I wanted to pass the boundaries of intelligence for something more pure...

Like Alfred Hitchcock and many others before him, Tom Kalin chose to explore the Leopold and Loeb case through film. The result, Swoon, takes a unique look at the crime by focusing on the intimate relationship between the two men rather than on the adversarial relationship between them and the rest of society, as we saw in Rope.

Through both the cinematography and the mise-en-scène, Kalin puts the audience into the time period of the film while simultaneously taking them out of it. The grainy black-and-white film stock is reminiscent of that which was used in films shot during the 1920s, while occasional extreme angles or use of a handheld camera give the film a more modern feel. Likewise, anachronisms such as a black female stenographer (at the time of the court case, the position was held only by white males) and technology that was unavailable in the 20s, such as touch-tone phones, were used very deliberately and effectively. Taken together, these choices give the audience the dichotomous feelings of watching events unfold as they happen and seeing them with the perspective granted by hindsight.



One of the most interesting scenes in the film comes in the aftermath of the crime. After they are arrested thanks to evidence left at the scene by the perpetually anxious Nathan, the killers are questioned separately and turn on each other. Once they are reunited, each tries to convince the investigators that he had been driving the car while his partner committed the murder in the backseat. They both stick to their stories so firmly that it's impossible to discern which of them is lying; in a tense moment, however, Dickie slips up and "forgets" that he had supposedly been driving. He uses his natural charms to cover his tracks, and both he and Nathan are charged with murder, but the film conclusively indicates that he was the more guilty party.

According to Tom Kalin, who spoke with our class a few weeks after we screened this film, that scene was taken directly from the court transcripts. The film's story grew out of the moment when Richard Loeb inadvertently identified Nathan Leopold as the driver of their car, implying that he himself had been in the backseat with the victim. After reading that part of the transcript, Kalin was convinced that Loeb had been the one to actually take the boy's life, and wrote the movie from that perspective. As a writing student as well as a film student, I found it very interesting to think about the entire film having spiraled out of this one defining moment of truth. The next time I see the movie, I will definitely be thinking about how it leads up to and away from that revelation.

What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for once...

I seem to have taken another unintentional hiatus. Winter break involved a lot less "break" than I thought it would, but I'm back at school now and taking two more film classes this semester. Well, one is actually a French class in which we study French films. In French. This will go swimmingly, I'm sure. Anyway, I still have a whole bunch of notes and blog posts in various stages of construction from last semester, so hopefully the backlog will keep me from going off-air again for a while. For now, I'm going to pick up where I left off.

By pure convenient coincidence, I saw Hitchcock's Rear Window in my Film History class last semester on the same day that I saw his earlier film, Rope, in The Movie Industry. It was my first time watching both movies, and seeing them just a few hours apart I couldn't help comparing the two and drawing some conclusions about Hitchcock as an auteur.

To some extent, Rear Window seems to be Hitchcock's second attempt at the continuous-take effect that he first tried out in Rope. At least, he seems to have learned from his previous mistakes; Rear Window is shot with a lot of long takes and a fluidly moving camera, but there are cuts where necessary to keep the audience interested visually as well as psychologically. Additionally, there is often a lot more going on within the frame than there was in Rope. Although both films take place entirely within the confines of one apartment, Rope kept the camera confined indoors, with the large windows serving only as a backdrop and to indicate the passage of time. In Rear Window, the titular pane offers the camera -- along with protagonist L.B. Jeffries -- an escape. Through his own camera lens, Jeff can view the entire apartment building (which, by the way, was the largest set ever built at the time the film was made) or zoom in on any one residence. Likewise, there are many different areas of the screen on which the audience can concentrate during those long takes, because the frame is filled with the activities of many different interesting and eccentric minor characters.



In addition to being a great technical improvement over Rope, Rear Window is a quintessential psychological thriller. The decision to trap the camera inside with Jeff gives viewers a keen sense of his growing fear and desperation, even when they may find themselves siding with other characters who think he's off his rocker. At any given time, the audience only has as much information as Jeff does, and as a result shares his feeling of helplessness. This emotional connection, formed from the beginning of the film onward, increases the suspense felt at the film's climax, when finally Jeff begins to hear ominous footsteps outside his own door.

Think of the problems it would solve -- unemployment, poverty, standing in line for theater tickets...

Many films, stories, and urban legends have been based on the 1920s Leopold and Loeb case, in which two young men decided to murder someone just to see what it would be like. Alfred Hitchcock's take on the tale, Rope, is notable for two reasons: One, it's Alfred Hitchcock, and that alone is enough to warrant a significant amount of attention. Two, he shot the entire film as one continuous take, an experiment that, while not entirely successful, is a very interesting attempt.

