Some Came Running

Cameron Crowe, Victim Of Auteurism

Don't try this at home: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Philip Morris, Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, 1946

Last evening, near the end of Film Twitter’s “We Need To Talk About Cameron” quasi-telethon, the critic Tina Hassannia registered some disapprobation thusly:

“ALOHA reviews are all framed in the auteurist framework, which inherently treats the white, male director as an artist worthy of discussion.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think of the movie, at the end of the day what’s important is: what’s going on with Cameron Crowe?”

“Now imagine trying to have a similar conversation about any mediocre, messy, or outright bad movie by a director who isn’t white or male.”

“When was the last time that happened?"

I have no trouble imagining having the “similar conversations” posited by Hassania, as I’ve had them, in the pre-Twitter days. “What’s going on with Spike Lee?” was a big question around the time of Girl 6, and again with She Hate Me; “What’s going on with Jane Campion?” was a big question for some with Holy Smoke (not for me—I loved it) and more so with In The Cut (yeah, that was bad).  The political sensitivities of young critics these days are so finely tuned that it’s hard to know sometimes whether a protest is part of an attempt to create a new critical paradigm centered around diversity, or just some kind of high-functioning troll activity (if I understand Hassannia’s subsequent Twitter updates correctly, Spike Lee doesn’t really count). But as we’re framing within the auteurist framework, and so much of the most interesting and provocative criticism happening today at least carries the implication that auteur-based criticism has somehow ruined almost everything, it’s worth noting that—judging from appearances, at least—a lot of Cameron Crowe’s current troubles stem from auteurism, or a misapprehension of auteurism.

Not that I’ve seen Aloha, or am in a particular hurry to. I began worrying about Cameron Crowe, like so many others, upon seeing Elizabethtown, in Toronto in 2005. Actually, not to get all inside baseball, but I had been worried about Crowe even before cameras started rolling on that picture. I knew that Crowe had written the script, an ambitious comedy-drama, with Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, and that DiCaprio was now determined to do only Serious Movies with Serious Directors such as Martin Scorsese, which left Crowe without a bankable leading man. And so it went. Anyway, I was at Toronto for the premiere of Elizabethtown, and Crowe personally returned to the scene of his Almost Famous triumph to deliver a quasi-apology at the beginning of the press screening of his new film, which was indeed, alas, Elizabethtown. I felt bad after seeing it. My thoughts were these: One, that Crowe was maybe the best-intentioned and most big-hearted of American directors (maybe I should have been thinking “of white male American directors,” but I wasn’t, I cannot tell a lie). Two, that because his kind of picture is so difficult to get produced nowadays, prior commercial triumphs or not (and let us not forget that between Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, there was Vanilla Sky), Crowe apparently feels compelled to cram EVERYTHING HE KNOW AND FEELS INTO EACH AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL FILM HE MAKES. The directors Crowe frequently cites as models and mentors, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, working within the studio system (Lubitsch was even, at one point, a studio executive), had the advantage of being able to produce with some consistency; if they couldn’t do something they wanted on Project X, they might be able to get it done on Project Y. They didn’t have the nagging consciousness of each individual film maybe being their last.

That consciousness is part of the artistic and intellectual DNA of at least two generations of “personal filmmakers.” Which Lubitsch and Wilder, both directors icons of critics and creators of the Possessory Credit School, were in fact not. One of the features of what we call "Auteurism," or "auteurism," as we know it, and so on, is how damned confused it is. The politique des auteurs as articulated by Bazin and Truffaut is a different kettle of fish from auteurism as articulated by Andrew Sarris. And while Sarris was in fact pretty careful about differentiating between illuminating evidence of a director’s personal signature and avowing that the director or “auteur” is the creative be-all and end-all of every artistically worthwhile film made, he might as well not bothered given the crude way such notions are bandied about on an almost daily basis. In any event, one thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the “personal touches” that distinguish Lubitsch and Wilder films from more routine Hollywood fare of its time is that these touches were by-products of a process that Crowe either doesn’t have access to or doesn’t want. Reading Charles Brackett’s recently published diaries, one is struck by how often Brackett virtually roles his eyes at Wilder’s insistence on narrative coherence—“Billy’s terrifying neurosis that everything isn’t crystal clear to the audience” is how he puts it at one point. Contrast this “neurotic” precision with the loose baggy monsters Crowe has to fight tooth and nail to get made at all, and then has to cut by thirty minutes or however long. The self-consciousness of the contemporary “personal touch”—even when adapting an intriguing Spanish-language horror/sci-fi romance, Crowe was madly compelled to transform it into My Empathetic Tortured Biopic Of My Old Boss Jann Wenner—can be laid, I think, pretty squarely at the feet of slavish devotion to misunderstood auteurism. Combined, paradoxically enough, with the production-on-my-own-terms ethos of the early French New Wave. All of which seems to have left Crowe in a pretty, and seemingly inextricable, pickle. At least when Lee and Campion went off the rails, they did so trying to accomplish something a little different from their prior fare. One reason I’m not in a hurry to see Aloha is because the accounts of the movie have me thinking dog-returning-to-its-own-vomit. 

