*. If you want to buy a copy of John D. MacDonald’s The Executioners today I don’t think you can, at least under that title. Since the release of this film it’s always been reprinted as Cape Fear, despite the fact that Cape Fear (the place) is never even mentioned in the book. Gregory Peck named the movie Cape Fear on a whim, because he found The Executioners “a turn-off.” He then figured that movies named after places (his example: Casablanca) usually did well. So he looked in an atlas for a catchy title and picked out Cape Fear. Cape Fear, the movie, didn’t do well, and put an end to Peck’s production company.
*. MacDonald deserves a great deal of the credit for Cape Fear though. A prolific author of popular semi-pulp fiction, in The Executioners he introduced what would become an archetypal plot: the civilized, law-abiding, suburban family that has to descend to some primitive state in order to defend itself from a mortal threat. Think of how many movies you’ve seen since that have taken the premise of “what would you do to protect your family?” and run with it. Wes Craven, to take just one example, found such a primal message irresistible, and made it the foundation for such early films as The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. Since then, it’s been a horror staple running from home invasion to rape-revenge and beyond.
*. That progeny is worth taking note of, as Cape Fear strikes me as being not so much a crime drama or noir as a horror flick. Max Cady isn’t a noir bad guy but a psycho killer. Look at the way he slithers into the river like an alligator. And the way the suspense builds throughout is pure slasher cinema.
*. Did that all start here? I’m not sure, but MacDonald must have been one of the first to popularize such a story since the book was published in 1957 and it takes as its launchpad an idyll of 1950s American suburbia that Cady, a ghost from the war, has no place in.

*. To please the censors Cady is no longer an ex-soldier. I would have thought that the least of the things that would have bothered them. But apparently they were quite exercised by the film, and made a number of cuts. I’m surprised how much was left in. The way Cady rubs that egg onto Peggy (Polly Bergen) is almost pornographic. And of course, the scene where he stares at the 15-year-old Nancy (Lori Martin, who actually was 15) in her short shorts. “Getting to be almost as juicy as your wife,” he remarks to Sam. How did a line like that stay in? Censors complained that “there was a continuous threat of sexual assault on a child.” Well, yeah.
*. One reason may have been that so much is only implied, and Cady isn’t actually doing anything wrong. Which is, curiously, the same defence Cady uses to stay out of trouble with the law. And so the movie, like Cady himself, proceeds indirectly, with lots of sexual innuendo. Look at how Nancy runs away from that looming crotch in the school. Or that nasty-looking pole with a screw sticking out of it that Cady is wielding at the end.

*. On reading the book Peck immediately recognized that Cady was the stronger part if not the lead. Whoever played Cady would steal the picture from white bread, predictable Sam Bowden. Fun fact: To Kill a Mockingbird came out the same year as this film. And is Sam so different from Atticus Finch?
*. There are some changes to the book that work. The bowling alley scene is new. The houseboat at the end is invented, presumably to tie in with the title that Peck picked out of an atlas. In the book the climax takes place at the Bowden home, with Peggy being used as bait. Nancy is being kept safe somewhere else. Cady’s lust for the jailbait daughter is something played up far more in the movie, and developed even further in Scorsese’s remake.
*. Two other scenes that are added to the movie and not found in the book are worth mentioning. In the book Cady roughs up a prostitute who won’t testify against him, but this character is made into something more complex on screen. Diane says to him at one point: “Max Cady. What I like about you is that you’re rock bottom. It’s a great comfort for a girl to know she could not possibly sink any lower.” This is an odd speech, and comes out of nowhere.

*. The other big change is the addition of the sleazy defence lawyer who represents Cady. There is no corresponding character in the book. His introduction also marks what may be a first. We recognize his type in a number of later movies: the liberal lawyer who enables criminals by manipulating the system and insisting on things like due process and rights. Dirty Harry was always butting heads with these guys. He’s stuck around, even though he disappears entirely from this movie without really serving any necessary purpose. Sam is a good lawyer, and in the end upholds the sanctity of the law. But we know that this degenerate suit is still waiting out there and is someone we have to be on our guard against.
*. Bernard Herrmann’s score comes on strong — too strong, in my opinion, over the opening credits when nothing is happening — and it’s a pity the rest of the production doesn’t live up to it. Scorsese knew what he was doing when he played it up even more and matched it with visual grandiosity. In this movie the biggest drag is J. Lee Thompson’s flat direction. I won’t call it uninspired, because it was quite determinedly inspired by Hitchcock, but it never snaps to life.
*. David Thomson preferred this film to the remake “because it is trash honestly done, whereas the Scorsese version is a tangled mess of violent urges and improving attitudes.” Here I’ll just address the point about trash honestly done. I think this is a nod to MacDonald’s unabashed populism and mythmaking. Peck, unlike Nolte in the remake, really is all that is good about America, while Mitchum is, as Thomson calls him, the Beast: primitive, bestial, elemental. He’s not a complicated man. As Diane says of him: “You’re just an animal: crude, lustful, barbaric.” For whatever reason, it’s a role that Mitchum seems to have enjoyed. He doesn’t often look like he’s enjoying himself on screen, but he is here.
*. Calling it trash is also a nod to the genre. This isn’t just a horror film, but a trashy horror film. A sleazy horror, but also a groundbreaking, seminal film that has left a large footprint. By itself you can see why Scorsese wanted to remake it.
*. It’s a movie that doesn’t entirely live up to that mythic or archetypal conception I’ve been talking about. This isn’t just because it was constrained by censors but because I don’t think Thompson really understood the size of what he was working on. That’s understandable, but Cape Fear is a big little movie, and one that hasn’t stopped growing over the years.

