Film Pairing — Cary Grant Times Two

With the possible exception of To Catch a Thief, these two films may be the best of the Cary Grant films, certainly of those with suspense at the core.  Romance, humor and danger are an entertaining mix for a double feature to snuggle up to some chilly night. In fact, it is such an obvious pairing I’m almost embarrassed to pair them.

Cary Grant And Eva Marie Saint

North By Northwest — As you would expect there is disagreement about which of Alfred Hitchcock’s films is his greatest. This one is toward the top of my list. By fluke, a Manhattan advertising executive (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a CIA agent. He is kidnapped and marked for death by a smuggler, played by James Mason. Grant’s character escapes and the chase begins — trains, planes, cornfields and national landmarks. Enter a love interest.  Eva Marie Saint portrays the smart (smarter than the usual Hitchcock blonde), beautiful, if not devious, damsel in distress.  Martin Landau is strong in a supporting role.  And I always like to see Leo G. Carroll. As usual, watch for Alfred’s trademark cameo                      

Cary Grant And Audrey Hepburn

Charade — A slightly darker film, but not all that dark, Charade is decidedly more of a mystery. A man is murdered, thrown off a train.  His widow (Audrey Hepburn) soon realizes she had no idea who her husband really was. Unfortunately for her, his unsavory cohorts believe she has the money her husband stole from them. And they want it back. When a handsome and charming stranger (Cary Grant) enters her life, she believes he’s there to help her.  Is he?  Stanley Donen directed this 1963 film based on a short story, “The Unsuspecting Wife,” by Peter Stone and Mark Behm. The strong supporting cast includes Walter Matthau, James Coburn and George Kennedy. There are many good reasons to watch this film. One is the score by Henry Mancini. The other is Charles Lang’s stylish cinematography.

As a number of critics have pointed out over the years, Charade seems like a Hitchcock film. If it were, it would be among the legendary director’s best. This alone makes it an interesting double bill. The opening credits on both films are also worth watching.  

Incidentally three years ago, Life Death and Fog polled visitors to vote on their favorite Hitchcock movies.  Click here for this blog’s top ten by the master.

Libations: With the Hitchcock film, try a Gibson. This is the drink he orders on the train. It is really a gin martini, usually served with a small, silverskin onion. Stirred, not shaken. With Charade, we need to drink in the spirit of Paris.  Perhaps now that it’s legal in the U.S., some absinthe.  For those who want to keep a clear head in order to keep track of Grant’s identities, mix tonic, lemon, citrus bitters, and rock candy for a great mocktail.

Film Pairings — Espionage Light, Some Early Hitchcock

Espionage is in the air.  I suspect the folks hanging around Hollywood are in a spirited development mood as they work on surveillance and spy stories to pick up on the national, if not international mood — not that there aren’t some classics in the archives.  An evening not so long ago I revisited some Hitchcock films made before he packed his British bags and headed for the colonies, where in my amateur assessment, he did most of his best films.

However in Secret Agent (1936) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) we clearly see what made Hitchcock Hitchcock — suspense pleasantly undermined by humor or humor slightly spiced by suspense. 

In Secret Agent, we have mostly a Noel Coward-styled, bantering dialogue with super actors John Gielgud and Madeleine Carroll as well as scene-stealing Peter Lorre and a surprisingly dashing Robert Young.  The film was based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham, one of the most popular novelists of the day and often credited with being one of the masters of the spy novel, along with Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

A couple of things jumped out at me while watching Secret Agent.  I had just seen Gielgud in a 1994 episode of the “Alleyn Mysteries” a few days earlier. He played an elderly gentleman, which of course he was.  But he seemed almost elderly in 1936 as well.  That means he had to have been 35 when he was born. The second shock was how beautiful and talented Madeleine Carroll was.  Where had she been all my life? I don’t remember her from my teen years watching all those late night movies on the hulking Zenith TV from the springy discomfort of the Hide-A-Bed in the living room after everyone else went to sleep. The third surprise was a handsome, debonair Robert Young. This was an actor as far from Jim Anderson in “Father Knows Best” or “Dr. Marcus Welby,” as could be.  It was easy to see Hitchcock locking on to an actor who promised to be Cary Grant. 

In the film, Gielgud and Carroll are hired to find and dispose of a German agent out to harm the allies. And they have psychopath Lorre to “help” them. It’s a wonder we won the war.

