I said last time that I had to wait for DVDs to trickle in, and trickled they have. Well, one has at least. Still waiting on more for next time, but hey, at least we've got A Streetcar Named Desire!
Now this is a fun one. Watching it today, there's nothing especially groundbreaking about it, and as far as I know, it wasn't all that groundbreaking back in 1934 either. In fact, It Happened One Night is downright conventional. It's plot—entitled lady runs away from her oppressive upper-class lifestyle, along the way meeting a dashing stranger with whom she bickers long enough to fall in love with—is one of the most dogeared sections in the romantic comedy playbook, and the rest of the production follows suit, remaining comfortable within the established rules of the filmmaking game. But innovation be darned! Over and over again, It Happened One Night proves that it doesn't matter how conventional or groundbreaking a movie is so long as it is executed well. The whole film is just such a pleasure to experience. The screenplay is fast and funny, the cinematography is playful, and Gable and Colbert have an infectiously delightful chemistry on screen. They both look like they're having the times of their lives. Also, the film is super sexual, which was a fun surprise for me when I first saw it. Like, sex is everywhere. Given that the film concerns several things that take place over several nights, I'm half convinced that the It in the title must refer to the you-know-what and that One Night is the wedding night at the end. That last shot (i.e. the curtain dropping) is one of the funniest, most sexually forthright (yet somehow understated) moments I've ever seen in a mainstream Hollywood movie from this era. The rest of the film flirts around innuendo admirably, but there's no beating around the bush (so to speak) in that last moment; that falling curtain is as cheekily unsubtle as a movie can get short of a flashing "gratuitous sex scene" marquee a la Wayne's World. Then again, maybe my surprise has more to do with my ignorance of cinematic history than anything. Wikipedia informs me that It Happened One Night was one of the last rom-coms produced in pre-Code Hollywood. So maybe some of you more film-literate readers can tell me if this film is an anomaly or not.
Blanche DuBois is an impressive feat of a character. On the one hand, she's a nearly intolerable tangle of contradictions, someone who's so caught up with appearances and her elitist ideas of what makes human beings worth her attention that it's often a relief when she exits a scene. The fact that she spends at least half the plot lying through her teeth and being just generally phony makes her presence all the more unbearable. There are several characters vying for contempt in A Streetcar Named Desire, but, for all of Stanley's frightening violence, Blanche is by far the most grating. This is true in both the play and movie adaptation (which is impressively faithful to the play while somehow also avoiding feeling like a play itself—lookin' at you, The Philadelphia Story). And yet, on the other hand, the movie somehow avoids viewing Blanche with contempt. Instead, the film (and, by extension, we as an audience) feels compassion for the poor woman. There's no schmaltzy heart-tugging or anything, but just the right amount of humanity in the depiction of her broken neuroses. If I had to pinpoint the source of this humanity, I'd have to split the credit three ways among Tennessee Williams's script, Vivian Leigh's performance, and the cinematography. Lines like "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers" land like bombs, and Leigh's acting is tinged with just enough desperateness to color Blanche with this compellingly primal fear of disappearing into the shadows of society. And speaking of shadows, the cinematography is particularly lush in its representation of Blanche, always cross-cutting her figure with both blinding light and lush darkness, and I'll be darned if you can film someone with such sensitivity without giving rise to at least a little feeling for the person. I've spent this whole post talking about Blanche, which is unfortunate, given the excellence of the rest of the movie, too. I'll close by posing this mostly irrelevant question: do I detect shades of Marlon Brando's Stanley fifty years later in James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano? You Sopranos fans out there let me know!
One of the great things about Rear Window (and there are a lot of them) is that it takes a high-concept premise and turns it into something that feels a lot bigger than that premise would seem to allow, something of intellectual and even philosophical depth. This is a particular strength of Alfred Hitchcock, and he does it time and time again, perhaps to the most acclaim in Vertigo but also to lesser degrees in Psycho, Suspicion, Rebecca, and any number of his other films. With Rear Window, we have the mostly pulpy premise of a man who is confined to his room by an injury witnesses his neighbor commit what looks like murder. It's a fun narrative hook, and the plot plays out pretty much in the same fun, pulpy vein. There are great visceral thrills to be had in Rear Window, and if thrilling were all that the film was up to, it would be a resounding success. But, as is the case with Psycho, Vertigo, et al., these thrills are delivered through Hitchcock's direction, and what direction it is! Without Hitchcock, it's a fun movie. With Hitchcock, it's a movie about existentialism, about psychosexual tension and voyeurism, about the unreliability of perspective, about the mysterious ways in which the world develops in leaps and bounds when we aren't there to see it. A lot of those things are hinted at in the screenplay, but it's the direction that really brings the themes to full bloom. I'd also like to note that while Rear Window is definitely about ideas, it never ceases to be great entertainment, either. If you don't care about the ideas, that's totally fine; there's plenty else to enjoy. Hitchcock was a master of this type of two-track cinema, where the film is both accessible and intellectual while being neither dumb nor esoteric (or esoterically dumb, for that matter). The only contemporary director I can think of who consistently manages this balance even close to as well as Hitchcock did is Christopher Nolan, and, c'mon, even he can't hold a candle to ol' Alfred.
As always, it's great to hear what y'all think about the stuff I ramble about here. Until next time!
If you feel so inclined, you can read the previous post in the series, #s 43-45, here.
Update: The next post, #s 49-51, is up right here.
