Forbidden Desires: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma

Voyeurism has always been an integral part of the appeal of motion pictures. However, over the years, the taboo of watching and staring into the lives of others was made largely acceptable by movies that didn't implicate us in our peeping. But Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma changed all that. They turned that taboo of staring and watching into a dramatic strategy where both directors forced us to face our own perverse fantasies and forbidden desires.

I first set out to examine this theme in a course I taught last winter at Ryerson University through the LIFE Institute. Partly, the idea for the series was due to my interest in both directors. Their films not only shaped my fascination as a moviegoer, but their work also implicitly led to my eventually wanting to be a critic. Being a critic then showed me that there were are also significant differences in their respective strategies. Where Hitchcock set out to become a master entertainer of exciting spy thrillers and dramas, De Palma questioned with ironic humour the very nature of what makes exciting drama. If Hitchcock desired (and won) a mass audience that made him one of the most highly regarded and respected commercial directors, De Palma became the opposite. He would often alienate audiences because of his ironic desire to treat movie conventions and storytelling in an irreverent way. In doing so, he deliberately (and cheerfully) undermined our desire for a happy resolution to the picture. Hitchcock may have been a genius at manipulating our responses by pulling the rug out from under our expectations in his dramas; but De Palma, in borrowing some of Hitchcock’s cinematic language (as well as the language of Buñuel, Polanski and Godard), used conventional drama to take us deeper and further into more contemporary issues of sexual fear and political unrest. In Forbidden Desires: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, I decided to pair films from their body of work that I felt best mirrored the different ways they work with voyeurism. The series continues tomorrow night at the Revue Cinema.

A Tale of Two Alfreds: Fiction and Fact

The most curious object I inherited from my late father is a skeleton key attached to a round metal tag that reads “Bates Motel,” along with the room number 1. I’m not sure how he came to own this movie memento, although his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock – they shared the same first name – predated the 1960 release of Psycho by at least two decades, with big-screen thrillers such as Suspicion (1941).

Beginning in 1955, every Sunday night Dad was glued to our black-and-white Zenith with a round picture tube for the half-hour anthology program Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS. A year later, he began subscribing to the legendary director’s monthly Mystery Magazine. 

My father would have been happy to learn that there’s a plan afoot for a film based on the 1990 nonfiction book by Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Anthony Hopkins reportedly is in talks to star as the portly filmmaker; Sacha Gervasi (Anvil! The Story of Anvil) might direct from a script by John McLaughlin (Black Swan). An earlier attempt to launch this project, with Helen Mirren playing Hitchcock’s wife Alma and Ryan Murphy (Eat Pray Love) at the helm, failed to come together for some reason.

Shock of the Unexpected...Excerpt From the Prologue to Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so the public won't be sent into a panic. Of course, the new President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton. From that comedy came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made. By delving into the American experience from Kennedy to Clinton, I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back, saying that it would never sell. One Canadian press almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book (with Critics at Large colleague and friend Susan Green) on the TV show, Law & Order, and later my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, though, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series. In light of the fact that this week is the 53rd anniversary of JFK's assassination, here is an excerpt from the book's prologue.

- Kevin Courrier

At the end of The Godfather, Part II, in the dead of fall, Michael Corleone makes the comment that history teaches us you can kill anyone. Most people heard in those remarks echoes of the assassination of JFK, even though the murder under discussion takes place three years after the mob leader's observation and Kennedy isn't yet president. For all we know, Michael might be referring to seeing Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho the previous summer, for not only did Psycho teach us that you can kill anyone, but the murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a motel shower before the halfway point of the picture also flew in the face of what film history taught us – and the frisson of that moment, that shock of the unexpected, would come to foreshadow the events of the sixties. Director Martin Scorsese recently referred to Psycho in that manner in the Kent Jones documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut. Phillip J. Skerry in his 2009 book, Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema's Most Famous Scene, talks about how the film "ushered in a shift in the cultural paradigm from the bland decade of the 1950s, with its emphasis on togetherness and family values, to the 1960s, that cataclysmic decade of political assassinations, student protests, free speech conflicts, race riots, Vietnam protests, and, above all, violence – in our streets, in our political institutions, in our culture, and most vividly in our media, especially in our films, and in our music." But how could one low-budget thriller with a turbulent twist send such a ripple through the next decade?

