On the Beach (1959)

“Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of the Earth?”

            I am not a fan of films that deal with the end of the earth and human existence. They always make me nervous. I was not particularly in a rush to see On the Beach because it is of people living in world after a nuclear holocaust and they are waiting to die from the radiation. But I had to see it because the cast is really great. The story actually turned out to not only be sad but very good.

            The year is 1964 and the world has come to an end from nuclear warfare. The only country that was not devastated by the blasts was Australia but even they are preparing to face the radiation that will eventually find its way to them. Out at sea are the only surviving Americans traveling a submarine from the US Navy. When the war started they were out at sea. They surface in Australia. The captain of the submarine Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck) works with the Royal Navy to go to sea to take tests of the air in different areas. One of the Royal Navy officers sent on the mission is Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins). He has a wife Mary and a little baby. Mary does not want to hear anything about how they will all eventually die.

            Dwight is to stay with Peter as his home outside Melbourne. Peter has his friend Moira (Ava Gardner) pick the captain up at the train station. Moira is immediately attracted to Dwight. That night Peter has a party at his place for Dwight. At the party is an older man named Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire). He is the one responsible for the weapons that have destroyed the world. Moira tells Dwight that she and Julian are the town drunks they have no but themselves. Out on the porch Moira asks Dwight about his family and he speaks about them as if they are still alive in Connecticut. You can see the sadness on Moira’s face as he speaks about his family she knows they are dead. When the party is over Dwight is sitting by himself on the porch. Moira is drunkenly walks over to him and they talk. She has Dwight take her in his arms and she passes out.

            The next Peter, Mary, Dwight, Moira, and Julian are at the beach. Moira and Dwight were in a sailing race when she flipped the boat over on purpose throwing her and Dwight into the water. When they get to the beach she jokingly tells everyone that Dwight made a pass at her so to get back at him she flipped the boat. Dwight takes Moira and wrestles with her a bit and when they come back he sticks to her joke. He goes to say something about Moira but instead of saying her name he says his wife Sharon’s name. Moira is upset after what happened on the beach so that night she goes to see Julian. She tells Julian she could have tried her tricks she uses to get a man but Dwight is married and he is still in love with his wife. Moira sees Julian is fixing up a race car. He tells her he plans to race it when he gets back from the submarine mission. She asks him if he plans on killing himself and he simply says if it happens.

            The American submarine leaves the next day for their mission. Scientists in Australia believe that rain and snow in other areas of the world will weigh the radiation in the air down and not be as powerful when it hits Australia. Julian and the crew prove their theory is unfortunately wrong the world is becoming hotter. One of the crew asks Julian how the war even started. He tells them:

“The trouble with you is you want a simple answer. There isn't any. The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained - - by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use - - without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb, and counter-bombs, and counter-counter bombs. The devices outgrew us; we couldn't control them. I know, I helped build them. Somewhere, some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something. He knew that if he hesitated for a second that his own country would be wiped off the map. So he pushed a button and the world went crazy.”

            The submarine reaches San Francisco. Some of the men are from the town. One man abandons the sub and swims ashore. The next morning through the sub’s loudspeaker talks to the man. The poor man saw his family dead in their homes. He wants to die at home he does not want to return to the ship.

            Back in Australia, Moira thought she would never see Dwight again and that she would be all alone again. Dwight comes back to her and they are never without each other. They go to see Julian race his car and he winds up winning after continually missing dying in a crash by a few seconds.

            The radiation fallout begins to hit Australia. One of the crewmen has become infected. Before Peter left he gave Mary pills for her and their baby to take so they would not suffer. Mary became angry she did not want to even think of killing her baby. The country began handing out a powder that would kill people if they took it. Peter took some for himself and Mary and she agrees to take it. The crewmen of the submarine want to return to the United States to die they want to die at home not in a foreign country. Dwight unfortunately has to leave Moira behind.

            The last scene of the film is of an empty space in front of town hall.

