Powder room

The beautiful victim

Watching A Perfect Murder (1998) again reminded me how much I like it. Written by Patrick Smith Kelly for director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), the story is based on Frederick Knott's play Dial M For Murder, which Knott adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film version in 1954. There are a few nods to its heritage, such as the camera in the opening credits spiralling upwards to a loft window with a touch of Vertigo, but the story is its own movie.

A Perfect Murder works because it focusses almost entirely on the triangle of Steven, Emily and David: there's no relief from the mental lock they have on each other, and no rationalisation offered by other characters. The casting is perfect. Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow are believable as wealthy, successful people (because they are) and Viggo Mortensen is just on the right side of smart. He lives in what is now an unbelievable loft, but his boho life is as intrinsic to the plot as the Taylors' wealth: if they didn't live like that, there wouldn't be a story. New York is presented as a village in three parts: the two apartments and Emily's home -- again, mirroring the characters -- and there is no escape either by car, boat or train. No friends, no-one you can trust. Most of all what I like about it is its economy. No set ups, no back story, information rolled out when it serves the story and not before. The technology has dated -- landline telephones, slow trading screens -- but it's credible. This is one of the last pre-smartphone thrillers: once everyone had a handset, killing would change.

Pat

Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary in 1988:

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). "It seems to be entertaining after all these years," she acknowledges. "They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, 'Can we make this?' I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake."

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith's agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. "That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes."

Hitchcock purchased Strangers On A Train through an intermediary so Highsmith's agent wouldn't know who was bidding for it and ask for a larger advance. It's interesting that the author puts so much distance between herself and the director: critics and fans put them hand in glove.

NB: Nice sweater.

Pattern recognition

Writers may not be more self-aware than anyone else but they keep better records. A body of work is the snail's trail of sensibility. But artists are as limited in their capacity for change as anyone else: no matter what they observe they will continue to make the same mistakes. This is one reason why writers tend towards melancholy: they have the data but can do nothing with it.

All by way of saying I've been reading the pulps again and trying not to drive a mental red-pen through words and sections. I finally -- finally -- made it through Dragon Tattoo. I love the images from the book and the film and I'm looking forward to Fincher remake and yes, it's sold a billion copies but boy does it creak. Pointless to rail against it, not least of all because the author is dead, but stroke of luck that the killer mastermind forgot to shut the door... The oversight would not embarrass Henning Mankell, who writes very well about Wallander drinking coffee and eating a sandwich; fairly well about the everyday nature of police investigations and terribly about crimes themselves. But Raymond Chandler's Playback is one of my favourite crime novels and that made no sense at all, so I have to give Mankell a pass... Now I'm back to Richard Price and Lush Life. Clockers was an OCD Adam 12. Maybe Lush Life will be the same. But I'm into it because of its dialogue and detailing.

In between I've been re-watching The Killing. The series has such a great setup that it can only be let down by the resolution. Not unlike the unravelling of a cheery Danish sweater... And dipping back into Twin Peaks, Hitchcock... And Californication. Nothing will be as good as Hank's first season so that's the one I return to. Again. The same decisions, the same mistakes over and over, the accrual of which becomes the author's style.

The 47th pancake

Mr. Stratford discusses Distance Looks Our Way. When I worked at the Auckland [City] Art Gallery people always seemed to be referencing it. That, the "cinema of unease" and the Edmonds Cookbook.

You know that feeling when you sit up suddenly and a pull a muscle? I think I just did that to my brain. It's been a long week / month / year.

Meanwhile...

20th Century Fox may have leaked a photo of the space jockey. Mr. Trent Reznor and Mr. Atticus Ross have released a free sampler from the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack. (If you buy the whole three and a half CDs' worth you get their Karen O cover of 'Immigrant Song' free. Full of win!) This is Purity Ring and this is The Brighter Future. And tonight, Matthew, Sienna Miller will be Tippi Hedren. The press announcement is not wrong to describe Hedren as Hitchcock's obsession but he had more than one.

This is the news

The US justice system is revving up to stop Lindsay Lohan having fun. Wish they'd moved to stop her injecting stuff into her lips; the rest is her business, shurely? Anyway. Old Salon interview with David Mamet:

Is the idea of the con game something that appears in all your films?

