Number Seventeen

NUMBER SEVENTEEN        C+            

Great Britain  (63 mi)  1932  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

Ya don’t have to do nothin’ in this ‘ere house — ya stand still and things happen! 

—Ben Tramp (Leon M. Lion)

This is something of a creaky, old-fashioned drama, the likes of which we never see anymore and quite unlike anything else in the Hitchcock repertoire.  However, that is not necessarily a good thing, as this is an early 30’s Hitchcock film that one would least likely recommend, where it may actually work better as a silent film, as it has all the characteristics, including a highly visual German Expressionist style.  But as is, with dialogue, this is one of the more unengaging films Hitchcock ever made, with no connection to any of the characters, many of whom are interchangeable, where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad.  This abysmal disconnect strikes one as an egregious error on Hitchcock’s part, but one has to acknowledge that this was simply not the director’s area of expertise, and it crops up again and again throughout his entire body of work, as Hitchcock was notoriously hard on actors, where just prior to his arrival in Hollywood he was quoted as saying “all actors are cattle,” quickly clarifying his position, “I didn't say actors are cattle.  What I said was, actors should be treated like cattle.”  Carole Lombard reacted to this comment during the making of MR. AND MRS. SMITH (1941), a divorce comedy where the director acknowledged, “Since I really didn’t understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written.”  Lombard played a famous practical joke on Hitchcock, which he describes, “When I arrived on the set, the first day of shooting, Carole Lombard had had a corral built, with three sections, and in each one there was a live young cow.  Round the neck of each of them there was a white disk tied with a ribbon, with three names:  Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and the name of a third member of the cast, Gene Raymond.”  In his autobiography, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that different directors handle/respond to actors, where in his view:  “Hitchcock told his screen stories as much as possible without help from his actors’ performances.  When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, ‘Just do what you always do.’  Hitchcock relied on his camera angles and his montage…to do what on stage we relied on the actors for.”  As for a final word on the subject, Hitchcock recalls, “When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’  If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?,’ I say, ‘Your salary.’”

While this was actually filmed nearly a year “before” Rich and Strange (1931), it was not released until afterwards, supposedly as inflicted punishment for the poor box office showing of Hitchcock’s more favored film, with the director calling it a “quota quickie,” fulfilling his obligation as the final film for British International Pictures.  Another adaptation of a stage play, this time by J. Jefferson Farjeon, which for all practical purposes is two different films, where the overly stagy first half is set in what appears to be an old haunted mansion with the camera fixed on a steep spiraling staircase, while the second half opens up into an action chase sequence taking place on a rapidly moving train.  The staircase and the train are the two main characters of the film, both explored through a cinematic experimentation and curiosity, as all the rest is purely incidental.  The logic of the first half combines Hitchcock’s obsession with old dark houses that were gloomy and oppressive, where the Bates family mansion in Psycho (1960) is virtually a parody of a haunted house, while Hitchcock also had an obsession with stairways, where the director was meticulously picky on every single thing used in his movies, so he made sure the props in his films were as he envisioned, where he was deeply involved in creating the sets for the movies he produced.  According to Alan Vanneman in Bright Lights Journal, November 2003, Bright Lights Film Journal :: Alfred Hitchcock Photo Study: 

Staircases in Hitchcock’s films almost always lead to trouble.  For Hitchcock, the simple act of going up a staircase seemed to be a disorienting experience, taking you away from safety towards the unknown.  Spiral staircases were particularly threatening.  In Hitchcock's films, circular movement — the swirling vortex — implies a loss of control, usually with sexual overtones, and often leading to death.