The Trouble with Hitch: Dueling Screen Sagas – Hitchcock & The Girl

Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock

Was the Master of Suspense a confused cinematic guru who finally learned to appreciate his long-suffering wife or a sadistic predator forever tormenting the blonde actresses he couldn’t seduce? Two recent films, with acting talent that cannot overcome bloated plots, offer conflicting points of view. Hitchcock, a theatrical release by Sacha Gervasi, purportedly chronicles the creation of Psycho in late 1959. Broadcast on HBO, Julian Jarrold’s The Girl zeroes in on what supposedly took place in the spring of 1962 while shooting The Birds, adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story. Alfred Hitchcock is portrayed by Anthony Hopkins as a mischievous Peeping Tom in the former new production and by Toby Jones as a repulsive creep in the latter. Their so-so impersonations are undermined by the lack of much physical resemblance to a very distinctive-looking historical figure. Alma Reville, the screenwriter and editor to whom he was married for more than half a century, is alternately a spunky helpmate (Helen Mirren) or a sad-sack enabler (Imelda Staunton). The blondes – an ultimately appreciative Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) screaming in the shower for Psycho and a thoroughly terrorized Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) battling feathered attackers in The Birds – present vastly different accounts about experiencing “the dark side of genius,” to borrow the title of Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography of the director.

Elegant 1940s Thrillers: The Spiral Staircase and Laura

Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase (1946).

Two of the most enjoyable and elegantly appointed thrillers of the Hollywood big-studio era came out two years apart – Laura in 1944 and The Spiral Staircase in 1946. Actually they belong to different genres. Laura is a murder mystery; The Spiral Staircase is a psycho-killer movie, one of the few classic examples from that period that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t direct. (Hitch turned out Shadow of a Doubt in 1943 with Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley, the “Merry Widow murderer” who provokes the fall from innocence of his small-town niece, played by Teresa Wright, who shares his name; and Strangers on a Train in 1951, wherein Robert Walker tries to crisscross murders with a handsome tennis champ played by Farley Granger.)

Hallucinatory Suspense: Brian De Palma's The Fury

Brian De Palma is hands down the most disreputable great American director. Sam Peckinpah got his due after he died; the movies that earned him the sobriquet “Bloody Sam” – not meant as a compliment – are now recognized as the work of a genius. But De Palma has always worked very differently from Peckinpah, burrowing slyly beneath the bristling, profane surface of pop. When he found his style in the late seventies and early eighties in movies like Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, his brash, dirty humor and his fascination with the tools of film exploitation alienated people (critics more than audiences: Carrie and Dressed to Kill were big hits) who couldn’t see that he was using those tools as a starting-off point. They missed it even when he announced his intentions at the outset of Blow Out: filming a parody of a sexy teen horror movie, a more sexually explicit version of something like Halloween, to fake out audiences and then cutting it off to segue into a political conspiracy thriller with the film-within-the-film’s sound man (John Travolta) as the protagonist. I think Blow Out is a masterpiece, but it wasn’t just misunderstood when it came out in 1981; it was willfully misunderstood. When I wrote in The Stanford Daily that it was one of the best political movies ever made by an American, I got incredulous letters from readers who denied there was a shred of politics in it – even though it’s about the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate, it contains allusions to Chappaquiddick and a character modeled on G. Gordon Liddy, it climaxes on an invented Philadelphia holiday called Liberty Day, and it’s color-coded in red, white and blue

You’d think that in an era when Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi are taken seriously as filmmakers, De Palma might catch a break for his pop sensibility, but Tarantino and Raimi don’t operate in the most dangerous area of violence, where it intersects with sexuality. Even Hitchcock didn’t. Except in Vertigo, which is a romantic melodrama – a genre De Palma essayed only once, in Obsession, and couldn’t get into – the sexual material in his movies is only there to play with us, lure us in so he can swap it for violence: Robert Walker coming on to Farley Granger in the opening scene of Strangers on a Train, Tony Perkins peeping at Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho. (Spielberg takes a leaf from Hitchcock’s book, of course, in the opening of Jaws, where we’re led to think that the wasted kid on the beach is going to get laid in the water by the girl with the come-hither eyes, but the only orgasm is the bloody thrashing in the water as she’s scissored by the shark.) De Palma’s bravado in taking Hitchcock tropes into the truly forbidden places Hitchcock wasn’t interested in – the way he riffs on the Psycho shower scene as a way of exploring adolescent sexuality in the opening minutes of Carrie and middle-aged sexual longing and disappointment in the first scene of Dressed to Kill – branded him as everything from a misogynist to a plagiarist. It was fruitless to point out that artists have always built on each other’s work and that there are fewer portraits of female sexuality more sympathetic than these two pictures. In 1987, when he filmed David Rabe’s dramatization of the Daniel Lang New Yorker article, “Casualties of War,” about the rape and murder of a Vietnamese teenager by some American G.I.s, he came up with perhaps the most compassionate and devastating movie ever made about what happens to women in a war zone. His detractors, apparently confusing the film with its subject matter, called it pornographic.

