Topaz (1969)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 143 mins.


There's a part of me that is sympathetic to the notion that a mediocre film from Alfred Hitchcock is still better than most other films. I'm guilty of extending that analysis to a few films that I recognize as interesting only because I bring to them a love, knowledge, and admiration of Hitchcock. If my views on some of his films are slightly inflated due to my interest in the man and his art, don't take that to believe that I think all of his films are above reproach. He made his share of bad movies, and a painful clunker like Topaz is particularly in need of some yellow police tape and a caution to stay away at nearly all costs.

Reeling from the relative catastrophe that was Torn Curtain, Hitchcock climbed back onto the spy thriller bandwagon with Topaz, released three years later and after much reflection on the director's part. It's disappointing that this film fails in virtually every way Torn Curtain did: bloated and overlong, lacking a central and cohesive theme, victim to its scattershot pacing and suffering from an absence of any thrills. Like the previous film, Topaz contains a few moments worth the Hitchcock name, but most of what we consider to be the director's hallmarks, from the narrative to the stylistic, are curiously absent. By the denouement, there is perhaps only a single shot that might stick with you in the coming days. If you were to dust Topaz for fingerprints, you might not turn up any of Hitchcock's.

It's not surprising how things could never quite come together for Topaz. The first draft of the script was written by Leon Uris, who adapted his own novel into something Hitchcock believed was impossible to film. To salvage Uris' script, the director turned to Samuel Taylor, who had delivered a delicately psychological and rich layered detective story for Vertigo; but even if Taylor's finished script is twice as good as Uris's, then I think that says more about how awful the first draft must have been. This is the director's longest film, and it feels like it. Although the plot could have been developed into something substantial, there are missed opportunities from start to finish, and what is too convoluted at first turns too simplistic in the end. (Far too simplistic, if you ask me, but Hitchcock was put in the corner by the studio after the original ending didn't test well. He shot three possible endings, and what made it onto the film is the least offensive, although that's hardly praise.)

Set against the Cuban Missile Crisis, two spies — one American (John Forsythe) and one French (Frederick Stafford) — are working together to help bring down a global network. There is some general international intrigue, including attention paid to the beautiful Juanita (an under-valued Karin Dor), mistress to the French agent who is also involved with a Castro-lookalike (John Vernon). But the affairs of men and governments is not woven together with any intricacy by Hitchcock, whose Notorious is among the best films to explore the murky line between love and duty. Perhaps you, like me, are occasionally willing to let something of depth and nuance slide in exchange for excitement and action, but Topaz lacks those latter elements as well (largely attributed in some circles to that its fact leading men are bland and its only alluring character, Dor's Juanita, disappears all too swiftly; even Torn Curtain, for all its shallowness, had Paul Newman, for God's sake). More damning than the lack of psychological exploration is the fact that even the Cuban Missile Crisis itself feels flat and astonishingly drab, and when you have a director that can send you to the edge of your seat as two characters search for a wine bottle, flubbing the brink of nuclear annihilation does not bode well for the film at large.

In addition to being Hitchcock's longest film, it was also his most expensive (and his biggest commercial flop). His team had fully dissolved, and Hitchcock knew he had another dud on his hands. The seams show where he tried to fix what he could see was too gone to rescue. With its foray into Cuba as well as on-location shooting in Harlem and Copenhagen, Topaz attempted to correct the bland Eastern European tourism of Torn Curtain by taking its characters to exotic locales; but the promise of exoticism is never paid off.

Then there's a simple matter of mechanics. Typically Hitchcock rewards his audience with something of value in almost every scene, but for Topaz only two moments are noteworthy. The first, a rather superb moment involving the theft of a red briefcase belonging to Cuban militants, I'd nearly forgotten about until I went back through my notes. The second, however, has stayed with me since I first saw the film. In the moment of Juanita's death (see above in the accompanying still), the camera flows into a bird's-eye view angle and captures Dor's purple dress flowing out from underneath her with the liquidity of oozing blood. Such a moment is proof Hitchcock wasn't finished yet, but for one stupendous shot to come in the vast expanse of 142 minutes is be drowned in a sea of problematic filmmaking.

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Torn Curtain (1966)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 128 mins.


The following review discusses significant plot points.

Torn Curtain has its origins in the James Bond series, which Alfred Hitchcock believed had been stealing liberally from his work in North by Northwest. There's a relative amount of truth in that, particularly the first few (and the best) installments. He became infatuated with the idea of making a "real" spy movie, something that erased the glamour and instead showed the darker side of espionage. The story of an American scientist posing as a turncoat (and fooling his own fiancée) to slip into the Soviet Union to collect intelligence seemed like it might just be twisted enough to show a spy get his hands dirty. Hitchcock had reason to believe a film like this would be a breeze — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps, Notorious, North By Northwest are all espionage jewels. But this project would prove to be a mistake for Hitchcock; his remaining cinematic collaborations fell to pieces, and the resulting film is among his worst.

In fact, everything that's wrong with this milquetoast political thriller has been passed down through film lore: the on-set squabbling between the director and his method-actor leading man, Paul Newman; squabbling between the director and master composer Bernard Herrmann; squabbling between the director and the studio, between the director and ... well, you get it. One after another, the pieces fell apart on Torn Curtain. If the rationale behind the film was purely dubious (why couldn't he have been satisfied with the glossy and decidedly unrealistic spy flick he had perfected in North by Northwest?), then the final product was doomed from its launch.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Torn Curtain is that it features Paul Newman in his '60s heyday, and neither he nor Hitchcock seem capable of raising the viewer's pulse. Much of that can be attributed to the anemic script, adapted first by Irish novelist Brian Moore and polished by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. (It should be noted Hitchcock tried to lure Vladimir Nabokov on board, to no success.) The script simply provides little by way of genuine suspense; the cinematographer, John F. Warren, and the editor, Bud Hoffman, lack the rhythmic rapport of Robert Burks and George Tomasini, so the sequences that should show the dirty side of spy life are too stagy. (The most famous sequence in the film is called "the farmhouse murder" in Hitchcock-devotee circles; the idea, as Hitchcock imagined it, was that the audience should observe how difficult it actually is to kill another person. Enticing, yes, but it falls flat, too.)

In theory, the typically wonderful Newman would be great as the next generation of Hitchcockian leading man, a slot most frequently filled by Cary Grant and James Stewart, but his performance as Michael Armstrong, an American physicist/spy, comes off as too apathetic and bland. But what worked for Hitchcock in the 1940s and 1950s was changing in the younger guard. Newman became frustrated because Hitchcock consistently rebuffed his attempts to understand the character to a greater degree (your motivation, Hitchcock is to have told him, is your salary). Newman's resignation is palpable in the character of Armstrong, and it doesn't help matters much that Julie Andrews is utterly miscast as Sarah, Michael's nitwit assistant/fiancée.

Accounts vary as to how excited Hitchcock was about the two leads. Hitchcock's agent, Lew Wasserman, lobbied for them, but apparently they weren't high on Hitchcock's radar. Still, he was familiar with both and he relished the chance to undercut their images, specifically Andrews's, by placing the two as an unmarried couple in bed together in the sexually charged first scene. It's slightly humorous in that deft Hitchcock way, but there isn't much joyous in Andrews's performance. The role seems to call for a firm but skeptical woman who believes she has lost her husband to the global enemy. (He can't tell her of his spy work, after all.) Deciding she'd rather have him than her home country, she sneaks overseas with him, but the film portrays her from this point on as confused, muddied, blank, and ineffectual. First drafts of the script call for Sarah to be the viewpoint character; between the two in this incarnation, Newman is certainly more engaging, and I wouldn't have wanted to see how Andrews would have fared as the lead. But the film is ultimately weaker on a narrative level for switching its point-of-view because the possibilities of Sarah's psychological dislocation prove more intriguing than Michael's scientist-as-spy persona. And once you set weak performances and a weak script against a set with a color palette dominated by shades of gray, it's not difficult to experience the sluggish.