Yeah, it appears in most of them. I think that film, as opposed to theater, is intrinsically a melodramatic medium. And one of the wonderful categories of melodrama is the confidence thriller.

Elsewhere you mentioned the "light thriller." What is that?

I contrasted the light thriller and film noir. The light thriller is much closer to the tradition of comedy. The film of comedy is such that in every scene, the hero makes a misstep and yet is rescued at the end by the forces of good, or by God, or by a deus ex machina. Tragedy is exactly the opposite. At each step, the hero seems to be doing the correct thing, but at the end of the movie ends up consigned to perdition, or death, or disgrace, because of some internal flaw. So film noir is much closer to tragedy and the light or Hitchcockian thriller is much closer to comedy.

Still the man even after marrying the Pidgeon robot. Kinda like her as well. Am sentimental. And from Jezebel, a short history of film merkins. Sadly they omit Sienna Miller's digital merkin, which was some pimply IT operator's karmic reward.

Bedside reading

A friend lent me a book, Writing With Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, by Steven DeRosa. Hayes worked with the director on four movies - Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. After their working relationship ended - bitchily, on Hitchcock's part - Hayes went on to write the screenplay for, amongst other things, Peyton Place - without which we would never have had Twin Peaks. DeRosa's book had me on page 10 of the introduction:

The politics of the studio system and the widening acceptance of the auteur theory downplayed the significance of the screenwriter's contribution to the art of filmmaking. Frank Capra's most successful films were all scripted by Robert Riskin, yet few people are familiar with Riskin's name. Similarly, Ernst Lubitsch collaborated with Samson Raphaelson on nine films, and John Ford collaborated with Dudley Nichols on eleven. Again, these screenwriters never received the recognition enjoyed by the "auteurs" for whom they wrote. But the director who has been most often canonised as an auteur is Hitchcock.

The first part of DeRosa's book is about the creation of the screenplay for Rear Window, based on a short story by the remarkable Cornell Woolrich. The account maps out in detail how Hayes' treatment for the film - itself based on an earlier treatment by Joshua Logan - ilustrates the basic premise of Woolrich's story - a man who thinks he has witnessed a murder - by adding characters and elements that expose and develop the plot. For instance here's Hayes on the character of Jeff's nurse Stella:

I like a character like that to act as a Greek chorus, to tell us what might happen and to go for comic relief. Because you can't have unrestrained suspense all the time.

Before coming to film Hayes worked in radio, with over 1500 scripts to his credit and a reputation as 'the fastest writer in Hollywood.'

'I would say Hitch worked with me more on To Catch A Thief than he did on Rear Window certainly. But still, he realised that I worked better if I was uninterrupted and he didn't interrupt me too much... We just discussed in general terms story and character, and he let me go and write until I finished. We did have lunches together and I'd tell him what I was doing, and he was patient enough to wait for it.'

After the screenplay was finished Hayes and Hitchock broke it down into shots together. Hayes was also on set during filming. In 2002 Hayes was interviewed about the experience by Chris Wehner:

CW: In Rear Window there isn't your typical strong villain and the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair, so how difficult was it to maintain a level of tension and suspense?

JMH: Having non-typical characters was of no real hindrance to the establishment of tension and suspense. In reality, there was a lot to work with. With a non-typical villain, you had the built-in opportunity to engage the characters in a "It couldn't be him. Could it? He's just a regular fellow" form of banter, just as much as having the protagonist limited in his physical actions helped the suspense of, "How in the world is he going to defend himself, if need be?" Writers sometimes habitually overdo it in how their characters move, act, and depict themselves. Grand flourish in a villain works for Bond movies, I suppose, but, in the world you and I live in, true villains don't act as such. At least not on any level you or I may have experienced. There's a form of everyday villainy that is largely forgotten now in cinema. And that's what audiences can align best with-what it is they see and know in everyday life.

That interview is archived on a slow-loading page here.

Mind if I use that portable keyhole?

Reasons to love the internets: the original recordings of Francois Truffaut's interviews with Alfred Hitchcock are available to listen to online. Free. All of them. Translator yapping over Frank and Hitch. Courtesy of If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats. Actual blog name. Conflation of happiness.