Accessible Thrills: Netflix's Hush

Kate Siegel stars in Hush, currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.

Novelist Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) is living the writer's dream, holed up alone in a cozy cottage in the woods while she works on her second novel. The book, a thriller that follows on the heels of her successful debut, is almost finished but Maddie is struggling with the ending. She's started doing the traditional writer's procrastination dance: cooking ambitious dinners for herself and messing them up, phoning her sister Max (Emilia Graves) to see how she's doing, moving from desk to couch to chair to see what works, before ultimately deciding that texting her ex-boyfriend is a great idea.

Her nearest neighbours are couple Sarah and John (Samantha Sloyan and Michael Trucco), friends who regularly take a short hike through the trees to come visit her and make sure she's alive. On this day in particular, Sarah swings by to return a copy of Maddie's recently-published first book. The women chat for a bit before Sarah returns home and Maddie returns to writing self-deprecating notes to herself on her open Word document. Sarah returns a few hours later, though, this time covered in blood and tailed by a masked psycho with a crossbow. She hammers on the glass door, begging Maddie to let her in, but Maddie ignores her and continues washing dishes. A bout of bacterial meningitis in her early teens left Maddie completely deaf and, unfortunately, Sarah knows her friend can't hear her screaming. Sarah doesn't make it, but Maddie proves to be a much bigger challenge as she becomes the masked man's new target.

Art Among the Ruins: Rodin by Russia’s Eifman Ballet

The Eifman Ballet performing Rodin (All photos by Gene Schiavone)

St. Petersburg’s Eifman Ballet’s international reputation as a potent example of contemporary classical dance was fully evident when the troupe, lead by celebrated choreographer Boris Eifman, made its Toronto debut at the Sony Centre last week. In performing Rodin, Eifman’s two-act narrative ballet based on the life of French sculptor Auguste Rodin and his tempestuous relationship with fellow artist Camille Claudel, the 55-member Russian ballet company flew across the stage with a power-surge of energy, carving the air with alternatively spasmodic and smooth gestures to tell a story of tortured artistic genius. It was visually and viscerally explosive.

Full Circle: Revisiting The Beatles' Revolver (1966)

In 1966 – before The Beatles abandoned the stage for good with a show at Candlestick Park, in San Francisco, and where Paul McCartney would recently play before the former baseball park itself passed into history – the new studio music they released that summer brought the group full circle to their first session at EMI in 1962. As if to commemorate the concept of completing a circle, the record was called Revolver. Recorded from April through June 1966, Revolver was a rich panorama of musical and philosophical styles, a masterpiece of eclecticism. George Harrison's interest in Indian music and religion came full bloom. The fruit of McCartney's venture into the world of avant-garde theatre, visual art and music fully emerged. John Lennon's fascination with Eastern thoughts about mortality, brought on through chemical enhancement, reached its apex. Ringo Starr even decided to redefine the sound of his drums to provide yet more personality to the music. 