The general lethargy can also be traced back to the score. Torn Curtain was the first Hitchcock film since 1955's The Trouble with Harry that did not have its music written or overseen by Bernard Herrmann. (He advised the aural elements of The Birds, but there was no formal score.) Hitchcock might have begun the film in denial, but by its end he knew what he had on his hands and wanted Herrmann to save the film outright — "If you cannot do this then I am the loser," the director wired to the composer ahead of Herrmann's work. However, Hitchcock had also come to believe the composer was recycling too much of his work and the director and the studio both wanted Herrmann to produce a pop score to fit with the height of pop rock in the mid-1960s. (Horrifically, Universal even wanted a possible musical number for Andrews.) Herrmann agreed, but turned in a traditional score anyway. Fighting ensued; in Hitchcock's version, he fired Herrmann, and in Herrmann's version, he quit. The absence of such a score — pins-and-needles mixed with heavy and sonorous brass — affects the film in exactly the way Hitchcock imagined it would. What was sluggish and needed emergency resuscitation received no such thing.

Devotees, particularly myself, are always curious as to why Hitchcock's later films are perplexingly bad. After all, he is one of cinema's giants, with so many masterpieces under his belt that he's secured his place in the pantheon of twentieth century art. Keith Waterhouse, who co-scripted the polishing of the film's first draft, has as sound of a theory as I've ever heard on why Hitchcock's later work suffers. It has to do with numerous miscalculations on the director's part: a strong sense of caution and trepidation previously unfelt in the 1950s; an incapability to new crews and actors; a preoccupation with seemingly irrelevant details; and, finally, a move downward toward satisfying the expectations of a younger audience instead of challenging them as he had done for the previous two decades. A Herrmann score (for example) wouldn't have saved Torn Curtain, but it's indicative the situation Hitchcock was in: he wanted something more contemporary, but was unaware how to pull it off. His reign as the Master was coming to an unfortunate close, and this sort of spy film, which might have worked in a different incarnation thirty years prior, became one of the most mediocre offering from the director, as tense as a limp balloon.

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Marnie (1964)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 130 mins.


The one thing people seem to agree upon when it comes to Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie is that it's a fascinating movie; everything else is up for grabs. It's perhaps the most critically divisive of his fifty-one feature films, which alone makes it mandatory viewing. It was derided upon its release as hokey, meandering, and simplistic; it's been given second life by Hitchcock aficionados who, in remeasuring the Master's legacy, declare it neo-expressionistic, psychologically complex, and cinematically influential. The two most famous takes on it come from Pauline Kael and Robin Wood. Kael said it was "Hitchcock scraping bottom" and "hardly seems worth the trouble." Wood, wading consciously into hyperbole, said, "If you don't like Marnie, you don't like Hitchcock. If you don't love Marnie, you don't love cinema."

I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't think you can say, as Kael does, that Marnie is Hitchcock at the bottom until you've seen Torn Curtain and Topaz, released within the following five years. Unlike Wood, I think the socially responsible thing for Hitchcock (and film) lovers to do is approach this film with a right blend of reverence and skepticism. But what lover of cinema can't help but be fascinated by a film that's simultaneously lauded for harkening back to Hitchcock's roots as a title designer during the silent era of filmmaking in Germany, and conversely accused of being sloppy, lazy, shallow, and overtly artificial?

Throughout this retrospective on Hitchcock, I've placed emphasis on his collaborative nature, the names and talent that he used from film to film, particularly in his 1950s powerhouse heyday. Marnie is the end of the line for many of those collaborations. It was the last film edited for Hitchcock by George Tomasini, who died shortly after its release; it was the last film shot by cinematographer Robert Burks, who did not work with Hitchcock on Torn Curtain and died in a house fire on 1968;

For a director interested in staircases and all their metaphorical treats, it's fitting that his career should wind down in a way that mimics a stair-step descent. Psycho is his last masterpiece, his grand experiment and the film for which he will forever be remembered. The Birds was his final great thriller, the sort of movie that isn't flawless but is as good as any non-masterpiece that reflects the sort of high-quality production that most of his films possess. Marnie, for all intents and purposes, is the last Hitchcock film Hitchcock made. Everything else afterward — four more films, to be exact — wouldn't have the same twisted soul.

Tippi Hedren — fresh off Hitchcock's previous film, The Birds — is the titular Marnie, a kleptomaniac with a fear of thunderstorms and the color red who bounces from town to town, dyeing her hair and acquiring jobs as secretaries in order to swindle thousands from different companies. Her thieving streak runs afoul when she encounters Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a widower who ranks in a printing company. Rutland is intrigued by Marnie's mania (actually, intrigued might be too soft a word; it's outright fetishistic) and blackmails her into marriage. Love, then you might say, is not the modus operandi. Mark approaches Marnie from his classically trained zoological past and his own psychological position, intent on curing her, even to the point of forcing her to attempt to overcome issues by raping her on their honeymoon.

Evan Hunter, the author of the first draft of the screenplay, was possibly fired because he was too disturbed by the rape scene, which was the essential element Hitchcock latched onto in Winston Graham's 1961 novel of the same name; when he wouldn't write it to Hitchcock's specifications, he was apparently let go. Hitchcock's wife, Alma, suggested the director bring a woman onto finish the screenplay, and thus Jay Presson Allen joined up. Hitchcock relished her straightforwardness, and she became one of his many co-worker crushes. Allen herself is the proponent of one of the theories as to why the film doesn't succeed like the director's others: "He loved what I wrote, he shot what I wrote, and he shouldn't have."

In other words, the light Hitchcockian touch was replaced with a Hitchcockian sledgehammer. As Marnie stands, things are Hitchcock-turned-to-eleven: characters reeling from tumultuous sexual psychology and begging to be analyzed to their Freudian extremes; dueling forces of dominance and submission; the obsession with blondes and the latent misogyny; the suspense, the melodrama, and the bizarre expressionism; and its utterly unclassifiable existence. The result, however, is somewhat unexpected. Because the director's themes and motifs are cranked up to their loudest setting, they tend to drown out the simple underlying mechanics of the movie. And for being so provocative, it's also a bit stuffy. There are a few great scenes, proving Hitchcock hadn't lost all his magic. A perfectly constructed shoeless theft by Marnie, for example, is about as suspenseful as anything else in Hitchcock's canon. But the good is slightly off-balanced by the strange, including pretty much everything about the ending.

Hitchcock was a man who had to settle perpetually in his career — he never snagged Gary Cooper for Foreign Correspondent, he never convinced the studio to give him William Holden for Strangers on a Train — but still, he often made the best of what he had. One of the curious aspects of his later films, however, is the profound and tangible sense of settling. The job of an actor is often to stand in for something larger, but many of his later films have actors who feel like they're also standing in for other actors, a sense that can mar a film from the start. Bond-era Connery and post-Birds Hedren do adequate jobs in performing roles Hitchcock clearly envisioned for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. But this time, Kelly wasn't merely a pipe-dream for Hitchcock. She had been wanting to get back into a film, and her husband, Prince Rainier, signed off on the project. Without politics and contracts, she might have actually ended up in the film, but the citizens of Monaco (angry at the film's sex-charged themes) and MGM (who demanded Kelly return to fulfill her commitments to them if she was going to work for other studios) essentially nixed the deal. My bias is, like Hitchcock, to Kelly; I've never found Hedren to be an engaging screen presence, and with Marnie she's not even particularly convincing. It's unfair to the film to wonder what Kelly would have brought to it, but there is this undeniable feeling in me that the right level of subtlety on Kelly's part could have positively counterbalanced the heft of the expressionism.