*. I’ve written quite frequently about the process of critical revision, whereby films that were panned when they were first released go on to climb the heights of critical (and, though less frequently, popular) glory. It’s a sort of comeback story that people get particularly invested in, as we all seem to like the idea of snooty critics (or unwashed masses, or both) not “getting it” the first time around, and that we’re involved in a project of righting a historical wrong by rewarding unrecognized works of genius.
*. Well, if you want a movie that can stand as a test case for revision, I give to you Marnie.
*. The initial reception was mixed in a pretty dramatic way. People thought it was either very good or very bad. Or even a mix of the two, a good-bad movie, as was expressed in the opinion of Edith Oliver in the New Yorker, who called it “an idiotic and trashy movie with two terrible performances in the leading roles, and I had quite a good time watching it. There is something bracing about Hitchcock at work, even when he is at his worst”.
*. Was Marnie the last of a stretch of Hitchcock classics, in the words of biographer Donald Spoto his “last great masterpiece” coming immediately after Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds? Or was it the beginning of a sharp decline? Next up would be the clunkers Torn Curtain and Topaz. Should we be looking forward or back?
*. Proponents of the former position might point to how Marnie was the end of a number of important collaborations, marking the last score for Hitchcock by Bernard Herrmann, and the last time Hitchcock would work with cinematographer Robert Burks and editor George Tomasini. But by the same token you could argue that the old gang were played out, and that what we were getting was a lot of old tricks amplified to the point of absurdity as a way of pumping life into them. Herrmann’s score, for example, was deliberately written as a way of overcompensating for what the conductor thought a lack of emotion on screen. Pauline Kael was just one critic ready to put Marnie into an obit column with her capsule review: “Hitchcock scraping bottom.”

*. But then there was the turnaround and revision, which Peter Bogdanovich credited largely to the influence of Truffaut’s book. In a BBC list of the 100 greatest American films done in 2015, Marnie would come in 47th. Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker in 2016, would call it Hitchcock’s “best film,” and credit Tippi Hedren’s performance as “one of the greatest in the history of cinema.” Not to be outdone, Robin Wood concludes the documentary on the making of the film, “The Trouble with Marnie,” by saying “If you don’t like Marnie, you don’t really like Hitchcock. I would go further than that and say if you don’t love Marnie, you don’t really love cinema.”
*. I quote these raves to play fair, because I think Marnie is terrible. Indeed, I’m with Oliver in finding it hysterically awful. To take just one example, when Marnie breaks down after her abrupt analysis session with Mark, crying out “Help me! Oh God, somebody help me!” I laughed out loud. This is camp on a level with Mommie Dearest.
*. Now if you’re a real film critic you take all the overplaying here and instead of calling it camp you describe it as expressionism, with Hitchcock going back to his formative influences in the early days of German film. And there’s no question he’s building up that nightmarish quality, especially with the strangely deserted locations. Why is there absolutely no one in that train station? Just so we don’t — heaven forbid! — lose sight of that handbag? And why is the cruise ship totally empty? Did Mark rent the whole ship for his honeymoon?

*. But the movie keeps doubling down in ways that I find hysterical. I mentioned the score, which just BLARES at every big emotional moment. But in case that wasn’t enough, you also get lightning and smashes of thunder in the background as punctuation. And the screen being washed in red! Red! Even a drop of red ink on her blouse will trigger poor Marnie. Which makes you wonder how she manages to put her lipstick on. But we know what Hitchcock thinks about plausibility.
*. What I mean is, Hitchcock didn’t think audiences cared about stuff like that. Or Sean Connery’s strange accent. Or the shot of the big ship at the end of the street (that the production designers wanted to reshoot). Or the horse-riding scenes. But how can you not laugh at the horse crashing into the wall, with the camera tilting crazily all over the place? It’s just too much.
*. For a movie this tightly strung, you’re always in danger of falling a long way into absurdity, and I think Marnie falls all the way. Marnie freezing as she reaches for the money in the safe at the end is another silly moment. Did audiences take this seriously at the time? Oliver apparently didn’t. I sure don’t. But the line between being expressive and overly expressive is a fine one.

*. The script, based on a Winston Graham novel, is sheer trash. Not a fatal problem, as Robert Bloch’s Psycho was trash too (but good trash). I don’t see how anyone today could take it seriously though. To be honest, I’m not sure how seriously Hitchcock took psychoanalytic claptrap. He was certainly interested in it, but in previous films like Spellbound and Psycho he seemed to have his tongue in his cheek when dealing with it. Here I guess we were supposed to be responding to Marnie’s plight as being like that of Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve. But that comparison only highlights how inferior Marnie is. It’s closer to Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Which, by the way, is also a better movie.
*. Even the repressed childhood trauma made me laugh. Though Bruce Dern is certainly a scary dude. His death, oddly enough, was also the catalyst for repressed memories in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte as well, which came out the same year. How odd.
*. So there’s where I come down on revision. I think Marnie is a joke, but it does score some points as camp. The script is hysterical psychobabble, the stars are both miscast, and the production has a cheap look to it that jars. Students of Hitchcock may get a kick out of seeing how often he quotes himself, and to what crazy ends, but to claim this is a great movie is being perverse.

