaving UNTIL...I noticed I was involuntarily crying just from LISTENING to the music. I had male roomates at the time who found it funny. (I wasn't sobbing, just wiping my eyes a bit.)So I stopped playing the album
but I came to this conclusion: John Williams had discovered musical notes -- highs, lows -- that could MAKE YOU CRY without having to actually watch the movie at all. The music dug deep and grabbed you. ET is Williams greatest musical acheievement. And he won an Oscar for it. You know, one of those Oscars that Herrmann never won.

Sidebar: in the 70's as Herrmann faded out and died(but not before scoring Taxi Driver and two DePalma movies -- "The new guys want me!") the two go-to guys for big, sweeping, thunderous scores were : John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith.

And in 1978, we got two Goldsmiths and one Williams which -- combined -- showed us EXACTLY how to make the opening credit music for a movie so damn exciting that the movie almost CAN'T COMPETE:

John Williams: The Fury(Brian DePalma)
Jerry Goldsmith: Capricorn One(Peter Hyams)
Jerry Goldsmith: The Boys From Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner)

Play those three babies back to back on YouTube and dig on just how exciting thriller scores USED to be. ( I believe that swanstep has advanced the theory that modern directors don't want to be upstaged by such great scores. Pity.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Second example: Peckinpah allies himself with Jerry Fielding, none of whose stuff is at all memorable. Straw Dogs (which Tarantino nonetheless classifies as a masterpiece) would be much better with a score by Leone or maybe by a couple of others, but Fielding is a non-entity/disaster.

---

There was this period of time in the 60's and 70's in which, before Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams fully "phased in," there was some competition from Elmer Bernstein(his great Mag 7 score, his good Great Escape score, his tear-jerking To Kill a Mockingbird score) and actual "60's domination" by Henry Mancini(soon to be unceremoniously fired off of Frenzy by Hitchocck in another one of his old man bonehead moves.)

I myself also liked some "plush jazz" composers who rather took up where Mancini left off: Neal Hefti(famously on The Odd Couple, but more movingly on Harlow and more sexily on How to Murder Your Wife) and Johnny Keating(the great music for the great sleeper Hotel); and Johnny Mandel(a truly gorgeous musical score for a truly repulsive love story turned horror movie called The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea)...all sorts of "ear candy" with a belief that "movie music should be as transporting as the movie itself."


CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

And then there was Jerry Fielding. Peckinpah used him a few times, but the only time I can even REMEMBER Fielding is in The Wild Bunch, and its interesting opening credits sequence, in which "regular" Panavision footage of four "soldiers" entering a town on horseback keeps freeze-framing into sinister images as Fielding's staccato, martial-music adds to the sense of foreboding. Watching some children gleefully torture a scorpion with a bunch of ants is spooky enough, but then comes the final freeze frame on "heroic" William Holden taking bank hostages and barking: "If they move...kill 'em!" Followed by a freeze frame and "Directed By Sam Peckinpah." (Everybody cheers. Yep.)

That's Jerry Fielding's finest hour. The rest -- I forget -- almost.

The almost is: a couple of months back -- and I've posted on this -- I watched on streaming, back to back, Robert Mitchum's two Philip Marlowe movis of the 70's: Farewell My Lovely and The Big Sleep(remakes, both.)

Farewell My Lovely had an emotional, moving, sexy and old-fashioned score(the movie was set in the 40's as originally done) by David Shire. But The Big Sleep(set in 1970's London!) had this weird, staccato, action-oriented, slightly jazzy and actually NOT BAD score by...Jerry Fielding. I was surprised he almost delivered a memorable score on this one. The opening credits and scores can be heard on YouTube.

I've read a lot on Sam Peckinpah -- a great director brought down by booze and drugs; bad treatment of women so he deserved it. (Died age 59, that's not very old) But evidently he yelled at Jerry Fielding over the first score delivered for The Wild Bunch. Sam felt it was awful, an insult to the director himself -- really got mean about it. So maybe Sam Peckinpah "broke" Jerry Fielding.

CONT







reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago


Straw Dogs (which Tarantino nonetheless classifies as a masterpiece) would be much better with a score by Leone or maybe by a couple of others, but Fielding is a non-entity/disaster.

---

All I remember of Jerry Fielding's score for Straw Dogs was that it was somebody's great idea to score Dustin Hoffman's final battle with baddies invading his North England country house...to ...bagpipes! It worked great. Is that a Fielding win?

---

So QT finds Straw Dogs to be a masterpiece, huh? Well...maybe it is. I vividly recall a Christmas time issue of Time Magazine that focused on "the big Christmas hits coming for 1971": Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, and Straw Dogs. Siegel, Kubrick, and Peckinpah delivering a heapin' helpin' of early 70's gore (with rape on the side) and...well, you had to be there , kids.

Hitchcock's somewhat less-famous hit Frenzy came out six months later and you can find on YouTube interesting footage of old man Hitchcock getting VERY ANGRY when an interviewer says:

Interviewer: Would you say that your film Frenzy was inspired by Straw Dogs?
Hitchcock: (His red face getting redder) But I'm NEVER inspired by somebody else's movie when I make one of mine. NO!

I mean, really pissed off. A glimpse at how Hitchcock held power in Hollywood. I believe him. He was doing post-production on Frenzy when Straw Dogs came out.

Still, the interviewer was on point one way: both Straw Dogs and Frenzy have a central rape sequence. But how the films TREATED rape was entirely different.

For Peckinpah, the scene was meant to be titillating and a turn on. The victim, Susan George, is attacked by a former lover and...eventually gives in to him, and ...eventually "likes it." Uh oh.(This is resolved in favor of evil when the boyfriend allows his more dominant gang leader to take over and Susan doesn't like THAT at all.)

For Hitchcock, the rape was anything BUT titiilating, the victim was more matronly than young sensual Susan George..the nudity was more reserved, etc. Of course, Hitchcock's rape scene was worse in one key way: the rapist then strangles his victim to death(his mo.)

Anyway you cut it, 1971 and 1972 were awful years in terms of screen sex and lack of consent. (But hey, in 1972, Raquel Welch made a Western called Hannie Calder in which she was raped by the Three Stooges -- Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, and Jack Elam -- and spent the rest of the movie killing each of them, one by one. Revenge!)

---

From out of this sexual mire, I suppose Straw Dogs emerged as a movie with plenty of atmosphere (the British countryside and foggy moors) and a "theme"(Dustin Hoffman's bespectacled nerd turns murderous hero and kills all of his tormentors.) Hoffman gave the movie its "prestige" profoundity, Sam Peckinpah delivered violence in a modern-day setting -- and in England yet. The sex WAS sexy in this one, which only made it more outrageous.

And..yeah. Straw Dogs. A marker of its time. Good enough I suppose...but not a masterpiece.

And other than those bagpipes, I can't remember a note of Jerry Fielding's score.

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2628) a year ago

I believe that swanstep has advanced the theory that modern directors don't want to be upstaged by such great scores. Pity.
Yes, and QT has been exhibit A for me of that. He's talked quite a lot about how he likes the control that writing soundtrack choices - both particular old songs and pre-existing score elements - into his scripts gives him. In the 'Straw Dogs' podcast he notably doesn't ever reflect on his own scoring proclivities. Maybe something about that will occur in a 'business arising' follow-up episode (these sometimes show up a few days after the main episode).

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I believe that swanstep has advanced the theory that modern directors don't want to be upstaged by such great scores. Pity.

--
Yes, and QT has been exhibit A for me of that. He's talked quite a lot about how he likes the control that writing soundtrack choices - both particular old songs and pre-existing score elements - into his scripts gives him.

---

Yes, QT rather "gets it" even as he is "part of the problem." Given that a Hitchocck movie with a Herrman score is as much a Herrmann movie as a Hitchocck movie(what we HEAR is as powerful as what we see, when Kim Novak emerges from the bathroom or Mother runs out at Arbogast on the stairs), or that a Spielberg movie is a "John Williams movie" at the soaring climaxes of Close Encounters and ET -- QT has got it exactly right: THOSE composers took over their bosses work -- and QT ain't having none of that.

Except once -- he actually hired Ennio Morricone to write original music (including a great opening theme) for The Hateful Eight -- and even though the movie STILL uses "old" Morricone cues(like from The Thing), it was score enough for Very Old Morricone to FINALLY win a Best Score Oscar in 2016 for a 2015 film! Irony all around.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Rumors circulated that after Vertigo and especially Psycho(for which Hitchcock paid Herrmann a cash bonus), Hitchcock felt that maybe Herrmann was taking too much credit(and rightfully so) for Hitchcock movies. It was part of the very complex rationale for firing Herrmann.

