Women Make The Best Psychoanalysts, Until They Fall In Love: Spellbound (1945)

I enjoy doing blogathons, first because it proves a great way to extend my voice beyond the rather small crowd of readers hear at the blog and engage in dialogue with fellow film bloggers on great works of cinema.  The result is often a greater, of not completely new, understanding of a work, or awareness to a work I would never have come across prior.  Second, I also enjoy these blogathons, because, thus far, they have provided me wonderful opportunities to revisit some of my favorite films.  Michael and Jill's TCM Summer Under the Stars blogathon has already allowed me to re-watch the zany The Blob much to my elation.  This second post for the month, in correlation with TCM's day devoted to Gregory Peck afforded me a chance to revisit my favorite Hitchcock film Spellbound.  Considering that it has been some time since I had seen the film and have certainly been able to pad out my Hitchcock blind spots to varying degrees since, I can still say that this film is undoubtedly and unequivocally my favorite, indicative not only of the elements that have led to Hitchcock become the first definitive auteur, but also some of the ways in which Spellbound, a work decidedly entrenched within psychoanalytic narratives, manages to reject the subject matter and visual innuendos made ever so infamous by the late director.  I know that there are quantifiably better, indeed perfect, works by Hitchcock, but given that Hitchcock is clearly poking fun at himself affords this film a layer of detached irony that is less clear in his later works, not to mention the use of Ingrid Bergman, who also happens to be my favorite actress.  Pairing the great leading lady with the equally adept Gregory Peck results in a narrative that flows with intensity and earnestness that makes its winding deceit and dreamlike trance accessible.  Hitchcock wrote the texts on modern horror and thriller filmmaking and it is all on display to great effort in Spellbound, right down to the jarring last scenes in all their erie impossibility.  If all of this is not enough to sell the skeptics out there, may I remind you that Salvador Dali helped create the dream sequence for which this film is most well-known, and its very existence challenges even the most liberal understanding of cinematic possibility.

Spellbound focuses primarily on the experiences of Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) a psychoanalyst, whose identification as a woman has proved both advantageous and hindering in her movement upward in the unconventional science.  The retirement of her boss and mentor Dr. Murchinson (Leo G. Carroll) proves quite troublesome, only to be extenuated by the immediate arrival of his replacement in Anthony Edwards (Gregory Peck) whose text on guilt and the labyrinth is a particular favorite of Constance's.  Hoping to stick to her guns and remain focused on her work, an initial dinner meeting between Constance and Anthony leads to obvious sexual tension that results in Constance finding herself creating excuses just to meet the new doctor, an encounter that assumedly leads to sex rather early.  It is during this meeting that Constance realizes that all might not be well with Anthony, particularly when he passes out after looking at the shadows of her robe, clearly breaking into some bizarre psychosis in the process.  The next day news comes of Antony Edwards not being alive and well, but dead after a murder, a picture affirming that he is in no way the person present in the psychiatric hospital.  Kowtowing to the suspicion, the false Anthony flees in fear, only to be followed by Constance to a hotel in New York, where it is revealed that the man, now going by John Brown, believes himself to somehow be tied to the murder of the real Anthony Edwards.  This allegation, Constance believes, is a result of mental deterioration and does not result in truth.  Committing to the act of helping John, whose last name is later revealed to be Ballentine, Constance helps the mentally troubled man discover that his fear of shadows and lines, comes from an unfortunate experience during skiing when he witness the real Edwards die inexplicably, a vision that opens up a repressed memory from his childhood involving a fatal accident with his brother.  Despite creating a rather clear psychoanalytic picture of Ballentine, Constance is stifled when authorities find a gun wound in the dead Edwards, to which neither have an explanation.  Despite Ballentine's being jailed, Constance continues her search for the truth, discovering that a little more than passing memories led to the death of Edwards and the psychological decay of Ballentine.  Indeed, foul play was afoot from the onset.