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 3

  "As if she could smell him..." M. Paradine (Alida Valli) senses the presence of Latour (Louis Jourdan)

Dear Farran,

Well thank you for sending me a nice slow Vertigo pitch across the plate. Your point is interesting and, I think, valid. But, given the structure of the extant film—it rather is a shame we’ll never be able to see the longer cuts—one has to look at Paradine sideways to get to that conclusion. But I like, anyway. It’s interesting too, that, during this particular period, the mid-to-late 40s (and for me, Hitchcock at the ABSOLUTE “height of his powers” is the stretch starting with ‘43’s Shadow of a Doubt and ending with ‘60’s Psycho), we find Hitchcock’s viewer-identification/sympathy strategies tilted to the female characters, e.g. Ingrid Bergman in both Notorious and Under Capricorn, Ann Todd to a somewhat lesser extent (strictly in terms of screen time, at least) here.

While it’s absolutely a stretch to call Hitchcock a feminist filmmaker, I think there’s still a lot of room to do some critical digging on his depictions of women. (Robin Wood’s chapter on Hitchcock and Bergman in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is a good start.)  Someone, it occurs to me, could get a nice paper out of the way Hitchcock used his own daughter, Patricia, in his films. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, in The Paradine Case, the not-well-known-enough Joan Tetzel plays a sarcastic young woman affecting to be jaded beyond her years, an anticipation of Patricia’s snarky senator’s-younger-daughter in 1951’s Strangers on a Train. 

In any event, your alternative reading of the movie underscores an almost entirely irrefutable truth about what makes Hitchcock a great filmmaker. He conceived Paradine Case as a way to tell a story that related to his own fears/neuroses: that is, the tale of a good man’s sexual humiliation at the hands of a (Hitchcock’s words) “nymphomaniac” and a “clod.” He did not get that, largely due to Selznick’s hand. But, as you demonstrate, he didn’t get nothing, either. Even when Hitchcock’s explicit plans fail, his instinct does not, nor does his artistry.

One thing I’m increasingly fascinated by is what I hesitate to call the movie’s Pirandellian dimension. Hitchcock famously insisted that the production design recreated the actual interior of the Old Bailey to a very precise degree. This is very much the theatre in which a “real” drama is played. The main actors, or course, are in costume, as they are during a formal dinner party at the movie’s beginning. It’s at this latter scene that Hitchcock meant to establish a particular character dynamic. At this affair, the sight of Ann Todd’s bare shoulder electrifies Charles Laughton’s Judge Horfield. Hitchcock establishes this in a bravura feat of both shooting and editing. He begins with a medium close-up of Laughton entering the party, and then speedily dollies in on the actor/character as something catches his attention. He then cuts on motion to a medium shot of Todd, and this shot itself is already dollying in fast (this was all done before the zoom lens as we know it was developed) to Todd’s shoulder, and once the camera rests on a close-up of the shoulder, the scene cuts back to Laughton’s reaction. We get the picture as surely as getting hit by a lightning bolt. Then Laughton makes his intentions known and brazenly comes on to Todd’s Mrs. Keane. Her refusal to play along is ostensibly what leads to Horfield’s dismissive, contemptuous treatment of Gregory Peck’s Keane in court, but this isn’t followed through with the strength of this initial impetus. I suspect this theme was diluted in the film’s trimming.

 

Something not like the Kuleshov Effect: Charles Laughton fixates on Ann Todd. 

In any event, my point is that all of the main characters of the movie, save Laughton’s, are severely circumscribed by the formalities of their environment. Formalities that are so exacting that one can mistake this movie for a period piece. But it is not: its London features electricity and double-decker buses, and an establishing shot of the Old Bailey exterior shows it undergoing post-Blitz reconstruction. In any event, the only reason Laughton’s character is not similarly circumscribed is because of his power. He literally IS the law here. Everyone else is toiling under what the kids nowadays call “the dominant ideology,” and playing their roles within its hierarchy. There’s a definite sadness about this state of affairs expressed in the film. It’s not as if Hitchcock is going full Ford Madox Ford in bemoaning sexual repression (“Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?”, as we remember from The Good Soldier), but there’s more than an implication of a similar sentiment. It comes across most definitely in the exchanges between Joan Tetzel’s Judy and Charles Coburn’s Simon, father-and-daughter sideline observers of the whole sorry business.