Picture/Portrait: De Palma & Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words

I can't think of any other film director whose work continually captivated me but has drawn such violent reactions from various friends than the movies of Brian De Palma. It didn't seem to matter whether it was ones that I loved (Hi Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Femme Fatale and Redacted), ones that I didn't (Sisters, Scarface, Body Double, The Black Dahlia and Passion), or ones with virtues disguised by their compromises (The Untouchables, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars), folks had an axe to grind and I was often the stone used to sharpen it. From the moment one individual introduced me to the fiendishly clever 1974 musical comedy, Phantom of the Paradise, I was drawn into De Palma's spiky impudence. The devious way he deployed irony to give genre pictures a wicked vitality I found to be both darkly funny and emotionally searing – even heartbreaking. This equivocal approach may account for most of the strong reactions I got from various moviegoers. Often when artists use irony, it's with a knowing sense of detachment, and the film congratulates you on your hipness while keeping you cocooned in your certainties. But De Palma played out life's failures on a grand operatic scale. He drew us into a waking nightmare and then proceeded to pull the rug out from under our convictions. That's maybe why one friend, who I took to The Fury after he returned from a yoga retreat, didn't speak to me for months. Subjecting him to a hallucinatory thriller about two teenagers with telekinesis and where De Palma (as critic Terrence Rafferty once wrote) "generate[d] horror from nightmarish exaggerations of the experience of adolescence: the feeling that your impulses have gone out of control, that even your own body is alien, perhaps hostile...," put him in touch with basic drives the weekend in the country was supposed to cleanse. A few years later, when we went to see Blow Out, he took a swing at me afterwards. (Luckily, he missed.) The picture was about a man whose gifts fail him when he tries to unravel a political conspiracy and save the one person he cares about most. What may have disturbed him was that it went against the grain of having our virtues overcome the desires of those who continually undermine them. Needless to say, he never again went to another Brian De Palma picture with me. But others eagerly took his place popping out of press screenings, or surging through crowds of people having a Christmas libation, to demand what I thought of Scarface, or verbally confronting me over how Carlito's Way infuriated them. One much friendlier critic years later, after seeing his Iraq War drama Redacted, even told me, "He better not be kidding."

Phony Feminism: The Girl on the Train

Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train.

Tate Taylor’s movie The Girl on the Train is awful, but it’s pretty much what the material – the 2015 bestseller by the English (South Africa-born) novelist Paula Hawkins – deserves. It’s a fake-feminist thriller, like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, though not quite as loathsome. Flynn’s book is the twisty tale of a vanished wife whose husband is assumed to have murdered her, but for the first half it presents itself, with a hip, up-to-the-minute chic, as the anatomy of a bad marriage. When the material turns around on itself and Amy, the wife, is revealed to be a sociopath who’s manipulated her own disappearance to make the husband look guilty, and thus get revenge on him for cheating on her, Flynn tries to play it both ways – to make Amy the villain the narrative requires while rigging a pitiful portrait of her childhood, when her parents, co-authors of a beloved series of children’s books, used her as the model for their implausibly perfect heroine. Flynn pretends to be commenting on the damage to the psyche of a little girl who’s stuck competing with her own flawless image, just as she pretends to be exposing the gritty reality of a disintegrating modern-American relationship relationship. But Amy’s behavior doesn’t match up convincingly with her backstory, and Flynn has made her such a demon that a backstory is superfluous anyway. It would be like inserting a flashback in Fatal Attraction that showed how her father’s cruelty toward Glenn Close had made her into the psycho who stalks Michael Douglas and boils his little girl’s bunny rabbit. Amy’s monstrousness – like Close’s Alex’s – is so clearly predicated on male terror of aggressive, outsmarting women that the idea of Gone Girl as feminist would be a bad joke if it weren’t so offensive.

Tales from the Making of Niagara, 1953 by Richard Shmelter

Publicity still from Niagara (Photo by Gene Korman).

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara Falls, a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control.” – Boisterous but accurate publicity poster for the film’s release.

“I only stop when I’m done.” – Equally accurate self-analysis from Marilyn herself. 

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Niagara, though some friends prefer to refer to my ardor for it in other ways: obsession, fixation compulsion, fetish. They’re quite right, of course. Maybe it evokes the frequent family road trips I took as a youngster from Toronto to Niagara Falls, or perhaps it was the obvious increase in temperature provoked in a ten-year-old boy caught in the torrential environment of Marilyn Monroe. Guilty as charged. I also enjoy reminding such friends that all those states of mind they teasingly attribute to my passion for this film are essentially the core features of the film noir genre itself.

I can’t count the number of times an argument, or let’s call it a heated disagreement, ensued between myself and other viewers or reviewers who took the noir genre more literally in its black and white, dark urban streets, femme fatale and psycho-thriller overtones. Some friends were underwhelmed by the splashy aura of the falls motif in Niagara, the nearly rural touristy setting, and of course the palette, even if they were mutually taken with Marilyn’s Rose and her sinister appeal. I’m a huge fan of all of those nourish aspects too, but I’m also a huge defender of Niagara as a late-blooming and innovative exponent of the genre that becomes all the more obvious if you simply watch it in black and white as a viewing experiment.