Hitchcock often used stairs as the place of the most suspenseful and climactic scenes of his movies, a place where something horrible usually happened.  They all had something in common, which was terrible things occurred and were always depicted in a scary fashion.  Borrowing from an outline for a Hitchcock educational course by Dr. Glen Johnson, Spring 2013, Stairs, staircases & levels, several instances are listed.  Some of the more infamous uses of staircases in Hitchcock films would include The Lodger (1927), as it figures prominently in the arrival of the Lodger (suspected as a serial killer of women), where he immediately goes up the stairs, bypassing the main level where the normal family congregates; The 39 Steps (1935), where Richard Hannay descends the stairs after discovering the corpse in his upper-level apartment, later dragging a resistant Pamela, who is handcuffed to him, to the upper-level bedroom, while Pamela eavesdrops at the top of the stairs and hears key information that confirms Hannay’s innocence; Rebecca (1940), the heroine makes a grand entrance to the ball, wearing a costume modeled on a portrait at the top of the stairs that she is tricked into wearing by the malicious housemaid, knowing it is the same costume the dead Rebecca wore, thoroughly disgracing and humiliating her in front of her angry husband, fleeing back up the same stairs; Suspicion (1941), Johnnie climbs the stairs with a possibly-poisoned glass of milk for his wife, using a light bulb in the glass as an exclamation point:  is he or is he not a murderer?; Vertigo (1958), the most famous Hitchcock staircase, the bell tower that Scotty anxiously ascends where Madeleine falls to her death; and Psycho (1960), Detective Arbogast makes his fateful climb upstairs to the fateful domain of Norman Bates’ mother, while later, Lila can't resist descending the cellar steps.  Other films would include DOWNHILL (1927), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Dial M for Murder (1954), REAR WINDOW (1954), The Birds (1963), and FRENZY (1972). 

In an excerpt from Meaghan Walsh Gerard, Hitchcock and Stairs - Meaghan Walsh Gerard (pdf format): 

In Number Seventeen (1932), a man, chasing his blowing hat down the windy street arrives at an empty home, with a ‘to let’ sign.  As he dusts off his hat,  he sees a figure moving in the windows and becomes suspicious.  When he walks up to the front door, it blows open and reveals a long, curving staircase—the central focus of the film.  We follow him into the home, innocent of what awaits.  He cautiously pokes around, then looks up.  The camera  follows his gaze by sliding the shot up the bannister to an oval opening before returning to the man at the bottom, who slowly begins to climb the steps.  As he creeps to the top he finds the moving figure, and a dead body.  At the beginning of the ascent the man is innocent.  He knows nothing of what he will find.  His only purpose seems harmless—to investigate strange activity.  But the moment he decides to climb the stairs he is accepting an encounter with the unknown.  When this happens he agrees to exchange his innocence for knowledge—good or bad.  The entire course of the evening has changed.  Almost all of the action throughout the film centers around this staircase.  Low-key lighting shines through it, making slatted shadows cut across walls and faces.  Worn shoes trod on it.  Heads peek and dead hands flop between the rails.  In this early film of Hitchcock, one can see the beginning of his obsession with the architecture of stairs. 

In what appears to be an immersion into vertical space, this film is a monument to Hitchcock’s obsession with stairways, three floors connected by a central staircase, with a smaller staircase behind that is unseen by the viewer and only made available to various characters, making it hard to distinguish between them.  The film starts off with Detective Barton (John Stuart) arriving at a house, the number 17 of the film's title, marked for sale or rent, though he never identifies himself as such, so the audience is clueless to his identity, calling himself Forsythe until the end, where he could simply be any ordinary man wandering in out of curiosity.  Ben (Leon M. Lion) is a Cockney tramp who keeps his pockets stuffed with food and remains blind drunk throughout, where his speech is near impossible, though he appears to have wandered into this old abandoned building purely by chance, as is their discovery of a dead body near the top of the stairs, lighting a candle to see more clearly, where Hitchcock blends plenty of shadows on the wall into the mix, altering reality and disorienting the audience, where a similar technique was used to much greater effect the same year by Carl Theodor Dreyer in VAMPYR (1932), creating an existing netherworld, a kind of shadow world unseen by humans where vampires roam.  A stream of people arrive on the scene creating utter chaos and confusion, with the camera continually moving back and forth between them, where there’s not a whit of difference between any of them, except Ben, who’s completely unintelligible and dead drunk all the time.  First Rose (Ann Casson) arrives, and then her father (Henry Caine) with some telegram alluding to a stolen necklace, followed by a trio of jewel thieves looking for the necklace, including a deaf and dumb girl Nora (Anne Grey) who later reveals she hears and speaks perfectly, suddenly trying to help them when they’re taken prisoner, a device used later in The Lady Vanishes (1938), while the corpse disappears only to return very much alive as Sheldrake (Garry Marsh), coincidentally Fred MacMurray’s name in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). 