The ornate settings in which Laughton/Horfield plays with unabashed free range (it must be said though that Hitchcock gets a far more controlled performance out of Laughton here than he did in Jamaica Inn, in which Laughton’s super-glazed hamming is delightful nonetheless) are a stark contrast to the dingy confines of the prison where Valli’s Maddalena Paradine dwells through most of the film. If you’ll forgive me, in more sweeping philosophical terms, the difference is to me reminiscent of the red pill/blue pill worlds of The Matrix. No, really. Hitchcock’s intention was different, but not, ultimately, in political terms, THAT different: “What interested me in this picture was to take a person like Mrs. Paradine, to put her in the hands of the police, to have her submit to all their formalities, and to say to her maid, as she was leaving her home between the two inspectors, ‘I don’t think I shall be back for dinner.’ And then to show her spending the night in a cell, from which, in fact, she will never emerge. […]It may be an expression of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situation in which a normal person is suddenly deprived of freedom and incarcerated […]”

As Leff relates, this mode of contrast did not please the movie’s producer: “At least three scenes between Valli and Peck occurred in a spare five by six conference room at Halloway Prison. […] Hitchcock often put his actors in confined places to make them (and the audience) sweat. The stark scenes in this virtually unfurnished room—the antithesis of the mahogany-and-marble home of Maddalena Paradine—adumbrate the documentary style of The Wrong Man. Valli and Peck worked on the set for nine days, producing footage remarkable for its severity. Selznick meanwhile badgered Hitchcock to leave the gangster-in-a-cell style to other, lesser studios […]” As astute as Selznick could be, he did not have much of an appreciation for mise-en-scène at times.

I feel bad for self-proclaimed Hitchcock nuts who pooh-pooh this picture, or any other non-thriller Hitchcock. (It’s true that I lean more to Robin Wood’s side than Rohmer and Chabrol’s on Mr. and Mrs. Smith; while Rohmer and Chabrol are correct in identifying that film’s most Hitchcockian scene, said scene is also borderline grotesque, and Wood is right in nailing down the film’s defining weakness, which is that Norman Krasna’s script is a borderline crass rehash of The Awful Truth.) Because no matter what the material, Hitchcock’s always inventing, stretching, testing, film language itself, which is never not interesting. As Rohmer and Chabrol state at the conclusion of their book, “In Hitchcock’s work form does not embellish content, it creates it.” And it’s almost always a kick to watch that miracle take place before one’s eyes. Don't you think?

GK

This is the third of a four-part series. See part one below; part two here; and I'll update when part four appears at the Siren's blog tomorrow, and maybe I'll put up a kind of post-game show when we're done...

UPDATE: The Siren's thrilling (it really is!) conclusion to this exchange is now posted, here. 

The "Paradine" Letters: An exchange with The Self Styled Siren, Part One

This is the first of a four-part dialogue. The next installment will appear at Self Styled Siren on Friday, May 1. 

Alida Valli in The Paradine Case, Alfred Hitchcock, 1947.

Dear Farran,

I'm taking you seriously as to the idea we discussed the other morning, at a delightful-as-usual breakfast at Court Street Grocers. The idea being to rejuvenate our respective blogs with an epistolary exchange about Alfred Hitchcock's 1947 picture The Paradine Case.  

(By the way, you see what I did there, with the totes adorbes allusion to our social relationship and our exemplary taste in local food emporiums? I was going for a Korean-tacos-while-watching-Schindler's List effect, which seems to be the thing in arts writing these days. OK, I'll stop now.)

As I mentioned, to you and in a blog post elsewhere, since my mom died I've gone on an enormous Hitchcock jag, for sentimental reasons and maybe other reasons as well. The supplement on the Criterion Collection disc of Truffaut's Le peau douce, a video essay by our friend Kent Jones on the book Hitchcock/Truffaut and its effect on Hitchcock's reputation, a preface of sorts I believe to Kent's feature-length documentary on the subject, certainly stirred up something in my critical consciousness prior to the personal catastrophe that set me on a cinematic sentimental journey of sorts. In any event, my companion in this latest round of Hitchcock studies was a used paperback of a translation of Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol's 1957 book Hitchcock, subtitled The First Forty-Four Films.

The book has a lot to recommend it, not just because Rohmer and Chabrol were astute critics. It’s really fascinating to read a Hitchcock study that ends with The Wrong Man: that is, before at least three Really Significant Canonical works (Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho) and two Significant Pieces of Expressive Esoterica (The Birds and Marnie) (and these are my own categories of course). So the argument that Rohmer and Chabrol make to establish Hitchcock as a major film artist seems peculiarly circumscribed to readers who have the entirety of Hitch’s career to take into account. There’s also the matter of the Catholic conservative perspective of the writers, which leads to them privileging I Confess and The Wrong Man in ways a lot of contemporary critics won’t or wouldn’t.