Still, I hold firm to my original statement. Two factors make Marnie mandatory viewing, regardless of how you feel about it in the end: the divisiveness among critics and scholars, and the fact that it's Hitchcock's final film before he moved into the final stage of his career. It's flawed, but it's not void of entertainment. There are some wonderful set pieces, though not enough to save the entire film. It might not be the masterwork some claim it is, but it's also too often unfairly dismissed simply for not being as good as his forays into psychological realms.

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The Birds (1963)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 119 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock utilized many motifs and recurring devices through his long career: the wrongfully accused man, the ubiquitous presence of trains, tall and foreboding staircases, the audience-as-voyeur, etc. It is odd that perhaps the most common device associated with him as far as public consciousness is concerned — the bird — occurs only in two films. Avian imagery is layered throughout Psycho (the taxidermic hobby of Norman Bates in the motel parlor; the way he pecks at his food and becomes ensnared in the fate of a woman with the last name Crane), but such imagery serves primarily as a sly metaphor as opposed to something that drives the film.

However, The Birds, his eagerly anticipated 1963 follow-up to Psycho, speaks for itself right in the title. Whatever your opinion on the film, it's impossible to deny that a flock of many birds turns the brain toward the Hitchcockian side of life, and in some cases, Hitchcockian nightmares. From a respective standpoint, such a connection is an anomaly in the director's canon.

I don't think Hitchcock made another masterpiece after Psycho, but The Birds comes closer than any of his later films. It is the last great film made by a great director — not flawless, but certainly a strong and exemplarily crafted horror film. Where does it fall short? I'm not aware of many who still step up in defense of its rather milquetoast stars: Tippi Hedren as socialite Melanie Daniels, and Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner, a hulking beau suitor for her with an icy mother (Jessica Tandy, in a good performance). In public Hitchcock spoke tongue-in-cheek about performers and on the set he could be equally cruel; but in private it's clear he knew how important they were. His technical masterpieces — and, to be fair, on a technical level The Birds is among his most ambitious films – all succeed in part because they're driven by rapturous performances. Think James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window; Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo; Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest; Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho; and the list goes on. Hedren and Taylor bring little to The Birds aside from being rough visual equivalents of Hitchcock's two beau ideals, Kelly and Grant, who were in fact the starting point for both the Melanie and Mitch characters. (Alas, Hitchcock lamented, Kelly was busy "being a princess" and "why should I give Cary fifty percent of the movie?")

Famously, or perhaps infamously, Hedren was to be Hitchcock's "next big thing," the reincarnation of Kelly's screen presence after his pursuit of Vera Miles ultimately failed. He had spotted Hedren in a commercial (sans dialogue, mind you) and recruited her as a potential star for The Birds, although did not make it clear until much later. He schooled her in Hitchcock 101: at the director's home, she watched Rebecca, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief, then acted out scenes from those movies with Hitchcock directing her. He made consultations on wardrobe and jewelry and, as his way was wont to be, attempted to build her up. He was so involved in her cultivation that she declared years later that "Melanie Daniels was his character," not her own. It was a miscalculation on Hitchcock's part, and The Birds shows that. Although Hedren may have fit his visualization of a latter-day Kelly, on screen she lacks the depth Kelly brought to her three roles in the director's films. Hitchcock may not have been classically trained in the art of acting, but he had the tremendous luck of having talented people star and co-star in his films and carry them through.

But the lead performances aside, there's still a great deal working well in The Birds. Although the script might not be the director's tightest, it takes risks and pulls off many of them. Scheduling conflicts prevented Hitchcock from recruiting Ray Bradbury as screenwriter (would have been great, right?), and so crime writer Evan Hunter came on board to adapt the 1952 novella of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, the third time Hitchcock would bring her material to the screen. It was tumultuous writing process, and Hunter was eventually made sour by the changes Hitchcock did after the screenwriter's time on the film officially ended, but some of the decisions are for the best, most notably the reason behind the birds' attacking. Simply put, there isn't any. In the immortal words of Norman Bates, we all go a little mad sometimes, and the birds begin attacking people, then keep attacking people, and not once in the whole movie are given any hint as to why. Hitchcock and his writers searched for one, but eventually went with the pessimistic and haunting reason of absolutely nothing. The final scenes were even pared back from a larger, more expansive view of the whole community devastated by birds, to (and I think it was for the best) simply watching the car full of our characters slowly roll away. Considering that final shot and the absence of any "The End" title card, the surreal and disturbing effect is heightened to the extreme.

It's the best decision in the film, followed by the pacing — which, although it drives some mad, I think is richly rewarding. Almost half of the length passes before a bird attacks, no doubt a storytelling technique that greatly influenced Steven Spielberg. Such a move is a gamble, no doubt, but it pays off in the film's final hour of pure tension, which follows the bird attacks getting tighter and tighter until the triumphant sequence where, crouched in the corner of a small room, birds relentlessly attack Melanie. (For the record: that took one whole week to film, using both real and animatronic birds, and reportedly sent Hedren toward a nervous breakdown.)

Many of Hitchcock long-time collaborators returned for The Birds after a brief departure during Psycho, including cinematographer Robert Burks and production director Robert Boyle. George Tomasini was again editor, and composer Bernard Herrmann was on hand, although The Birds features no score and instead utilizes real and ambient bird sounds that he supervised to create atmosphere. (Say what you will about the film's ultimate effect, but Hitchcock the Experimentalist was in full swing with an unknown lead actress, no music, a huge budget, and thousands of birds. Appropriately, the film was given a special premiere screening at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Tomasini was a sublime career editor, whose best work was with Hitchcock. From the back-and-forth voyeurism of Rear Window to the crop-duster attack of North by Northwest and the shower scene of Psycho, he brought structural success to so many pivotal moments in Hitchcock films. His work on The Birds is equally dynamic, a striking balance of slow suspense (think Melanie outside the school, the birds slowly accumulating on the monkey bars behind her) to a literally explosive elements (the explosion that occurs in the gas station during a bird attack). For Burks and Boyle, the photography and art direction on The Birds is still quite impressive today — maybe among the most technically complex and startling of Hitchcock's canon. Hitchcock brought on Ub Iwerks, the former animator and Walt Disney collaborator, to serve as a "special photography adviser" to the film and to oversee the optical printing technique he had invented. The four brought more 300 matte trick-shots to the screen, blending thousands of real and fake birds, and pushing the boundaries of conventional special effects. The crème de la crème of these sequences is the final ominous shot, a car slowly driving away with birds covering the landscape. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan notes Hitchcock called it "the most difficult single shot I've ever done"—thirty-two different camera exposures layered atop each other to create a single image.

Hunter, the film's screenwriter, recalled Hitchcock boasting that "he was entering the Golden Age of his creativity. He told me The Birds would be his crowning achievement." I don't think either critical or popular consensus reaches that conclusion, and ultimately I don't think Hitchcock did. But the association of the director to birds remains as conclusive proof that The Birds is, in a general sense, among Hitchcock's most recognizable films in the social consciousness. One could make the case that the three most "pop culture" films occurred in successive order: North by Northwest, Psycho, and then this film. In their own unique ways, each speaks to the magic of making movies and watching them. And while The Birds falls short of masterwork status, it's an important film in the Hitchcock chronology — and a damn good horror flick at that.

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Psycho (1960)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 109 mins.


Note: You may think it ridiculous to submit a warning that this review discusses significant plot details and should only be read by those acquainted with the film, but if teaching at the college level has taught me anything, it's that each year at least two-thirds of my intro-level creative process class are neither familiar with Psycho nor its most famous sequence. In any event, if you're new to the film, you've been warned.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker in 2008, noted that we're inclined to think genius "is inextricably tied up with precocity," essentially something that thrives on the energy we have in our younger days. Among his many examples are Orson Welles, who made Citizen Kane at 25; Herman Melville, who began writing a novel per year in his twenties and finished Moby-Dick by 32; Pablo Picasso, discovered at 20; and Mozart, who wrote Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at 21. He might have included Bob Dylan, who had gone from Freewheelin' to Blonde on Blonde before he was 25, or Paul McCartney, who was not yet 28 by the time the Beatles had broken up.