So I’m delighted to report that Richard Shmelter, author of the thoroughly readable and charmingly obsessive Tales from the Making of Niagara, 1953, published by Malibu Sunset Media, not only shares my sense of its brilliantly noirish sunlit darkness, but also acclaims it as the film that first put Monroe on the stellar star map and also made her what she clearly was, has been and I suppose always will be: what he calls an iconic influencer. The fact is that, in the absence of a historical context back then in the 50’s for the very postmodern social media concept of what an influencer is and does, Shmelter demonstrates that the impact of her persona and gravitas makes it not only acceptable to call her that, but almost imperative. I guess that kind of makes her a posthumous influencer.

DC’s Doomsday – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I felt so, so bad for the five- or six-year-old boy sitting with his family in the row ahead of me for my screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He got up from his seat several times and capered about through the aisle, barely paying attention to the noise blaring around him, and when he did, asking pointed and, I thought, very excellent questions like, “Who is that?” and “Mommy, why does Batman hate Superman?” His parents shushed him each time, but I wanted to high-five the poor kid. What a tragedy it is that these people brought him to this film, thinking he would have a fun time watching his heroes on the big screen. What cruelty for Zack Snyder and Warner Bros to have done what they did to these characters, and by extension, to him. When Batman v Superman isn’t a violent, grim, tedious slog, it’s an unforgivable corruption of some of comicdom’s most beloved characters, who are twisted to serve a ten-year marketing plan and Snyder’s galaxy-sized ego. It’s one of, if not the single most unpleasant and incoherent comic book movies ever made. And all I can do for that kid is be grateful that the Marvel movies and shows are still there to remind him how this shit is supposed to be done.

The Agony and the Artistry: Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway

Photo: Robert Capa/Magnum.

“At some point in the unfolding of his brilliant career, a tragedy began to take shape”: so begins Mary V. Dearborn’s Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (Knopf; 738 pp.). What follows is the history of that tragedy. More, perhaps, than any previous Hemingway biography – save Paul Hendrickson’s harrowing Hemingway’s Boat (2011), which is more a psycho-factual exploration of selected themes than biography per se – Dearborn’s is a chronicle of physical and mental agonies, some fateful, others self-inflicted. In this telling, as tragedy takes its shape, it misshapes the life. It’s a more than valid view of this particular figure. Even in his prime, when he was kicking ass and taking names, beaming out from front pages and basking in celebrity, Hemingway was moving toward a violent end almost too easy to see, with hindsight, as predestined. The end seemed foretold in family dysfunction – suicidal father, mother whose outsize presence and personal ambition both inspired and infuriated her son. It was encouraged by ego, money, and acclaim after the first stunning short stories and history-making novels. It was urged from the 1930s onward by alcoholism, physical self-abuse, and a tendency to disastrous accidents. It burgeoned in the lengthening depressions, cognitive degeneration, and inferior work of his last decade. And it came, finally, in the early hours of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway took his life with a shotgun in an isolated house in the mountains of Idaho, three weeks short of his sixty-second birthday.

Pads and Claws: The Cat Vanishes

In Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), detective Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) loses his cat when he tries to feed him food he doesn't care for (worse, he tries to fool the pet by pretending it's his favourite). The cat's disappearance becomes a test of loyalty that opens up the theme of the picture. In Argentinian director Carlos Sorin's sly and deceptive The Cat Vanishes, when the pet feline Donatello flees, it becomes a test of sanity for both the characters and us. The Cat Vanishes is being compared to Hitchcock's thrillers, but the resemblance is superficial at best. Unlike Hitchcock, Sorin submerges the familiar techniques of suspense while presenting instead a chamber piece that's embroidered with chills. The story is as devious as the missing Donatello.

