Unless you count Disney as an auteur, there was no filmmaker whose name was a real selling point for the mid-20th century public beyond Alfred Hitchcock. A full half-century after his final feature was released, that status hasn’t really been rivaled. Yes, directors like Tarantino or Christopher Nolan may have substantial popular followings, and myriad others their cultier ones. But the “Master of Suspense” remains a behind-the-camera star on a different level, one that was frequently a bigger lure than the biggest star actors he utilized. Not only is he still widely identified with the screen thriller in general, just about any extant variation on that genre can be traced back to his pioneering imprint—whether it’s the slasher (Psycho), spy intrigue (North by Northwest), or odd-couple comedy mystery (The Lady Vanishes).
All three of those just-named classics will be among the 14 titles this year in SF’s annual Hitchcock Fest, which occupies the Balboa Theater this Fri/22 through Mon/25. One of the movies being screened is not by Alfred Hitchcock, but is partially about him: on Monday there will be the local premiere of Kim Novak’s Vertigo, a new documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe (of Psycho study 78/52 and Lynch/Oz) in which the now 93-year-old star recalls her most famous vehicle, and other aspects of a storied career.
It will naturally be followed by the original Vertigo itself, the 1958 thriller in which James Stewart plays a heights-fearing former SFPD office who develops a neurotic obsession with a woman (Novak) who is eerily near-identical to a prior apparent suicide. The baroque, stylized psychodrama, and Novak’s dual-role turn, were both somewhat coolly received upon original release. But it’s become one of those movies whose reputation seems to rise with each passing year, such that in 2012, it topped the Sight and Sound poll gauging critical consensus on the “greatest films of all time.”
The current Balboa program runs a gamut, encompassing the cream of this director’s early British features (The 39 Steps, Lady Vanishes), his only remake (1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much with Stewart and Doris Day, revamping his own 1934 original), one of his occasional gimmick-driven enterprises (the 1948 Rope, whose very long takes convey an illusion of being “in real time”), some enduring knockout popular entertainments (NxNW, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train), and his memorable later flirtations with flat-out horror (The Birds). There are also some curiosities for completists: A big hit at the time, 1941’s Suspicion introduced Hitch to his frequent star Cary Grant, and got Joan Fontaine her Oscar. But now it seems an awfully flimsy thing, too-clearly thrown together in a hurry to reunite the actress and director of the prior year’s far superior Rebecca.
More obscure still—relatively speaking, since no Hitchcock film has gone un-reexamined—are a couple of his less-renowned 1950s endeavors. That decade commenced with Stage Fright, a galumphing London-set comedy mystery in which the director seemed rather conspicuously immune to the appeal of both squeaky-clean ingenue Jane Wyman and waxy femme fatale Marlene Dietrich. (He rather back-handedly praised the latter for being so “professional,” as she pretty much controlled everything about her own scenes, which by inference he pretty much gave up on.)
Then there’s The Wrong Man, his sole project billed as “a true story,” with Henry Fonda as a Manhattan musician who in real life went through a hellish ordeal after being mistakenly identified as a serial holdup robber. It has its fans, but you can see why Hitchcock didn’t revisit this terrain. Only fiction’s flexibility could afford him full license for the showy setpieces, macabre humor and other elements he most enjoyed creating, and audiences most enjoyed watching.
Though it’s been 46 years now since he passed away at age 80, almost any movie that deals in suspense, action, or terror owes some debt of gratitude to Hitchcock’s technical and stylistic imprint. Of course, some directors have made that influence more obvious than others, and no one has ever paid tribute as openly or dedicatedly as Brian De Palma—who, it happens, is getting his own retrospective at Bay Area Alamo Drafthouses starting this weekend.
The six-part De Palma Summer series starts with his 1976 commercial breakthrough Carrie, the first screen Stephen King adaptation—and still perhaps the best, with Sissy Spacek as the telekinetic teen and Piper Laurie as her crazy evangelical mum. It’s followed by 1996’s Mission: Impossible, which kicked off a still-running Tom Cruise espionage franchise reinventing the 1960s TV series. It seemed a work-for-hire endeavor, albeit one the director brought considerable visual esprit to. The only scene I’ll ever really need to see again, however, is the one where Vanessa Redgrave shares a limousine with Cruise, and regards him with all the predatory amusement of a cat toying with a mouse.
The other four films in this “Summer,” however, are all slavish, overt Hitchcock homages. They’re lurid murder mysteries laden with self-consciously dazzling camera choreography, black-comedy snark, and bursts of extreme violence that brought furious accusations of embedded directorial misogyny. De Palma used Hitchcock’s famed Psycho composer Bernard Herrmann on 1973’s Sisters, involving Margot Killer as Siamese twins (one good, one bad, of course); their collaboration would’ve continued, had the musician not died two years later.
That ingenious concoction was Hitchcockian in other ways too, yet its proximity to “the master” paled alongside the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), and Body Double (1983). All were deliberately outrageous thrillers whose degrees of conmingled sex and violence would have surely made that proper Englishman blush. They remain shamelessly flamboyant, entertaining, and quease-inducing.
Once at the top of the Hollywood heap (notably with Scarface and The Untouchables), De Palma did not stay there past Y2K, suffering a series of critical and box-office letdowns. But any roundup of his career highlights, many included here, can still knock yer eyes out. Note that the six features aren’t necessarily showing on the same days at the three separate Bay Area Drafthouses, with the series starting as early as Sun/24 and ending as late as July 17 in different locations.