But then – and Gladwell mentions him specifically by name – there was Alfred Hitchcock. The director went to work behind the camera at the age of 26; his first film, The Pleasure Garden, was made after years as an apprentice designing title cards. He broke onto the scene with The Lodger when he was 28, and before he turned forty he made The Man Who Knew Too Much (35 years old), The 39 Steps (36 years old), and The Lady Vanishes (39 years old). Yet the director's unmatched masterpieces were all made after he turned fifty.

His most famous film, and in many ways his most experimental, is Psycho, the film Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan dubbed as possibly "the most overly familiar motion picture in history." It is only when one sits down and tries to imagine something new to say about the film that one's brain begins to shake. What is left to say that hasn't been written countless books and essays, hasn't been taught in any random liberal arts college course, and hasn't been dissected now on the Internet? Not much new it seems, but plenty worth repeating because it focuses in on the particular genius of Hitchcock and how, at 61, he managed to turn his greatest experiment into a canonical piece of cinema.

Released in 1960, Psycho was a turning point even for the man who always seemed to procure a previously unknown corner. There's a necessary point to be made about this film coming so late in the director's career: in the 1940s he often experimented for the sake of effect (Lifeboat, Rope, etc.), but in the 1950s and 1960s he experimented as a way to drive a stake into the establishment for the sake of profundity. Psycho deviates from the director's films of the previous decade in three important ways: it was cheap and fast, made with only half of his standard crew; it was scandalously sexual and was among the loudest announcements that the 1950s were definitively over; and the director had a greater monetary stake in its success than he had ever had before.

Hitchcock pitched the film to Paramount and his staff as "a simple, low-budget American shocker, in the style of his TV show, which would provide a breather from more lavish, grandiose productions" (McGilligan). But few were as excited as he, and as ironic as it may seem, he ended up forging ahead on production with a crew largely different from the reliable personnel he repeatedly used on his films. His steadfast cinematographer, Robert Burks, who had worked on almost every Hitchcock film in the 1950s, had been assigned to a different project; the same went for famed production designer Robert Boyle. (They were replaced by a cameraman and production director who had both worked extensively with the director on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.) His only real long-time collaborator carryovers were editor George Tomasini and composer Bernard Herrmann.

To save money, Hitchcock deferred his salary (more on that in a moment), shot in black-and-white (as much for budgetary reasons as to disguise the color of blood), and kept the project as low-key as possible. He anonymously bought Robert Bloch's 1959 novel through an agent for a one-time fee of $9,000, and the whole production cost Paramount around $800,000 (about $5.5 million, in 2007 dollars), roughly one-fifth the cost of his previous film, North by Northwest. Cheap then, comparatively, and quick, too; but cost and speed in the context of Hitchcock don't equate to inattentive. Although he intended Psycho to look like a B-movie, the distance between a poverty-row production like Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour and this film is still quite cavernous. In other words, Hitchcock was willing to sacrifice a lot but he wasn't willing to sacrifice the essential elements — the star, the vision, the tightness of the screenplay, the intentional foray into controversy, the meticulous planning — that makes a Hitchcock film what it is.

Psycho proves itself a continual reward because of those essential elements on the part of the director, the right knowledge of where to cut and what to keep. Few directors could work artifice into theme like Hitchcock, but with Psycho he proved he hadn't lost the talent honed on the cheap in England of producing brilliance on a budget. Hitchcock's cinematic language in Psycho is clear and careful. A friend of mine once suggested Citizen Kane is the easiest film to teach because Orson Welles lays out his cinematic language in the most obvious and instructional of ways. I countered with Psycho, which I teach to my creative process class. Because it has a forest's worth of paper devoted to it, few films document the movie-making process and the collaborative nature of the industry better.

Consider the point, still early in the film, when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) stops at the Bates Motel in the middle of a rainstorm, where she meets the caretaker, Norman (Anthony Perkins). The levels to which Hitchcock is able to manipulate your impressions of the scene, from the obvious to the subconscious, are still staggering to this day. Those new to the film waver between comfort and fear; we're trained to feel leery of such isolated locales, but also to be cautious of driving in intense weather. Marion makes the best decision she can at that moment, and we go along with it. A lesser director might let the tension deflate, but Hitchcock builds it steadily. Is she safe? We seem to think so; Hitchcock even slips into the frame a textual cue through a folded newspaper in Marion's purse, the banner headline stating voters have okayed a particular measure, but due to the shape of the folds, only the word "OKAY" can be read.

Our radar is made murky by Perkins' performance as Norman, impeccable to the degree he captures how simultaneously reassuring and creepy awkward niceties can be. There is an ebb and flow of tension and curiosity, Marion obliviousness to her boundaries and Norman fervently aware of his. The pace kept through the editing is remarkable in that it lowers the viewer into comfort through repetition and formality, but willingly jerks us back to the potential danger of the situation by shifting angles or rearranging the staging.

What helps drive this tension is Hitchcock's most subversive element. To the unacquainted, Marion is the film's primary character; so why is Norman such a powerful presence? Why does all of the storytelling elements seem to suggest the two are equal at this point, particularly when one character materializes seemingly out of nothing? The film's center of gravity shifts beneath the scenes of Norman and Marion, culminating in the apex of Marion's story and what emerges as the foothills of Norman's: the infamous shower scene.

It is one of cinema's lasting treasures, for all the obvious reasons. Storyboarded by Saul Bass, filmed over the course of one week, and put together as a montage from 78 flash pieces of film, the shower scene of Psycho justly earns its the cinematic canon for what it is (a horrifying murder, the likes of which still haunt showerers to this day) and what it is not (lacking in general fanfare, discreet and even-handed with only the slightest moment of penetration between knife and flesh). It stands on its own, of course, but it is richer in its form and meaning inside the context of the film — the glimmer of hope we have for Marion, recanting on her crime; the virtual silence of a person's unknown last moments followed by the staccato of Herrmann's icy strings; eventually Norman's frantic clean-up and the equally powerful scene of the sinking car in the nearby pond. It is an expertly built sequence (is there another of equal cultural recognition and cinematic skill?), yet it possesses all the more merit for serving not only as pure cinema but a gearshift inside Psycho, the moment the story officially transcends Marion and is placed between Norman's shoulders. (We indeed follow him all the way through to the end, when the film makes the slightest misstep by giving a fumbling and verbose diagnosis of Norman from a prison psychologist; although to be fair, it was a decision Hitchcock deliberately made to bring the film to a close as soon as possible and avoid any kind of decompression on the audience's part.)

Not surprisingly, the Production Code board struggled with Psycho. They railed against the opening scenes, where Leigh is shown in her white lingerie after her unmarried afternoon tryst Sam Loomis (John Gavin), and of course they shrieked at the shower sequence — and, no doubt to Hitchcock's delight, it was because of the scene's potential display of nudity rather than the brutal murder. Stephen Rebello, author of the definitive Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, reports that three members of the board believed they saw nudity and two did not. They demanded Hitchcock remove the nudity and screen the film for them again. But when it came back, the breakdown reversed itself: now the three who had previously seen nudity were satisfied, but the other two were livid. McGilligan reports:

[Hitchcock's] final maneuver was volunteering to reshoot the opening if he could leave the shower sequence alone—adding the stipulation that the censors had to show up on the set for the reshoot because he was confused as to how to satisfy their objections. The story—perhaps apocryphal—is that the reshoot was scheduled, but the censors never materialized, so nothing was changed. "And," script supervisor Marshal Schlom said, "they finally agreed they didn't see the nudity in the shower sequence which, of course, was there all the time."