*. You know your Shakespeare and you know what you want your Shakespeare to look and sound like. You want the straight text, without any cuts or rearrangements. You want period dress, not some reimagining of the story in Victorian or contemporary costume. You don’t want a Shakespeare movie to look like a movie, you want a production shot on stage, with lots of long takes and no fancy camera tricks. Maybe the odd close-up, but that’s it.
*. Well, even if that isn’t what you want it’s what you get here, as Laurence Olivier no longer had the clout to get the budget to make a proper movie out of Othello. So instead they shot the currently-running National Theatre Company production, using the same sets and not so much as bothering to add a musical score. I’m not sure if anyone even thought they were making a movie. People shout their lines and their gestures all remain exaggerated and oversize, which is right for the stage but looks hammy on a big screen.
*. It’s a production today that will appeal to the purist, being a barely altered text that even includes most of the lines that are almost always cut. The cast is stage royalty, and snagged Academy Award nominations in all four acting categories. It also marks the screen debut of Derek Jacobi.

*. That said, and without wanting to be contrary, I don’t care much for the performances. To each their own, but here are my reasons.
*. Olivier plays Othello in blackface, which, while not something we need be offended by today, does look ridiculous by modern standards. They also didn’t get it right for the lighting, as his skin has a sickly greyish tinge that recalls the shopping-mall zombies from Dawn of the Dead.
*. Aside from his appearance, I didn’t like his portrayal of the Moor. He was aiming for something exotic with his voice and mannerisms, and got it, but I don’t know how well any of it works or fits with the play. His gait makes him look like he’s injured, and from his first appearance smelling a flower he comes across as conceited, even foppish. There’s little of Othello’s requisite gravitas and more of a smirking, cocksureness in the early scenes. Pauline Kael: “As a lord, this Othello is a bit vulgar — too ingratiating, a boaster, an arrogant man.” A bit like I imagine Cassio should be played. Then, after being emotionally poisoned by Iago, he turns into a gibbering wreck, unbalanced but not dignified.
*. Maggie Smith is miscast. For starters, she looks too old. She was thirty at the time, but she’s one of those actors who has always looked older or more mature than her age (Angela Lansbury is another, someone who could have played a grandmother in her twenties). My reading of Othello is that Desdemona is young and naive, drawn to a much older man (Olivier was in his late 50s so that part is right). Desdemona is also a head-turner of a beauty. She is a major prize that Othello has won, and she’s the kind of beauty that other men notice and that makes their husbands jealous. That’s not Maggie Smith. She does do pathetic well at the end though.
*. Even if you don’t agree with this reading of Smith, it’s hard not to feel that she fails to express any sort of passion for her husband. In the early scenes she seems almost repelled by him. It’s so glaring it makes me wonder what she was thinking. I can only imagine a director yelling out “Come on, Maggie! You’re supposed to be head over heels in love with this guy!”

*. Frank Finlay would be OK as Othello in most productions, but here he feels out of place, as the only serious character in the film. He is surrounded by fops and fools. Kael calls him “pale, parched little Iago,” but he looks like he could beat the tar out of the rest of the cast with one hand. He also doesn’t have any of Iago’s charm and charisma. Who would be sucked in by such an obviously nasty piece of work?
*. Derek Jacobi as Cassio is a lightweight, foppish character. I doubt anyone could have pulled the part off while labouring under that wig, but he still overplays it (that is, indulges in stage acting). This is especially noticeable in the big scene where he gets drunk. I also didn’t like this scene because it’s quite obvious that there’s nothing in their flagons and cups. Of course there wouldn’t be in a stage production, but as I’ve already said, didn’t they know they were making a movie?
*. Joyce Redman does her best with Emilia, a minor role that is hard to get right because it’s not that coherent in the play. Unfortunately, her one big scene in Act 4 is cut completely. She does get to play the lines in the previous scene that show her awareness of her husband’s perfidy though.
*. I don’t usually call out those places in movies where you can see a dead person still breathing if you look really hard, but at the end here, after Othello has killed himself and fallen on top of Desdemona’s corpse, you can see a corner of his bright white tunic lying against his black skin and it’s obviously moving in and out with his breath. It’s near the center of the screen and the contrast makes it unmissable. Indeed, it’s hard to take your eye off it as it moves in and out. I can’t understand why someone didn’t see that. Did they not know they were making a movie?

*. I don’t care much for this film, because it’s not much of a film. It’s the opposite of Orson Welles’s 1951 version, which scrambled and even ignored the text at times in order to overwhelm us with a startling visual rhythm and style. Welles’s Othello was also the result of working with limited resources, though in his case it made the production of the film paradoxically more expansive, shooting in various locations over a period of years. But Welles took these limitations and made something fresh and totally cinematic out of them. This Othello is so visually dull, and so determinedly un-cinematic, you want to look away.
*. Stuart Bruge was mostly a stage and TV director. The only other major Shakespeare film of his that I know of was the 1970 Julius Caesar, which was awful. He doesn’t seem to have been much interested in what film could do, and to be honest I found myself just wanting to have this movie on in the background while I made dinner, so that I could listen to it as I would to a radio play.
*. To all of this the usual defence is that it’s the film of a staged play and so you have to judge it as such. True, but that’s not the kind of thing I go to the movies to see. I think I might have liked this Othello on stage, but I’d have been happy if it had stayed there too.

*. Futuristic satire sometimes fails because it’s too far ahead of its time. That’s the sort of feeling I had watching The 10th Victim, though less because of the themes it addresses than for an aesthetic sensibility that hadn’t arrived yet.
*. The idea itself wasn’t new in 1965. The movie’s based on a short story by the wonderfully inventive author Robert Sheckley that was published in 1953. I’ve read the story, but not the later novel he expanded it into (which came out right after this movie), or either of the two sequels. In any event, the original story introduces the basic premise: people agree to hunt each other to the death, alternating as hunters and prey chosen by lottery, as a form of televised mass entertainment that allows society to blow off some steam.

