Movies (On The Waterfront | Rope | Rebecca)

[jaggedwolf]

On The Waterfront (1954)

Is it funny that I thought there would be actual boxing in this movie given the "I coulda been a contender" line the film is famous for?

The only other Marlon Brando film I've seen is The Godfather, where he plays quite a different age and position. Here, he's a young longshoreman in a corrupt union. I liked the romance till the mid-struggle kiss. The priest is totally chewing the scenery when he calls out the workers for not testifying and letting the union leadership continue to murder any whistleblowers, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Was bizarre to find out afterwards that this film is the director's defense of identifying former Communists to the House Un-American Activities committee??? The waterfront union in the film is murdering people, while the people the director named don't appear to have committed any harm beyond being a member of the Communist party in the US at the same time Kazan was, back in the '30s.

Rope (1948)

I've been rewatching Pretty Little Liars, and planning to consume more of the show's inspirations/references/allusions, and so of course, there's Hitchcock. I've only seen Rear Window and Vertigo. The more recent of those was 9 years ago. The plan is to go through a list of Hitchcock's films and watch in chronological order the ones whose names I recognized.

Which leads me to Rope, a film that has absolutely no connection to PLL, but I've heard about forever as the one where the heavily implied gay couple murder a guy together. What I didn't know was that they also leave the body in their apartment, where they immediately host a dinner party for murdered dude's family and mutual friends.

That part's not a spoiler, this is all known in the first five minutes.

I had fun watching this - my favorite shot was of the chest and dining room as the housekeeper is cleaning up, the living room conversation so audible to us but all of its participants offscreen, the viewer knowing that the housekeeper is leading up to putting the books in the chest and thus opening it. I didn't notice the 10-minute one-shot segments at all, though one of the "sweeping behind a man" disguised cuts made me pause the film because I couldn't wrap my head around the change in angle. But I moved on fairly quickly.

The side characters at the party were great. My favorite was David's aunt, an astrology-obsessed lady with poor vision, but there's a dignity to David's dad I appreciated, in his unwillingness to find any humor or validity in Brandon, Phillip and Rupert's discussion of how some people are simply superior and thus should be allowed to murder.

I spent the whole movie looking forward to Rupert finding the body, to be forced to reckon with what the philosophy he espoused had wrought on the schoolkids he'd been responsible for - up to that point, I was quite satisfied with Rupert as a character. He's that kind of older man who says outrageous things, says he's joking, gets the nervous laughter of leeway from everyone because he's so respectable and important.

And yet, once we hit that moment of discovery, the movie feels lessened. Rupert's technically saying the words I'd hoped for, but he seems so unwounded, with no real moment of self-reflection, that I can't feel too bad about his horror and look of defeat.

More amusingly, halfway through this movie I did think to myself, "dang Brandon and Phillip, why'd you have to go murder your pal, all your friends seem to like you quite well and are supportive of your goals", which is very silly given that logical thinking is not common among murderers like these two.

Rebecca (1940)

So, I realized I missed Rebecca when scanning the list of Hitchcock films, hence watching Rope first. But someone reminded me of this film recently, and it does come up a little in Sleep No More, and so I gave it a watch.

I knew vaguely that it was about a woman marrying a widower who gets menaced by the housekeeper, and so I didn't expect all that time at the start with Monte Carlo, or all the time at the end with the inquest in town. Less Complete Isolation than expected? But those parts still hit hard. My friend and I kept going "the most overwhelmed/loneliest/saddest girl in the world" over our unnamed protagonist suffering. I can't believe I said "Mrs Danvers totally wanted to fuck Rebecca" right before Mrs Danvers proceeded to wax rhapsodic over brushing Rebecca's hair and stroking Rebecca's sheer nightclothes.

They had to change Maxim's murder of Rebecca in the novel to...manslaughter? accidental? in the film, because Hays code, but I don't know, the ambiguity worked. We only have Maxim's word for what happened, and he's not exactly sold himself on his stellar personality to that point, even if it's heartening to see Unnamed Protagonist be firm about something for once.

Have this video on how they used miniatures of Manderley for the visual effects.

Comments

[belacqua]

It's a common criticism of Rope that Rupert was miscast/doesn't land. I don't think I mind Rupert as much as other people do, but I love the movie enough that I just find his speech entertaining and excuse its faults.

Also iirc they wanted Cary Grant for Rupert but he didn't want to do it because it was gay; James Stewart, according to screenwriter Arthur Laurents, never realized it was gay. This has nothing to do with your criticism but I need you to know it.

I read the stage play years ago and found it much less compelling but one detail I remember is that Rupert had an injured war vet thing going on, which added another layer to the morality argument about murder.

The Hays Code change to Rebecca doesn't work for me. So much else surrounding Rebecca's death is clearly spelled out (and in general, I expect Hitchcock to tell me everything that happened lol he's not very withholding or soft on his characters) but.. no catch to the husband saying he super didn't kill her. I like the movie in general though. Of course you didn't even know it was gay.

I'm very excited for the rest of your Hitchcock watches. I don't know if Dial M for Murder is on your list, but I think you'd enjoy that one. Less horror and more detective mystery.

[jaggedwolf]

Oh yeah, I read that about the actors. I don't think Rupert was miscast, necessarily, since I bought him as that kind of guy, the final confrontation just didn't land for me.

I did not know Rebecca (the film) was gay that way but I think I was predisposed to view Mrs Danvers in that lens because she's one of the non-Macbeth characters in Sleep No More and torments Lady Macduff in a creepy dance-and-poison sequence which in retrospect was not that gay but my mind will see what it wants.