The Production Code office signed off on Psycho, and numerous decency boards cautioned heavily against it. But Psycho was one of the gambits in the late 1950s and early 1960s that helped severely weaken the previous strength of the Code. It was a phenomenon upon release, and with so many people flocking to see it, the culture tide began to splash against the censors.

No film up to that time created as many return visits than Psycho, which proved glorious for Hitchcock. In order to persuade Paramount to fund the film, he deferred his standard salary and directed it free, on the condition that he be considered 60 percent owner of it until Paramount hit its intended box office goal and then all further revenue and ownership would be his. He heavily marketed the film himself, appearing in its trailers and dropping clues to its mysteries and insisting no one would be admitted once the film had begun. It was the second-largest grossing film of 1960 and earned Hitchcock his fifth and final Best Director nomination from the Academy Awards.

McGilligan notes that Hitchcock always insisted he never foresaw Psycho as a blockbuster, and that any money he earned from it was a "secondary consideration" to making the film itself. With many others, you'd have to wonder if that's true, but I think in Hitchcock's case it genuinely was. The film's screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, always believed Hitchcock was drawn to Psycho because of his and his wife's illnesses in the late 1950s, making "the picture at the very time he was grappling with his own mortality." That may be why Psycho was and remains Hitchcock's last masterpiece. The director had spent an entire career offing people in a variety of ways and for a multitude of reasons, but certainly no other Hitchcock film showed the randomness of death in such a shocking and emotionally powerful way. This is a capstone to an unparalleled career.

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962)

Viewers who turned their television dials to CBS on the evening of October 2, 1955, were greeted with Charles Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette" played against a simple caricature of a rotund man in profile. After a beat or two, a silhouette appeared, a man also in profile, walking toward the drawing until becoming aligned with it. The silhouette lingered, Gounod's music twiddling away with the silhouette, forever linking the two. Then:

Good evening, I am Alfred Hitchcock. Tonight I'm presenting the first in a series of stories of suspense and mystery called, oddly enough, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I shall not act in these stories, but will only make appearances, something in the nature of an accessory before and after the fact, to give the title to those of you who can't read and to tidy up afterwards for those who don't understand the endings.

And so began the director's foray into television, a medium which, in his words, "brought back murder into the home – where it belongs."

The 1950s are generally remembered as docile years — picket fences and two-and-a-half kids and gin-and-tonics served under the sunny and grandfatherly smile of Dwight Eisenhower. When we think of 1950s television we tend to think of wholesomeness, sitcom fare like Leave It To Beaver. But lingering right underneath that serene illusion of the decade are darker elements, witch-hunts and duck-and-cover exercises done in the fear of nuclear annihilation. The darkness of the decade, or at least its moral ambivalence, is embodied wonderfully by Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the most sinister shows to run on network television. And that's all the more surprising when you consider that it debuted a full two years before Leave It To Beaver.

Lew Wasserman, a personal friend of Hitchcock as well as his agent, is credited with the idea of putting Hitchcock on television. And why not? It would be a clear opportunity for Hitchcock to cash in on the name he had spent years connecting with mystery and suspense. The director tried to launch a national radio series during the 1940s but never had much luck, and television was the new mass-media machine of the 1950s. Hitchcock was well known and generally liked (artistic respect, we now know, would have to wait a few years, and it would require this television show to reach the masses completely). Shrinking his popular aesthetic in scope and length to easily digestible episodes on home televisions seemed to have success written all over it. His contract was financially pleasing, and the rights to the episodes would revert to him after they ran.

Hitchcock's bank account benefited wildly from his television show, and he became more popular than ever, reaching a wider audience than merely his films, and for once, he was part of the show, not just a mind behind a lens. But what is not given much credit is how seriously Hitchcock took the television project. He was a savvy marketer — often heading up the publicity projects for his own films — and could have simply lent his name and image to the series, turned over the reins to any random person, and let the money come in. But no doubt part of the show's tremendous success comes from the fact that Hitchcock also lent his mind.

The first four seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents total 268 episodes, each thirty minutes. The final three seasons, totaling 93 episodes, were expanded to sixty-minutes and the program was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It would be disingenuous of me to say I've seen all of the episodes; but I have seen many, enough to discuss the show at large, including the eighteen total directed by Hitchcock. This essay, an installment in my retrospective on the director, will primarily be about those episodes and the show's historical effect and reach.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is another argument in the ongoing case that Hitchcock — the man and the mind — was like a lightning bolt, the likes of which we may never see again. Biographer Patrick McGilligan says the television series was "an enterprise that might have consumed a full year's attention for a man less well organized, less brimming with ideas and energy." The 1950s were Hitchcock's prime film-making years, and he had a similar drive in launching the show. Less than six months after the idea for the show was hatched, it premiered. Varying accounts exist of how intensely Hitchcock was involved in the show; obviously we know he wasn't ghost-directing in his free time, or participating in extensive re-writes or re-edits as he did with his films, but the extent to which he participated in the show's development was often undersold, primarily by Hitchcock himself, who preferred to defer credit to his long-time assistant Joan Harrison. (This was characteristic of the man whose films hardly bore his name as a contributing writer.)

Harrison produced more than 250 episodes of Presents, and without question was the chief ringleader behind the scenes. But with Hitchcock's name attached, he also put in grueling hours to make sure it reached success, particularly during the first two seasons. McGilligan notes that the director was involved in story and personnel choices and served as a liaison between the show and the network. As the series continued past the first two seasons, he delegated more authority and responsibility, but through to the end he was still working weekends to approve stories and writers and screening final episodes for any post-production suggestions. "A television show, like a souffle, reflects the taste of the person who selects and mixes the ingredients," Hitchcock once said. "It matters a great deal, for example, whether onions or garlic are used and when arsenic is added."

The television show gave Hitchcock, who had a penchant for short fiction, an outlet for hundreds of story ideas that couldn't be adapted into films. He preferred the simple, single-engine driven plot that keeps a short story pushing forward, and relished the twists that often came at the end. If stretched too far and unsupported with more details, Hitchcock believed short fiction could become tedious for a two-hour film; not so with thirty minutes. Since the launch of his directing career, he had been collecting favorite tales and stories. Much of what appears on Alfred Hitchcock Presents came from published works — the likes of H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Rebecca West, Julian Symons, V.S. Pritchett, Eric Ambler, John Moritmor, Roald Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Belloc Lowndes, Ray Bradbury, and Cornell Woolrich. Even with films, the director preferred the published world to the original world; adapting a published work required less story development, thus allowing the director to focus more exclusively on the cinematic rendering of the material. The show also gave opportunities to emerging and established directors, like Robert Stevenson, Ida Lupino, Robert Altman, George Stevens Jr., William Friedkin, and Robert Stevens.

At the end of the show's first season, the New York Herald Tribute wrote that "the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock Presents is Alfred Hitchcock presenting," a sentiment which I think holds up nicely even today. It's a remarkable feat that, as he was in the midst of directing his masterpieces, Hitchcock appears in every single episode of the series as its host. We hear stories of the director as a jokester and huckster on the sets of his films, and his films are often morbidly funny, but if you want to see Hitchcock pushing the boundaries of humor, you needn't look any further than any random episode of Presents. His droll wit, often self-inflicted and regularly cruel toward his network and his advertisers ("Crime does not pay, not even on television — you must have a sponsor," is one of his best lines), is utilized to great success. An actor he is not, but a performer — ah, yes, he is a performer. The man who fed him his words was James Allardice, a former journalist, television writer and playwright, who ghost-wrote most of Hitchcock's lines during the openings and conclusions of the show. It was a fruitful and productive relationship; Hitchcock loved a particular anecdote about a high school play Allardice wrote, in which an electric chair set under a sign that read: "You can be sure if it's a Westinghouse." (Not too difficult to understand why they got along so swimmingly.)