*. That sense of the Big Hunt (as it’s called) being “mankind’s safety valve,” is drawn directly from Sheckley’s story, where the hunt is run by the Emotional Catharsis Bureau and is referred to as a purge. A name that would be picked up on in our own time for a dystopic murdertopia franchise.
*. In presenting a state-sponsored death sport that’s broadcast as entertainment, The 10th Victim is often credited with being the first of many similarly themed films, from The Running Man through Battle Royale to The Hunger Games (most recently, the popularity of Squid Game. shows it’s an idea with some life in it yet).
*. Being first counts for something, and it wasn’t just the first, but preceded the mass popularity of this sort of entertainment by several decades. Which gets to the point I started off raising: that The 10th Victim was actually too far ahead of its time.

*. What I mean is that it’s too much a product of the swinging Sixties, without the edge needed to give its satire more bite. I couldn’t stop thinking how much better a job Paul Verhoeven would have made of it, set alongside violent futuristic satires like RoboCop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers. Director Elio Petri was certainly interested in political satire with an edge, but we’re too much in Austin Powers-land here. I’m even pretty sure the bullet-firing bra Ursula Andress wears in the opening scene was the inspiration for the fembots. Zany Bond spoofs were all the rage at the time, and that’s what Petri was really plugging into.
*. Andress plays Caroline, a hunter. She’s a statuesque Nordic stunner (spawned in a Hoboken insemination clinic) who is also a bit of an “iceberg.” Sure to melt her is a Mr. Sexy named Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni). He’s Caroline’s prey, but may turn the tables on the former Honey Ryder. Even with his hair cut short and dyed blonde this is a guy who could “teach a course in Latin erotics.” Fire and ice are about to meet!

*. Unfortunately, the two leads have no chemistry and the plot is too stupid to bother with. The whole thing could have, and probably should have, been presented as more of a satire on media bloodlust, with the hitmen being pitchmen selling mint tea, but this angle remains secondary to random jokes on the decline of civilization. Things like Marcello’s mistress having a collection of classic literature that is just old comic books. Or Marcello keeping his parents hidden away in a secret room. Or the California-style cult of the sun worshippers. Or any of the fashionable pads the characters lounge around in, including the yellow yurt at the end that goes on a trip to Rome’s Temple of Venus.

*. So while sending up the media is on the menu here, it’s not given a lot of play, and Caroline and Marcello just aren’t interesting enough for us to care about. It’s all too silly, and the shootout at the end, with Marcello being chased by his wife and mistress, seems a conscious parody of 8 ½ more than social commentary. Somewhere along the way Petri appears to have lost sight of what the movie was about, and never found the proper tone for it. It’s still entertaining nearly sixty years later, but the stakes for this kind of satire have been raised.

*. It’s a shame that this Hamlet, a joint production of the BBC and Danish Radio that aired in 1964, isn’t better known. But I don’t think the BBC has ever promoted itself all that well. There wasn’t even a DVD version released until 2011, and even then it wasn’t a very clean print.
*. Then there is the title. Well of course Hamlet is at Elsinore. That’s where the play is set. The point of interest here though is that it was actually filmed entirely on location at the castle of Kronborg in the Danish city of Helsingør (in English, Elsinor). But then so what? Shakespeare had certainly never been to Elsinore, so his Elsinore was already a wholly made-up place. There’s little use of exteriors, and the interiors might have been just as convincingly rendered in a studio, without all the attendant difficulties of getting good sound while shooting on location. Meanwhile, does this look more authentic for being shot at Kronborg Castle than at Ivangorod, Dover Castle, or Blenheim Palace?
*. The producers wanted to cast actors who weren’t well known because it was thought that major stars would be a distraction. So they ended up with a cast of soon-to-be-stars, most of whom are terrific.

*. Christopher Plummer is Hamlet, a year before The Sound of Music. He’s a distinctive melancholy type here, seeming distracted most of the time. Then there’s a curious decision made not to show the Ghost, which makes him seem even more distracted, if not unhinged. I say curious because the play makes it clear that the Ghost has an objective existence. This production, however, works hard to suggest it is at least in part a mental projection. The Ghost’s speech on the ramparts is all delivered with the camera on Plummer’s face, and as he nods and grins at the Ghost’s revelations the impression we have is that he’s only being told what he already believed. There’s something more going on here than just his having a prophetic soul.

*. Robert Shaw is here a year after playing Aston in The Caretaker and Red Grant in From Russia with Love, two very different but equally chilling roles. He’s a personal favourite of mine, but even allowing for bias I still think his Claudius one of the best I’ve seen. He has a shifty look and casts a mean side eye. He walks around Elsinore bare-chested, and has more virility than is normally associated with the part (in fact, he was only two years older than Plummer, with June Tobin, who plays Gertrude, being the same age). But he’s also a bully, and like all bullies he goes to pieces at the end when Hamlet finally stands up to him.
*. Michael Caine, in his only turn at Shakespeare, is Horatio, and does a fine job playing second (or third) fiddle. Apparently he wanted to project a possible homosexual attachment to Hamlet, but even when I was looking for this I didn’t pick up much of it. What I did wonder about was Osric and Laertes. Was there something going on there?
*. Donald Sutherland is Fortinbras and he’s the only flop. And I mean flop. I don’t think I ever figured out what accent he was trying to affect. Surely not Norwegian? Listen to him say “Where is this sight?” when he comes striding on the stage at the end and try to place how he says “sight.” It’s just weird.

*. The women didn’t do as well. I think June Tobin as Gertrude and Jo Maxwell Muller as Ophelia are both very good, but they never went on to do much. Not the same opportunities? Or just different career choices?
*. Alec Clunes plays Polonius as a harmless, doddering fool. I think it was only in later productions that Polonius started to develop a bit of an edge. Here he’s still a comic type.

