Sunday, June 27, 2010

Commentary Track Gush

Early in the commentary track on the Duplicity DVD, writer-director Tony Gilroy says he hates those commentary tracks in which the filmmaker just starts "gushing" about everyone he or she worked with on the movie. So then what does Gilroy proceed to do? He gushes about the actors. And the crew. And (with a few feints toward modesty) himself. Gilroy's commentary turns out to be indistinguishable from dozens of others that often sound like long versions of Oscar-acceptance speeches.

It's not that I advocate a ban on DVD directorial commentary. If you accept that a certain amount of congratulatory blather is inevitable, there are almost always intriguing things to be learned from even the most self-serving commentary track. Regarding Duplicity, for instance, it's not uninteresting (if hardly earthshaking) to find out that the Bahamas stood in for both Miami and Dubai, or that the cafeteria of a Manhattan girls' school was dressed to look like a posh hotel suite in Rome, or that Gilroy used a handheld camera in one scene because he wanted to suggest that at this point in a story otherwise brimming with misdirection and con games, the "real reality" was being shown for once. For me at least, understanding how cinematic illusions are created, or how specific techniques express meaning, has always been part of the movies' appeal.

That said, I certainly prefer the commentary tracks one typically finds, say, on a Criterion Collection DVD. Usually, Criterion enlists a well-credentialed film scholar to talk about style, theme, historical context, and so on. Sound a little dry? It can be, but at least you don't have to hear that this or that actor was "such an amazing pro" or how a "brilliant" DP, editor, or production designer—and they're never anything less than brilliant—helped save the director's butt.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Happy Birthday, Psycho!

I couldn't let this week pass without noting a special anniversary. Yesterday, Psycho turned fifty. On June 16, 1960, driven by an offbeat marketing campaign ("No one will be allowed in the theater after the movie begins"), Alfred Hitchcock's terrifying (and deeply ironic) masterpiece opened to eager crowds.

The film seemed like quite a departure for Hitch. He had reigned as the cinema's Master of Suspense since the 1930s, but none of his earlier pictures could properly be called a horror film. They were terrific thrillers, mind you, mixing wit, glamorous stars, glossy production values, stunning formal mastery, and, yes, suspense in equal proportions; but the shocks of Psycho— that notorious stabbing in the shower, the subsequent staircase murder, and the final unmasking of the killer—caught his fans by surprise.

Only a year before Psycho, Hitchcock had made something more typical of his oeuvre: the spy-chase epic North by Northwest. It was produced for what was then Hollywood's biggest studio, M-G-M, on what was then a lavish budget, $4.3 million. Its screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, called it "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," and indeed the movie proved to be one of the director's most popular to date.

But then Psycho came along. Determined to scare the hell out of the audience, Hitchcock would push screen violence to the very limits imposed by industry censors, "good taste" be damned. Working from a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and a script by former songwriter Joseph Stefano, he shot the movie in black and white on cheap sets with $800,000 of his own money: Paramount Pictures, his primary employer at the time, was wary of the lurid subject matter and had balked at financing it. The cast, which included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles, was quite capable but not exactly in the Cary Grant–Grace Kelly–James Stewart league, at least in terms of star power. Hitchcock cut all sorts of other corners and went without salary in exchange for 60-percent ownership of the film. Responsible only for marketing and distribution, the Paramount executives figured they had little to lose.

Of course, Hitch made out like a bandit. Psycho quickly raked in millions and, more important, became a milestone in movie history. It's now a staple of film-school classrooms. Critics and scholars have written about it, and written about it, and written about it—and keep writing about it. The late Robin Wood, in a famous mid-sixties essay, compared it to Shakespeare's Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, dubbing it "one of the key works of our age." Wood toned down his enthusiasm for Psycho a bit in later writings, but for my money he got it right the first time.