The Lady Vanishes is cut from the same cloth as Secret Agent and perhaps both, in terms of style, owe a great deal to The Thin Man, a popular American film that preceded both of them by a couple of years.  A little silliness, some outright slapstick and a flirtatious duel between Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave, reminiscent of Nick and Nora.  Maybe this similarity merely reflects the style of the times.

Dame May Whitty steals the show, for me, as the lady in the title.  It takes a few minutes, more than it should, I think, for the story to take off. Once they get out of the hotel and onto the train, it’s a great ride. And we pick up more early evidence of Hitchcock’s fascination with cool blondes and fast trains. The film was based on the novel, The Wheel Spins, by Ethyl Lina White, a popular British crime writer of the era.

An accompaniment to the evening? Gin and tonic, possibly with a slice of cucumber. Hide your smart phones. Get comfy in your upholstered chairs and give in to espionage with twists of Brit wit and whimsy.  This is late 1939, remember.  Not a lot of blood and car chases.

San Francisco Bookstores — Nostalgic Look Back, Some Who Weathered The Storm

We began this series talking about how many of the big bookstores have disappeared in the recent but fast-breaking wave toward ebook domination. No Borders or Barnes & Noble inside San Francisco’s city limits. Virgin, Stacey’s, and Cody’s are gone from here. But some, who were around before these stores were even built have come and gone.

During my brief but enjoyable stint as editor of the Nob Hill Gazette, I assigned myself a story that required me to explore Francisco’s bookstores. What a job. (What would I assign myself next? Bakeries, gelato joints?) That would be 1983. Many of the bookstores I wrote about then have also disappeared. However, some have survived.

So, as I contemplated what bookstores would be next in this ongoing series, I began to look at Antiquarian bookstores. That’s when I remembered doing that article I wrote a little more than a quarter of a century ago. I wondered which bookstores I wrote about and what I said.

Of course, there was City Lights, which still exists and still shines as does its owner and co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But there was another famous bookstore owner here in the City — Warren Howell.

“Warren Howell, son of the man who founded John Howell Books in 1912, is regarded as the “dean of bookmen,” a title he both earned and relishes,” I wrote then. He was the person to go to if you wanted first editions of works by Keats, Whitman and Spencer. He once possessed a Samuel Johnson dictionary and first-edition hand-printed copy of Ulysses signed by James Joyce. His store on Post Street was often regarded as the best Antiquarian bookstore on the West Coast. It is gone now.

However, the Argonaut Book Shop, founded in 1941, still exists and is a highly respected dealer in antiquarian books, particularly about the history of California and the American West. If you want to know what a bookshop is supposed to look like, this is it. At least that was Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion when he ordered a replica of the store built in Hollywood for a scene in his film, Vertigo. In addition to its Western literature orientation, the shop has a broad selection of books on the American Civil War as well as posters from World War One and other maps, prints, and photographs.

786 Sutter Street, (415) 474-9067, www.argonautbookshop.com

For those who miss John Howell Books, don’t despair. There’s a fine, antiquarian bookshop just off Union Square. John Windle Antiquarian Booksellers occupies a large suite in a building full of highly respected, fine art galleries. Unlike the galleries, wide open and generously lit, the shop seems more like a sacred library, a place where one might uncover the next DaVinci code. And as the mood suggests, the store specializes in medieval illuminated text manuscripts and “illustrated books and fine bindings from the 15th through the 20th centuries.

49 Geary, Suite 233, (415) 986-5826, www.johnwindle.com

I wouldn’t consider Fields Bookstore to be antiquarian. However, the fact that it has been around since 1932 — in the same location — gives it some historic authority. This shop was in my original story in the Gazette under the category of “Metaphysical.” This wasn’t the stereotypical California “vibe” kind of metaphysics. This is oriented to series readers of esoteric and magical studies, major Eastern religions, Jungian psychology and considerably more. They deal in both new and used books and because this is the only bookstore for what is now being called “Polk Village,” they also have a selection of general interest bestsellers as well.

1419 Polk Street, (415) 673-2027, www.fieldsbooks.com

Other bookstores have disappeared since my original article was published. You might remember Small Press Traffic, which specialized in books by individuals and independent publishers. Richard Hilkert Bookseller, Ltd., was a rare books shop on the pre-trendy Hayes Street. There was McDonalds, a gigantic used bookstore, noted for its dust and lack of organization. Two stores devoted to film and theatre — Limelight and Drama Books — are now among the missing. Old Wives Tales was a store was devoted to books for, by and about women. And well before Different Light bit the dust recently, the first of its kind in San Francisco, Walt Whitman Gay Bookstore, went out of business. You might also remember Paperback Traffic, which had a huge store on Polk and a second later on Castro. There were others. And there will be others even as the whole idea of reading approaches new frontiers.