*. With such a cast, and some interesting creative decisions, it’s too bad this wasn’t filmed. Instead it was shot in videotape, and it shows. Director Philip Saville worked mainly in television and you really feel the limits of the small screen. As noted, the sound is awful, but also the editing is choppy and there is a repeated attempt to create depth of field that they just can’t achieve on any level. Figures even in the middle distance disappear in the haze.
*. Overall: a lot more than what you might expect, but still something less than what might have been. A good Hamlet and a standout Claudius. And the real Elsinore, if that makes a difference.

*. Victory is one of my favourite Joseph Conrad novels, though it’s not very well known. It’s the kind of book that makes people say of it that it has some of Conrad’s best writing and some of his worst.
*. And so with The Bad Sleep Well. This is a movie I really love . . . most of. There are passages, especially the opening wedding ceremony, that I think are among the best things Kurosawa ever did. But at the same time, this has never been one of his most popular films.
*. Why? I think the far-fetched story alienates some people. It was the result of a collaboration among five screenwriters (Kurosawa being one), and apparently a lot of rewrites were done on the fly. As it stands, it’s two and a half hours of a grotesque revenge plot involving secret illegitimate children, identity swapping, and scaring people insane with ghosts.

*. Does it have much to do with Hamlet? Not to my eye, though the business with the wedding cake can be seen as a version of the Mouse Trap (only it can hardly be a tool for getting the guilty board members to expose themselves, since Nishi is clearly already convinced of their culpability in his father’s death). Aside from that, the only thing it really borrows is the notion of a son avenging his father’s murder.
*. Admittedly, this is a storyline that isn’t all that common. Usually we have heroes avenging the murder of their spouses or children. Not often a father. And it’s even a bit of a stretch here, as Nishi wasn’t very close to his dad.

*. Kurosawa was going contemporary after several films set back in samurai days. But how feudal is his contemporary Japan? The Public Corporation is like a fiefdom, demanding a superhuman level of loyalty.

*. This, in turn, leads us to a bureaucratized evil. You even get the exclamation/excuse that in doing such bad things the men in suits were “just following orders.” It’s a murderously corrupt system, and the Corporation is clearly a quasi-criminal enterprise (it could have been called the Syndicate or the Organization), so in the end who’s responsible?
*. It’s beautifully photographed, with brilliant framing that is perhaps only a bit overly formal. It’s hard to say though as this was very much the custom in what we think of now as the art house cinema of the day, and the layout of Japanese homes, with all their screens and grids, exaggerates the effect even more.

*. Even a location like the ruins of the munitions factory is invested with a kind of cinema vérité poetry. And it’s crammed with symbolism too, from the bunker to the smokestack to the beam that separates Nishi from Yoshiko.

*. To what extent is this a black comedy or satire? I honestly don’t know, figuring that I’m probably losing a lot in translation. But the score seems to strike a comic note at several points where I didn’t expect it.
*. I didn’t even recognize Toshiro Mifune. Did he gain a lot of extra weight for this role? And he’s hiding behind that blank corporate façade perfectly.
*, Kurosawa thought it was too far ahead of its time, that he made it too soon. That may have been true in Japan. I think it would have worked for an American audience in 1960, and it holds up very well today.
*. The ending is particularly ambiguous given the title. Will Iwabuchi sleep well, given he didn’t sleep at all the night before? Or has he murdered sleep? You could argue that the alienation of his children is a form of punishment, but does he care? Or does he care about the corporation’s welfare more? I take this latter position, which makes the ending particularly dark. His kids are gone, but he has to answer that phone, literally bowing to head office’s authority.
*. As for his kids, Yoshiko and Tatsuo, what exactly are they going to do? He’s a drunk and she’s a cripple. They’re both adults but don’t seem to have jobs while still living with their dad. So where are they going?

*. But to return to a point I raised earlier, who is head office? In the Kurosawa documentary included with the Criterion DVD the caller is referred to simply as a “great evil.” So somebody higher up the corporate ladder? The government? Whatever it is, I like it that we’re not told, and that we never hear the voice on the other end of the line.

*. When I was a kid I had one of those Weird Tales-style comic books that told the story of a corporate climber who kept moving up the ranks, but always being put off from seeing the big boss by a secretary posted outside the boss’s office. When the man on the rise finally takes over the company and is allowed to enter that office he finds it’s only a black void that he will now presumably be trapped in for eternity. You could think of it as a corner tomb, or a portal to hell. But all it really was, was a perfectly black frame.
*. I was reminded of that comic at the end of this movie. Is the great evil just the fact that there’s no directing intelligence at all? That the bureaucracy, the corporation, the system, is all there is?

*. Enter Ghost! And that’s what I call an entrance! He’s wearing what may be the greatest cape in film history. It puts Dracula’s and Superman’s and even the magical cape of Doctor Strange to shame, billowing like a giant black flag in a hurricane and signaling in semaphore of tragedy ahead.
*. Nothing else impressed me quite as much in this version of Hamlet (or “Gamlet” as it apparently translates to in English, for some reason I can’t understand). Though I do think this is an impressive interpretation in a lot of ways, nothing can quite live up to that Ghost.
*. Much of it seems like an odd combination of pieces that don’t always fit together. It has an expansive feel to it, for example, but is a radically pruning of the text. What’s more, the cuts come where you least expect them. And by that I mean not that famous lines are lost (all the lines in Hamlet are famous now), but that the movie builds up toward making you think you’re going to get certain speeches and then you don’t.