In actuality, the film is a series of takes about six minutes long, because at the time the film was shot that was the longest take possible. Hitchcock gets around this by using a handheld camera that follows the characters around; every six minutes or so, it just happens to come up against the back of someone's jacket or a chair or something else that's solid, giving him the time to change reels while still making the cuts completely invisible.

One very interesting shot that results from this method is that an important conversation takes place entirely offscreen. Brandon and Phillip have killed a classmate of theirs, David, and hidden his body in a large trunk in their living room, which they cover in a tablecloth and use to serve dinner at a party to which they've invited David's parents, his girlfriend, and their old schoolteacher.



Naturally, everyone is concerned when David doesn't make an appearance, but the party goes on without him (at least, as far as the other guests are aware). After they have effectively eaten off of the young man's makeshift coffin, everyone moves over to a large seating area, but the camera remains on the trunk. We hear the party guests discuss once again David's possible whereabouts, while watching the maid, Mrs. Wilson, clear dishes off of the trunk in which we know David's body is hidden; among the guests, only Jimmy Stewart, as the schoolteacher who gave his young students the (purely theoretical) idea to kill in the first place, is visible at the edge of the frame. This juxtaposition of audio and visual information creates the very tension that gave the Master Of Suspense his nickname.

The philosophical arguments presented in the film are compelling enough to make up for the lack of variation in camera work. The teacher, Rupert, postulates that a select group of superior human beings should have the right to kill those who are inferior. His reasoning is cold and academic; it is Brandon and Phillip who decide, arrogantly, that they fall into that "superior" category, and moreover, that Phillip is decidedly inferior. Once he sees how his rationale would be applied out in the real world, Rupert is appropriately horrified -- and yet, still coldly logical enough to deduce that his former students were the ones behind their classmate's disappearance.

Beer drinking don't do 'alf the 'arm of love-making...

When I think of Alfred Hitchcock, the first images that come to my mind are of absolute terror. When digging through a $5 DVD bin at Wal*Mart several months back, I pulled out a boxed set of 20 films from early in the Master of Suspense's career. Admittedly, at this point the only Hitchcock movie I'd ever seen was Notorious, but since I don't happen to live under a rock, I was of course familiar with the famous shower scene from Psycho and the basic plot behind The Birds. This was all I knew of Hitchcock, so naturally I was surprised to see that there was very little actual horror in his earlier works. There are some suspense films in the collection, such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but the movies that most surprised and interested me were the silent romantic comedies. The first of these that I watched was 1928's The Farmer's Wife.

I should start by saying that, although I enjoy silent films, I lack the patience to watch them as closely as they need to be watched. For all my love of classic films, I am a thoroughly modern viewer; I've grown so used to multitasking that I'm almost incapable of sitting down to watch a movie without playing a video game or surfing the internet at the same time. With sound films this isn't much of a problem, because although I may occasionally miss some vital or artistically nuanced action on the screen, I can keep up with the movie's plot simply by listening. Dividing my attention between the TV and my laptop is a lot dicier during a silent film, because all of the information is presented visually. Thus, the first time I watched this film I missed a lot of important parts, such as the farmer's dying first wife reminding Minta, the maid, to hang her master's pants to dry. This seems like a frivolous request to make from one's death bed, but it lets the audience know that the soon-to-be-late wife of the farmer wants him taken care of after she's gone, and that she approves of Minta being the one to do it. This bit of foreshadowing sets up the relationship between Minta and Samuel that doesn't fully develop until the end of the film.

Luckily for me, the film as a whole doesn't rely too much on title cards. Hitchcock lets his actors do the talking, telling the story through actions and emotions rather than words. The audience doesn't need to be told that Samuel is lonely -- we can tell by the way he gazes at the empty chair in front of the fire. Likewise, it's clear from Minta's disapproving expressions, even before the text reveals what she's thinking, that she finds fault with each of the women on his list, perhaps because she herself is not among them. Thirza Topper's vanity, too, is established not by what's said about her but by the sheer amount of time it takes for her to get ready to receive Samuel.

The plot itself is trite but amusing, and I think most audiences would enjoy watching the arrogant Samuel Sweetland rejected again and again. The lack of sound doesn't detract from the clever writing, as Samuel finds new and inventive ways to insult each of the women he proposes to. Overall, it was worth seeing once, but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again.

Sources:

Hitchcock, A.(Director). (1930 January 4). ['Movie']. The Farmer's Wife. British International Pictures.

The Farmer's Wife (1928). (2008). IMDb. Retrieved October 25, 2008, from Internet Movie Database Web site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018876/