I also sensed an even older Hitchcock firing Henry Mancini off of Frenzy because again -- no matter WHO the director is, a "Mancini thriller" is Mancini's baby first of all (Experiment in Terror, Charade, Arabesque,Wait Until Dark.) I'm guessing Hitchcock didn't want to give up his "power" there. (Mancini's "Frenzy" overture can be heard on YouTube and it is at once SO much better than Ron Goodwin's as used in the real movie, and yet, clearly, would have imposed Mancini music on a Hitchocck film.)

And yet -- surprise! -- Hitchcock went ahead and hired the great John Williams to do Family Plot, so the final Hitchcock film sounds just like a SPIELBERG film! Or a LUCAS film! I expect by then, Williams was too powerful(from Jaws) and Hitchcock just gave in.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

In the 'Straw Dogs' podcast he notably doesn't ever reflect on his own scoring proclivities. Maybe something about that will occur in a 'business arising' follow-up episode (these sometimes show up a few days after the main episode).

--

Well, that would be interesting. I suppose "QT the film scholar" can admire all the great movie musical composers even as "QT the film maker" has no interest in letting composers "take over his film." He made an exception for the great Morricone, but STILL threw in some old tracks -- and some weird little known songs -- like Roy Orbison's ditty at the end of The Hateful Eight.

QT is actually continuing the tradition -- begun with The Graduate? -- of scoring entire movies with rock songs both known and unknown. Reservoir Dogs made use of "Little Green Bag," "Stuck in the Middle with You" and Nillson's GREAT novelty tune "Coconut"("You put the lime in the coconut, drink it all up...") to great memorable use. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown went for "70's soul" and the Delfonics et al. And Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gave us a parade of both known AND little known 60's hits. (I was around in the 60's, and I have no memory of some of the songs in that movie, even as songs like "Summertime" and anything by Paul Revere and the Raiders were instant memories.)

But QT also lets his fans play "name that movie music" when he puts in instrumental selections from "Dark of the Sun" and "Kelly's Heroes" and "The Thing" in his movies.

He's QT. He gets to do that. I don't know if there is a Herrmann out there for him. I SUPPOSE he could use 90-something John Williams sometime. Or at least some John Williams score samples...

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

A stray thought:

Most of my favorite movies have favorite SCORES to them:

Psycho
North by Northwest
The Magnificent Seven
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Professionals
ET
Jaws
Terms of Endearment
The Untouchables

...but a few do NOT have memorable scores. The Wild Bunch for one.

Dr. Strangelove for another -- it HAS no score, sampled or otherwise.

The Birds isn't a total favorite of mine but its "scoreless soundtrack" with screeching electronic bird sounds is as much a part of its persona as the screeching violins in Psycho.

And this:

I can name one movie from 1971 -- Play Misty for Me,
and one movie from 1972 -- Frenzy...

..which both use this old-fashioned "fake instrumental rock and roll" that sounds completely, totally phony today.

In Play Misty, its the opening fake rock song as Eastwood drives into Carmel. In Frenzy, its the fake rock instrumental emanating from out of the diner where Bob Rusk departs the potato truck. Back then, this was "usual." Now, the songs in BOTH movies sound fake, fake, FAKE!

reply
formatting help
[–] ElizabethJoestar (943) a year ago

Well, that would be interesting. I suppose "QT the film scholar" can admire all the great movie musical composers even as "QT the film maker" has no interest in letting composers "take over his film."
--
I'm not a filmmaker, but isn't that kind of egotistical of QT? Film is a collaborative medium, and even in cases where the director is involved in much of the production a la Kubrick or Chaplin, they still need competent creatives working with them at the end of the day.

I don't get how having a great, memorable score can upstage your movie unless the rest of the movie is terrible. Or am I missing something here?

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2628) a year ago

I'm not a filmmaker, but isn't that kind of egotistical of QT? Film is a collaborative medium... I don't get how having a great, memorable score can upstage your movie unless the rest of the movie is terrible. Or am I missing something here?
Film is collaborative alright but in the interviews I've heard and read QT has expressed anxiety about handing over some monumental percentage (20%? 30%?....) of his film's impact and meaning to some composer's completely original score. I'd love for him to clarify these remarks but presumably he has a risk/reward equation in mind: sure you *might* get a superb original score out of your composer but you're *much more likely* to get something that is worse than what you (esp. if your tastes is refined as QT's) have been able to assemble for yourself out of pre-existing materials.

Now, QT listens to lots of music when he writes and even allows those prexisting music choices to guide his writing. In some respects this is just an extension back into the writing process of what a lot of directors do in editing (even just for rushes/dailies), where they cut stuff together roughly with some temp music (often taken from previous film scores). Modernly lots of film composers in fact complain that they're often just told to produce a sound-alike (just different enough to avoid copyright/plagiarism) version of the temp score that the director has edited to (and often completely fallen in love with). This isn't a new phenomenon exactly - famously Stanley Kubrick fell in love with all his temp classical music for 2001 and ended up throwing away Alex North's officially commissioned score. But in the digital era all directors have editing suites on their laptops and can obsessively tune their temp music to their hearts content - leading to the 'temp sound-alike' requests late in the process that drive composers bananas.

reply
formatting help
[–] ElizabethJoestar (943) a year ago

Ah yes, I did recall the Kubrick story. I suppose I can get that... it's just a shame because I have heard those complaints about modern composers being requested "temp soundalikes" and I think that has affected the memorability of modern scores in Hollywood movies.

reply
formatting help
[–] ElizabethJoestar (943) a year ago

I also sensed an even older Hitchcock firing Henry Mancini off of Frenzy because again -- no matter WHO the director is, a "Mancini thriller" is Mancini's baby first of all (Experiment in Terror, Charade, Arabesque,Wait Until Dark.) I'm guessing Hitchcock didn't want to give up his "power" there. (Mancini's "Frenzy" overture can be heard on YouTube and it is at once SO much better than Ron Goodwin's as used in the real movie, and yet, clearly, would have imposed Mancini music on a Hitchocck film.)
--
I thought Hitchcock's issue was that Mancini's score was too dark and humorless? He wanted something that would suggest "murder can be fun," as he once told John Williams.

Mancini's thriller scores are altogether better than the unmemorable music Goodwin delivered for Frenzy in the finished film, but with the exception of the fizzy Arabesque, they are all very grim, I suppose, especially The Night Visitor (a bizarre, wintry 1971 chiller featuring an ax-crazy Max von Sydow). TNV is almost medieval in its soundscape, suffocating in its bleakness. Frenzy, for all its horrific violence, does have a strong undercurrent of dark comedy and much of the thematic content of the film involves the casual way bystanders regard violent crimes, so perhaps Goodwin's music offset that better in Hitch's mind?

reply
formatting help
[–] ElizabethJoestar (943) a year ago

I think QT is right about all this, and feel that Michael Powell's alliance with Brian Easdale is another case in point. Peeping Tom could have been Psycho but with Easdale's horrid score of bonk-plonk piano it really never had a chance. You have to love Peeping Tom despite its score, and the same thing is true of their other collaborations. Easdale got an Oscar for his score for The Red Shoes but I think that's quite undeserved: while the film-making and the dancing are great, the music's just a placeholder and is shockingly unmemorable. The film would be better with some old Tchaikovsky dubbed in.
--
I couldn't disagree more. I think Easdale's score for The Red Shoes is brilliant and haunting. I actually listen to the ballet portion of the score on its own sometimes.

Peeping Tom-- well, I can get onboard with the score there being rather meh. I remember next to nothing of it.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I'm not a filmmaker, but isn't that kind of egotistical of QT? Film is a collaborative medium... I don't get how having a great, memorable score can upstage your movie unless the rest of the movie is terrible. Or am I missing something here?

---

Film is collaborative alright but in the interviews I've heard and read QT has expressed anxiety about handing over some monumental percentage (20%? 30%?....) of his film's impact and meaning to some composer's completely original score. I'd love for him to clarify these remarks but presumably he has a risk/reward equation in mind: sure you *might* get a superb original score out of your composer but you're *much more likely* to get something that is worse than what you (esp. if your tastes is refined as QT's) have been able to assemble for yourself out of pre-existing materials.

--

I've been reading and thinking about this discussion for some days now(I can't always access to come talk here) and it is really fascinating to me. "Food for thought."

