Nutshell: The film starts with a stage curtain opening... on real life London! RADA acting student Eve (Jane Wyman) has a mad crush on pretty boy actor Jonathan (Richard Todd) who yanks her out of class to ask a little favor - seems he’s been sleeping with big time stage star Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich) who is very married... and he's now the prime suspect in her husband’s murder. Could Eve whisk him away to her father’s boat up the coast so that he can evade the police? Eve hides Jonathan, and then uses her acting talents to infiltrate Charlotte’s life and find the evidence that will prove the big time star is the killer and the man both women love is innocent. Complications include Eve’s divorced and constantly bickering parents (a wacky Alastair Sim and Sybil Thorndike) and the detective investigating the murder, Ordinary Smith (Michael Wilding)... whom she falls in love with. The idea of an actress playing different roles to go undercover and find a killer is fantastic - but this story just squanders it. I wonder if part of the problem was Wyman - who won an Oscar for JOHNNY BELINDA - had a limited range or just didn’t want to play unglamourous characters. So one of the big problems is that she goes undercover looking like herself, which kind of kills the concept.
Experiment: MAJOR SPOILERS!!! This film has a flashback that lies. When Eve is driving Jonathan to her father’s boat, he tells her what happened - how Charlotte murdered her husband and got Jonathan to cover it up, which lead to him being discovered at the crime scene by the maid, and we see what happens as he tells the story... and his story is a complete lie! What I find interesting about this is that it shows how the visual side of our screenplays is much much much more important than the dialogue. If Jonathan had just told her the story verbally - and we just showed him in the car telling her what happened - we would be able to accept that it was all a lie later in the film. But we *see* the story as he tells it, and seeing is believing. Later when we find out it was a lie, we have trouble processing that because we *saw* what happened! Hitchcock took a major beating for this experiment from the critics, and the film flopped. Audience members could not accept *seeing* a lie - what we see is real, what a character says may be a lie.
I don’t know if this experiment would fail today - but I remember when I first saw BLOOD SIMPLE wondering how the hell Jon Getz could possibly show up at the bar after we saw photos of him shot dead. Later I realized the photos had been doctored, but I had been pulled out of the story for a moment. Though RASHAMON shows us the same story from different POVs - and each telling is very different than the others. So maybe it could work?
Great *Shot*: When Jonathan enters Charlotte’s house - the crime scene - we have a continuous take from the street outside, Jonathan opening the door and entering the house, then closing the door and we follow him upstairs. No cuts, all one shot!
Hitch Appearance: 40 minutes in - Eve is walking down the street talking to herself and trying to get into character, she passes Hitch... who looks at her like she’s crazy. Today, she might just be talking on a cell phone.
Great Scenes: The downfall of this film - no great scenes! There are even some scenes that might have been pretty good if written differently. This is not only a movie about The Theatre, it seems stagey. Lots of sit and talk and stand and talk scenes, and not much movement. No chase scenes, no suspense scenes, nothing! A thriller without the thriller scenes! Talk about rookie screenwriting mistakes! So we’re going to look at where the story goes wrong, and one interesting thing the film does right...
See Me Think! Speaking of BLOOD SIMPLE and Jon Getz, there’s a great bit in that film where you see his character *think*... and figure out a situation. In STAGE FRIGHT there are two scenes where we see people think, and both are kind of cool. When Jonathan is telling Eve his story, there comes a point where he realizes that all of the evidence points to him as the killer instead of Charlotte. This is done without dialogue. We see Jonathan’s face, and each piece of evidence superimposed (an action bit - like picking up the murder weapon and getting his fingerprints on it or being spotted leaving the crime scene by the maid). He realizes that he’s going to be blamed for the murder, without saying anything. Done visually.
The same method is used later when Eve’s Dad is trying to figure out a way to shock Charlotte into confessing while she is on stage at a garden party RADA benefit. He sees a woman in a white dress, and a blood stain is superimposed over it. (Charlotte’s dress had a big blood stain after the murder, and Jonathan destroyed it to protect her... destroying the only evidence that could have saved him.) Eve’s Dad then sees blood stains on a bunch of women’s dresses... and eventually he gets to a carnival shooting gallery and sees blood stains on the Kewpie Doll’s dresses. He then has to win a Kewpie Doll, get blood on the little Kewpie Doll dress, and has a little Cub Scout take the Kewpie Doll up to where Charlotte is on stage singing. Which completely freaks her out...
Identity Confusion: The Garden Party RADA benefit is one of a handful of scenes that should have been very tense because Eve has to be herself *plus* play the role of Charlotte’s temp maid. The problem is, none of these scenes seem to be written for suspense - with someone discovering she’s not who she claims to be, and because there is no real difference between Eve and the temp maid physically, we don’t even have a Clark Kent Without His Glasses situation.
IN *DISGUISE* AS THE MAID:
AS HERSELF:
In an earlier scene, when she is first putting together the temp maid character, she wears a pair of thick glasses swiped from her landlady... and can’t see a thing when she’s wearing them. But she never wears the glasses again - never when she’s playing the maid. This is a lost opportunity. The glasses not only made her look different, they are something she could forget or not have, creating suspense and problems when she is dealing with someone who knows her as the maid. Also a way for *us* to identify who she is supposed to be in this scene. Plus, if she can’t see when she is wearing the glasses, that would create times when she *must* take off the glasses (and potentially be caught as a fraud) and times when she makes big mistakes because she can not see with the glasses on.