*. Just to give some examples of what I mean: (1) I was surprised when the film broke for intermission just when Claudius is praying (or failing to pray) for forgiveness, assuming Hamlet was about to discover him and give his “Now might I do it” speech. But in fact all of this is dropped and Hamlet never sneaks up on him. (2) We get to see Hamlet coming across Fortinbras’s army marching off to fight over a straw, but there’s none of his soliloquy interpreting the meaning of it. (3) Most notably, after being wounded with the bloody rapier Hamlet takes a long walk outside the castle to find a suitably dramatic spot to expire in, then lies down and says merely “The rest is silence.” You had to think he was going to be saying a little more after all that build-up.
*. I guess if you know the play well enough this might not bother you, at least too much. Apparently director Grigori Kozintsev had thought of producing the play as pantomime. There were a few times when I actually turned off the subtitles because I was finding them annoying. I don’t have Hamlet by heart, but I knew the gist of what was being said and that was enough. The translation was done by Boris Pasternak, but the subtitles were given in the original (that is, Shakespeare’s) language anyway.

*. Another example of incongruity: the exteriors, shot mainly around the fortress of Ivangorod, are suitably rugged and imposing, as though Elsinore has been carved out of the cliffs, but they don’t really match with the giant studio interiors. I’m always bothered when the floor of a movie castle looks so clean and smooth you could eat your dinner off of it.
*. Kozintsev: “The general view of the castle must not be filmed. The image will appear only in the unity of the sensations of Elsinore’s various aspects. And its external appearance, in the montage of the sequences filmed in a variety of places.” Even so, I felt like the settings tended to overwhelm the actors and their lines, and the film as a whole seems too intent on showing them off, wrapping as many of them as possible into a single scene through multiple transitions and lots of camera movement.
*. The fragmentation Kozintsev mentions does help him to create the sense of Elsinore being a prison though, as does the motif of shooting through bars and other barriers. This reminded me a lot of the similar effect achieved in Welles’s Othello. Even Ophelia’s hoops and stays are like a cage she’s being put into. Meanwhile, I assume the bird is meant to represent the soul set free. Its most notable appearance comes after the lid has been hammered shut on Ophelia’s coffin.

*. There are some places where the cuts are interesting. I like how they cut the dumbshow before the play, which is something I think every production should do. And Claudius’s response to the play is interesting: he clearly knows what Hamlet is up to, stands and claps a couple of times and then storms off in a rage. That seems to me to be the way it should be played, but it’s rarely done like that.
*. Another interesting cut is the Ghost’s appearance in Gertrude’s bedroom. Not only does he not have any lines, we don’t see him at all. The only thing we see is Hamlet staring at nothing. This puts us in the position of his mother, who cannot see the Ghost in the play, and makes us wonder if Hamlet is beginning to lose his grip.
*. In general, I think it’s a movie that doesn’t handle the big things all that well but does a good job with the little things. As an example of the former I’d point to the fight with Laertes over Ophelia’s grave, which really seems to come out of nowhere.
*. I’ll give a few examples of little touches that I really enjoyed: (1) The way Hamlet taps his fingers on the drum when talking to the players. This nicely represents his distracted state of mind but also how they will all march to his beat. (2) When walking through the castle in one scene Hamlet stops to remove a pebble (or something) from his shoe. That’s a nice, incongruously naturalistic way of grounding him in this stony world. (3) Addressing poor Yorick, sand keeps pouring from the skull. I don’t think a skull needs embellishing as a memento mori, but this does it without feeling like it’s too much.

*. Apparently Kenneth Branagh considered this to be a definitive screen adaptation of the play. I’m not sure what he meant by that. As I’ve already noted, it’s a long way from even being a “greatest hits” version of the text. I think he might have been impressed by its epic qualities, which he adopted for his own version in 1996.
*. I don’t think it’s definitive. It’s too much of a mixed bag. The same director’s King Lear would be a greater triumph. There are a lot of things I really like about this movie, but there are some bad parts as well, especially with regard to what’s missing, like where the cuts just seem too abrupt and awkward. Why does Polonius carp at the Player for going on too long when he’s only delivered a couple of lines? That kind of thing.
*. While it may not be definitive, it is a prominent landmark and compares well with the other great screen Hamlets. A definitive production of Hamlet doesn’t exist anyway. Indeed, we don’t even have a definitive text to work from. This is a long way from perfect, but overall it’s as good as any.

*. I came to Matango not as a fan of director Ishiro Honda, the man who created Gojira (and who went on to direct seven more Godzilla movies for Toho). Instead, I’d read William H. Hodgson’s 1907 short story “The Voice in the Night,” which is the somewhat stodgy but nevertheless still quite effective horror tale that Matango was loosely based on.
*. Hodgson’s story has a sailing ship encountering a man who tells of being abandoned on an island with his fiancé where an invasive species of mushrooms infect people and turn them into fungi, a fate that the unhappy couple share. It was first filmed as a standalone episode for the TV show Suspicion in 1958 that you can watch online. It’s more faithful to the original story but not very good. Matango was the second adaptation.

*. I wanted to like it. It’s a movie with a certain reputation that doesn’t quite rise to a cult among monster-movie fans. Apparently Steven Soderbergh wanted to remake it but couldn’t get Toho’s permission, and Guillermo del Toro also ranks it as a favourite. It was controversial in Japan because the make-up effects on the faces of the people turning into mushrooms resembled radiation burns. For many years it was an obscure, shlocky title, having been released directly to television in the U.S. as Attack of the Mushroom People and later on home video in the U.K. as Fungus of Terror.
*. Unfortunately it never lives up to its promise. I’m not sure what direction they were trying to go. The story is genuinely creepy, but the film isn’t scary at all. Of course the full-blown mushroom people look ridiculous in their totally Toho rubber suits, but they’re made to seem even sillier with the oddly giggling soundtrack and the fact that they seem mostly harmless.
*. The real danger the mushrooms present lies in their addictive quality. Once you’ve tasted wild ‘shrooms you can’t get enough. Much as with The Stuff, it soon becomes more a case of it eating you than you eating it.