As a starting point(again): just how MANY of my favorite movies have emotional, all encompassing scores, whether for tearjerking(To Kill a Mockingbird, ET, Terms of Endearment -- and I'll add The Perfect Storm here; James Horner); thriller excitement(NXNW first, then Psycho, then Vertigo -- but also Cape Fear, Arabesque, and Wait Until Dark, and how about Superman and Batman on the superhero side?) Western excitement(its own "brand" in its day - Elmer Bernstein or Jeffy Goldsmith -- The Mag 7, The Sons of Katie Elder, Rio Conchos, Bandolero, 100 Rifles) etc.

Here's a connection: Jerry Goldsmith in 1974 did the emotional and moving score(with mystery elements) for the LA noir, Chinatown and then in 1997(as an older, less powerful musical force) did the "Western-ish" macho score for the LA noir, LA Confidential(I swear the score turns into Rio Conchos in the final two minutes.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Anyway, all favorite movies(whether "A" like Chinatown or "B" like Rio Conchos) ALL because of their great scores(I'll make sure to include The Untouchables again here, with its FOUR different and great musical motifs trading off.)

But I certainly like my QT movies, and only one of them(The Hateful Eight) has a "traditional score" -- and even that is intermittent -- Ennio has to share the soundtrack with his "Thing" music and more than a few radio songs.

Which brings me to this: maybe QT can get away with his "non-scored movies" because he simply doesn't have too many(any?) flim composers available to GIVE his movies "big sweeping or scary scores." Jerry Goldsmith is dead.Elmer Bernsteing is dead. Ennio Morricone is dead. Even James Horner(The Perfect Storm AND a little movie called Titanic, plus his totally different calypso-ish score for 48 HRS)...dead. Bernard Herrmann is LONG dead. John Williams is 90 and works selectively.

I wracked my mind and came up with one "modern" composer who maybe could do what Herrmann and Goldsmith did: Danny Elfman...who specializes in Tim Burton movie, some Marvel movies(Spider-Man) and who famously re-worked Herrmann's Psycho score in an amazing achievement as far as I was concerned.

But you put Danny Elfman music on a QT movie and you get ...a Tim Burton movie? Plus: I don't think Elfman works much anymore. (He just scored Tim Burton's "Wednesday," says IMdb.)

But who else. Does Michael Kamen (Die Hard) still work? HE had a sound. I keep reading about Hans Zimmer but I can't remember a note of his scores. Plus -- I'll bet one of these guys is dead.

Its funny...in the 70's, movies pretty muich had John Williams scores or Jerry Goldsmith scores. Henry Mancini had ruled the 60s, and worked in the 70's(mainly on Pink Panther sequels) but somehow Mancini became a bit "old hat" in the 70s -- too tied to the jazz-based scores of the 60's.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

And what about Hitchcock? Bernard Herrmann got Hitch from The Trouble With Harry through Marnie-- with some of Hitchcock's greatest movies in there . But who else did/could Hitchcock use? Dimitri Tiomkin mainly -- starting with Shadow of a Doubt and then moving on to the early fifties with Strangers on a Train, I Confess, and Dial M. Tiomkin -- who feuded with Herrmann -- won the Oscars that Herrmann did not, and his music is OK but...truly second place to Herrmann(I mean, Strangers on a Train sounds a LOT like Rio Bravo.)

This point: I acknowledge Notorious as great, perfectly directed Hitchcock(with two major stars.) But its opening theme music to me is just a bunch of 1946 over-melodramatic NOTHING. I'm sure it fit 1946 just fine but coupled with "basic titles" Notorious can't hold a candle to the Herrmann/Saul Bass credits sequences of Vertigo, NXNW, and Psycho. THOSE movies arrived as the movies were trying to "get bigger and more exciting" versus TV and the music followed.

Exception: One 1946 score that "travels" with a great feeling of 60's/70's emotion is Hugo Freidhofer's score for "The Best Year of Our Lives." That score stands out to me as one that could have been used in later decades and is NOT tied to the dullish melodrama of the Notorious score(who did THAT one?)

So anyway, perhaps to my "coddled ears" I most worship that whole 50s/60s/70s time with big enveloping scores and the composers(Herrmann, Tiomkin in Rio Bravo mode, Bernstein, Goldsmith, Williams) who excited us so damn MUCH with their music.

And they are gone and that kind of music is largely gone, isn't it?

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Here's one: Martin Scorsese. He STARTED with Herrmann at the end of Herrmann -- the great Taxi Driver(with Psycho's "three notes of madness" at the very end ON PURPOSE.) But it didn't take too long before Scorsese did HIS thing with scores composed of rock and jazz singles "of his time." (Scorsese now looks "boomer old" given how much Rolling Stones and Motown is on the soundtracks of GoodFellas and Casino -- not to mention Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" (GoodFellas) and "I'm in With the In Crowd" in Casino.)

And didn't The Irishman - his most recent film - use a lot of period 60s/70's rock on the soundtrack?

So you could say that QT and Scorsese are "of one" - with no great musical composers available to them now, they use either rock music OR the compositions of movies past (Dark of the Sun, The Thing) to score their new movies.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I'm reminded, BTW, that both Scorsese (in his Cape Fear remake) and QT (in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) BOTH used the SAME discarded 1966 Bernard Herrmann music from Torn Curtain: the murder of Gromek. The Gromek music appears in the hurricane/houseboat finale in Cape Fear and TWICE in OATIH, both times when Leo is using the flame thrower.

A Herrmann musical motif thrown out by Hitchcock ended up used by TWO modern day auteurs -- Herrmann's music saw its day, after all.

BUT THIS: Not only did Hitchcock throw out ALL of Herrmann's score for Torn Curtain(replacing him with the so-so John Addison), but he made sure that the murder of Gromek had NO music, which made it more realistic and brutal.

And then in 1972, he did this again. Not only did Hitchcock throw out ALL of Mancini's score for Frenzy(replacing HIM with the so-so Ron Goodwin) , but he made sure that the murder of Brenda Blaney had NO music, which made it more realistic and brutal..with the added horror of an innocent women, not a male Commie spy, being the victim this time.

Hitchcock's insistence on no music for those later movie murders may have sounded in this: he knew he could never get murder music as classic as Psycho had. I've seen the Gromek murder with Herrmann's music, and it is really just...dramatic music, we don't SCREAM. Indeed, John Addison ALSO wrote some music for Gromek's murder and...same result. Just dramatic.

Would have Brenda Blaney's strangling(coming after a rape) been more terrifying if some sort of music had played over it? I'm guessing Hitchcock felt: no. "I can't repeat Psycho, ever again."

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

The screaming violins during Marion's murder is scary enough, but during Arbogast's murder(which is a shorter piece of film, requiring a quicker musical cue) the violins REALLY come on strong -- exploding as Mother comes out the door, louder and more high pitched than in the shower. As I like to say, with THAT music, if Jayne Mansfield had run out in a bikini and HUGGED Arbogast...the audience would have STILL screamed. (Also the screams are huge when the music comes on for the "back-to-back shock reveals" in the fruit cellar -- Hitchcock asked Herrmann to put his murder music on there, too.)

On the Psycho DVD extras, you can see the shower murder with no music and -- not the same. Plus: again, very realistic and brutal. You can hear Janet Leigh's cries of "No!" and "Please!" during the murder, and after Mother leaves, Leigh's final dying breaths come out as "sad sighs." Its moving and a bit more sickening that the movie version with all that screeching.

(I doubt Arbogast's murder would have played without music at all. It NEEDS music just like Mount Rushmore did in NXNW.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I also sensed an even older Hitchcock firing Henry Mancini off of Frenzy because again -- no matter WHO the director is, a "Mancini thriller" is Mancini's baby first of all (Experiment in Terror, Charade, Arabesque,Wait Until Dark.) I'm guessing Hitchcock didn't want to give up his "power" there. (Mancini's "Frenzy" overture can be heard on YouTube and it is at once SO much better than Ron Goodwin's as used in the real movie, and yet, clearly, would have imposed Mancini music on a Hitchocck film.)
--
Elizabethjoestar replied:

I thought Hitchcock's issue was that Mancini's score was too dark and humorless? He wanted something that would suggest "murder can be fun," as he once told John Williams.

--

Yes, I've read that. I've also read that Hitchcock reportedly told Mancini "if I wanted Herrmann, I would have hired Herrmann," which sounds like a fake quote to me.

But the proof is in the pudding. Whereas Mancini's opening overture MIXED the kind of regal "return to London" theme WITH sinister music(and yeah, perhaps a bit too much "Phantom of the Opera" organ music), Goodwin gave Hitchcock the overture Hitchcock wanted: not a HINT of thriller music, rather a grand and majesterial pageant like theme that would have fit "Mary Queen of Scots." Hitchcock WANTED that contrast, he said (and this also seems to announce "Hitchcock is back in London" as Hitchcock's own "self-salute.")