            The entire cast did a brilliant job. Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck have incredible chemistry. They had made two films together before this and were best friends outside the movies (when Gardner died Peck took her dog). You could tell both of them were tortured over what was going to happen that Moira did not want to be alone and that Dwight could not think of anything but his wife and that his relationship with Moira was nothing more than a short romance. Gardner was very good. It was kind of sad to see her playing a drunk because she had become one herself in real life. You can see the toll of her hard drinking and staying up all night partying on her face but she still looked beautiful especially in one close up of her when Moira is talking to Dwight about wanting to walk the streets of Rivoli. Peck was perfect in his part you can believe he would be a naval captain and look like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. I was very surprised that I actually enjoyed Anthony Perkins in this film because usually he gets on my nerves so bad. I felt terrible for his character the most since he had a wife and baby. Fred Astaire as a drunk was odd at first but he was great the man really did have acting talent besides his musicals.

            On the Beach is an apocalyptic film but it is not bad. Nothing scary is shown like dead bodies all over the place nor the men and women suffering from radiation poisoning. It was a film and story about how a group of people are reacting to the knowledge that their time on earth is coming to an end. Some are lonely, some are suffering from guilt, some are dealing with the thought of taking their own lives to be spared an awful pain. On the Beach is a very well made film all around and one of the most heartbreaking I have ever seen. It is definitely worth seeing.  

Goodbye Again (1961)

“To love, one must be loved”

            The plot to Goodbye Again is one that is still being written today: A woman named Paula Tessier (Ingrid Bergman) has been seeing a man named Roger Demarest (Yves Montand) for the past five years. Neither of them wants to marry since they were both previously married to other people and their marriages did not work. In the five years they have been together Roger has been seeing other women on the side while Paula has only been with him. Their situation does not bother Paula until Roger calls one day canceling their plans for dinner because he apparently has business.

            When they eventually see each other Roger gives Paula some business from a friend of his to decorate someone’s house. The woman has a young son named Phillip van der Besh (Anthony Perkins). From the moment Phillip lays eyes on Paula he is taken with her. The whole rest of the day he cannot get his mind off of Paula. He does not even know her name and spends his afterhours looking for her. Phillip finally finds Paula at a small dive with Roger. Phillip is very drunk so they drive him home. Paula tells Roger that she likes the idea that someone has been looking for her.

            The next day Phillip finds Paula at the shop she works at. He feels terrible about how he acted the previous night and wants to take her out to lunch. She declines so he just follows her around all day like a stalker.

            As the story goes on Paula finds that Roger has been lying about where he has been going and the more Phillip talks about her needing real love and how she is always alone the more she gravitates towards the younger man. She eventually lets herself go with Phillip but she knows it will not last which unfortunately he cannot accept that it will not. In the end Paula marries Roger.

            The whole plot is about how Paula struggles with being a woman of forty (Bergman was actually forty-six but does not look it at all). When Phillip leaves her one night she yells that she is old and when they go on a small vacation she overhears a little girl ask how old she is. Paula struggles with the thought that Roger is always with younger women and sneaks around with them and the fact that she is going around with a younger man.

            Now if this had been made today I would not have been able to sit through it but the cast was so good and it was wonderfully filmed. Ingrid Bergman is just amazing. She has such a magnetism to her and commands your attention. There was one scene after Paula comes home from being out Phillip and she just sits in the dark not knowing what to do with herself then Roger comes by and she just lets loose and tells him what is wrong. Bergman was perfection she was not over the top whatsoever. Anthony Perkins will unfortunately always be Norman Bates from Psycho to me. He was very good he was very believable as his character but I just cannot get into him he irks me in some way that I cannot explain.

            Ingrid Bergman’s clothes were designed by Christian Dior. You can tell they are Dior’s designs from the late 1950s/early 1960s. His pieces are so beautifully cut and designed they are very simple yet completely sophisticated. Along with Adrian’s costumes Rage in Heaven, Dior’s clothing looked stunning on Bergman they fit her tall frame wonderfully.