*. This addiction angle is apparently what drew Honda to the project, who saw the film as a serious comment on youth culture in Japan at the time. Which would be interesting too, but again it’s not a point that’s clearly made. The group stranded on the island are starving so it makes sense they’d eat the mushrooms. And as it is, the ‘shrooms don’t result in cases of reefer madness but basically just make everyone happy and mellow. All the final-stage creatures seem to want is a hug. Nor is it all that effective as a swipe at rebel youth, since the gang stuck on the island are too old.
*. I can understand Soderbergh wanting to take a crack at a remake. There’s potential here throughout. I loved the set of the infected ghost ship, and the mushroom garden might have been something truly original and grotesque instead of the chintzy rubber plantation it looks like. People do get fungal growths and they’re disgusting, so if the effects had been better it could have been a real stomach-turner. The ending that has Akiko going full Betty Driscoll from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers could have been so much more sinister. The group dynamics, especially given the open question of who has eaten the forbidden fungus, might have played out like The Thing. So many might-have-beens.
*. Murai’s expression of loss at the end is nicely ambiguous. “I’d be happier living on that island than in this city.” Which makes sense if you’re turning into a mushroom and that’s where you lost your girlfriend. There may be an evocation here of a demonic fairyland. But what does he mean when he says that the citizens of Tokyo are just the same as the mushroom people? That in a modern, urban society we’re all drugged-out zombies anyway? And why is such a message tacked onto the end? It hasn’t been developed at all or even introduced up to that point, despite the presence of a few flashbacks from the characters.
*. There’s no question this is a lot better than your usual Toho creature feature. But it leaves you with the feeling that it could have been even more. I’d like to think it could still be remade and something salvaged but at this point that ship has probably sailed. For better and for worse this is all the Matango we’ve got.

*. Also known as “the one where they get in a fight on top of a cable car.” I imagine that scene was sort of like the car chase in Bullitt (a film that came out the same year). In the script for Bullitt all it apparently said was “car chase.” They would have needed a bit more than that here, to take into account the planting of the bomb, the one bad guy falling to his death, and the jump to the other cable car, but there still might not have been much more than half a page of notes.
*. The cable-car fight grows in the imagination. For one thing, I’d had it stuck in my head that Schaffer, Clint Eastwood’s character, had been the protagonist. That would have made more sense — Richard Burton (age 43, overweight, and reported to be drinking up to four bottles of vodka a day!) was scarcely credible as an action star — but in fact Schaffer had been knocked unconscious and was sleeping back in the castle, leaving the heroism for Major Smith. Or Alf Joint, the stuntman who lost three teeth doing the jump.
*. The other thing that struck me watching the cable-car scene today is that there’s a lot less of it than I remembered. Most of it was done with process shots. For all the daring of the stunt work, which certainly was impressive, it only amounts to a matter of a minute or so on screen.
*. I kept thinking how they’d do it differently today. This is an old-school production which makes wonderful use of locations and physical stunts. In addition to the cable-car jump, Burton knocked himself out at one point (or else he was dead drunk), and the squib that exploded on the Gestapo officer’s face temporarily blinded him (squibs were a new technology in 1968). Sure some of it looks off, like the dummy that falls from the cliff and the ones in the jeep that explodes at the airfield, but overall it holds up well. I prefer practical effects to CGI any day.

*. One place where I think things have improved with today’s movies though is in pacing. I think Where Eagles Dare is sometimes sluggish and that’s not solely attributable to our abbreviated twenty-first century attention spans. Even in the 1980s action films would handle their main sequences in a far livelier way than director Brian G. Hutton does here. I kept thinking of the attack on the guerilla camp in Predator as a comparison. But we could also go with a more contemporary comparison. The assault on Blofeld’s mountain-top fortress in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is far better handled than anything here.
*. We spend a lot of time watching the gang set traps with their inexhaustible supply of dynamite bundles and it seems things should move a little quicker through the final act. I think some of this too might be blamed on the bizarre decision Smith makes to take the three double-agents with them. How was that ever going to work? Come on. And then it just goes from one escape sequence to the next, with the good guys always one step ahead of the explosions.

*. Geoff Dyer wrote a fun little book about this movie called “Broadsword Calling Danny Boy.” He’s pretty dismissive of director Brian G. Hutton: “Hutton’s stylistic signature as director lies in the absence of anything that might permit us to recognize him as an auteur. Apart from the stuntmen — and -woman — no one connected with the film is more undercover than its director.” But is a lack of flash a bad thing? I don’t think it has to be, at least for an action flick. But Hutton’s problem is that he doesn’t really deliver the goods with the action.
*. I grew up on the adventure novels of Alistair MacLean (and Hammond Innes, who I might have thought of as the same guy at one point). But aside from the basic premise I don’t think this is a great story. Eastwood found the script had too much exposition and he had a point. It’s far too complicated and left me wondering at the end just what had really been going on. The big dining-hall scene with Burton droning on only confused me. I wondered what would happen if one of the British double-agents was actually a triple-agent? How would Smith/Schmidt know? It’s not like they could have trusted Smith. And wasn’t this an incredibly complicated (not to mention dangerous) way just to smoke out some moles?
*. The cast manages. Aside from his being drunk I still had trouble buying Burton in his role but I guess he makes out. Eastwood refused to have his hair cut to look slightly more military, but can you blame him? That Sonic the Hedgehog ‘do looks great. Mary Ure had top billing along with the two male leads but I wonder how many people remember her today. She died young from an overdose.
*. Did you know that “radio room” in German is Funkraum? I didn’t know that, but I got a laugh out of seeing the sign on the Funkraum door. I guess radio in German is funk, or rundfunk. This is not, however, where we get the English word funk for a mix of jazz, soul, and rhythm & blues. That goes all the way back to the Latin fumigare for a strong, earth odour.
*. Another laugh came with the German soldier shot at the end of the bridge whose head falls forward so his helmet doinks on the railing. I don’t know if that was meant to be funny, or if it was even intentional, but it’s great.
*. Dyer’s book makes a lot out of how much the movie meant to him as a kid. Like me, he read MacLean as a tween. Going over the names he drops of people who still claim to love this film (Steven Spielberg has called it his favourite war movie) I have to wonder how much of this is nostalgia among men who are now middle-aged or older. While I think it’s still good entertainment, it’s too long, plays slow, and has a ridiculous storyline. Aside from the cable-car stunt there’s not even anything new or interesting in the action department but just the usual clichés like bad guys who can’t hit anything and cars (and planes!) exploding into balls of fire every time they get bumped. And yet it takes me back to better times. Maybe not better movies, but better times.

