Some Came Running

The tableaux of Bette Davis and Claude Rains

Bette Davis in Deception, 1946, directed by Irving Rapper, shot by Ernest Haller.

Claude Rains in same. The two subsequent shots are joined by a dissolve; the above screen capture of the Rains shot is taken from the middle of a slow dolly-out from a tighter framing. 

I watched Deception on the recommendation of my friend Ali Arikan, who was surprised and mesmerized by it when he caught it on television recently. It is a juicy, stylish romantic melodrama but it didn't take me as aback as it did my friend, but as I watched it occured to me that the dutch-angled portentous mirror shots that derive from a certain cinematic Expressionist mode that goes all the way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and were perfected in this mode by Michael Curtiz in the likes of, say, Mildred Pierce, made a year before this film for the same studio, Warner Brothers, were either staples of the romantic melodrama genre or even part of a Warner "house style" back in the day. As we know, we really don't get this kind of thing in romantic melodramas anymore. 

There are many reasons why. Watching the new Blu-ray of Roberto Rossellini's 1954 Journey In Italy the other day, it occured to me that this—the movie, that is—was one of them. Not that Journey is a visually drab film but it's certainly distinctly, deliberately unaffected (relative to the likes of Deception) in its POV. Today's dramas focusing on couples don't overtly owe much to either Rossellini or Cassavetes, which is too bad, but those filmmakers broke a certain visual stranglehold, or mold if you prefer, and Rossellini made a point of doing it in a film that featured two big movie stars (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) as his leads. A lot of critics and cinephiles these days are insisting that "neorealism" wasn't a real thing, but whether or not it was, Rossellini did something. Who could have predicted that once the mold was broken, what would eventually take its place would be, in urban romantic melodrams, faux-industrial apartment porn, and in rural ones, faux-Maxfield Parrish or worse yet faux-Thomas Kinkaide?

Big evil

So we were watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 Strangers on a Train the other night, and among its fascinations I was most struck, this time, by the director's visual conception of the film's "villain," Bruno Anthony (masterfully embodied by Robert Walker) who is of course the increasingly not-so-secret sharer of its "hero," Guy Haines. As Bill Krohn aptly points out in his excellent book Hitchcock at Work, Bruno "is the Monster from the Id," and, more importantly from Guy's unconscious point of view, he represents a means by which Guy may scratch—as in permanently eliminate—an itch. Hence, up until his apotheosis as a means, that is, his murder of Miriam, Guy's troublesome wife, Bruno is almost always visually outsize, the dominating figure in pretty much every frame in which he appears. 

As in the above shot, in which Bruno makes himself at ease in his private compartment, putting his feet up (of course we recall that the respective protagonists were introduced, and their characteristics indeed limned, by way of their shoes, walking). Hitchcock keeps every part of Bruno in focus even as the soles of his shoes loom in the center of the frame. As in the shot at the top of the post, from the soon-to-be-late Miriam's point of view, of Bruno at the fairground entrance, a slash mark in the middle of the frame, a sharply defined malignant man in full, as it were.

As I said, this version of Bruno stays in play up the the point Bruno murders Miriam, and as reflected in her glasses he is at the height of monstrousness. Having done the deed, he does not quite recede, but he is rather peskily incorporated into Guy's existence, like a wart; note Bruno's forward-gazing presence as one of Guy's tennis matches: just another face in the crowd, only different. 

But up until the murder, Hitchcock's visual conception of Bruno is inflexible, to the point where it could not necessarily be entirely accomodated by the filmmaking technology of the time. You see this a lot in Hitchcock, not just the early stuff but in the middle, all the way up to The Birds: visual ideas so audacious and imaginative that they could only be acheived by way of special effects, or kluges incorporating a mix of effects and techniques. The recent Criterion Blu-ray disc of Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes reveals in great detail the particularities of the dolls and model cars used in the film's opening shot, an ostensible camera-swoop from a height onto a train station and chalet on a fictional mountain range. Unable to accomplish the aerial shot "for real," Hitchcock and his team did it via minatures. Two decades later, Hitchcock conceived a similar opening for Psycho, and was able to use actual aerial shots, but still had to resort to dissolves to finally get the camera into the hotel room where we find Sam and Marion. 

In any event, for a shot of Bruno speaking on the phone prior to going out and committing "his" murder, Hitchcock wanted to foreground Bruno in a sort of family portrait, showing his dotty, doting mother and his increasingly irritated father squabbling over Bruno's mental state even as Bruno's on his way to committing homicide. He wanted every figure in focus but didn't want to use a wide-angle lense to get the "deep focus" effect and I presume that as of the time of the film's making there were no flat lenses with a focal length sufficient for the depth the director was going for. So Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks opted for a process shot, which results in a slight degradation of detail but gets the desired effect.

I don't follow lens advances as much as I ought to, so I wonder if the shot as Hitchcock conceived it would be possible without having to split it in two, as the maestro did then, today. I do recall, in an interview with Premiere pegged to his 2000 film What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis waxing enthusiastic about how Hitchcock would have loved new-fangled tools like CGI. There were a couple of wags on the staff who snorted at this for a variety of parochial reasons; to tell you the truth, I might have been one of them. But I think Zemeckis was precisely correct. When I look at something like the opening shot of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, which in a sense approximates the opening of The Lady Vanishes, train station and all, and ups the ante on the camera mobility aspect...only this time the fake people are computer-generated, and not models, I think: Yes. By any means available/necessary.