What of the show itself? It is great fun, with episodes often coming across like pressurized Hitchcock films. The hand of the director can be sensed behind nearly every aspect of the series, and the themes and motifs that recur throughout the show are Hitchcockian to the nth degree: murder, suspicion, betrayal, guilt, voyeurism, doppelgangers, crime. The plots are curved and twisted; although Presents predates The Twilight Zone by four years, the two are often connected simply by the skewed angle on humanity and the frequent moralistic twist endings. Presents is hardly political and rarely as fantastical, but no doubt it was a great inspiration for Rod Serling, whose show would also run on CBS. Hitchcock himself introduced to the show's attitude in the first episode as "striv[ing] to teach a lesson or point a little moral, advice like mother used to give – you know, walk softly but carry a big stick, strike first and ask questions later, that sort of thing."

The pilot episode, called "Revenge," has the Hitchcock sensibility in the plot and construction. A woman (Vera Miles, who's ravishing in an over-large white button-up draped across her swimsuit-clad boy) has suffered a mental breakdown and her protective husband moves her to a trailer park adjacent to the California coast. When she claims to have been attacked in their home, he seeks revenge, attacking the man she identifies as her assailant. All is well until she ... identifies another man as her assailant. The episode is a stylish debut, with close-ups and selected lighting, the camera positioned at oblique angles, and a great murder scene partially obscured and partially reflected in a mirror.

The rest of the first season's episodes (of which Hitchcock directed four) play out the same way. One Hitchcock-directed episode, "Back for Christmas," has a murderous husband undone by his wife's kindness. Joseph Cotton appears in the episode "Breakdown," a heavily stylistic episode where a man experiences a car crash and is completely paralyzed except for his single little finger. The story relies on many point-of-view shots — a rarity in television — and a haunting internal monologue to achieve an eerie feeling of inescapability and doom. But the crème de la crème of Hitchcock's work in the first season has to be "The Case of Mr. Pelham," which actually is the sort of thing Serling could have worked into The Twilight Zone. Starring Tom Ewell, the "case" is actually of doppelgangers. Pelham is an aloof and distant man of wealth who grows anxious and paranoid as he begins to suspect someone is impersonating him, not merely at certain moments of importance but in the mundane moments in life.

Throughout the series, Hitchcock ran afoul with the ambiguity of the episode endings — namely whether characters who committed crimes were receiving proper punishment for their deeds. Untethered with the Production Code, Hitchcock was still stuck with nervous advertisers that didn't want to run commercials along successful murders. Where an early episode like "Revenge," the series pilot, would directly imply punishment for the characters in the stageplay, later episodes had to state explicitly what was coming. In "One More Mile To Go," a country man who murders his wife is antagonized by a police officer on a motorcycle who is determined to have the man fix a broken taillight. Normally it'd be as easy as popping open the trunk — except, of course, the dead wife's body is in the trunk. "One More Mile To Go," a Hitchcock-directed gem from the second season, pushes boundaries; after the man murders his wife, he cleans off the weapon and burns a blood-stained handkerchief and decides how he's going to load the body into the car, all while the orchestra swells and sighs with music of unbridled romance. In the end, as the officer escorts the man to the police station where the resident mechanic "will have that trunk open in no time," Hitchcock zooms the camera in on the broken taillight, oval-shaped and flashing on and off to look like a blinking eye. And there the episode ends: a vague impression that the man is caught, but he's alone on a country road and already murdered once, so who knows?

In many instances, the story within the episode would literally take away all possibility of punishment and let the perpetrators get away with the crimes. Hitchcock, as you might expect, would need to toss something onto the ending, but would deflate the safety of punishment with bad jokes. In "The Perfect Crime," from the show's third season (tied with the first season as the best), Charles Courtney (played by Vincent Price) gets away with murdering a lawyer named John Gregory (James Gregory) and using the remains to make a vase out of "special clay." Except, as Hitchcock explains in self-consciously pathetic narration:

I regret to inform you that Courtney did not retain his last trophy very long. He was caught. A charwoman knocked over the precious vase breaking it into pieces, a few of them identifiable as, uh, bits of Mr. Gregory. You see, the gold fillings in his teeth had resisted the heat of the kiln. But all the good doctors and all the good police couldn't put Mr. Gregory together again.

He might as well be rolling his eyes, and by the time we arrive at the lame pun, Hitchcock understands no one except the advertisers really care. The same sense of safety in the ending is elusive in what might be the show's most famous episode, "Lamb to the Slaughter," directed by Hitchcock and adapted from a Roald Dahl short story where a pregnant woman (Barbara Bel Geddes), upon hearing the news that her husband is leaving her, kills him with a frozen leg of lamb. If it's not the best example of the show, it's certainly among the most perverse. The woman deceives the police from start to finish, and even though the lead detective essentially solves the mystery, he can't pinpoint the murder weapon. "For all we know it could be right under our noses," he says as he and his crew sit down to dinner — a perfectly cooked leg of lamb, as a matter of fact. The ending here, with the woman cackling at her masterwork, is blunted by criticism with another Hitchcock tacked-on anecdote: "she would have gone scot-free if she hadn't tried to do in her second-husband in the exact same way." It's a wonder anyone who had trouble with the on-screen murder ever found that excuse satisfying.

These are only a few of the hundreds of episodes in a series that is quite worth your time, and, as the cliche goes, still better than most of the stuff on television right now. As I said above, the first and third seasons are probably the show's strongest — the strongest episodes directed by Hitchcock and the strongest episodes not directed Hitchcock, which still carry the hallmarks of the director. The series is a curious and rewarding departure from his longer, more nuanced cinematic artwork, but because he never let the show venture too far away from his watchful eyes and ever-spinning mind, you know it has the quality the Hitchcock name is known for.

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How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

d. Chuck Jones / USA / 26 mins.


Theodore Geisel and Charles Martin Jones – today better known respectively as Dr. Seuss and Chuck – were a wicked force in combination. Theirs was not a long-standing partnership, like other illustrators and animators, but their work together bears the best hallmarks of each. None is more popular or more widely known than their 1966 collaboration on the half-hour television special of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which the two adapted from Seuss's book of the same name.

In many respects, The Grinch is the yang to the yin of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The latter, adapted by Bill Melendez and Charles Schulz from Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, premiered only one year earlier. Both are about characters who discover the holidays are more valuable than commercialism and mere presents and decorations. Both brought together a popular illustrator with a popular animator, but they take decidedly different routes to acquiring their hearts. Charlie Brown embraces the literal and biblical meaning of Christmas and disinfects the commercialism away while reaching a satisfying middle ground of reason-for-the-season happiness and kindness. The Grinch is bathed in a surreal and mythical world of Whos and Grinches (or rather, one Grinch and a dog). The Whos are the townspeople in a valley below a mountaintop where the Grinch lives, and all we need to know for the special to have any resonance is that the Whos love Christmas and Grinch can't stand it. He is so anti-Christmas that he plots to steal it from them and spoil their morning joy, until his plan is rendered obsolete by their joy in spite of his thievery. The plot is absent any religiosity whatsoever but not missing an iota of the purity in kindness and heart that Christmas is meant to inspire. In many ways, the Whos gathering around the town tree – joining hands, and singing "Fahoo Foray" – is as arresting to the senses in its wondrous simplicity as Linus's tender and earnest rendition of the Gospel of Luke.

