Trollheart

You really are drunk aren't you? Didn't you see the signs all over proclaiming
TROLLHEART'S THREAD! ?

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Okay, the gods of random-ness have spoken and decreed I shall watch movie number 37 on my list first, which is this:


A Clockwork Orange (1971)

I'll watch it this week and hopefully have the review and my thoughts by the weekend.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Frownland

Yep, the 2009 one.

They're thematically linked but can be watched in any order.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Trollheart

Okay, I know I had said that the first one up would be A Clockwork Orange, and I will get to it, but so far I have not managed the time. However as fate would have it. Rear Window happened to be showing on the telly this week, and I only watched it last night, so it’s fresh in my mind. Therefore it makes more sense to kick off with that.

Title: Rear Window
Year: 1954
Writer(s): John Michael Hayes, based on the short story by Cornell Woolrich
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: James Stewart as L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies
Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont
Wendell Corey as NYPD Det. Lt. Thomas "Tom" J. Doyle
Thelma Ritter as Stella
Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald
Judith Evelyn as Miss Lonelyhearts
Ross Bagdasarian as the songwriter
Georgine Darcy as Miss Torso
Sara Berner and Frank Cady as the couple living above the Thorwalds, with their dog
Jesslyn Fax as "Miss Hearing Aid"
Rand Harper and Havis Davenport as newlyweds
Irene Winston as Mrs. Anna Thorwald

Genre: Murder Mystery
Level: A (Level reflects how classic the movie is seen across the broadest spectrum of society, with A being the highest and D being the lowest)
Familiarity: I’ve seen enough parodies and heard enough to have a general idea what it’s about
Awards and Honours: Golden Lion** (most prestigious award), Venice Film Festival; Best Actress* (Grace Kelly), National Review of Awards; Best Actress* (Grace Kelly), NYFCC (New York Film Critics’ Circle); Best Director*** (Hitchcock), NYFCC; Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film ( (Hitchcock)**, DGA (Directors Guild of America) ; Best Written American Drama (John Michael Hayes)**, Writers Guild of America Awards; Best Film** (BAFTA - British Academy of Film and Theatre Awards); Best Director**, Best Adapted Screenplay (Hayes)**, Best Cinematography - colour (Robert Burks)**, Best Sound - Recording (Loren L. Ryder)**, Academy Awards; Best Motion Picture Screenplay (Hayes)*, Edgar Allan Poe Awards; National Film Registry*, National Film Preservation Board; OFTA Film Hall of Fame - Motion Picture*, Online Film and Television Awards (OFTA)

*=won
**=nominated but did not win
*** = runner up
Budget: $1 million
Box Office: $37 million

I’m going to say now, straight and upfront that I was more than a little disappointed with this. I’m quite obviously in the minority, as every review I read of it gushes praise, but I don’t see it. Although it was certainly a great movie, and deserves to be a classic, for a Hitchcock movie - while I admit I have seen few of his - I didn’t get the tension I expected. The whole atmosphere, given that the idea of a heatwave is supposed to create tension and irritability and short tempers, came across to me as too light-hearted. I think maybe it was James Stewart who was to blame, and it’s telling that he features nowhere in the awards the movie was nominated for, though to be fair I don’t believe Grace Kelly deserved one either. I was totally non-engaged with all the characters. Stewart’s laid-back, jokey persona has never chimed with me; while I can see him in It’s a Wonderful Life, I can’t imagine him in North by Northwest. He just doesn’t have the seriousness I think this movie needed.

Kelly for me is the sidekick, there to add the eye candy and, though she does feature heavily in the movie, actually breaking into Thorwald’s apartment (she swings over the rail in that dress? Really?) and cracking the case, she’s still an extension of Stewart’s character, his partner in crime, if you will, and I don’t find her convincing. Her sudden conversion to Stewart’s theory, having been dismissive of it a moment before, does not ring true to me. Admittedly, this is down to the original author of the story, but I feel it could have been handled better. Yes, she probably initially is doing this to humour Stewart and try to patch up their fracturing relationship, eager to show him - and maybe herself - that she is more than a society girl, but I don’t see any catalyst for this. One moment she’s hands on hips and “you’re going to end in jail” and then it’s spy central with her. Doesn’t make sense to me.

If there’s a character I believe in it’s his nurse, played by Thelma Ritter. She’s a very sort of Karla-from-Cheers character, plain-spoken and honest and ordinary, and her absorption into the conspiracy is more subtle. I like her. But I don’t like Stewart, who is basically something of a peeping Tom who happens to stumble across a murder and becomes a witness to it that few people will believe. I also think the detective is about as cardboard as they come. He is bland, unassuming, faintly amused by everything he’s told and he only gets involved when Stewart has been pushed out of the window, and you get the feeling even then he’s thinking “well, you know, maybe there’s something in what he said but…”

I find the idea of people leaving all their windows, curtains, shutters, blinds, whatever, open all the time, so that there is no privacy at all, hard to credit. I’m unfamiliar with New York in the 1950s of course, and I understand there's a heat wave going on, so maybe this is how it was, but I would certainly not want to be in a position where anyone next door or opposite could see into my house/apartment. Is this just artistic licence I wonder, to move the plot along? And how is it that nobody, and I mean nobody notices Stewart looking out, first with just his eyes, then binoculars, and finally a camera with a telephoto lens? Nobody, until Thorwald sees him, and only because Kelly has been signalling Stewart and he follows her gesture to see who she has been signalling to.

There’s no dark ominous music, no jumpy scenes a la Psycho or The Birds, nothing to make you feel like anyone is in any real danger - other than when Kelly is in the apartment and that’s cut pretty short when the cops arrive. Even the final scene, where Thorwald advances on Stewart and the latter holds him off by blinding him with flashbulbs in his camera seems a clunky device, and the confrontation is over very quickly. Also, why did the man kill his wife? Yes, she was disabled and he was probably fed up looking after her, and likely had a bit on the side, but it’s never explained. The only scene that at all affected me in the movie (other than the scenes of “Miss Torso” doing her sexy routines at the window, ahem) was the death of the little dog, which really shook me, especially as the tiny corpse is hauled back up in the basket to its owner. And in a story about human voyeurism and murder, that my attention could only really be arrested by a non-human character speaks, to me, volumes about this movie.

I must admit, the film does wrong-foot you, more than once; with the news the detective brings to Stewart that Thorwald's wife has been sighted in wherever, you think maybe he’s jumping to conclusions, and even when Thorwald confronts him I expected it to have an innocent explanation. In fact, my thought was that while they were surveilling Thornwald, the other woman, whom Stewart calls “Miss Lonelyhearts”, was going to take her own life and the lesson would be that they were looking for a crime that was not there and missed the chance to save someone who needed help. But in the end, I feel the movie has a very awkward, abrupt ending and I’m quite dissatisfied by it.

Those who know me will be aware that, while I’m prepared to acknowledge something as a classic, be it an album, book or film, that does not prevent me from finding fault with it if I believe it’s there to be found, and it does not give it an automatic pass. If it did, then this journal would be a waste of time, as no matter how poor I thought a movie was myself, I would have to say it was great just because it’s considered a classic. That’s never the case with me; I make up my own mind, guided - but not driven - by the opinion of perhaps the majority, but I reserve always the right to contest or even defy that opinion.

Here, I allow this is a very good movie, but as a Hitchcock one, I found it a disappointment and am rather surprised to find many reviewers and critics calling it his best, or one of his best. I am also quite amazed to see this movie touted as one of the best in the world. To me, it’s far from that. A classic movie, sure. But a great movie?

Not in my book.

Personal rating: 6/10

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018