The Cat Vanishes opens humorously with a lengthy exposition scene that resembles a similar one that concluded Psycho. A number of psychologists are gathered to discuss Luis (Luis Luque), a history professor who has been institutionalized after having a major breakdown. This esteemed scholar had thought a colleague had stolen his life work with the aid of his wife Beatriz (Beatriz Spelzini), so his violent outburst against both of them lands him in the mental hospital. But the doctors also believe that his breakdown was temporary. Given his solid reputation, they arrive at the conclusion that maybe he should be released into the care of Beatriz. At first, Beatriz tries to make Luis comfortable and calm, but when Donatello freaks out at his arrival and soon disappears, Beatriz begins to wonder if all is well with her hubby after all. She even wonders if his appearance and the cat's departure are linked.

The Power of Big Love (Part Two)

Big Love differs from other cable series in its unpredictable casting. The Sopranos, True Blood, Mad Men and Six Feet Under, for example, generally have cast unfamiliar, even unknown actors, in the leads, so as to avoid viewer preconceptions. (I was barely aware of who Edie Falco (Carmelo Soprano) and James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) were when The Sopranos began and didn’t know most of the casts of the other shows.) Big Love has taken the opposite tack by signing on better known actors and setting them down in unlikely roles. I would never have imagined casting American indie actress Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry, American Psycho), as the repressed, sexually and otherwise, Nicki, Roman Grant’s daughter, whom Bill married for political reasons, in an attempt to being some rapport between him and his father-in-law, and who finds herself caught between conflicting loyalties to her husband and father. She’s a revelation in that role. Similarly, I never realized how good Jeanne Tripplehorn could be when she had a part worthy of her talent. The actress, who was previously best known for her ordinary roles in bad movies like Basic Instinct and Waterworld, is superb as Bill’s only legally recognized wife, who was never born to the polygamous faith and who has thus never quite reconciled herself to it. (The reasons she agreed to it are revealed at the outset of the show but I won’t spoil that for you.)The same could be said for Bill Paxton (Twister, Apollo 13), who as Bill Henrickson, plumbs the depths of ordinariness, even banality, to get at a multilayered persona beneath, someone who is more like Roman than he can admit. That’s a tour de force performance Paxton never got to give in his competent but one dimensional movie roles.

Critic's Crypt: Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator & From Beyond

Jeffrey Combs in Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985).

Critics At Large is pleased to present CRITIC’S CRYPT, a new column in which our writers compare, contrast, and explore two horror films that are linked by a common element. For our first installment, Justin Cummings tackles two Lovecraftian horror adaptations by director Stuart Gordon.

I mourn daily the gross appropriation of the works of Howard Philip Lovecraft in popular culture. I blame those (like the bacon-loving patrons of theCHIVE and its ilk) who attach empty-headed significance to the icon of Cthulhu the same way Bill Watterson’s Calvin is grotesquely bandied about by idiots everywhere on pickup truck window decals. Cthulhu is inescapable in today’s culture, filling store shelves with squid-faced plush dolls and bumper stickers, bought by consumers who couldn’t name you a single Lovecraft story, let alone have ever taken the time to read one. Lovecraft himself was a weirdo and a racist: a brilliant asshole through and through. His writing is the product of a deeply troubled mind, which grasped at the greater truth he desperately hoped was hiding behind the drudgery of daily life – an artist with great talent plagued by financial trouble and an inescapable sense of despair. He was what you might charitably call the “sadder but wiser” sort of guy, whose stories were almost always linked by a general fascination about “that which man was never meant to know.” It’s horror, to be sure, but intellectual horror; stories inspired by and largely about ideas that are too frightening for the human mind to comprehend. These tales were never typified by gore, sexual content, or general gross excess, although you could be forgiven for thinking so based on adaptations like Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986). It’s these kind of representations of his work which, I think, have led to an inaccurate perception of what the tales of Lovecraft are really about, and of why his work remains so influential long after his death (at least to those who read it).

On their own terms, Re-Animator and From Beyond are terrifically fun splatter pictures. They’re among the premier examples of genre convergence in horror cinema, combining science fiction, comedy, and body horror in ways that still feel fresh and charged with energy. In fact, they share more than just genre: they both star Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, and are both directed and co-written by Stuart Gordon. Viewed as a double bill (an experience I can enthusiastically recommend), they feel like sister pictures – two different expressions of the same creative spark. Re-Animator is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West, Re-Animator,” which is both longer and far less entertaining than Gordon’s version, and From Beyond is a greatly expanded version of the original 7-page story of the same name. They were produced and released back-to-back in a storm of cheap shoots, fake blood, intense performances, and some genuinely excellent filmmaking craft, all inspired by Gordon’s experience in the world of theatre and his interest in the blood, the shock, and the passion of the Grand Guignol tradition.