I do rather like Ron Goodwin's opening music for Frenzy on its own terms: its a celebration to be sure, one feels GOOD even knowing that what lies ahead is going to be pretty horrific (in contrast.)

But I think Mancini was more honest with the material: there is a "twist" to his pageant music that suggests to me the nuttiness of Bob Rusk himself, early on.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Note in passing: I showed Frenzy to a (brave) female acquaintance and she reacted against it from the beginning: hearing Goodwin's rather tinny orchestration and the rather banal titles, she wasn't even impressed by the helicopter shot. She said (and I quote): "This opening looks so CHEAP to me. It looks like a 70s movie."

Hah. Well, it kind of does. Compared to Saul Bass' three great credit sequences(Vertigo, NXNW, Psycho) and then The Birds credit sequence, and even the Torn Curtain credit sequence, Frenzy does rather open in a cheap and pedestrian way. But I always got past that -- the helicopter shot was dazzling to me, the music, triumphantly announcing Hitchcock's comeback.

BTW, the WORST credit sequence of Hitchcock's post Bass period was the one for Marnie, which with its "turning pages" motif (and Herrmann's rather knowingly old-fashioned score) plays like "the best movie of 1944."

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Mancini's thriller scores are altogether better than the unmemorable music Goodwin delivered for Frenzy in the finished film,

--

Yes, Goodwin's opening "pageant" music is really his best work in the film, less a rather "twisted waltz" theme he gives Rusk as the potato truck scene begins.

That said, both the very long potato truck scene AND the very long stalking, rape, and murder of Brenda Blaney play WITHOUT music..so Goodwin wasn't allowed to mess with the suspense. (Less a terrible blaring of horns on the final shot of Brenda's dead face with tongue stuck out.)

I suppose I can "hear" Mancini's music being put over Rusk's initial terrozizing of Brenda...he could lift music he'd used for the menacing of Lee Remick in Experiment in Terror or Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark...but Hitchcock fired Mancini and put no music over Rusk's entrance save a quick burst of strings when he comes through the door(a great bit, I'll admit -- I heard people say: "Its HIM" the second Rusk appeared. The music cued him as the killer.)

---

but with the exception of the fizzy Arabesque, they are all very grim, I suppose,

---

Well, that's true. Whereas Charade had a sort of "radio single" feel to its credit sequence(people sing lyrics to the tune), Arabesque felt big and muscular and exciting...for the chase film it was.

Charade gets grim for the duration of the movie, as does Experiment in Terror as does Wait Until Dark(which had a "piano strings plunking" motif that evidently made studio musicians literally sick to their stomachs.)

--

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

especially The Night Visitor (a bizarre, wintry 1971 chiller featuring an ax-crazy Max von Sydow). TNV is almost medieval in its soundscape, suffocating in its bleakness.

---

You know, I've heard of that title, but I know nothing about it -- til now. An ax-crazy Max Von Sydow? So he was in a horror movie BEFORE The Exorcist.

---

Frenzy, for all its horrific violence, does have a strong undercurrent of dark comedy and much of the thematic content of the film involves the casual way bystanders regard violent crimes, so perhaps Goodwin's music offset that better in Hitch's mind?

--

Well, I can "superimpose" Mancini's Charade music, or Wait Until Dark music over "Frenzy" and it becomes a different movie -- but, again, a Mancini movie. And I'm not sure if Mancini's "Latin-based jazz" would fit even in a comic mode over the Oxford dinners(which, come to think of it, don't HAVE music even in the Goodwin version.)

Irony: one reason Hitchcock fired Berrnard Herrmann in the 60s is that his music(especially his romantic music) was considered too "old fashioned and symphonic" by studio bosses. HENRY MANCINI was "the sound of the 60s."

And yet, by the 70's, Mancini's music was now old hat itself.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Circling around: as great as my memories are of all the composers of the 50s/60s/70's are (and I'll add Mancini, I left him out)...it does seem like QT and Scorsese are using previously recorded music because so few modern composers are available.

Though one just came to mind: Carter Burwell, whom the Coens used rather exclusively(his True Grit music is great Western struff) ..but then the Coens are broke up for now(we lost THEM before we lose QT.)

And this: I don't like the sequels, but Psycho II has a score by the great Jerry Goldsmith, and Psycho III has a score by ...Carter Burwell!(early on, he must have come cheap.)

Psycho II goes for a sad tearjerking opening theme that "pushes us" to see Norman Bates as a nice sad guy(I disagree.) Psycho III goes for some pretty damn weird and atonal stuff(fitting the avant garde sensibilities of director Tony Perkins I think.) But without Bernard Herrmann on the soundtrack, the Psycho sequels simply don't take place in Psycho's world.(For Psycho IV, they stuck Herrmann's score on the new movie, but in all the wrong places. It didn't work.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] thingmakersback (1219) a year ago

Odd this mention of Brian May and George Miller, as that is a different Brian May from the one associated with Queen. And I am not sure that the word "corny" is anything like appropriate for the scores Brian May wrote for the George Miller films, although his output is not necessarily among the best in film music overall...

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2628) a year ago

This week's Video Archive Podcast ep. is devoted to a single film The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and its director George Roy Hill. Both Avary and Tarantino have interesting things to say about the shape and specificity of Roy Hill's talents, esepcially his eye for certain sorts of stories and certain sorts of characters. Really good stuff in my view.

Anyhow, I was (with difficulty) able to track down an OK-ish copy of The Great Waldo Pepper so I could see it for the first time before listening to the podcast. TGWP was considered a bit of flop at the time simply because it didn't do the *giant* business that The Sting and Butch Cassidy had done, and because it earned only half what Redford's other film that year, 3 Days of the Condor did. But TGWP was in fact solidly profitable, It made at least 4x its budget, so it's a little weird that it's been a film that's hard to see ever since. A lot of solid-or-better films from Roy Hill outside his mega-hits have been a little lost like that - part of the price of being a serve-the-story, not-a-stylist, non-auteurish sort of director perhaps? Or is it the power of mega-hits to loom over careers that bites auteurs too that's the real point here? Roy Hill and his reception over time is a great starting point for discussions about film, the industry, the formation of a canon, and so on, and that's the jackpot that Avary and QT hit in their discussion here. Recommended.

Update: The following blog-post summarizes the podcast episode and includes a playable link to a stream of it:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-director-quentin-tarantino-calls-one-of-the-greatest-storytellers-in-the-history-of-cinema/

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

This week's Video Archive Podcast ep. is devoted to a single film The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and its director George Roy Hill. Both Avary and Tarantino have interesting things to say about the shape and specificity of Roy Hill's talents, esepcially his eye for certain sorts of stories and certain sorts of characters. Really good stuff in my view.

---

I'll take a listen.

I have DVDS of both Butch Cassidy and The Sting...George Roy Hill's megahits, and Newman and Redford speak on both of them, and both of them -- especially Redford -- say that George Roy Hill was one of the great unsung directors of his time.

Butch Cassidy was the biggest hit of 1969; The Sting was the second biggest hit of 1973 and won Best Picture and Best Director for Hill. So he was a bigger deal as a director (among Hollywood insiders) than Alfred Hitchcock in those years and achieved some things that Hitchcock did not (like winning the Best Director Oscar.) You could say that Hitchocck "had better press," but I suppose Hitchcock's acheivements over 6 decades trumped Hill's more limited run of glory.

Still, obviously a competent director and he made interesting musical choices for Butch(Burt Bacharach's uptempo 60's pop for a WESTERN) and The Sting(Scott Joplin's 1903 ragtime for a movie set in the THIRTIES.)

Both Butch and The Sting also won Best Original Screenplay awards -- Hill knew how to pick material.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Anyhow, I was (with difficulty) able to track down an OK-ish copy of The Great Waldo Pepper so I could see it for the first time before listening to the podcast. TGWP was considered a bit of flop at the time simply because it didn't do the *giant* business that The Sting and Butch Cassidy had done, and because it earned only half what Redford's other film that year, 3 Days of the Condor did. But TGWP was in fact solidly profitable, It made at least 4x its budget, so it's a little weird that it's been a film that's hard to see ever since.