            Goodbye Again is a very good movie. Really I give all the credit to Ingrid Bergman. You can always see her characters’ struggles in her face and her actions; she becomes her characters that you see past her as just an actress. That point really drives the story and makes you feel bad for her character. Goodbye Again is a very well made film from direction to acting and one I suggest seeing if you can find it.

 

Murder on the Orient Express

“The murderer is with us now!”

            Murder on the Orient Express is one of the quintessential mystery stories ever written… of course it is the story was written by the great mystery writer of all time Agatha Christie. Christie excellently takes her main mystery and motive from the Lindberg Baby kidnapping and weaves the sad story into the lives of her characters. The story takes place on board the famous Orient Express traveling from Turkey (on the European side) to London. Famous detective Hercule Poirot is traveling back to Belgium on the train on the insistence of his friend Mr. Bianchi. One night the train gets caught behind a large pile of snow on the tracks. The next morning the body of a passenger named Ratchett is found in his room dead from multiple stab wounds. There seems to be no motive behind the killing. No one on the train knows each other… or do they? What possible motive would strangers have for killing this man?

            Such a great plot for a murder mystery book which was made into an even better murder mystery movie. No writer in Hollywood today could come up with a better story for a movie. From the moment the train pulls out of the station you get this great thrill of excitement as if you were on the train traveling across 1930s Europe yourself.

            Another great thrill is watching the amazing cast. This is like a movie dream team. The reason I bought this movie was for Ingrid Bergman around the time I started to become interested in classic film. This was actually my first Lauren Bacall movie I had never seen her in anything before although I knew who she was. Seeing a young Michael York aka “Basil Expedition” from Austin Powers was a bit strange at first but now I can only picture him as the Hungarian Count Andrenyi. Anthony Perkins plays McQueen who is oddly in a way a less psychotic more neurotic version of Norman Bates. Sean Connery was the biggest name at the time and the lure to get the other big names signed on for the movie. He plays Colonel Arbuthnot a former Colonel for the Scots Army. Vanessa Redgrave is the beautiful Miss. Debenham in love with Arbuthnot. And let’s not forget Albert Finney who brings great life to the main character Hercule Poirot.



            Everyone in the cast brought great life to their characters. I read the book after having watched the movie and the whole time I was thinking about the actors in their parts and all of them fit so well. Reading the book you can just imagine Albert Finney as Poirot with his slicked hair and funny voice. Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall were hysterical in their roles they make this movie so enjoyable to me. Bergman plays the timid Swedish missionary Greta. She has some of the funniest lines in the movie, they’re not supposed to be funny but the way she says them with her real Swedish accent have me laughing before she even starts talking. Bergman won an Academy Award (and the only Award of several the movie was up for) for this part and she deserved it. Her facial expressions are almost like an instinct or real like she was not acting at all. Lauren Bacall is the obnoxious American Mrs. Hubbard who constantly talks and very loudly. Even in her fifties Bacall was still a beautiful lady (even now currently in her eighties) with a great bite. She was perfect for the role of Mrs. Hubbard. I find it rather a great coincidence that both Bergman and Bacall made their greatest films in Hollywood’s Golden Age with Humphrey Bogart.

            Murder on the Orient Express is a movie I can watch over and over again and never be tired of. It is one of the movies that was made and put together so wonderfully. Watching Murder on the Orient Express always makes me wish movies like this could be made today one that had some of the top best actors and actresses of today with a story that is as great as they are. The movie remains very faithful to the book and is the only film adaptation of her books which Agatha Christie was liked very much.

Psycho (1960)



“I think I must have one of those faces you can't help believing.”

Ever since I first watched Psycho I have always asked myself the question of why this film is so great. After seeing several Hitchcock films such as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, To Catch a Thief, and several others I still could not understand the big deal with Psycho. Then I realized for the most part that like any classic movie to truly appreciate it you need to look at the time period it was made in… and do a little bit of research along the way.