Both specials are great, but The Grinch is better. In addition to the remarkable poetry of Seuss's language and the incomparable voice-over by Boris Karloff, each frame brims with the endless possibilities of Jones's imagination. Like Seuss's writing, which contains no extraneous lines, the art produced and supervised by Jones is equally secure in its exact place. No matter how arbitrary something may seem, time and time again The Grinch proves itself to be an entire feast for the eyes. Perhaps it would not be fair to say Jones is the most influential animator of the twentieth century (the competition is wondrous and large), but he is certainly among the best, and this special – today as widely seen, circulated, and parodied as his contributions to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts at Warner Bros. – is a golden testament to his skill as a director. The still drawings are as finely crafted as the animation (the "stealing" of Christmas is the most pleasurable aspect of the special), and it's in the seamless hybrid of the Grinch as both a sort-of animal and a sort-of human that brings him to life. He is unseemly but elegant, slithering and disgustingly green but with impeccable posture.

Only three voices get spotlight treatment, and the most prominent of those is Karloff, who earned his immortality in the Universal horror films of the 1930s. His textured baritone voice is the perfect as both the narrator and the Grinch. It is not widely known that Karloff didn't sing the famous song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," which was actually performed by Thurl Ravenscroft (known better as the voice of Tony the Tiger in Kellogg's television commercials). Bizarrely, Ravenscroft received no on-screen credit for his singing, so it was as unknown then as it is today, which led to Seuss personally sending letters to newspaper columnists so Ravenscroft would get his due. June Foray, a veteran voice artist who would contribute to Hanna-Barbara cartoons among others, has a small part as the voice of Cindy Lou Who.

Seuss's 1957 book and the 1966 special with Jones are both mainstays in our culture, certainly popular around Christmastime as a holiday tradition but entertaining as twisted parables any day of the year, much like Frank Capra's timeless (and season-less) classic It's a Wonderful Life. His literary output totaled more than 60 books, which collectively have sold more than 220 million copies worldwide. As far as English-speaking peoples are concerned, I'd wager a vast majority of men, women, and children are familiar with the man's works, even if inadvertently so. The word grinch, as any dictionary will tell you, is defined as "one who spoils the pleasure of others" and its etymology can be traced directly back to its first usage, in Seuss's 1957 book, where he made-up the word that has become so popular it is now wholly generic.

I referred above to Seuss's writing as poetry, which might make a few of my poet friends cringe, but as a writer, he employed the rigorous mechanics and tools of poetry as skillfully and as lyrically as anyone else writing in the twentieth century. His work is ostensibly for children, but perhaps those who reap the most intellectual pleasure from it are adults. Seuss made-up words left and right, but his work can be scanned for precise meter and rhythm, and heaven knows he receives much more circulation than most American poets outside Robert Frost. Seuss's writing is concise and compact, and like most poetry, doesn't withstand the addition of more words or ideas than it already contains; this is why Seuss's works translate the best in the short-film format and explains why so many feature-length adaptations of his work fail so miserably. How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a rare treasure because it is such a lively and brilliant adaptation of material that was already so lively and brilliant. As simple as that sounds, it's damn near impossible to pull off. But then again, Seuss and Jones together are like lightning striking twice.

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A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

d. Bill Melendez / USA / 25 mins.


This holiday season is the first airing of the Americana masterwork A Charlie Brown Christmas since the death of its animator and director, Bill Melendez, who passed away in September at age 91. Melendez was the only animator trusted by Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, and he worked in collaboration with Schulz on bringing Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and all the rest to life starting from 1959 through the cartoonist's death in 2000.

Aimed primarily at children (at least that's what it'd have you except), the story is deceptively straightforward. Charlie Brown, in a holiday malaise, confides in his friend Linus that he doesn't understand the cheerfulness of the season. After he finds himself appointed the director of the school Christmas pageant – and selects a weak, barren and natural tree instead of a neon-pink industrial-strength aluminum decoration – his cynicism at the commercialization of the holiday spills over the edge. Christmas seems without a point until Linus volunteers to explain the meaning of the holiday with a verbatim quotation from the Gospel of Luke to show "what Christmas is all about."

Reportedly Melendez thought Linus's reading of the New Testament was too strong. America was still in the middle of the Warren Court's broadly sweeping proclamations of equal rights and liberalism (which was absolutely correct, in my opinion), and school-sponsored prayer and Bible study had just been found unconstitutional in the three years before A Charlie Brown Christmas aired. Schulz's famous response to Melendez's concern was: "Bill, if we don't do it, then who will?" And it's difficult not to be swayed by Schulz's gentle logic. A Charlie Brown Christmas, as its title suggests, is an unabashed Christmas special; there isn't anything all-inclusive about the holidays here, and to a degree there's a fair amount of joy in that. The special doesn't try to be anything other than a clear and honest explanation of Christmas, referring to the source material requisitely and unblinkingly. Yet, the religion aspect doesn't drown anything out; if anything, it evens the playing field. Schulz wasn't looking for any converts to a particular creed, only converts to a particular attitude: commercialization changes things, often in the direction that we lose sight of the intended meaning. (The idea can be extended to almost any federal holiday in the United States, whether religious in origin or not.)

With the knowledge of Melendez's death upfront on my mind, I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas with an abiding respect for how something so technically simple and straightforward can become something so extraordinary. The sapling Christmas tree Charlie Brown selects is like a metaphor for the special painted into itself; the show is unadorned and on-point with its astute pillory of the commercialization of the holidays, and let's not forget this is perhaps the most definitive statement on that fact. (Although to be fair, the special has an ironically checkered relationship to commercialization, including brief sections that have since been removed that prominently featured the logo of its corporate sponsor, Coca-Cola.)

Melendez's career was devoted to animation, from his initial hiring into Walt Disney's team in 1938, where he contributed to Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo. After he parted ways with Disney over a union dispute, he joined Leon Schlesinger's animation team at Warner Bros., where he produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first full-length Peanuts special and Melendez's first animated film as a director (it spawned dozens of other Peanuts programs). Schulz wrote the script with his characteristic austerity and optimism, and the program won an Emmy Award and the George Foster Peabody Award.

The score, composed and jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi and performed by his trio, is almost as famous as the special itself and should be appreciated separate from the animation. The soundtrack album is a mainstay at my house around the holidays, and it's one of the only holiday albums I can bear to hear repeated. (Tracks include renditions of "O Tannenbaum," "What Child Is This?" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Guaraldi's composition "Linus and Lucy," which would become known widely as the theme song to the Peanuts animated specials, is one of the only non-holiday related songs on the album.) Having not seen A Charlie Brown Christmas for many years, I was struck on a recent viewing at how cropped and short the score is within the half-hour running length. It seems to shuffle from incomplete song to incomplete song like an iPod fresh from the bathtub.

Given its immense cultural status and tremendous success, it almost goes without saying that CBS network executives believed in 1965 it was going to be a flop. (These sorts of great things are always "doomed to fail.") I don't think anyone at CBS programming would have predicted we'd still be watching a simple half-hour special more than forty years after its initial airing. I enjoy A Charlie Brown Christmas now as an adult more than I ever did as a child; the awe is still there, the silly humor of Snoopy and the advanced sophistication of holiday burnout and the gentle reminder that it should instead be a time for peace. It's enough to make you believe there's something powerful at play here, something at least more powerful than mere nostalgia.

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Dr. Strangelove (1964)

d. Stanley Kubrick / UK-USA / 94 mins.


Of all the memorable moments in Stanley Kubrick's jet-black satire Dr. Strangelove – and to be sure, there are many – I can't believe I'd forgotten this:

It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurence [sic] of such events as are depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any real persons living or dead.

That's the disclaimer that runs across the screen before the film begins. Re-watching Dr. Strangelove for what must have been my seventh or eighth time, I was floored by its presence. Why didn't I remember that being there? I'm not sure if it was required by Columbia Pictures or the U.S. government, or whether it was might have even been inserted voluntarily by Kubrick as an opening knock-knock to one gigantic joke. All I know is this: without putting that disclaimer at the beginning of such an incendiary political satire on nuclear warfare, the military-industrial complex, and the nightmare scenario, Dr. Strangelove might have come across as an actual horror film.