---

I didn't know that Waldo Pepper did 4x its budget. I think that can be chalked up to Redford' s popularity at the time, but its lack of performance against Condor in the same year could probably be tied into the fact that Waldo Pepper is quite the downer. A nice man and a nice woman die horribly in airborne accidents. William Goldman wrote the screenplay and wrote in a book: "Audiences weren't prepared to see Redford in such a dark story; it should have had Nicholson." Well, Nicholson was hard to get.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

This always interested me: having hit the jackpot twice with the team of Redford and Newman, Hill's next two movies after The Sting starred, in order, Redford(Waldo Pepper) and Newman(Slapshot.) Neither made Butch/Sting dollars.."proving" that they were worth more as a team. Well, you could only do that twice.

Waldo Pepper is a period piece with some echoes of The Sting in the time period and dress of the characters.

But Slapshot is modern day and a REAL departure for Hill: raucous, gritty, down-n-dirty, filled with profanity(what hockey coach Newman says to a snooty team owner about her son was considered by Pauline Kael to be the most filthy dialogue ever uttered by a star), Also funny as hell. There is a very improvisational feel to some of the scenes involving Old Dog Newman and the young men playing his hockey punks, including The Carlson Brothers as The Hanson Brothers, now cult favorites -- with their Coke bottle eyeglasses, Canuck accents and totally brutal behavior on the ice.

Paul Newman counted Slapshot among his favorite movies, and it is easy to see why: it really FIT what he wanted to do in movies: break loose and break out, go back to his roots as a rebel. Newman skates, fights, cusses and womanizes up a storm in this movie. Its perfect for him.

--

Like John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet, George Roy Hill came up through live TV dramas and his filmography doesn't quite match theirs in longevity and power. Butch and The Sting are the centerpiece of everything, but he also did Hawaii(boring) and Thoroughly Modern Millie(a musical misfire, but I liked it -- hey, John Gavin is in it , and fine....) That his final film was "Funny Farm" with Chevy Chase seems a bit of a letdown, but...that's Hollywood.



reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2628) a year ago

I didn't know that Waldo Pepper did 4x its budget.
It only cost $5 million - for a period piece with lots of stunts and action sequences and Redford!
Its lack of performance against Condor in the same year could probably be tied into the fact that Waldo Pepper is quite the downer. A nice man and a nice woman die horribly in airborne accidents.
It's a jaunty, larky, nice movie up until those deaths happen - Redford interferes with a rival fliers's undercarriage causing him to crash, break his legs, generally lose his livelihood, yet we're asked to believe that it's no biggie and they go on to become business partners and friends. It's all a bit Wile E. Coyote/Magnifcent Men in Their Flying Machines... *until* a lovely, winning Susan Sarandon falls from the wing. The second death comes quickly after this and is even more horrible (Redford has to mercy kill his buddy and the audience/us are implicated). Brutally too, the dead buddy's sister played by Margot Kidder (a former lover of Waldo's) has no lines after that second death, and after being silent in a scene with a recuperating Waldo she disappears from the movie completely. So there's a basic change in tone half way through the picture *and* TGWP also suddenly loses its whole female side. A gently elegaic period piece becomes a somewhat message-y downer. (One imagines Billy Wilder reading the script and giving the advice on p. 50, 'You just lost a million dollars'.)

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2628) a year ago

I suspect too that TGWP was impacted by there being a bit of a glut of period films, esp. post-ww1 and Depression era, and early Hollywood films in the 1970s. I remember seeing ads on TV for TGWP and Lucky Lady (1975) around the same time as a kid and thinking they looked like the same film. In a way it's staggering that those films and Day of the Locust and The Wild Party are all set around the same time and all came out the same year. And, look, all sorts of other stuff from The Fortune to Hard Times to The Last Tycoon to At Long Last Love to Nickolodeon to Silent Movie to Bound for Glory all came out around then too. By 1975-1977 my sense is that people were getting a bit sick of the whole period.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I didn't know that Waldo Pepper did 4x its budget.

It only cost $5 million - for a period piece with lots of stunts and action sequences and Redford!

---

I expect the highest cost was Redford's.

But I'm reminded: certain young directors went uncaringly nuts about going over budget once they had their first successes. Spielberg went overbudget on Close Encounters and 1941; John Landis went over budget on The Blues Brothers. These guys had been held to "cruel and merciless" budget restrictions on Jaws and Animal House but once those movies hit...those guys went crazy with the cash. Same with Michael Cimino(who had once been ordered by Clint Eastwood to stop filming Thunderbolt and Lightfoot four days early -- which meant forcing four days of shooting into one -- then The Deer Hunter bought him a total budget overrun on Heaven's Gate.)

Meanwhile, directors like George Roy Hill and fellow "50's TV director" John Frankenheimer were pretty famous for making pretty major and intricate movies on time, on budget...maybe LESS budget than necessary. Robert Evans said he never saw a filmmaker get a bigger movie done on a tight budget and schedule than Frankenheimer on Black Sunday(1977.)

So George Roy Hill probably knew exactly how to get the most bang for the buck out of The Great Waldo Pepper(a name derived from REAL screenwriter Waldo Salt, who wrote Midnight Cowboy and whose daughter, Jennifer Salt, is in Brian DePalma's Sisters. It was all SO incestuous and in-jokey back then. Still is, I guess.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

It's a jaunty, larky, nice movie up until those deaths happen -

--

Which probably took the audience by surprise and turned TGWP into yet ANOTHER one of those "70's downer movies" that peaked in 1974 but didn't stop then. (TGWP was 1975.)

George Roy Hill and Redford had just given audiences the fun and happy ending of The Sting and then..THIS?

---

Redford interferes with a rival fliers's undercarriage causing him to crash, break his legs, generally lose his livelihood, yet we're asked to believe that it's no biggie and they go on to become business partners and friends. It's all a bit Wile E. Coyote/Magnifcent Men in Their Flying Machines... *until* a lovely, winning Susan Sarandon falls from the wing. The second death comes quickly after this and is even more horrible (Redford has to mercy kill his buddy and the audience/us are implicated).

----

Yes, those scenes had a sort of horror movie brutality to them, with the message being that these daredevil stunt pilots were in a rather horrifying profession -- and as I recall, Sarandon was rather forced into the wing-walking that killed her.

---

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Brutally too, the dead buddy's sister played by Margot Kidder (a former lover of Waldo's) has no lines after that second death, and after being silent in a scene with a recuperating Waldo she disappears from the movie completely. So there's a basic change in tone half way through the picture *and* TGWP also suddenly loses its whole female side. A gently elegaic period piece becomes a somewhat message-y downer. (One imagines Billy Wilder reading the script and giving the advice on p. 50, 'You just lost a million dollars'.)

--

Its been a long time since I've seen TGWP, but I do remember its sudden swerve into "death, darkness and depression" and also how the story rather fell apart at the end.

Which reminds me: the screenwriter was William Goldman, whom I quote often around here because he's one of the few Hollywood insiders to write a few books with good gossip about movie stars and directors and how scripts are written, etc.

Goldman's bonafides were Oscars for he screenplays of Butch Cassidy(Original) and All the President's Men(Adapted) both for Robert Redford.

And yet, Goldman was hardly foolproof. Something's wrong with the structure and tone shift of Waldo Pepper, and as the decades rolled by, Goldman wrote more and more pedestrian scripts (and some winners too -- his version of "Misery" was great.) Anyway, William Goldman: star screenwriter but some misses to go with the hits.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I suspect too that TGWP was impacted by there being a bit of a glut of period films, esp. post-ww1 and Depression era, and early Hollywood films in the 1970s.

---

Yes, a rather weird stretch of movie greenlights in the first half of the 70s. One could say that the blockbuster success of The Sting drove many of them, but many of them were already in production BEFORE The Sting hit big, or RELEASED before The Sting hit big (like Boganovich's Paper Moon which came out in the summer of 1973; The Sting came out at Christmas.)

Across late 1973 and early 1974, Robert Redford found himself in three period pieces in a row: The Way We Were(30s, 40's, 50s); The Sting(30's) and The Great Gatsby(20s.) I remember the often long-haired Redford had to put up with short hair cuts for so long that he made sure to wear a big head of 70's hair in 3 Days of the Condor , modern day.

---

I remember seeing ads on TV for TGWP and Lucky Lady (1975) around the same time as a kid and thinking they looked like the same film. In a way it's staggering that those films and Day of the Locust and The Wild Party are all set around the same time and all came out the same year. And, look, all sorts of other stuff from The Fortune to Hard Times to The Last Tycoon to At Long Last Love to Nickolodeon to Silent Movie to Bound for Glory all came out around then too. By 1975-1977 my sense is that people were getting a bit sick of the whole period.