In terms of formal analysis, they treat The Paradine Case, Rope, and Under Capricorn as pretty much a trilogy, and not just because they’re, you know, subsequent films. Each of the pictures represent a variation on a singular formal perspective, that is, each of the films is a sort of long-take laboratory. The first one, the one we’re most occupied with, The Paradine Case, ran into some trouble in this respect because its producer, David O. Selznick, who also adapted the film’s scenario, was not very big on the long take at all. Here’s Leonard Leff in his book Hitchcock & Selznick, about a day on The Paradine Case shoot: “One day, looking ahead to the fluidity of his Transatlantic pictures, Hitchcock prepared an elaborate tracking shot of [Gregory] Peck and [Ann] Todd. While grips frantically pulled away furniture to make a path, the probing camera followed the actors through a long and arduous take. Todd called the shot ‘frightening,’ but Selznick had the last word: ‘Theatrical.’ Appearing on the set, he ordered the sequence filmed conventionally. Hitchcock unwillingly obliged.” 

And so it went, apparently. Still, Hitchcock was able to pull off at least two memorable shots in this vein: the final God’s-eye view of the courtroom, with Gregory Peck’s shattered character, the barrister Keane, nearly staggering out, which shot inspired rapturous praise from Rohmer and Chabrol; and the famous-but-not-famous-enough shot of murder defendant Madame Paradine (Alida Valli) sitting in her courtroom box as witness and lover Latour (Louis Jourdan) enters the courtroom, and the camera tracks his long walk behind and then in front of her. “We had to do that in two takes. The camera is on Alida Valli’s face, and in the background you see Louis Jourdan coming down to the witness box,” Hitchcock recalled to François Truffaut. “First, I photographed the scene without her; the camera panned him all around, at a two-hundred degree turn, from the door to the witness box. Then, I photographed her in the foreground; we sat her in front of the screen, on a twisting stool, so that we might have the revolving effect, and when the camera went off her to go back to Louis Jourdan, she was pulled off the screen. It was quite complicated, but it was very interesting to work that out.”

The shot is magnificent both from a technical point of view—I wonder it you’d actually need to do it as a composite now, given certain advances in technology that we can maybe talk about later—and a pictorial design point of view, and, most important, it registers emotionally. As Hitchcock noted, “We wanted to give the impression that she senses his presence […] that she can actually feel him behind her, as if she could smell him.” Yes, we do get that. The Paradine Case gets pooh-poohed by a lot of self-proclaimed Hitchcock fans because, the murder element aside, it’s more of a melodrama than a thriller. Ostensibly what they used to call “a woman’s picture.” Boiled down, it’s the story of a good man (Peck’s Keane) who falls in love with his client (Valli), which wreaks havoc on his marriage to a good woman (Todd). Complicating factors include Charles Laughton’s judge, who has a weird sick thing for Keane’s wife, and of course Jourdan as Madame Paradine’s paramour.  But hell—I think it’s pretty top-flight melodrama, in the Hitchcock mode (which is quite different but equally as cinematically and emotionally astute as the Sirk mode): swift, sharply written, involving, emotionally potent. I think another reason the movie gets short shrift is that there’s a tendency to take Hitchcock himself too much at his word. Rohmer and Chabrol note that Selznick chose the film’s actors (and indeed he did!) and “insisted on Louis Jourdan for the groom, whereas the director would have preferred a ‘clod’.” Sounds as if the fellas agree. Hitchcock amplified this to Truffaut, after grousing that Peck couldn’t “properly represent an English lawyer.” Hitchcock calls the casting of Jourdan the film’s worst flaw. “After all,” he says, “the story of The Paradine Case is about the degradation of a gentleman who becomes enamored of his client, a woman who is not only a murderess, but also a nymphomaniac. And that degradation reaches its climactic point when he’s forced to confront the heroine with one of her lovers, who is a groom. But the groom should have been a manure-smelling stable hand, a man who really reeked of manure.” 

Whoa! There’s a lot to unpack there. It’s like he wanted to make the long-form version of Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Hitchcock’s own sexual idiosyncrasies/insecurities as expressed/implied here aren’t HUGELY unusual, particularly when you take into account the nearly inherent sexism of men of his generation and nationality. But for a director who did so many amazing things with his actresses and his female characters, he definitely had, in this case, a huge blind spot. I think Jourdan is fine here and I know you do too; I think Hitchcock, in his desire to indulge his own paranoia about pretty women walking around with gorillas on his street, underestimates the erotic appeal of the smooth, which Jourdan most definitely represents. Maybe this is where I should get off and let you do some talking…

GK

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Self Styled Siren reply. Stay tuned for Part Three, at this site, on the morning of Monday, May 4. Thanks, as ever, for reading.