Let's talk about sex.  If this were any other film by Hitchcock, that would likely be the appropriate way to begin a critical analysis, and considering that this particular work makes it clear that it is pulling from the theories of Freud it would seem obvious to do just that, however, Spellbound may well be the least psychoanalytically inclined of his films.  Sure there are moments that would make even Freud blush, the fork and knife scene at the initial meeting between Ballentine and Constance being an obvious example, not to mention the surrealist touch with Dali's involvement.  Yet, none of this suggest a film where repressed memories are the result of wild navigations through the world, such as are the case in Vertigo, nor do the crimes take on a degree of sexual supplanting, as occurs in Dial M for Murder or Rope.  Beginning the film with a quote from Shakespeare, Hitchcock creates a film that centers the blame for crime and violence in the individual, further suggesting that their actions are not results of deeply entrenched psychological issues from one's youth, but a result of frivolous jealousy and assertions of lost masculine privilege.  For what may be the only time in Hitchcock's filmic career, a criminal act occurs, simply out of criminal intent.  That is not to say that the film does not extend on to explore psychological issues in other ways.  Take for example its look at the character of Constance, which is highly problematic by contemporary standards.  Considering that Hitchcock was quite invested in the world of the subconscious, his desire to degrade women is nothing new, except here it is particularly verbal and highly against their place in a career that would afford them authority.  Constance is played up to be good at her job, unless of course a dashing man enters the picture, at this point she loses all sense of rationality and is willing to forgive a man of murder (albeit correctly) on his word alone.  Guilt also figures prominently into the film, whether it be the falsified guilt of Ballentine early on or the very real guilt that faces the killer in the films next to last scene that involves one of the most haunting uses of point-of-view camera work in cinema to date, all adds up to the suggestion that what is ultimately the worst about murdering, or believing that one did so, is not the act, but the inability to get over doing so at a later time.  To be void of such guilt, would make one a Psycho...which is a discussion for a different blogathon.

Key Scene:  While I wanted to be unique and go against the obvious choice, one cannot help but adore that dream sequence designed by Dali.  It is the close a viewer will ever get to seeing what it would have looked like were Hitchcock to have worked in the era of German Expressionism and surrealism.

There are blurays of this available in multiple box sets, or individually.  There is also a Criterion DVD that is OOP, which is how I watched it, as such I will let you decide how to track this movie down, but I will note that it is worth doing so in the near future.  The movie is an absolute must see work.  As before I am grateful to Sittin' on a Backyard Fence and ScribeHard on Film for being able to participate in the TCM Summer Under the Stars blogathon.

Acting Out Their Dreams, It Came To Be: How The West Was Won (1962)

Epic of epics...all is epic.  I begin with this play on the classic Bible verse because I am rather certain that How The West Was Won may well define the greatest of filmic endeavors.  Sure a ton of people love Gone With The Wind, but it also has a tone of social problems and suffers from historical detachment, where as this sprawling western, even in its set of troublesome imagery, is so grand and epic in proportion that it required an entirely new filming style all its own to be undertaken.  Shot in Cinerama, a film and projection style that required three cameras of film to be recorded and, subsequently, projected separately, to view this film is to see something break the very wide boundaries of the cinematic western landscape.  I have a nice television and one of decent size and even I found myself hoping that it would extend beyond the edges just a bit more, as though my widescreen television was somehow preventing this film from reaching its full potential.  If this new style were not enough, How The West Was Won is also set up in an episodic format showing a somewhat connected history of information answering the statement in the title.  With directors like John Ford offering segments, as well as sections including a veritable who's who of Classic Hollywood stars, How The West Was Won is easily one of the greatest achievements in the dwindling days of the old style system that would be turned on its head only years later.  Borrowing heavily from the cinematic experimentation of Abel Gance and the desire for the grand of D.W. Griffith, How The West Was Won is definitively and undoubtedly a masterpiece.  I really wish I had saved this as the last film of the marathon, because it is easily the culmination of all that is glorious and adored about the western as genre, is a what one should think of when considering a film to be "sweeping" in its narrative.  It has a two and a half hour runtime, but with the intermissions, fully realized storyline, even if segmented and some of the most awe inspiring cinematography I have seen in a film in quite some time, the winding down of this film and its brilliant burst into the future came all to quickly and left me hoping for another set of stories.