---

Its worth wondering "why did this happen?" Partially these movies were set when the directors who made them were either kids -- or (like me) watched movies from the 30s, 40s, 50s on TV and wanted to re-create their youthful favorites. Bogdanovich pretty much remade Hawk's Bringing Up Baby with What's Up Doc and saluted John Ford with The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon (he'd already saluted Hitchcock with Targets.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I recall 70's critics also making the point that all these period pictures were perhaps made to take people out of the more depressing aspects of the 70s(Vietnam in its last rancid years, Nixon on the one hand and all sorts of scary revolutionary battles on the other)...and "retreat to the past." Depression era films were often set in rural locations(Paper Moon, Hard Times) and easy to make on low budgets -- just re-dress a few old buildings.

I might add that even Alfred Hitchcock's ultra-violent, modern-day Frenzy of 1972 brought back his STYLE from the 20s and 30's, and his classic "wrong man" plot. As critic Richard Schickel wrote at the time: "If Hitchcock is perfectly capable of imitating himself, why leave the job to a man like Peter Bogdanovich?")

Like all trends(except Marvel movies), the "nostalgia movies" burned themselves out with flops at the box office. Bogdo sank with At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon. NICHOLSON AND BEATTY TOGETHER sank with The Fortune. Depressing Depression movies like Altman's Thieves Like Us and Ashby's Bound for Glory made no coin. Lucky Lady -- with veteran Stanley Donen at the helm - was shockingly tone deaf(and re-shot to bring leads Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds back to life after killing them in the first version.)

The Great Waldo Pepper was part of all this --- it sounds like it made money, but not Sting money(and The Great Gatsby didn't do well at all, Redford or no Redford.)

---

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Of that group above, I have to single out three;

The Fortune: In 1975, Jack Nicholson won Best Actor and got a huge hit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which also won Best Picture and other big awards. In 1975, Warren Beatty had one of his biggest hits in Shampoo. And yet, ALSO in 1975, somehow these same two "giants" flopped with The Fortune, worse yet, under the direction of Mike Nichols, the wunderkiind of the 60's (Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, stage plays.) It just goes to show you: no one can predict anything about a movies success and: the script is the thing. That said, Jack Nicholson is frizzy-permed hair and moustache WAS pretty funny in this; Beatty willingly played 'the stff" to some comic effect against him. But Mike Nichols didn't make another movie in the 70s.

Lucky Lady: This is one of the few movies where I managed to read the script before it was even made(I had a friend in the business.) It READ pretty good, and as I noted above, the version I read had the two lead men getting killed at the end (they were California ocean-bound rum runners) The movie went into production with Liza Minnelli(miscast as a woman to drive men wild), Burt Reynolds(in what he called "the Jack Lemmon part" and George Segal.)

But Segal quit the movie and Gene Hackman got hired for big bucks to replace him . And the movie was just no good. A big sea battle off of Catalina just didn't play right and unctuous John Hillerman made no sense as the mob boss I pictured as big guy in the script. I felt worst for Stanley Donen, who directed my favorites Charade and Damn Yankees...oh and co-directed a little something called Singin' in the Rain. Lucky Lady wasn't in that league.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Hard Times: The Time review opened with this sentence: "Surprise: a good Charles Bronson movie." And it was, written and directed by a genre specialist named Walter Hill who, along with Sam Peckinpah(for whom he wrote The Getaway) and Don Siegel, helped "bridge the gap from Hitchcock to Scorsese to Tarantino."

I realized at a certain point in time that the "romantic suspense thriller" in which Hitchcock made so many films was yielding to "guy's action pictures" in my life and taste. The Hitchcock era has faded into the past as hard, bloody action continues on.

Anyway, Hard Times. Set in Louisiana during the 30's Depression. Mysterious stranger Charles Bronson gets off a hobo train ride and meets up with bare knuckle boxing manager James Coburn. Coburn and everybody else take Bronson as "too old for this, pops" -- until Bronson knocks out an opponent or two with ease and starts working his way up to bigger and stronger opponents -- and takes them out too. There's a Main Event big fight at the end, with gangsters looking to rig it and Coburn's life on the line if Bronson loses and...well, the whole movie is up, running and over, nice and fast.

What I personally like about Hard Times is that both Bronson and Coburn shaved off the moustaches that each liked to wear in the 70s, and become "plain, tough men." Coburn was struggling in the 70's to remain a star, but he IS one in Hard Times -- that great deep voice, that great lanky build, that smooth walk -- those big choppers. Bronson says very little,shows off his 50-something muscles and makes those fight scenes SING.

As Bronson prepares to board the hobo train out of town and Coburn sees him off, we get this exchange:

Coburn: Hey....well, we should say SOMETHING....
Bronson: (Says nothing, smiles)

And the train leaves with Bronson on it. And Walter Hill has The Driver and The Warriors and, and in the 80s, 48 HRS to come...

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

A stray thought about The Great Waldo Pepper led to a couple more on the same wavelength and the wistful desire to share a little "for posterity."

I saw The Great Waldo Pepper in the spring of 1975. ("3 Days of the Condor" would be Redford's fall 1975 release.)

I saw it at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, which is now known as the Arclight.

The Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 with "Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" as its opening attraction -- that movie was not made in "pure" Cinerama (a three-screen oddity that I recall only being used in the 60's for "The World of the Brothers Grimm" and "How the West Was Won" -- both of which I saw as a kid in "pure" Cinerama at the Pantages on Hollywood Boulevard, right next to the Frolic Room bar which features prominently in "LA Confidential"(Kevin Spacey has a drink there) and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"(OAITH) (Leo DiCaprio crashes his car there.)

I did NOT see Its a Mad Mad World at the Cinerama Dome, even though it played there(I think) for almost a year. My parents were in no hurry; we all saw it around 1965 in a suburban theater. Who knows why?

I DID see a movie with Charlton Heston and Laurence Oliver called Khartoum at the Cinerama Dome in 1966 and I still have the souvenier book to prove it.

Came the 70's, the Cinerama Dome wasn't used so much for "special event" movies, in Cinerama or otherwise. "Regular movies played there."

And a lot of them were from Universal -- Universal seemed to reserve the Dome(which had only one screen) to open a LOT of their movies. Hence, at the Cinerama Dome, I first saw Frenzy, The Sting(big line), and The Great Waldo Pepper.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

But due to "starving student" budget and living various places in the 70's, I didn't see EVERY Universal movie that played the Cinerama Dome. For instance, American Graffiti played there a long time in 1973, but I didn't see it there, and Charley Varrick followed American Graffiti at the Cinerama Dome, and I didn't see IT there either(favorite movies both, but I lived far away from there at the time.)

One NON-Universal movie I saw at the Cinerama Dome was a special MORNING showing of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Pre-release. I cadged some free tickets and devoted the morning to that long movie, into noon. At the intermission, I still recall some agent at a wall phone calling in: "Yeah...yeah...I'm watching the new Kubrick. Ah...Barry Lyndon. Its good. But its SLOW. but no, I think its a masterpiece."

In QT's OATIH, the modern day Arclight was "re-dressed" as the Cinerama Dome for a quick shot of the theater's lights coming on as dusk turned to night, in a montage of neon lights kicking in everywhere(it is to be a dark night indeed: the night of Sharon Tate's murder...or not.)

It was a great burst of nostalgia to "see" the Cinerama Dome brought to life that way by QT..and he put a legit 1969 release in on the marquee, complete with photos of the stars(an odd lot: Maximillian Schell, Brian Keith, Diane Baker): "Krakatoa, East of Java" -- which had the word Cinerama on the prints but...was it REALLY Cinerama, I don't know. It was a weird movie, sort of out of its time, ignored rapidly(and, wrote some wags, Krakatoa was EAST of Java.")

QT also has his Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) go see Dean Martin as Matt Helm in "The Wrecking Crew"(complete with Sharon Tate as co-star.) She sees the film at the Bruin (named for the University of California at Los Angeles sports teams -- the Bruins - bears; UC Berkeley had the REAL Bears.)

When "Sharon Tate" is outside the Bruin theater, you can see a theater across the street playing "George Peppard in Pendulum" (not a very famous title, yes?)

THAT theater is the Village.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

The Village and the Bruin have faced each other on that corner in Westwood Village, aka Westwood, West Los Angeles(next to the UCLA campus) since at least the 30's, maybe the 20's.