Much of the black humor is lost in this film, becoming a series of nonstop acts of misdirection and concealed identities, where the true detective is only revealed at the end, with people continually coming and going, subject to poorly staged fisticuffs, locking people in rooms, prisoners being tied up, a few harrowing escapes, and what amounts to changes of allegiance, where the thieves escape through a cellar door that leads down a very long flight of stone steps to a train station.  The film finally amps up the manic pace for a runaway train sequence, where thieves hijack a train while following in close pursuit is a commandeered bus, where Hitchcock achieves the desired  effects though quick edits and his clever use of miniatures and scaled down models of a train, bus, and ferry designed by William K. Everson.  This sequence has silent film written all over it, cutting back and forth between the speeding bus and the train barreling down the track, with a transport train ferry waiting at the end of the line, where the frenetic pace achieved is an example of pure cinema, though the ridiculous story throughout couldn’t be more absurd.  Instead it appears Hitchcock is playing around with toys, having fun with his new train set that he got for Christmas, where it lacks the cohesiveness of a finished work, but appears to have captured his interest for only a short duration.  Perhaps he needed to tinker with a film like this in order to make The Lady Vanishes (1938), which mirrors the chase scene exactly, though with a far different outcome, showing a certain railway expertise behind the camera, combining Hitchcock’s fascination with trains and his ability to tell a good story.  This film, on the other hand, is an example of the difficulty Hitchcock had making the adjustment from the silent era to talking pictures, taking him at least five years before he made the successful transition with The 39 Steps (1935), where these earlier more experimental films are reminiscent in some way to technological achievement films, which today include many Hollywood blockbusters, where the entertainment factor is an explosion of special effects which are achieved at the expense of overall character development and human understanding.  The film was a box office disaster, though it is notable for being the first use of a Hitchcock MacGuffin, in this case using the stolen necklace as a decoy in the overall plot twists. 

Note – There is no confirmed Hitchcock cameo in this film, but just after the fifty-one minute mark, there is a quick glimpse of a passenger on a speeding bus filled with other panic stricken passengers, but this one is wearing a dark coat and hat, facing away from the camera, bouncing up and down from the bumpy ride for about four seconds. 

Lucy

LUCY             C                    

France  (90 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Luc Besson           Official site [Japan]

Luc Besson is a director that has the subtlety of a Mack truck, preferring to accentuate an adolescent, comic book style version of ultra violence, where this is little more than another shoot ‘em up movie, as bullets are flying throughout this film.  While the film attempts to establish tension and pace, using standard movie techniques of big budgeted Hollywood films, this is something of a cross between the ludicrous and most ridiculous realms of Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION (2010) and Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978), though arguably less entertaining, where at $40 million dollars this plays out more like a futuristic B-movie where the accent is on the visual design.  Short on ideas (written by the director), the film borrows liberally from other sources, mainly the sadistic violence of Korean films, where Choi Min-sik as Mr. Jang is one of the faces associated with Park Chan-wook’s The Vengeance Trilogy (2002 – 2005), mixed with an exaggerated Eurotrash action sensibility that attempts to boggle the mind with macho action sequences and the achievement of Godlike human consciousness, where Scarlett Johansson as Lucy, the same name as the original ape primate that was estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago, goes from a helpless kidnapped victim drugged with a high concentration of a mysterious wonder drug that suddenly gives her superpowers.  It’s like the ultimate H.G. Wells fantasy from The Island of Dr. Moreau, his 1896 science-fiction novel, where he incorporates genetic experimentation through his ideas on The Limits of Individual Plasticity, where animals can theoretically be bio-engineered into stronger and more intelligent versions of their natural molecular components, becoming super creatures that can rule their species.  Rather than a race of defective, genetically altered mutants, the result of failed experimentation, this one inexplicably succeeds, turning Lucy into a highly evolved being with super consciousness, including superhuman strength, telepathy, telekinesis, time travel, or the ability to stop time altogether, where she can alter physics and matter with her mind.  The scientific narrator droning on throughout is Morgan Freeman, completely wasted as Professor Norman, an expert on human consciousness seen giving a lecture where he claims humans can only use 10% of their brain, where anything beyond that is pure conjecture. 