How The West Was Won, as noted, is a series of stories, all focused on creating narrative as to how the west, or more specifically, the expansion westward influenced the persona and history that would be America.  The film begins with a story entitled The Rivers focus on Zebulon Prescott (Karl Malden) and his family as they make their way west via a large raft, making said journey along with another family.  Along the way they meet a fur trapper named Linus Rawlings (Jimmy Stewart) who one of Prescott's younger girls takes a liking to, despite Rawlings's suggestion that he is not the marrying type. Although when their paths repeatedly intersect it becomes clear that marriage is a necessity. The next story The Plains  centers on another member of the Prescott family Lilith (Debbie Reynolds) living as a showgirl in St. Louis, only to discover that she has obtained through the donation of a wealthy admirer a stake for gold in California, which leads to her being followed by gambler and pseudo-admirer Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck) whose debonair manners woo many women, but he proves to need real feelings to eventually win over the suspicious Lilith.  The next section focuses on The Civil War and the experiences of young soldier Zeb (George Peppard) whose parents are Linus and Eve (Carroll Baker) of the earlier river story.  He, despite Eve's reluctance joins the war effort and becomes a hero after taking down a rebel deserter who infiltrated the ranks of the Union in order to assassinate high ranking officers, one of which is played brilliantly by John Wayne.  Next the section called The Railroads focuses on the invasion of the "iron horse" into the plains and its particular affect on the native populations, a group which wild man Jethro Stuart (Henry Fonda) attempts to protect, only to realize that he can only promise natives safety and trust for himself and not the entirety of the colonizing white man.  Finally, the film ends in a section titled The Outlaws in which Zeb who is now a marshall in a western town takes on an infamous enemy and outlaw named Charlie Gant (Eli Wallach) resulting in an intense and high-paced shootout on a moving train.  After Zeb slays Gant the film focuses on Lilith and the rest of the Rawlings family returning home, before the film takes to a visual flight from the desolate landscapes of the old west to the modernized and skyscraper heavy modern world of Los Angeles suggesting an evolution over a length of time, but one that is always tied to the endeavors of the early settlers.

I cannot get How The West Was Won out of my mind and it is almost entirely due to its unusual cinematic style.  The triptych style of Cinerama filmmaking allows for the narrative to unfold as something very much out of a story book, each character moving throughout the space from being minor almost incomprehensible characters in the background of shots to larger than life figures occupying the space at the center of the screen.  The sort of wide-angle/fisheye visual style that results form this particular filmmaking style also intensifies the emotions of characters within the narrative, Jimmy Stewarts fumbling suaveness heightened to a point of inescapable charm, or Debbie Reynolds's ethereal beauty consuming the entire space of a shot, making each scene melt behind her.  Similarly, it allows for an understanding of how truly consuming the landscapes of the west would have appeared to  the initial settlers, with plateaus and valleys seeming to stretch on into some eternal distance, again a result of the way the juxtaposed images create a new degree of depth.  What is also magical about this particular style is that it captures action and movement in a degree that arguably has the same effect as 3D or IMAX in that the images pop-out of their space when coming into the screen, although Cinerama has an extra layer, because it will also as easily pull a viewer into the centrifuge of a piece of action, the oncoming train scenes and the barrel rolling wagon scene serve as two opposing examples of the possibilities that this new depth allowed.  It was a brilliant choice to cast huge names in these roles, even in uncredited parts, such as Lee Van Cleef and Harry Dean Stanton, because their larger-than-life personas match the intensity and grandiose nature of the filmmaking.  Think here of John Wayne's presence, even if incredibly brief, he steps into the room occupies the space and seems so at ease that one forgets that he is only occupying one of three possible frames.  However, what proves to be the most rewarding element of this style is the moments when the films flicker differently if ever so briefly. My favorite one being a moment when Lilith is dancing and she appears to leap through a frame without touching the ground, these accidents, could be chastised as problematic, but in this context they add a layer of mythology and adoration to something that is decidedly larger than life.  Cinerama aimed at blowing the lid of of filmic possibilities, and in the same vein How The West Was Won aimed to do the same for the genre.

Key Scene:  While every moment is excellent, I would say to get a full feel for what is made better by the choice to use Cinerama then The Railroad section is perhaps the best example of all the elements working simultaneously.

While I watched this on the DVD version, I cannot begin to imagine how much better it would look on bluray, particularly since it offers the option to watch it is "smile box" format which aims to recreate the feeling of attending an original Cinerama screening of this work.  I mean look how much I had to minimize these pictures just to fit them into the blog format.