And on my "starving student" budget in the 70's, I saw these movies at the Bruin:

Woody Allen's Sleeper
Coppola's Godfather Part II
Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction

and these movies at the Village:

Three Days of the condor(fall 1975)
Marathon Man (fall 1976 -- it felt like two NYC spy movies a year apart at the same theater.)
The Day of the Locust
Sneak preview of Capricorn One with DePalma's The Fury

...and that's it. The "starving student" in me only rarely popped for first run films in Westwood. They were costly. (QT has Sharon Tate getting off of a 75 cent matinee ticket; I recall tickets in the 2 to 3 range, which you couldn't do a LOT of per month.) Otherwise I saw the movies elsewhere cheaper, or second run, or at the various colleges in the area. Or on the "Z Channel"(an LA based pre-HBO channel showing new movies, three a week only. Like The Sting.)

But anyway: here is Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood entertaining me on general principles AND enshrining on film the theaters where I saw some key movies of my life: at the Cinerama Dome, the Village, the Bruin, and the Pantages.

PS. I stood outside the Village for a few premieres, like Barbra Streisand's "A Star is Born," with her ex-husband Elliott Gould standing near me on the sidewalk , just watching (his buddy said "go up there, she'll let you go in" , and he said "nah" and walked away.) Or the premiere of Three Days of the Condor, with Jane Fonda(not in it) going in. Redford, the star wasn't there, but I guess his pal Fonda agreed to go.

PPS. Just over a year ago, in late 2021, director Paul Thomas Anderson got his LA-based movie Licorice Pizza booked EXCLUSIVELY at the Village in Westwood for one month. I've read it sold out all showings to heavily applauding local audiences, probably including every classmate, family member, or fan of the Haim sisters. I didn't get to go there for the run, but it was nice to hear of the Village being used so warmly.

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2628) a year ago

At the intermission, I still recall some agent at a wall phone calling in: "Yeah...yeah...I'm watching the new Kubrick. Ah...Barry Lyndon. Its good. But its SLOW. but no, I think its a masterpiece."
Ha ha.... I bet almost every Kubrick movie has had calls back from early screenings like that... I saw Kubrick's last 3 films (Shining, Full Metal, Eyes Wide) on first release, in each case in a very excited state with incredibly high expectations.... and in each case did *not enjoy* the experience at all. Kubrick's intense overthinking of his material was clear but each of those last 3 movies in the moment felt both painfully on trend (Horror, Vietnam War, Erotic Thriller) but also 'late to the party' and wearyingly self-conscious and 'slow'. In some cases it was easiest in the moment to be like the Agent here and express a kind of cold admiration for these overstudied, unenjoyable films, but in other cases avowed Kubrick fans like myself reacted with a mixture of anger and disappointment - the Master had embarrassed himself, had lost his touch and possibly his marbles.

In each case though, Kubrick's film got better the more you watched it and the further away you got from that overexcited first viewing. Kubrick's whole approach to performance and dialogue and basic things like scene- and shot-length(at least since Strangelove) is so strange that you have to leave behind your usual movie-viewing habits perhaps in favor of your museum-going habits to really get with it, so that first viewing (*particularly* if you're in the biz. or in your peak commercial movie-going years) ends up being a sacrificial lamb, just a painful first step towards your final state of enlightenment, ten years down the road possibly, about Stanley's latest opus.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

"Yeah...yeah...I'm watching the new Kubrick. Ah...Barry Lyndon. Its good. But its SLOW. but no, I think its a masterpiece."

Ha ha.... I bet almost every Kubrick movie has had calls back from early screenings like that... I saw Kubrick's last 3 films (Shining, Full Metal, Eyes Wide) on first release, in each case in a very excited state with incredibly high expectations.... and in each case did *not enjoy* the experience at all.

--

Ol' Stanley had that effect on people. Lots of people.

---

Kubrick's intense overthinking of his material was clear but each of those last 3 movies in the moment felt both painfully on trend (Horror, Vietnam War, Erotic Thriller) but also 'late to the party'

--

Especially "Full Metal Jacket" of 1987 which had the misfortune of following 1986 Best Picture winner "Platoon." This had happened in 1970 when "great artist" Mike Nichols' Catch-22 followed new guy Altman's MASH...but less devastatingly.

---

and wearyingly self-conscious and 'slow'.

---

More on "slow," anon.

But the 'self-conscious part" remains that dooming factor for all art film makers who pretty much DECLARE themselves art film makers, and pretty clearly DELIVER art films.

Kubrick pretty much trapped himself in the role. His films after 2001 were all Warner Brothers, yes? And Warner Brothers gave him carte blanche on everything and allowed him to go years, and then DECADES between movies. (I guess he lived on his earnings in those years, but I expect Warners gave him development money.)

But in exchange for that "carte blanche treatment" for the Great Artist, Kubrick had to BE a Great Artist. Or at least try, every time, to be "special." I'd say he succeeded in being "special" each time. Whether or not he made meaningful movies every time , well, even THERE I will say "yes."

But "meaningful" doesn't exactly equal "all time classic" or even "giant blockbuster."

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Plus, as I recall, from The Shining on, the Academy barely nominated Kubrick and his films for anything. Did any of his movies after Barry Lyndon get a Best Picture nomination? (I'll go check, but I'll guess Full Metal Jacket only ...or nothing.)

----

In some cases it was easiest in the moment to be like the Agent here and express a kind of cold admiration for these overstudied, unenjoyable films,

---

I'll clarify here that I think this agent -- or perhaps "lower down studio exec" usually covered movies a lot less "important" than Barry Lyndon but had to report in with enthusiasm. It was funny to listen to -- I don't think he saw me skulking nearby.

---

but in other cases avowed Kubrick fans like myself reacted with a mixture of anger and disappointment - the Master had embarrassed himself, had lost his touch and possibly his marbles.

---

Well, we are told that this is the "role" of a Art Film maker. Of course Hitchcock was a very "commercial" guy whose films had an 'art" component...I always liked that about him. The drain into eyeball and out shot in Psycho seems very much "art film" and yet plays as horror entertainment at the same time.

And even the stuff at the end -- Topaz more than Frenzy perhaps -- showed all sorts of "stopping the story for experimentation" going on.

Hitchcock perhaps got dumped on a little less than Kubrick at their respective ends because...indeed...so much MORE was expected of Kubrick.

I recall after Eyes Wide Shut came out(and Kubrick was already dead before it CAME out), Roger Ebert summoned a group of male critics around a table for a "special TV episode" designed to explore: "Is Eyes Wide Shut REALLY a great art achievement?" What I remember rather amused/depressed me(and this is a memory, maybe the clip will prove otherwise) , that to a man, these were all middle-aged gray-haired men in sweaters, not in the best shape. It was an indictment of "the life of the mind." (However, I've heard that Andrew Sarris was a crack tennis player and his wife Molly Haskell was cute.)

Anyway, as I recall, the critics debated it back and forth but finally decided that YES, Eyes Wide Shut was a great achievement, after all. (I've seen it recently and its worth enjoying for the gorgeous colors and light alone, blues and gold burning out our eyes; a bright RED felt pool table -- it rather follows up on the look of The Shining, as if Full Metal Jacket in between didn't exist.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

In each case though, Kubrick's film got better the more you watched it and the further away you got from that overexcited first viewing.

---

Yeah, I think that's how it works with Kubrick.

Take The Shining for instance. QT's beloved LA Times second string critic Kevin Thomas was assigned the review and I remember the key phrase clearly : "It is too much of a horror movie for art film fans, and too much of an art film for horror fans."

That was a pretty good take on how The Shining went wrong "the first time out." The shocks weren't much there(as I've noted before, Jack's killing of the cook is much less meaningful and cinematic than Mother's killing of the detective -- Jack is NOWHERE as deeply terrifying as Mystery Mother coming out from that doorway), or too slow, and the ending kinda/sorta fell apart, you ask me. (For a HORROR movie, for an art film, maybe its OK.)

But the reputation of The Shining seems to have grown and grown and grown over the years, becoming a "horror classic" in the interim. Jack Nicholson(wrongly accused of hamming it up in the film -- it NEEDED that) kept defending it as a high earning film, and I guess eventually it was.

I've always said that I think for "atmosphere and set up" the Overlook Hotel snowed in, comes in second ONLY to Psycho's house and motel as an arena for terror(better terror in Psycho, but you can't win 'em all.)

---

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Kubrick's whole approach to performance and dialogue and basic things like scene- and shot-length(at least since Strangelove) is so strange that you have to leave behind your usual movie-viewing habits perhaps in favor of your museum-going habits to really get with it,

---

Ha. Great point -- perhaps about ALL art films -- bring your museum-going habits!