Perhaps unwittingly, once again it’s Scarlett Johansson playing this super consciousness, as she did as a computer generated voice of artificial intelligence in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), where she was only heard and never seen, evolving too fast for the human race, eventually connecting to other forms of artificial intelligence, creating their own metaphysical world of superior intelligence.  In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), she plays a more highly evolved extraterrestial creature visiting earth with vile ulterior motives but becomes fascinated with the idea of being human, where here she is again in human form, where her capabilities are too complex and can only be expressed through computer generated special effects that include some cheesy forms of animation.  In every one of these performances, Johansson adds her own sexual emphasis, using her female guile like a black widow spider to lure unsuspecting men into traps where they may remain stuck or destroyed in some capacity.  All the more interesting that she is the one initially trapped by the smoothtalking charm of her boyfriend Richard (Pilou Asbæk) that she’s only known for a week, attempting to coerce her into running an errand for him by delivering a locked suitcase to a Mr. Jang at the front desk of an upscale hotel.  Not knowing the contents, she refuses, but before she can walk away, he handcuffs her wrist to the briefcase.  Only Mr. Jang has the key.  This set of circumstances is intercut with footage of wild animals stalking their prey, cheetahs hunting antelope or a mouse approaching a baited trap, giving an all-too-obvious, over-the-top feel of forced exaggeration, where characters are entirely expressed through stereotypes, as Mr. Jang ominously arrives with his armed yakuza henchmen and life as she knew it is over.  From behind the desk of a penthouse suite in a sleek skyscraper, Mr. Jang is consolidating the world’s supply of CPH4, an experimental pharmaceutical drug used in pregnancy to help regenerate cell growth.  Taken in huge quantities this has superhuman effects, but we only discover this when they surgically insert plastic packages of this drug into the intestines of unwitting subjects, turning them into drug mules where the plan is to transport packages all over the world.  In Lucy’s case, the bag bursts inside her abdomen sending the drug racing through her bloodstream, expressed in a mind-altering moment that alters the power dynamic.  From that point on, men with guns are no longer a concern for her, which she quickly demonstrates in amusing fashion. 

