Properly Screened

I hadn’t seen this film in almost thirty years, but it was one of the screenings I’d been looking forward to the most, mostly for sentimental reasons. I was introduced to it in high school video arts by Mr. Weesner, who used the crop-duster scene to teach us about Hitchcock’s obsession with storyboarding and visual control. I can still picture him pressing pause on the classroom VCR, pointing at the leading lines and emptiness around Cary Grant, explaining how none of it was accidental. That sequence was conceived almost entirely in advance, planned shot by shot. The suspense doesn’t come from dialogue or music but from the composition of each frame. Hitchcock uses vast negative space --- Cary Grant stranded in an empty, sunlit field --- to heighten tension, subverting expectations of danger lurking in shadows. Each visual beat escalates with architectural precision. When the Mount Rushmore finale hit, I realized I had completely forgotten that the movie ends with Thornhill and Eve d...

It took some historical context for me to understand why this noir, which initially felt campy and predictable, has endured as a masterpiece. Compared to modern films like The Substance or Black Swan that also explore what happens to women when they are no longer seen as desirable, Sunset Blvd. (1950) feels restrained, classical, and polite. What I didn't realize was that Sunset Blvd. was the first film brave enough to tell the truth about how Hollywood treats leading ladies as they age. Gloria Swanson, a real silent-era icon --- at one time the most famous woman in the world --- was cast as Norma Desmond, a forgotten middle-aged silent-era star living in a decaying mansion on Sunset Boulevard. The film follows struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, who becomes Norma's (ambivalently) kept (much younger) man. Norma is convinced she’s on the verge of a comeback, while the audience can see she’s descending into madness. When it premiered, studio executive...

Wanting something badly enough has a way of loosening your boundaries. That’s the theme at the center of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), a cynical comedy about realizing how much of yourself you’ve given away. For C.C. Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon), ambition turns his apartment into a hook up spot for his bosses and their mistresses. Baxter is a lonely insurance clerk in New York City looking to climb the corporate ladder. He falls into a scheme where he allows the executives at his firm to borrow his Upper West Side apartment for their trysts in return for promises of advancement. At first this arrangement feels harmless, but over time, Baxter isn’t just giving up his space, he's giving up his sense of dignity.  Fran Kubelik (played by Shirley MacLaine) is making a similar compromise in love. Fran works as the "elevator girl" at the same insurance company. She’s romantically involved with Mr. Sheldrake, Baxter’s married boss, who promises he will leave his wife fo...

I've spent my movie watching career generally avoiding the Classic Westerns genre. The frontier masculinity is off putting. So are the racist depictions of Native Americans. And the treatment of women as symbols rather than subjects. This film has all three. In The Searchers (1956), John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a brooding Confederate veteran driven to hunt down the Comanche chief who killed his family and abducted his niece, Debbie, played by Natalie Wood.  This film is one of the most mysterious of the classic Westerns because of the degree that the audience is asked to read into the antihero's motivations. Does Ethan feel he is to blame for the death of his family? Is he on a quest to bring Debbie home because he's secretly her father? Does he mean to rescue her, or is he so outraged by the threat of miscegenation that he'd rather kill her? Is that why Debbie's adopted brother is so insistent in joining him, to guard against his fury? Maybe Ethan is meant to b...

  I’ve been trying to see Singin’ in the Rain in a theater for years, and when a local cinema announced a screening, I really wanted it to work. A local theater --- recently “saved” by a man better known for losing his dental career after some  creative insurance practices and other legal troubles ---  announced a screening just a few miles from my house. I wasn’t sure what to expect, the idea of seeing a film locally felt too good to pass up. Usually, catching one of these titles means driving nearly 250 miles or more round trip. Having the opportunity so close tempted me away from using my better judgement.  I arrived early, hoping for the full experience, but the movie had already started. When I asked why, I was told it began early because “some people showed up early.” Inside, the seating had been replaced with metal café tables and chairs, and the projection was so dim that I could barely make out what was on screen. I'm also almost certain that they wer...

I'm just going to tell you what Roger Ebert said of this film, which he rated four stars. So here is it, verbatim. The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.   Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In “Casablanca,” he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.   The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wi...

I can't watch Alfred Hitchcock films without thinking about Mr. Weesner, my high school video teacher.  But to reduce him to that --- my high school video teacher --- is woefully inadequate. Weesner was a dear family friend and my mentor. Over the decades we must have talked about hundreds of films. And we watched at least a dozen in his home theatre. I was a cocky kid, but he somehow delighted in my hot takes. (Years after his death, I finally watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , one of his favorites. "A sad, toxic depiction of male friendship," I would have told him. That would have made him laugh.) There is so much I want to say about the role he played in how I think about art --- how I think about myself --- but it all gives me a lump in my throat. After his death, I stopped seriously watching movies for years, unable to love or hate something without being overcome with the grief of never being able to talk to him about it.  But, boy did he love Hitchcock, ...

When the first Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll was published in 1952, Bicycle Thieves earned the top position. Ten years later, it was relegated to sixth place (tied with Battleship Potemkin ) and Citizen Kane (1941) took the number-one spot. The film stayed there for fifty years, an immovable monolith of “greatness,” until Vertigo nudged it aside in 2012. My dad and I went to a free screening as part of the 90th anniversary celebration of the Golden State Theatre in downtown Monterey. The historic Moorish revival movie palace—with its opulent decor, velvet seats, and frescoed ceiling—was the perfect setting to watch a film that opens in the protagonist’s own palatial estate, Xanadu. It felt a little like stepping through the screen. More happens in the first ten minutes of Citizen Kane than in most full-length features: a death, a mystery, a newsreel obituary, and a montage that sketches the entire arc of a man’s life. The story pieces together the ...