Officially, of course, it's the longest film title most people know by heart: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It ponders out-loud just how chaotic it might be if the general overseeing the nuclear fleet went absolutely crazy and sent the bombardiers to pre-emptively attack Russia. The rational president discovers he is helpless. The military advisers are predicting the best-case scenario – "getting our hair mussed" – is "ten to twenty million dead, tops!" A Russian doomsday machine can't be turned off. And the top weapons specialist has a right hand that not only wants to heil Hitler, but also apparently wants to strangle the specialist himself.

Kubrick might have been the most idiosyncratic of all directors. He set out to make a cold war apocalyptic thriller, but it was only after he dug his fingers into the material that he saw the potential for razor-sharp satire. (Terry Southern, writing a profile of Kubrick for Esquire magazine, was brought in as a co-writer.) It was the right decision on his part, and Dr. Strangelove is, in my opinion, probably his best film. It has an utterly memorable and simplistic visual style, some of the best comic performances from the 1960s, and a knock-'em-dead script.

The film weaves three stories together. In the first story, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has finally cracked. Believing the communists are "sapping and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids," he orders the launch of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and locks down the military base, holding his British air force adviser Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) captive. In the second line, Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickins) leads his squadron with the bombs on board. And in the third story, an emergency military meeting is convened in Washington, D.C., by President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again), who discovers from Gen. Buck Turgidson (George S. Scott) that, short of a miracle, there's nothing that can be done about the bombers. Muffley also discovers from the Russian ambassador (Peter Bull) that their doomsday device cannot be turned off and a counter-strike is inevitable. This all true, says the president's Nazi émigré weapons expert, Dr. Strangelove (again Sellers, in his smallest but most memorable role).

The performances are stellar across the board, due in large part to Kubrick, who coaxed the right stuff out of his actors. As a comedian, Sellers was never better than his triple-play in Dr. Strangelove. Each of his characters are memorable and remarkably different from one another, from the egg-headed Muffley to the schizoid Strangelove. (He was to play Major Kong in the original planning, and there are numerous reasons cited for his withdrawal.) It is one of the Oscars' great, great errors that he lost Best Actor to the star of My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison, who had already been given numerous accolades for his stage performance.

Lest we forget the wonderful supporting cast: Hayden, impeccably stern as he chews his cigar and spouts his purity-of-essence philosophy, and Scott, who famously wanted to act as a straight man but whom Kubrick convinced to shoot scenes a little too fast and a little too loose. Scott's hyperbolic Turgidson (based in part on real-life, hot-headed, drop-the-bomb U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay) is crazy-eyed and paranoid, worried the Russian ambassador will "see the big board" of projected flight paths, and whose bloodlust for warfare literally seems to be borderline lustful. At times it is hard to believe that Turgidson says the things he does, but it works because Turgidson himself seems to find it hard to believe everyone else is apparently so oblivious.

A few technical details merit mentioning: The opening credits are written in one of the most memorable fonts of all film credit sequences. The art direction and set design are shockingly simplistic but highly effective and give the film a surprisingly feel of accuracy (although it was filmed on sound stages in London). The war room is essentially a round-table topped with lights and set in front of gigantic maps of the United States and Russia, decorated with flashing light bulbs. Ripper and Mandrake essentially stay in an office room for the entirety of their storyline, and Kong and his air force men stay in the belly of their B-52 bomber. The art direction won a BAFTA Award, and Dr. Strangelove was named the Best Picture of 1964 in Britain. (In America, the film was nominated for four Oscars, losing Picture, Direction, and Sellers's acting to My Fair Lady, its director George Cukor, and Harrison, respectively. It lost the Adapted Screenplay category to the historical drama Becket.)

The sorest spot in Dr. Strangelove today is the question of whether it is still timely. It is without question dated. From a historical viewpoint, the U.S.S.R. is dissolved, Russia and the United States are no longer embroiled in the cold war, the arms race is over, and to the best of the public's knowledge, the nuclear war-games are at a standstill (although certainly more countries possess nuclear capabilities than this writer would like). Its lack of any substantial female characters is noticeable, although for being 1964, kudos goes to having a prominent character of color, played by James Earl Jones in his film debut.

But as I see it, timeliness and relevance are two separate phenomena. Dr. Strangelove, particularly during the last decade, has perhaps never been more relevant. Its apocalyptic fears seem astute in a millennium born of the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many nations with strong antipathy toward the United States have attempted to develop nuclear weapons. Where the film departs foreign policy and enters into pure philosophy and sociology, however – the fragility of life, the cautionary tale of technology gone wild, the triviality of mankind when seen stacked against devices meant to kill widely and instantaneously – is a fear I'm sure won't be leaving our minds any time soon.

What hasn't faded with time is that Kubrick managed to make one of the best comedies out of such a bleak subject. It is satire of the highest order, on par with Swift, Pope, Twain, and Bierce, and is perhaps the definitive 20th-century satirical work. It is incredible enough to make us laugh and grounded enough to make us wince. Talk about achievement.

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The Learning Tree (1969)

d. Gordon Parks / USA / 107 mins.

The first crop of films inducted into the National Film Registry are all well-known heavy-hitters: Citizen Kane. Casablanca. The Wizard of Oz. Gone with the Wind. But among the first twenty-five is a truly surprising entry – a small, largely unknown 1969 melodrama called The Learning Tree. It's a film with a backstory that makes it, in many ways, just as groundbreaking as its fellow inductees.

By adapting his own memoir for the screen, Gordon Parks became the first African-American director of a major Hollywood studio production. (It is important to note the "Hollywood studio production" aspect of that banner, as there were earlier independent films – as far back as Oscar Micheaux's 1920 film Within Our Gates.) The totality of that cannot be underestimated. The Learning Tree looks at the life of two young black men in the Midwest during the 1920s, a responsible young man named Newt (Kyle Johnson) and a resentful young man named Marcus (Alex Clarke). They are both struggling simultaneously against a racist society and their own burgeoning adulthood, and the story unfolds through both of their perspectives and reaches heights of tension when the two cross paths.

The Learning Tree should not be solely known for being the first film made by a black director. It's a tender tale of rural life, performed by characters who feel real and sincere, and manages to still be entertaining despite some superficial entertainment flaws. The truth is that nearly all the actors are amateurs, which works with the film and against it equally. Unfortunately the acting and dialogue frequently feel quite stilted, which keeps the audience at arm's-length, but the film is not devoid of emotion; the overarching story is particularly engaging, and the closeness of the material to Parks gives the film an unmistakable authenticity. While the acting and story are at times moving, perhaps the best technical aspect of the entire film is its camerawork. Before he became a film director, Parks was a well-known still photographer for Life magazine; he published photos that captured the blemishes of twentieth-century American life – segregation and poverty – and also the empowering social movements of the 1960s. Parks and cinematographer Burnett Guffey (who manned the cameras for In a Lonely Place, From Here to Eternity, and Bonnie and Clyde) present as beautiful a landscape as can be seen in any film from the time period.

Parks was an amazingly productive man. Born into poverty and orphaned at 15, he never graduated high school and taught himself his artistic talents. He worked for the U.S. government during World War II and then joined Life, where he shot photos for more than 20 years. He was the author of multiple books and also poetry and music, and served as editorial director of Essence magazine in the early 1970s. After The Learning Tree, he directed Shaft and its sequel, but did not find himself behind the camera of a well-known film again. He was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1988 and died in 2006, and perhaps he will be most remembered for opening the door to other black filmmakers. The Learning Tree has yet to be released on DVD, which is a shame, but fortunately it's being protected for the ages in the Library of Congress. Perhaps this film will someday acquire a larger audience.

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