Full Carnival Drag: How Music Works by David Byrne

Musician David Byrne

Over the past couple of weeks I have been to a backyard concert featuring Jacob Moon and Suzie Vinnick; a Tribute to the Music of Pink Floyd at Hugh’s Room in Toronto; and led a discussion on the importance of music in the life of the church. We talked about the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of music and experienced all of those aspects in the concerts. I also spent a long time trying to arrange a song on the guitar. Then David Byrne’s new book, How Music Works (McSweeney’s, 2012), appeared on the shelves. I bought it immediately.

David Byrne is the brainy and gangly leader of Talking Heads, a band which even during its lifespan seemed to exist outside the pop music world. Against contemporaries like The Clash, Elvis Costello and The Sex Pistols, the Talking Heads were…ummm…artsier and maybe even geekier. Byrne’s angular dance moves and odd vocalizing was, at times, off putting, but, with Tina Weymouth’s bass and Chris Frantz’s drums providing a funky bottom to the sometimes political lyrics, the band managed to successfully combine art school ideas, rock ‘n’roll rifts and whimsy. The whimsy and art were multiplied in Byrne’s solo career as he added influences from World Music and performance art to his resume. He has published a number of books, one on the use of Power-Point, another on his habit of taking a bicycle with him when he tours. How Music Works contains a chapter expanded from a TED.com talk, another one from an introduction to a picture book about CBGB, and yet another which began life as an article in WIRED magazine, and much more.

M*A*S*H: Novel into Film into Sitcom, and Notes on the Long Run

The cast of Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), based on the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker. (Photo: IMDB)

“Richard Hooker,” whose real name was Richard Hornberger, had been a surgeon in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, during the Korean War. Failing to interest a dozen or so publishers in his sheaf of random anecdotes about cutting soldiers and cutting up in America’s least-understood modern conflict, he partnered with sportswriter W.C. Heinz, who took a hired gun’s silent pay to whip the sheaf into shape. It was published, in 1968, as MASH: A Novel of Three Army Doctors, and a few days ago – for no reason other than that an episode of the associated sitcom was on television, and that I was eager to avoid doing some actual work – I retrieved the paperback of the novel that I’d had since high school. I remembered some things about the book and had forgotten others. Remembered: the characters, while similar to those who populate Robert Altman’s 1970 film adaptation, bear almost no resemblance to those of the long-running (1972-83) TV version. Forgotten: the style and matter of the novel are cool and mordant in a mostly appealing way – albeit with much of the sexism that makes the Altman film offensive, but without a hint of the sanctimony that so defined the series in its last several seasons.

Curtis Hanson: A Career in Perspective

Eminem and Curtis Hanson (right) on the set of 8 Mile in 2002. (Photo: Eli Reed)

Film director Curtis Hanson, who died in September at the too-young age of seventy-one, was stuck in B-movie territory for a decade and a half before he graduated, in 1987, with the thriller The Bedroom Window. (One of his last B-pictures, Losin’ It, about three SoCal high-schoolers who drive to Tijuana to get rid of their virginity, was coarse and chaotic but very likable. One of them was played by Tom Cruise, just months before Risky Business made him a star, and I’ve never enjoyed watching him as much since.) Once he made it to the majors, so to speak, Hanson made eleven pictures, and I like all or part of every single one except for his first hit, the witless 1992 Gothic The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – it was efficiently directed, but the dunderheaded script was insurmountable. What made him so reliable a filmmaker was a combination of his bred-in-the-bone understanding of genre conventions, his transparent love of actors and his undervalued gift for getting fine work out of them, and his relaxed finesse as a storyteller. This last is no surprise: from his first days in movies, the early seventies, he was a screenwriter as well as a director, penning the compulsively watchable, enjoyably amoral Canadian mystery The Silent Partner (directed by Daryl Duke and starring Elliott Gould, Susannah York and Christopher Plummer) in 1978 and contributing to the scripts of Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Carroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf in the early eighties. And he kept his hand in: he wrote The Bedroom Window and co-wrote the best picture he ever turned out, L.A. Confidential, with Brian Helgeland, as well as one of his last movies, Lucky You, with Eric Roth.