Referencing Hitchcock

Click here for a book review I wrote about eight years ago.

I originally penned this piece for a now-defunct online magazine called Retroplanet. The book under review was Thomas Leitch's The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, a 400-plus-page reference volume published by Checkmark Books/Facts on File. Sadly, it's now out of print, although you can still get used copies from the usual online sources (Amazon, ABE, etc.). Anyone seriously interested in Hitchcock should have it. A professor at the University of Delaware, Leitch is a thoughtful and meticulous film scholar, not just a buff, and he put together a remarkably solid work, writing all the entries himself. See my review for details.

The book was part of a short-lived Facts on File series called Great Filmmakers; it produced only two other volumes, one on Orson Welles and one on Stanley Kubrick. While I never acquired the Kubrick tome, I do have The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles, an edited volume with multiple contributors. That book has its uses, but, unfortunately, in terms of accuracy and insight it's much inferior to Leitch's solo work on Hitchcock, which should be better known than it is.

Of Director's Cuts and Deleted Scenes

"There's a point at which auteur perfectionism slides into decadent excess, and the film suffers," writes Alex Rose in the spring issue of the American Scholar. Rose is addressing the phenomenon of "director's cuts"—re-released versions of movies in which scenes previously deleted have been restored, or to which, in a few cases, some computerized cosmetics have been applied. His examples include Apocalypse Now Redux, with its "inexcusable interludes of colonial romance and stranded Playboy bunnies"; the twentieth-anniversary edition of E.T., in which the cops' guns are digitally replaced with walkie-talkies; the "Special Edition" Star Wars, with its "egregious Pixarification of Jabba the Hut"; and the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Amadeus, which reinstates a scene wherein Mozart's wife explicitly offers herself to Salieri in hopes of securing her husband's acceptance by the emperor's court. Finding this last instance particularly deplorable, Rose contends: "The scene is boring, weird, redundant and finally detrimental in that it tips Salieri's libidinal hand. No longer is he a chaste Italian craftsman whose devotion to God is corroded by tyrannical jealousy, but an ineffectual pushover whose petty sexual frustrations threaten his lust for retribution." Rose goes on to argue that production constraints which prevent directors from getting everything they want can sometimes benefit their films. Such constraints, he says, can force a director to find inventive ways around them and produce a better end product. By contrast, director's cuts, which offer "the opportunity for infinitely many do-overs," too often serve only the filmmaker's vanity.

Though Rose's points are all well taken, something he neglects to mention bears notice: the inclusion on many DVDs of deleted scenes as part of a "special features" section. These, I would argue, are not a bad thing at all. The original theatrical versions are left intact, and for anyone who's interested, seeing the stuff that landed on the cutting-room floor can spark insights into the creative process. We get to judge for ourselves how certain omitted scenes might have harmed—or enhanced—what did make it into the final cut. An example from the DVD of Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah leaps to mind. In the film, Tommy Lee Jones plays a straitlaced retired MPO investigating the murder of his son, a soldier who was killed near his base shortly after returning from Iraq. The scene in question depicts Jones's visit to the hospital room of his son's girlfriend, herself an Iraq veteran who lost an arm and a leg to a roadside bomb. When she reveals that the son responded to her injuries with a crude sexual joke, the father is taken aback and apologizes to her on the boy's behalf. The scene underscores both the father's naivete and his essential decency; and it makes an important point about the desensitizing effects of war—effects that turn out to have been a crucial factor in his son's death. Whether retaining this scene would have lent the finished film more texture or richness can be debated. But its inclusion as a DVD "extra" makes that debate possible, and if you're at all intrigued by how movies get made and the choices (not to mention the compromises) involved in the process, deleted scenes can be particularly illuminating.

The Coen Brothers and the Language of True Grit

I can't say I was too surprised when I heard that the Coen brothers were planning a remake of True Grit. (Production may already have begun on it, in fact.) While the Coens are no strangers to genre exercises (see Miller's Crossing) and western settings (see Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and especially No Country for Old Men), I suspect that what most attracted them to this project was the language. Charles Portis's original novel (1968) mimicked the voice of an aging, no-nonsense spinster recalling how, as a fourteen-year-old in 1870s Arkansas, she swore to avenge her father's murder, enlisted the aid of a boozy, one-eyed U.S. marshal, and rode with him into Indian Territory to accomplish the task. Befitting the narrator, the dialogue and descriptions were at once folksy and formal; here's a typical passage: "He took only a second to draw a bead and fire the powerful gun. The ball flew to its mark like a martin to his gourd and Lucky Ned Pepper fell dead in the saddle. . . . 'Hurrah!' I joyfully exclaimed. 'Hurrah for the man from Texas! Some bully shot!'"

As arch as that isolated snippet sounds, Portis's stylistic conceit actually worked quite well over the course of the novel, which became a best-seller. How well the language worked in Henry Hathaway's film version, which appeared a year later, was questionable, however. Time's critic described the problem thus: "On the printed page, the studiously naive dialogue contributed to an authentic period piece. Spoken onscreen, such lines as 'I will not bandy words with a drunkard' tend to clutter the air like gnats." (Still, the film was a hit, for which John Wayne, playing the marshal, won his only Academy Award.)

Stylized speech, often some bent version of regional vernacular, has always been a favorite implement in the Coen brothers' toolkit—from the "you betchas" of Fargo to George Clooney's outlandish patter in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Given that history, they'll probably have great fun adapting Portis's peculiar rhythms and constructions, and I'm hoping it'll all work better this time around. Reviewing the original film in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris observed that Hathaway directed his actors "somewhat against the consciously literary dialogue" of the novel. The Coens, on the other hand, are likely to have their cast reveling in it.