---

so that first viewing (*particularly* if you're in the biz. or in your peak commercial movie-going years) ends up being a sacrificial lamb, just a painful first step towards your final state of enlightenment, ten years down the road possibly, about Stanley's latest opus.

--

Hitchcock had a rather gimmicky saying: "My movies go from being failures to being classics without ever being successes in between." He cited Psycho as an example and he must have meant the CRITICS -Psycho was a huge hit. Vertigo strikes me as a better example.

But Hitch's point was well taken and it applies perhaps to Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

On the slowness of Kubrick:

I can zoom in on a scene that is VERY slow and yet I LOVE it...and it seems to have its fans per the YouTube comments.

Its after the butler spills his drink on Jack and they go into a totally empty hotel ballroom bathroom for the butler to clean up the spill stain on Jack with a rag and water.

Hitchcock always favored "style over content," so let's cover the content quickly: the butler, an ever-so-polite and considerate servant with a kindly face and a sterling British accent, slowly reveals himself to Jack as "someone evil," someone who has likely murdered before(his young twin daughters) and is inciting Jack to kill again(his young son.)

But there is art even within the content. Is this a GHOST? Outside of that(in a time warp, perhaps?) is this the MAN who killed his children? Is he not a butler, but a former caretaker?(For "the caretaker" is the man who killed his own children.")

The butler gets a famous line at the end of this scene: "But YOU are the caretaker, sir....you've ALWAYS been the caretaker." (Or was it "You've always BEEN the caretaker.")

But enough of the content. The style, oh that great Kubrick STYLE.

The bathroom. Blood-red paint; 1920s art deco style.

The camera angles: Breaking all sort of DP rules, Kubrick keeps switching where Jack and the Butler are in the frame, leaping back and forth from different views of them.

The PACE: Carefully, calculatingly, magnificently SLOW. Museum-visting slow.

And Jack -- to his eternal credit(yep, I'm a fan) -- gets right into the slow pace along with the butler, and allows his ever-so expressive face muscles(and eyebrows, and EYES) to contort ever so slowly as he finds common ground with this murderous butler (who, in the midst of his timid, milquetoast eloquence, flings a very mean racial slur at the cook who is trying to save the day.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

I could watch "Jack and the butler in the bathroom" over and over. It is its own magical scene -- nothing much near Hitchcock(Hitch might have shot the scene, but in 1/3 the time.) All Kubrick. With kudos to the butler(an actor who I believe was in 2001, ACO, and Barry Lyndon first.) And kudos to the high-priced superstar with (at the time) one Best Actor Oscar to his name.

Side-bar: as "companion pieces" to the butler is "Lloyd the Bartender." Again with the slow pace, again with the haunted character.

I tell ya, between the "Lloyd the bartender" scenes and the "butler" scene(plus a few more, like "gimme the bat, Wendy") The Shining is classic enough for me.

Film Critic David Thomson has declared The Shining to be Kubrick's greatest film --which really surprised me.

"Cuz growin' up, it was always:

Dr. Strangelove (the "compact comedy entertainment"
2001(The greatest Cinerama art film of all time.)

I remember, in college in the 70's, talking into a long night with a Kubrick fan(as he talked to me as a Hitchcock fan) comparing and contrasting the two and then zeroing in on Kubrick's artistic superiority(of sorts) and the idea that with Dr. Strangelove and 2001 "back to back" (with 4 years in between), Kubrick had set in stone his greatness for all time.

But this guy and I also agreed that "Strangelove"(despite its doomsday story") was the "tight accessible comedy" and that 2001 was too "heavy" for the masses. (But a great light show for stoners.0

"Strangelove" is NOT slow; its cross-cutting suspense comedy sequences move like wildfire(from the War Room, to the nuke bomber, to the Air Force base where General Jack D. Ripper has gone mad.)

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

"2001" is very slow and all of the Kubrick movies after it are slow too.

Except two- which is a lot given Kubrick's small roster:

A Clockwork Orange: on my short list of movies I actively hate. I hated Alex, I hated his gang. I LOVED all the torture of Alex by government; I HATED how he got out and returned to his old ways. ACO came out around the time that Dirty Harry was extermining guys like Alex; I didn't get it (Frenzy came out around then too -- oh, how I would have loved to see Bob Rusk get the "eyeball treatment.")

Full Metal Jacket: It slows down to a crawl for the scene where the drill instructor meets his destiny in a midnight latrine; but before and after was some mean, macho stuff.

I know a guy -- military father -- who just LOVES Full Metal Jacket and can quote not only Lee Ermey's DI but the guy up in the Nam helicopter machine gunning Vietnamese with his big muscular bicep hogging the frame as he shoots.

"The helicopter shooter," it turns out, was first hired to play Ermey's part, but Ermey sent in an audition tape and stole the role --but the other guy got his big scene, with such lines fed by Joker(Matthew Modine) as:

Modine: How can you kill women and children?
Machine-gunner: Easy...I just lead them a little slower.

Modine: How do you know if you'r shooting Viet Cong down there?
Machine-gunner; Easy. If they run, they're Cong and I shoot them.
Modine: And if the don't run?
Machine-gunner: Then they are WELL-DISCIPLINED Cong...and I shoot them.

Macho black comedy one-liners. The hidden core of Full Metal Jacket(until about the last half hour in England masquerading as Viet Nam.)

"Full Metal Jacket' was less "authentic" and operatic (and hysterical) than "Platoon." But it was in certain savage ways..more funny. Which was not really a good thing.

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

(Sidebar: I saw Platoon with a full house in the burbs, and when it was over and the credits were crawling, I watched a group of older men who came together, bow their heads and lock their arms and hug in a very intimate, crying way -- right there in an aisle of the theater. Nam vets.)

--

One thing about Kubrick -- like QT WANTS to be -- you can run his entire canon in a real quick line of prose:

(Early movies)
The Killing
Paths of Glory(ABC showed this without commericals one night as an "event sponsored by IBM" in the 60s.)
Spartacus(The movie Kubrick disowns -- maybe because you cry at the end?)
Lolita("How did they make a movie out of Lolita?" They didn't.)
Dr. Strangelove(I saw this on college campuses a few times, and EVERYBODY said the lines out loud.)
2001 (Pauline Kael hated it, and Rock Hudson walked out on it.)
ACO (I hated it.)
Barry Lyndon ("Its a little slow...but its a masterpiece. Agreed. I love the early scene when the articulate highwayman robs O'Neal of everything and notes that if he gave anything back, "that would defeat the purpose of my trade.")
Note in passing: I kept my "preview book" of that morning showing of Barry Lyndon for a few years until I was dating a woman who -- out of nowhere -- professed a love for that movie. So I gave her the book. A year later, the book AND the woman were gone. I consider that romantic, actually. She might have been gone but she kept my Barry Lyndon book! At least I still have my Khartoum book)
The Shining: One horror movie list put The Shining at Number One, Psycho about Number Four. NO.
Full Metal Jacket: "What's your major malfunction?"
Eyes Wide Shut: The COLORS. And that orgy was at a Glen Cove mansion -- just like the one in North by Northwest..

CONT

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

A brief salacious note: Amazing how, for that orgy scene and a few others in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick or his minions found a bunch of women who all looked pretty much EXACTLY THE SAME and PERFECT..nude. Tall, thin, big breasts, noteable derrieres.

I know this is where our younger MC males might come in and say some pretty raw things about the women in question, but I say: Stanley's sure got a TYPE.

I think he had a woman with the same body all the way back in ACO "torturing" Alex during his deprogramming in prison.

Which reminds me: the prison boss torturing Alex in A Clockwork Orange was played by Michael Bates, who would be seen 6 months later in Hitchcock's Frenzy as Inspector Oxford's assistant.

Even Hitchcock had to comment on it: "So mean and yelling in the Kubrick. So quiet in my film. The same man!"

Asked what he thought of ACO, Hitchocck said "I thought it was a very interesting picture." No way to get Hitchcock to elaborate!

reply
formatting help
About | Contact | Privacy | Terms | Standards | Contribute
Top Movie Discussions
Challengers Discussion | The Fall Guy Discussion | The Idea of You Discussion | Civil War Discussion | Dune: Part Two Discussion | Love Lies Bleeding Discussion | Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Discussion | Monkey Man Discussion | The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Discussion | Abigail Discussion | Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Discussion | Boy Kills World Discussion | Tarot Discussion | Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Discussion | Kung Fu Panda 4 Discussion
Copyright © 2017 - 2024 MovieChat LLC

MovieChat is not affiliated with IMDb, IMDb Message Boards, or Reddit