A more random assortment of golden oldies is playing the Roxie this weekend under the umbrella title Larger Than Life & In 4K. All are recent restorations, though otherwise the connections are slim, ranging from Cronenberg’s prescient 1999 VR paranoid nightmare eXistenZ to Milos Forman’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1984 film of playwright Anthony Schaffer’s historical fiction about Mozart, Amadeus. Two others are likely to be a little less well-known to most current audiences.
Of these, there’s Lina Wertmuller’s 1972 The Seduction of Mimi, which upon its eventual U.S. release in 1974 did a great deal to make her a sudden directorial superstar—the first woman to claim any such stature. It remains easily one of her best, an unruly, sometimes very funny sociopolitical satire with frequent costars Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato as a Sicilian laborer exiled to Turin, and the hippie-ish free spirit he meets there. Turi Ferro plays all the Mafia kingpins our hero encounters in his beleaguered progress. As with many Wertmuller joints, it’s got elements that can be downright offensive by today’s standards—particularly a grotesque slapstick climax of mutual revenge sex. But her penchant for treating serious themes in an over-the-top, messily farcical manner would arguably never gel this completely again.
The other likely discovery for many will be Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 Sholay, a splashy Indian comedy-action-adventure paying tribute to classic American westerns (albeit on a scale worthy of Sergio Leone). Initially ill-received by both critics and audiences, it soon turned into one of the biggest, most beloved hits in Bollywood history. Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan play a handsome pair of inseparable ex-cons whose exploits begin with a huge bandits-on-horseback vs. train chase, then encompass further perils including romance, myriad shootouts, and catchy song and dance interludes. This jaunty 3.5 hour epic will be shown Sat/23 in a recently constructed “director’s cut” with restored original ending, previously deleted scenes, and superwide 70mm aspect ratio.
Yes, there are some new (or in some cases at least newer) movies arriving this week as well. Unfortunately the most eagerly awaited among them, I Love Boosters from Oakland’s own Boots Riley, was not available for preview by deadline.
Diamonds
This latest from Turkish-Italian writer/director Ferzan Ozpetek (Hamam, Facing Windows) is dedicated to the late, aforementioned Melato, as well as fellow screen divas Virna Lisi and Monica Vitti—“all my actresses and more” in a “movie about the power of women,” as Ozpetek himself puts it to cast members in the opening scene. He’s also assembled them to pay tribute to the Italian cinema of another era, in which they’ll portray staff at a theatrical costume shop in mid-1970s Rome.
Run by oft-squabbling sisters Alberta (Luisa Ranieri) and Gabriella (Jasmine Accorsi), it gets a big chance when an Oscar-winning designer (Vanessa Scalera) commissions them to realize the elaborate duds for a famous director’s new period epic. But that order may be more than they can reasonably handle, and its pressures exacerbate the troubles already afflicting various characters. One is grieving the loss of a child, another is a battered wife; the studio finds itself hiding both a young woman on the run from police, and a boy whose mother can’t afford to put him in daycare.
This is the kind of movie in which setpieces have everybody bursting into retro Top 40 song, and the “mean girl” figure (Ranieri) gets her distemper explained by a past disappointment in love whose sudsiness is surpassed only by the shameless contrivance of its present-day resolution. You get the picture: A glam, plush wallow of a self-conscious “crowdpleaser,” laughter ’n’ tears arriving on cue, with Ozpetek gratuitously surfacing from time to time just to beam onscreen at his own fictive creation. It was a big hit in Italy, and will no doubt prove equally satisfying to some viewers here—those who’d like something akin to Steel Magnolias or The Help, but in an Italian-getaway mode. That there is barely a credible moment in these 136 minutes shouldn’t deter anyone so inclined. Diamonds opens at the Lark in Larkspur Fri/22.
Sun Ra and Dylan, together at last (well, at different theaters)
Two events at CinemaSF venues pay tribute to two of the most distinctive musical talents of the 20th century’s latter half. Unclassifiable jazz innovator Sun Ra, who passed away in 1993, would have turned 112 this year—and given his self-mythologizing mix of Egyptology, sci-fi and Afrocentrism (for starters), that still wouldn’t have been the most fantastical thing about him.
The 4-Star’s birthday celebration on Sat/23 begins in late afternoon with director Christine Turner there in person to present her recent documentary Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, a PBS “American Masters” entry that utilizes plentiful archival footage to limn the many sides to this singular multimedia artist. Then at 8pm, there’s a program featuring live music from the Samuel Gonzalez Group, followed by Robert Mugge’s 1980 Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, which consists primarily of concert footage from the Arkestra in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
The next night, Larry Charles will be in conversation with Ian Grant at a Balboa screening of his 2003 big-screen directorial debut Masked and Anonymous. It’s almost certainly the best narrative film in which Bob Dylan basically plays Bob Dylan (not counting tricksy Scorsese documentary Rolling Thunder Revue). But then the competition isn’t exactly stiff—Renaldo & Clara and Hearts of Fire are two movies that were barely seen when they came out, and very seldom gets revived, both for good reason. M&A is a cryptic fiction cowritten by Charles and his star with Dylan as “Jack Fate,” a cryptic rockstar released from prison to play a benefit that might save America… or something.
It is a slick oddity, with a star-studded cast including Penelope Cruz, Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Angela Bassett, John Goodman, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Susan Tyrell, Mickey Rourke, and your Aunt Sally—at least, it seems hardly anyone got left out. In addition to performances by the man himself, there are also covers of Dylan songs by everyone from The Dixie Hummingbirds and the Grateful Dead to Los Lobos and Italian hip-hop group Articolo 31. It wouldn’t be surprising if hearing Charles talk about making the film turns out to be even more rewarding than watching it.
