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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Hitchcock may have been a master of many things, but his goofy endings were like a dead cockroach found at the bottom of a near-perfect cinematic sundae.
Aug 13, 1999 | News of Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone's June 9 arrest in Beverly Hills for alleged DUI and possession of hashish surely brought tears of gratitude and relief from film buffs everywhere. It was a brilliant execution of the feds' famed Al Capone strategy -- unable to nail the gangster for murder and mayhem, they eventually got him for tax evasion. Likewise, Stone cleverly stayed just this side of the law while committing a series of directorial bludgeonings that left a bloody aftermath of overkill in theaters around the world. Now busted on relatively minor charges, he can be tried and quickly executed. We will sleep again.
Stone, the man responsible for "JFK," "Wall Street" and "Natural Born Killers" among others, is an obvious target (although he may yet be granted clemency on account of "Platoon"). But not all cinematic crimes are committed by the usual suspects. As in any good thriller, sometimes the perpetrator is someone whose integrity you'd never question -- someone like Alfred Hitchcock. The implacable English director, who died in 1980, may be the prime example of a film legend whose reputation has come to overpower any realistic view of his work.
Not long ago on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show, there was a roundtable discussion on the Master of Suspense. Participants included director Peter Bogdanovich and Hitchcock's daughter Pat. A clip was played, evidently selected to illustrate the Master's genius. As I recognized the scene in question -- the rip-roaring climax of the 1951 film that revived Hitchcock's Hollywood fortunes, "Strangers on a Train" -- I spoiled the reverent mood (in my own living room, at least) with a loud guffaw. That particular classic happens to feature the goofiest ending this side of "Robot Monster."
Here's the scenario: Two plainclothes cops tail a suspect (Robert Walker) in an amusement park. Suddenly the varmint makes a break for it. His choice of getaway vehicle? A merry-go-round. The cops panic -- the suspect is, well, sort of escaping! At the very least he's bound to out-duel those little bastards for the brass ring. So, there in the crowd of kiddies and teenage dates, the cops do the only sensible thing -- they pull out their big irons and start blasting. First to get it is the carousel operator, whose carcass lands on the big lever and apparently pushes it to the rarely used "turbo" setting. (Like the safety improvements prompted by the Titanic disaster, this incident must surely have had a silver lining -- today, merry-go-round manufacturers no longer build their machines with a spin cycle.) Any faster and kids will be flying in all directions like spray off a wet dog. A brave feller crawls beneath the crazed machine to reach the lever, which he then unfortunately seems to pull back to the "explode" setting (another design flaw). The ride blows up. The varmint dies. The End. Another Hitchcock masterpiece!
I first saw "Strangers on a Train" after spotting it on a late-night TV schedule, marked by those four glittering stars reserved only for filmdom's most sacred works. A similar recommendation, plus a genuine fondness for Hitchcock, drew me to "Shadow of a Doubt," identified by Pat Hitchcock as her father's favorite among all his films. It stars Joseph Cotten as a malevolently charming murderer who hides out with unsuspecting relatives in a California town, and Teresa Wright as his naive and adoring niece. Like so many Hitchcock movies, "Shadow of a Doubt" is a pleasure to watch almost all the way through, a movie to sink into as you would a warm bath. And like so many Hitchcock movies, it ends in the kind of crushingly lame climax better suited to a Quinn Martin production.
We're on a train again, watching Cotten struggle with the significantly smaller Wright, aiming to throw his niece out the door and into the path of yet another onrushing locomotive (it was 1943 -- family counseling was still in its infancy). Sadly for Cotten, he fails to reckon with the invisible magnets in his ass, which suddenly cause him to fly violently out the door and become one with the cowcatcher of old No. 409. Why was the petite Wright able to accomplish this? Probably for the same reason Tippi Hedren went into the attic in "The Birds." When, during the Northern California location shoot for that 1963 movie, Hedren had the temerity to ask just why her character would want to go upstairs, Hitchcock is said to have replied: "Because I told you to." (The final split for Hitchcock and Hedren came after a spat on the set of "Marnie" when, as Hitchcock later explained, "She did what no one is permitted to do -- she referred to my weight.")