Shot in Taipei, Taiwan (though Mr. Jang and his henchmen speak Korean), Besson often uses fast-motion, stream-of-conscious speeds, while also backtracking to prehistoric conditions when humans had not yet evolved, where only apes roamed the earth.  Similarly, modernity is expressed in animalistic fashion by a world run by the mob, street gangs, drug addicts, and corrupt cops.  Like Superman eradicating crime from the streets with superpowers, Lucy takes on the force of evil initially through telepathy, as she has the capacity to absorb knowledge instantly, but can also move objects with her mind while discovering she is immune to pain.  She begins accessing more and more of her brain capacity, where the screen continually updates her current status until near the end she reaches the maximum of 100%, sharing much of her experience with Professor Norman, who can’t offer much wisdom in the area where she’s traveling, seen working two computers simultaneously at blazing speed.  While there should be an accompanying mental challenge to the viewer as she reaches new realms, but it’s all done by special effects, copying much of what we already saw in INCEPTION, spending much of her time inside her head, focusing on the instantaneous expansion even as she knows her life cycle will end soon, where she’s literally fighting against time.  All the more reason that the continuing attempts by Mr. Jang to exact his mob revenge against the escaped Lucy seem silly, becoming absurdly ridiculous when bringing out a bazooka, carrying no element of suspense, adding nothing to the story except predictability, where Besson litters the screen with endless shootouts that prove nothing, especially when Lucy is rapidly evolving before our eyes into the future of humanity, all within 24 hours.  Besson delivers the film that he envisioned, as it resembles all his other heavy-handed works of stereotypical cliché’s and mindless violence, though special effects nerds may love to watch while staring at a badass Scarlett Johansson who has little acting required, growing increasingly distant and cold, as she simply looks pensively into her own head.  Unfortunately, the effects aren’t any more unusual than watching Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT (2002), which was more than a decade ago, a more intriguing futuristic story by Philip K. Dick that featured much better acting.  There is no room for character development in a film that can only deliver cardboard cutouts, generating little sympathy for anyone onscreen, even a superhero lead character that is supposedly saving the world.

King Kong (2005)

KING KONG             C                    

USA  Germany  New Zealand  (187 mi)  2005  ‘Scope  d: Peter Jackson

The film that inspired Peter Jackson to become a filmmaker, where the story has it after watching the movie on television when he was 9, he woke up the next day and began making models, turning his own updated version into something along the lines of an Indiana Jones adventure story, where much of the look of the landscape feels as if you are at Disneyland wandering around one of the artificially designed set pieces, a special effects bonanza, where the director obviously got carried away with the buckets of money he was given to make this film, so much of it is overdone to the point of excess, some of it downright ridiculous, as so much is over the top, but in the quiet moments, which were few, it works wonderfully.  The Fay Wray part was extended and reconceptualized with Naomi Watts, where she plays a down on her luck burlesque performer during the Depression, her face seen through a reflection on a sidewalk window glass by safari adventure photographer Jack Black, who dreams of making a film on the never discovered Skull Island, an unchartered island that remains perpetually “out of time,” a place where compasses and navigational equipment don’t work.  Black obtained a kind of treasure map which led him to this journey, where he brings Naomi Watts along for the ride. 

The opening sequence on the island is creepy and scary, beginning with a ridiculous move by Black to offer a piece of chocolate candy to a horrid looking native child, believing everything will be under control.  So of course, all hell breaks loose as they are attacked by almost zombie-like decrepit-looking humans that could be hundreds of years old.  These are the black-skinned, nose and face pierced, face painted native inhabitants, who could just as easily eat you as look at you.  But the boat crew arrives with guns to clear the way.  But Naomi has escaped in the night to the thunderous sound of drums with Kong.  The journey to find her leads to a stampede of dinosaurs, where men are running underneath them in a scene resembling INDIANA JONES (1984), but also the stampede sequence of LION KING (1994).  Instead of stepping to the side, they continue to run underneath where they can easily get squashed.  Surprisingly, all but a few survived.  Meanwhile, Watts inexplicably decides to perform her burlesque act in front of Kong as a means of pleasure and amusement, which leads to a huge temper tantrum when she stops.  But that’s the last of his bad moods, as Kong fights off a series of dinosaurs, perhaps a half-dozen or more, including three at once, all with Watts in his hand, switching her back and forth as he crushes skulls, breaks jaws, swings them around like a wrestler, throwing them against the rocks, even socking them square in the jaw.  Only at the end of this prolonged sequence does Watts realize she’s safer with him than without him.  Kong looks at her like, what do I have to do for you to pay attention to me, and walks off in a huff.  She yells after him, “Hey, wait for me,” and runs after him where he scoops her up and throws her on his shoulder as he thunders through the jungle.    