            One of the big questions about Psycho is what makes this film so scary? We look today at what is considered “horror” often with half naked women running around as a crazed guy in a mask runs through the woods chasing them with a blade. Modern horror movies do not grip us psychologically. The bad guys are scary to look but that is about all they are not real and we know that. Psycho is what makes Alfred Hitchcock a genius he made a genuine horror movie that was realistic in its subject. What unnerves us as the viewers so much is knowing that men like Norman Bates exist in the real world and that what happens to Marion Crane could happen to anyone.

            Paranoia plays a major role in the film. All the main characters go through a state of paranoia. The point when Marion steals the money the characters and the audience are put into a constant state of paranoia. It is a great device and feeling that other “thrillers” severely lack. We get into Marion’s paranoia over the simplest things. As she drives away from Phoenix after she has seen her boss she starts to imagine what everyone must be saying about her. We see her squirming in her seat and fear in her eyes. Marion feels paranoid believing someone besides her coworkers know what she has done and this feeling intensifies when the cop knocks on her car window. Even Norman becomes paranoid when his sinks Marion’s car with her body in it and it stops a bit before it submerges completely. The killer starts to unravel with paranoia when Detective Arbogast and Lila Crane and Sam start coming around asking questions.  We are lead to feel for Marion we want her to get away. Even though Norman is a bad guy we take a deep breath in anxiety hoping the car will go down so he will not be caught. To me the best example of paranoia and fear is when Lila is walking through Norman's mother's room and she catches her reflection in the mirror really quick and scares herself. That was awesome it shows how on edge she was and also broke the tension somewhat. 

            No analysis of Psycho would be complete without talking of the most famous scene in cinematic history: the shower scene. If you can look at this scene deeply it is truly terrifying and genius. Hitchcock played on the fact that we are at our most vulnerable when we are naked alone in the shower. Marion’s privacy and vulnerability has been brutally invaded. This is what shocked and disturbed so many movie goers when the film premiered. Hitchcock also used the idea that what you do not see is scarier than what you do see. We never see the knife plunge into Marion the camera quickly cuts away before we see contact. At the end of the brutal commotion is a great transition from the water flowing down the drain to Marion’s open dead eye. Truffaut asked Hitchcock what attracted him to turn the novel Psycho is based off of into a movie to which the director replied “the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming as it were, out of the blue. That was about all.”

            Another aspect that shocked audience members is the killing of Janet Leigh half way through the film. This was never done before no one was expecting to see her die. This was part of Hitchcock trying to direct the viewers away from what they were so used to doing when they went to movies. As viewers we try to think we are clever and know what will happen next, he was deliberately playing on the fact that he could control the audiences’ thoughts. It is always a shock when something happens that we do not see coming.

            Adding as much of the tension and shock is the incredible score by Bernard Herrmann. The music does not move us it is cold and sterile only played by strings. The music does not allow for any attachment emotionally to the characters which we are not truly meant to. Herrmann made the score a bit twisted; the strings are soft while being played on a high note. Hitchcock did not want a lot of music being played throughout the film, he did not even want music in the shower scene mostly because there is not instrumental music playing all around someone in real life. Once he heard the score for the scene Hitchcock changed his mind.

            Now I do appreciate Psycho more than I used to once I read about it and watched in a film class I took but I will have to disagree that this is Hitchcock’s greatest film. Yes it has left a very long and fantastic legacy on film making but I just do not see it as the director’s best. It is a very good story because it strikes a nerve it is something that could happen it could be real. I will say the film making is the best I have ever seen I will always be amazed by the cinematography and the direction. To me Psycho is just not as good as Hitchcock’s early American films.

            When Hitchcock was interviewed by François Truffaut about Psycho, the director said that he did not care about the subject matter or about the acting what he really cared about was getting to the audience through filmmaking and making them scream. He made this thriller for the audience. Even after its release fifty-one years ago audiences are still left amazed and terrified.