Also, scenes where she is with one person who knows her as Eve and another who knows her as the maid are always too easy. In one scene the maid is supposed to walk Detective Ordinary Smith to the door, but Smith *knows* Eve and would instantly recognize her. That should have created a big suspense scene... but Smith says he can find his own way out. No suspense. This happens again and again in the film - suspense is *avoided* through some contrived situation that lets Eve off the hook. Suspense scenes are turned into ho-hum scenes where we have a moment of potential fear that if Eve has to do this, she’ll be discovered... then she doesn’t have to do it after all. Easy out.
When your story is about someone with a secret identity, you need to have some element that shows us the different identities, you need to have times where those elements are not present yet the person must become the other identity, and you need to have ways for them to be caught (and people there to catch them). Because the difference between Eve and the maid was an accent - and not even a string one - there was no threat that Eve might get caught being the maid (or vice versa).
Not My Problem: The biggest problem with the story - For 95% of the film this is a typical Hitchcock wrongly accused man story... except the wrongly accused man goes into hiding and isn’t part of the story! Instead, we focus on this woman who has a crush on the wrongly accused man. Eve is never in any real danger, because she wasn’t the one who is accused of murder. Even if she’s discovered playing the maid, what’s the worst that can happen? She gets “fired” as the maid... and the guy she has a crush on (who is not her boyfriend, and is sleeping with another woman) is still hiding. This story is not Eve’s problem - she is never in any real danger, and there are no consequences (to her) if she fails.
And to make matters worse - she falls in love with the detective! That means she isn’t even doing this for the man she loves, the man she loves is not in danger, the man she loves isn’t wrongly accused of murder... the man she loves is now the cop! She is no longer part of this story at all!
And to make matters even worse than that - half the time we are following her *Dad* around! It’s her Dad who hides Jonathan. It’s her Dad who comes up with the Kewpie Doll thing. It’s her Dad who seems to be doing all of the heavy lifting in the story!
So the story is not about the wrongly accused man, is not even about the woman who loves the wrongly accused man, half the time the story is about the father of the woman who once had a mad crush on the wrongly accused man but is now dating someone else! Do you see the problem here? The story focuses on characters who are peripheral to the conflict and are not in any danger at all!
Villain/Hero Confusion: But once we get to the last 5% of the story we run into a big problem... because the wrongly accused man is not wrongly accused at all. He done it. So all of the work Eve has been doing to prove this guy is innocent has been a complete waste of time: her time and *our time* as the viewers of the film! It never mattered whether she succeeded or failed - because she had nothing to do with the outcome. He was always guilty. Had he been innocent and had she been really in love with him, this story might have worked. But when the protagonist’s actions can not change the outcome of the story, we are just watching someone who is not in any danger wasting their time. It makes the whole film pointless.
And how are we supposed to hope she proves the guy is innocent one minute, and then hope the police catch the guy a few minutes later. Jonathan can’t be both the hero and the villain - those are two opposite roles. He can be the wrongly accused man or the real killer, but both doesn’t work.
One of the big problems I had with the film was casting: Not just Wyman’s inability to play different characters, but having to sit through a bunch of Dietrich musical numbers that were just there to capitalize on her, and all of the Alastair Sim quirky shtick (though I thought the bit where he uses the accordion and sings song lyrics instead of dialogue was a good idea), and Detective Ordinary Smith seems to be completely without character or charisma... yet Eve instantly falls in love with him! But Richard Todd as the wrongly accused man doesn’t work for a minute - this guy is wearing a huge sign around his neck that says “Psycho Killer In The Last Reel”. It’s like a murder mystery where all of the suspects are unknowns except for Gary Busey (see CROOKED... on second thought, don’t!). And Todd hams it up - he snarls every single line! By the time we get to the end, where all kinds of things happen in a theatre and Jonathan and Eve end up hiding in the prop room, we know he done it... and the story goes so far over the top with Jonathan suddenly becoming a mad-dog killer with a bunch of previous murders in his past who decides to kill Eve mostly for fun (but to help his insanity defense), you just wonder what was going through the writer’s head. The only way to top it off is to have Jonathan *cut in half* off camera when the fire curtains are dropped on him. The end - curtain is closed.
STAGE FRIGHT just does not work. For all of those people who think the genius of Hitchcock movies is Alfred Hitchcock, here’s proof that you can give The Master Of Suspense a crappy script and you end up with a crappy movie with some great shots and a few great cinematic concepts like the lying flashback. You give Hitchcock a great script, like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and it becomes a classic film with all of those great shots and great cinematic concepts. You have to give the greatest director something to work with. They can make good writing even better, but they can’t do anything with bad writing... except film it.
Next week, it gets even worse! My least favorite Hitchcock film, UNDER CAPRICORN. Haven’t seen it in decades, I wonder if it will be a gem like I CONFESS or a stinker? No matter what, I will end this series owning *every* Hitchcock film on DVD.
- Bill
BUY THE DVD AT AMAZON:
No comments:
Post a Comment