*. For younger people living in the third decade of the twenty-first century it may be hard to understand how big a deal television once was. In the 1950s it was conquering the world, much like the Internet would do fifty years later. A switchboard operator in The Apartment doesn’t want a date that will interfere with her watching The Untouchables. That’s how much it meant. Colour broadcasting, however, wouldn’t start taking over until the mid-1960s, which meant that movies were still giving audiences something most people couldn’t see at home. Though this didn’t always mean colour, as it didn’t in this case, or in Psycho, released the same year.
*. Television is both a direct and indirect presence in The Apartment. According to Bruce Block on the DVD commentary Billy Wilder hated television, and once said that the only time he watched it was when they were showing a movie by a director he couldn’t stand, since it would then be the perfect medium. Hence the joke of Jack Lemmon’s C. C. Baxter doing the usual lonely-guy routine of frozen dinner while channel surfing on the couch, but never getting to actually watch Grand Hotel because of all the words from our sponsors. That’s no way to see a movie!
*. But then Baxter and Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) are small-screen types. When she’s recovering at his place Baxter offers to move the TV into the bedroom for her. That’s being a gent. And there’s Fred MacMurray in a very dark turn. David Thomson thought Sheldrake “would shock a new age used to MacMurray’s benevolence on TV in My Three Sons,” but in 1960 he’d already played a heel in Double Indemnity and My Three Sons hadn’t started yet. Also, Block notes how all of the supporting cast here were well-known television actors.

*. I mentioned Psycho for the use of black-and-white, but it was also a movie shot as a TV production, with Hitch using most of his crew from his show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And both films make something out of the incongruity between the new family hearth and decidedly transgressive subject matter.
*. Nobody gets killed in a shower in The Apartment, but while it’s a step down from Sunset Boulevard (ten years earlier) it was still breaking norms. I think it marks the end of Wilder’s great run of movies that were fresh and shocking then and can still capture an audience today.
*. First and foremost there are the two leads. Sure their work environment is toxic. Wilder even thought of the story primarily as that of two people becoming emancipated from the office, which is full of male predators whose casual cruelty would make one of the Mad Men cringe. But are Baxter and Kubelik any better?
*. They’re both young people on the rise, immoral and unscrupulous. Nor are they much angels outside of the office. Baxter has no qualms about sleeping with the married woman he picks up in a bar. Kubelik does go back to Sheldrake after all (as does Baxter). You could say either that they’re redeemed at the end or that they just suit each other. Will they stay together or are they more likely to bounce at the first opportunity to move up a level?

*. Roger Ebert: “while Baxter and Miss Kubelik may indeed like each other — may feel genuine feelings of the sort that lead to true love — they are both slaves to the company’s value system. He wants to be the boss’ assistant, she wants to be the boss’ wife, and both of them are so blinded by the concept of ‘boss’ that they can’t see Mr. Sheldrake for an untrustworthy rat.”
*. The studio was worried that Baxter might be too unlikeable, and it was suggested that they give him a limp or some kind of disability. I’m glad they kept him as just a weasel, and Lemmon plays the part perfectly. I’ve always thought there was more to Lemmon than just comedy and Wilder was able to bring it out. Meanwhile, MacLaine does a great job of balancing “sexy, funny, and sad” (screenwriter Izzy Diamond). But how dumb is she? She can’t spell well enough to be a secretary and the only job she can get is as an elevator operator. She also can’t see that Sheldrake is playing her. I know nobody is stupid all the time, but that’s pretty thick.
*. Dealing with suicide was tricky, but it’s nicely balanced out with the echoing scenes where they the two lovebirds mistakenly think the other has gone all the way. Overall it’s a beautifully plotted movie (I’m not as fond of the dialogue), with all sorts of cues that have to be stored away to be picked up later. Diamond, who had also written Some Like It Hot, was obviously still on top of his game.
*. Also worth praising is the set design by Alexandre Trauner. The office and apartment sets are perfect complements, and expressive of both theme and character. To return to the movie/television blending I started off talking about, the wide-open spaces of the office are big-screen, the cluttered apartment small.
*. It’s testimony to how ahead of his time Wilder was that while this movie shows some lightening of his darker vision it’s still has twice the bite of today’s rom-coms, whose plots were often derived from the same “wrong guy vs. the right guy” formula. I’m not a fan of rom-coms, but that may be because my favourite examples of the genre all go back half a century or more. Progress in the arts is a mirage.