Meanwhile, the boys from the ship, with all their weapons, have their hands full with the dinosaurs and bugs, including a swamp sequence where giant sucking creatures swoop down atop a man’s head and suck him in, something right out of Alien (1979), or another giant roach eating sequence that is really gross, where machine gun bullets wipe them off of human bodies, without so much as a scratch to the humans.  What aim!  And this from a kid who has never fired a gun before, who throws it away afterwards like it’s tainted goods.  Again, the crew from the boat save the day with still more weapons, most all of whom survive, but oddly, all are on one side of a canyon while Adrien Brody, the supposed script writer and romantic interest (showing zero chemistry), the only man who actually cares about saving Watts, is on the other.  So he sets off alone into the jungle to find her.  Within a few film seconds, he amazes us by finding the exact spot where they have laid down for the night to snooze, a spot perched high over the entire valley with the river below and the sun setting far away.  ”It’s beautiful,” Watts repeats to Kong, attempting to humanize his feelings.  Brody finds her, and as Kong awakes pissed off, catching him stealing his girl, giant flying bats decide at that moment to descend upon Kong in droves, distracting him sufficiently while Brody and Watts can escape, grabbing hold of giant bat wings and descending to the bottom of the canyon falling safely into the water — another one of the ridiculous moments.  The beauty of the original King Kong (1933) is in its simplicity, where the cutting edge special effects were a marvel of invention at the time and continue to elicit awe and amazement well into the next century.  If Jackson’s film causes audiences to revisit the original, it can be viewed as a success.   

Needless to say, Kong is on them within seconds, and purely by accident they are able to subdue to beast with a bottle of chloroform to the nose.  Black sees dollar signs in his eyes and the scene shifts to New York for the extravaganza opening for the Eighth Wonder of the World.  When all hell breaks loose, Brody has mysteriously anticipated it all, and only he senses that Kong’s wild rage will only be subdued by the presence of Watts, and he tries to lure him to where he thinks she is.  After a scene that could just as easily be car crashes and city mayhem from SPIDER MAN (2002), there is a momentary calm.  Out of the steam rising from the street walks Watts, almost in slow motion, like Clint Eastwood entering the scene in a Sergio Leone movie.  When they reunite, it’s the closest thing to happiness in the entire movie, reflected in a magical sequence where he takes her into Central Park in the snow, where he slips on the frozen ice, and the two slide around on his giant butt, as if ice-skating, laughing with glee, as if they are the only two beings on earth.  This is the money shot in Jackson’s remake, a beautiful expression of extreme tenderness, where nothing in the rest of the movie is as memorable.  Enter the military, who make their idiotic presence felt late at the end of the film, stupidly shooting without thinking.  Kong’s climb to the top of the city’s highest building is a delight, carrying Watts most of the way, stopping to enjoy another sunset where Watts can again utter “It’s beautiful,” but as the airplanes appear, he carefully places her out of harm’s way and climbs alone the last few stories. 

In perhaps the film’s most ridiculous moment, the darkness following a sunset suddenly turns light and the rest of the film plays out in the daylight.  Amazingly, she climbs an outside staircase up to the top to join him, where the airplanes are sending a barrage of bullets at him and the accumulated damage is slowing him down, but the two have moments together at the top of the world, where Kong looks sad and somehow aware of his mortality.  Both are infatuated by what they can’t understand, but there’s a peculiar peace between them, where love is certainly in the air.  Brody breaks through the police barricade and rushes up the 100 floors or so on the elevator to greet Watts after Kong tumbles down to the ground, which is captured with a sky cam.  Down below, the wretched humans are gleefully praising the Air Force, but Black, or course, has the last line, “It wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.”  There are simply too many references from other films on display here, where imitation is a form of flattery, but very little is original, and the victimization of Kong in the hands of his enemies is over-accentuated to the point of wretched excess, attempting to dramatize all the lurid melodramatic aspects of the story, but it brings nothing new, where the romantic notions eventually lose weight and are overcome by an overlong, overindulgent and often annoying CGI special effects/action/adventure movie.