Look At Me Damien, It's All For You: The Omen (1976)

As I am approaching the actual date of Halloween I am realizing that there are so many real classics of the horror genre that I have completely failed to watch, particularly some of the works from the seventies, and a whole ton of the films from the eighties.  As such I am going to try to sneak a few more of them in in these last few days before Halloween, and who knows maybe next year I can undertake an entire new set of works and focus specifically on some of the major holes in my viewing list.  The Omen is one such film and I was quite excited to undertake the work, because something about Gregory Peck dealing with demonic children just seemed to be a great concept to me, however, I must admit The Omen was considerably underwhelming when the entire product comes together.  Sure the famous moment of the nanny committing suicide and some of the frantic cinematography lends nicely to a horror vibe, but it is clear that the film has become somewhat dated and despite my adoration for Gregory Peck, it is clear that he phoned this performance in, but I may just chock it up to his age at the time of performance or a lack of general direction to the film.  While I can applaud the movie for being transnational in its concept, it manages to take a great concept of the devil's child and blow it way out of proportion to the point where some brilliant commentaries on evil within politics, the philosophical nature of faith and the problem of assuming the necessity of a child are outdone by laugh inducing beheading scenes and one of the worst replicas of a baby skeleton that has ever been produced.  Of course, The Omen is not all bad, it is generally a better than average movie and I can certainly see why it has accrued such a reputation, I was blown away by at least a few scenes and their cinematography and the message they are attempting to posit is quite ambitious, unfortunately the sum of all The Omen's parts just does not equal what it could have.  For a film about a demon child, Damien factors in quite little into the plots movement.

The narrative of The Omen begins in Rome with the birth of child for husband and wife Robert (Gregory Peck) and Katherine Thorn (Lee Remick).   Tragedy strikes though when Robert is informed that his baby has not made it through the night and has died, but that the church had another child born at exactly the same time that could easily pass as their own.  Not wanting to destroy his wife's happiness Robert agrees to take on the child and the two raise a new boy who they unknowingly name Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens).  During Damien's fifth birthday party his then maid yells from a window of their house that everything she does is for him and then proceeds to jump off the balcony with a noose tied around her neck.  This dark and unusual moment leads to a spiraling of equally bizarre events beginning with the emergence of Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw) who claims to have been sent by "The Agency" to take care of Damien, along with her comes a scary dog who was by no coincidence preset during the suicide.  Robert is then approached by Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton) a maniacal Irish priest who warns Robert that if he does not seek salvation that he will die.  A photographer who works closely with Robert catches images of this priest at another event only to discover that whenever he takes his picture an unusual black line pierces through his body, something that eventually foreshadows the priests death by impalement.  It is during this point that Robert realizes he is dealing with something larger, particularly after his wife's pregnancy and eventual miscarriage are visioned by the priest prior to his death.  This realization leads Robert, along with the photographer, who fears for his own life, on a quest to find the origins of Damien's mother, a quest that takes them all about biblical locations and through the deepest bowels of satanic attachments to the church.  The climax is intense and suggests some rather intense things about the state of global politics and would be extremely brilliant were it not for the films roundabout methods.

While I mentioned the political commentaries in this film multiple times, I am more concerned with the films statements on birth and motherhood as they relate to Damien's presence.  One almost feels bad for Damien throughout the movie because the ways he reacts to being near a church or the defeated looks he gets on his face when the animals at the zoo flee at his presence almost seem to suggest that the young boy is merely a vessel in a greater evils actions.  Even the one scene in which you can attach direct blame to Damien for a violent act is set up in such a way as to suggest that it was an outside force literally causing the boy to break out of his orbit and attack his mother.  Perhaps this set up suggests that it is not Damien to blame for the actions, but, instead; Robert for thrusting the child in a situation in order to placate a worried Katherine.  It is obvious that these grandiose issues of demonic presence and evil afoot would have been avoided were Robert to simply be honest with Katherine and tell her that their child had not made it, particularly since we learn he is murdered.  Furthermore, the emphasis that Katherine have a second, sort of replacement, child alongside Damien adds another layer of issue in that one can assume that Robert and Katherine's answer to fixing their familial issues is not to address the issue at hand, but instead to add another body to the problem.  Ultimately, of course, this is completely undermined by the films end as not only is the new child exacted from the situation, but (SPOILERS) so are Katherine and Robert, leaving the troubled Damien to exist in a world in which he is destined, arguably, against his will to do evil.  If only the Thorn's had not been so focused on having a child all would be well.

Key Scene:  It is hard to top the iconic suicide scene, but the cemetery scene sure comes close.

I am not completely enthralled with this film, but to tell you not to watch it would be to ignore its incredible historical presence, and I am sure the bluray looks way better than my watch instantly version did anyways.