Caption: Detail from the celestial ceiling mural at Fields Bookstore. The artist is Shelley Masters

Opinion — My Own Version of Nine, Nine, Nine

A couple of weeks ago, at Murderati, writer David Corbett revisited a scholarly panel discussion held at the recent St. Louis Bouchercon. The topic was best crime films of all time. At the Tipping My Fedora blog, there are the results of a huge undertaking: A list of the “Top 101 Film and TV Mysteries.” Both are well worth reading. As you might expect there isn’t 100 percent agreement. I’ve been playing with various “top” lists over the years and thought I’d throw my lists into the mix.

With apologies to Herman Cain, I’ve come up with three lists of nine. But first, some caveats. My list is biased. It is based on my relatively late in-life-arrival on the crime fiction scene, a general lack of awareness of foreign crime films, and an inexplicable disinterest in movies made before 1940. The other point to be made is that this is a list of what I think are the “best” crime movies, not necessarily a list of “my favorite” films. And while best and favorite are still only opinions, I believe there is a difference. If it were a list of my favorites, the list would look a little different. For me “best” means that they are something beyond just damned good. They break new ground or exemplify a complete and perhaps overwhelming mastery of the form they chose. I love the American-made Alfred Hitchcock movies, for example, but, in my opinion, many of the ones I really like, are seriously flawed, which brings me to this: I know making lists like these is no way to make friends. Here they are, anyway.

Film Pairing — Three Views of the Not So Perfect Crime

Clarence Darrow might be the most famous real attorney in American history. In addition to his legendary defense of evolution in the Tennessee “Scopes Monkey Trial” (made into the play and film, Inherit the Wind), Darrow also defended the notorious young geniuses Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold who killed a third young man to make manifest an intellectual theory that if one is smart enough, common morality no longer applies. If, then, you can commit the perfect crime, you are, in effect, entitled to do so.

The killing of young Bobby Franks in 1924 is believed to have inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 experimental film, Rope, and it was most certainly the basis for the 1959 award-winning movie, Compulsion, as well as the 1992, edgy and award-winning film, Swoon.

Despite having the same crime as the basis for the drama, the three films are nothing alike.

Rope, starring Farley Granger and James Stewart, is largely regarded as Hitchcock’s foray into experimental filmmaking and the famous director himself, thinking he’d failed, kept the movie from circulation for twenty years. Happily, time proved him wrong. It is a fascinating movie, cinematically as well as dramatically. It is hard to tell whether the real genius in the film is the cinematography or the clever subtext that allows the homosexuality of the main characters to ride just below Hollywood’s stifling puritanical code. Highly recommended.

Sadly, Compulsion, which was more faithful to the facts of the actual crime and trial, wouldn’t or couldn’t reveal the full, complex nature of the characters about whom the film was made. Though the crime was murder and not a sex crime, the relationship between Loeb and Leopold, their shared philosophy and love or obsession for one another, is at the heart of the matter and made their defense — in front of a jury of their “peers” — much more difficult because there were no peers. Whether, as a film, this was any better than a standard episode of Law & Order is a question in my mind. However, it is a pleasure to see Orson Welles, however briefly, and E. G. Marshall engaged in courtroom battle.

Swoon is something else altogether. It neither shies away from the characters’ sexual attractions as Compulsion did, nor did it turn a gruesome murder into an interesting intellectual parlor game as was done — and done well — in Rope. At the time of its release, Swoon was heralded as a landmark in the “new queer cinema” and might still have the capacity to shock some viewers. Director Tom Kalin, who later would direct another real life crime story, Savage Grace, seemed to focus on the homosexuality of the characters and the homophobia of both the prosecution and the times rather than the crime for which they were indeed guilty. However, looking at how the other two films evaded or avoided the boys’ relationship altogether lends a bit of credence to the film’s innate criticism — or perhaps over compensation.

Pick any two of the above black & white films; but remember, in the 1920s, Prohibition was still in effect. You may have to settle for bathtub gin or something illegally purchased in a foreign country. Absinthe, perhaps. Or do we have to save that drink for the trial of Madame X?