Week that Was

Hitchcock Moves On

It seemed like such an inauspicious end to the life of a man who had turned death and murder into a 20th century art form. On Tuesday April 29, 1980, Alfred Hitchcock died in his sleep at his Bel Air home from renal failure at the ripe old age of 80. There was no mystery, no suspense, no suspicion of foul play. Hitchcock even dispensed with his own axiom: "There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it." Having been sick for a while he'd slowly moved towards death. In August 1979, he told Ingrid Bergman that he was going to die, and it seemed that everyone knew this as well. That January, the Queen of England had made him a knight. The British-American Chamber of Commerce named him Man of the Year. In the months before his death, he bitterly detached himself from the world. He stopped eating and seeing friends, often growing angry and frustrated at those around him, all the while hastening his own end and allowing others to let go. By the time it came, there was no surprise. Alma, his wife and collaborator, was by his side, but illness had worn her down as well so no one was quite sure how much she comprehended. In the end, his ashes were scattered over the Pacific, but his films remain as popular as ever.

The Saint of the Cinémathèque

40 years ago this week, the actions of the international community of filmmakers brought justice to a wronged man as Henri Langlois was reinstated as the head of the Cinémathèque Française. Langlois and his friend and filmmaker Georges Franju had started the institution in the 1930s. They heroically assembled the world's largest collections of films and cinematic documents despite the Nazi's attempts to destroy all films made before 1937. However, the government involvement in the organization, which had begun after World War II, increased over time and on February 9, 1968, they sacked Langlois, citing his eccentricities and lack of management skills as their reason. French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux replaced Langlois with Pierre Barbin, however the filmmakers who had either grown up watching films at the Cinémathèque (the "children of the Cinémathèque") or had received a career boost by being championed by Langlois protested this decision. Langlois was a widely adored figure and within hours 40 filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson withdrew permission for their films to be shown at the Cinémathèque. Quickly Charlie Chaplin, Roberto Rossellini, Fritz Lang, Richard Lester, Carl Dreyer, Orson Welles, and Jerry Lewis also followed suit. Parisian filmmakers and film students protested on the streets (Truffaut, Godard and a young Betrand Tavernier were injured by police), and pressure mounted on the government to reverse their decision. The "Langlois Affair" was resolved after almost three months when the French government withdrew its financial support from the Cinémathèque Française, meaning Langlois could be reinstated but that the organization was financially much worse off. The protests around Langlois' sacking anticipated the events of May '68 and, along with the May '68 protests, was a contributing factor in the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival later that year. Both Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) are set against the cultural backdrop of Paris during the Langlois Affair.

Conduct Unbecoming

On April 30, 1933, just three weeks after it was first released, Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduite (Zero for Conduct) was banned by the French authorities. The 40-odd minute film was about teenage boys in a French boarding school who revolt against their prison-like existence, and was deemed by the board of censors (under pressure from the government) for its "praise of indiscipline & attacking the prestige of the teaching profession". The teachers in the film were portrayed as dictatorial, although Vigo chose to have some of them by dummies or skeletons. The film was inspired by Vigo's own unhappy childhood spent in boarding school after his father, Spanish militant anarchist Miguel Almereyda, was strangled in a prison cell in 1917 when Vigo was 12. Zero de Conduite's most famous moment is the iconic scene in which the boys have a pillow fight in slow motion which turns into a parody of a religious procession as feathers fall all around them. Tragically, Vigo died of tuberculosis 18 months later, just after the release of his other great classic, L'Atalante, after making just four films. It was not until just after the end of World War II that the ban on Zero de Conduite was lifted in France, however the film was then recognized as the masterpiece that it is. The influence of Vigo's film can be seen very clearly in François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Lindsay Anderson's If…. (1968), while the slo-mo pillow fight scene has been much imitated in films as diverse as Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliott.

I Don't Know Who Killed Me

On April 30, 1950, long before PDAs, Day Runners and the Covey system, there was Rudolph Mate's D.O.A., which took the concept of personal day planning to life-or-death extremes. It was on this date that the conceptually innovative film noir, which starred Edmond O'Brien and Pamela Britton, opened in theaters. In D.O.A., O'Brien plays an accountant who, after a wild night at a jazz club, starts feeling ill. Seeing a doctor, he learns that he's been poisoned and has only days to live. The film, then, goes on to detail O'Brien's attempt to solve a murder: his own. Writing in Salon, critic Michael Sragow called D.O.A. "a high-concept movie before its time," and, indeed, the movie literalizes the screenplay device of "the ticking clock" that is so prevalent in thrillers today. Interestingly, during the Cold War era, in which ideological impurity was the threat-of-the-moment, a drama was built around an individual poisoning. Today, in the post-9/11 24 era, it is the body politic, contaminated with sleeper cells and other traces of extremist ideologies, that is feared to be corrupted, and a vial of iridium is replaced by a ticking nuclear bomb.

By Any Other Name…

"Rosebud" — that immortal cinematic come-on was first heard by movie audiences on May 1, 1941, when Citizen Kane opened in theaters. Orson Welles' debut feature is routinely cited as the greatest American movie ever made. In telling the fictional story of Charles Foster Kane, a wealthy newspaper magnate modeled on William Randolph Hearst, the film is something of a psychological mystery. Innovatively structured and shot, by Gregg Toland, with striking deep-focus compositions, the film sifts through the shards of Kane's life, attempting to discover the meaning behind that dying word. The characters in the film don't solve the mystery, but we, the viewer, do, realizing that the happy times for this most American of characters occurred only long ago in his poverty-stricken youth. Despite its importance today, the film was a box office failure at the time — in no small part to the pressure that Hearst applied to sink it. (At one point, Hearst offered RKO Pictures $800,000 to destroy all prints and destroy the negative. When they declined his offer, he made sure that no Hearst paper or radio station mentioned, let alone reviewed, the film.) The movie nearly sank from public consciousness, until it was released in Europe in 1946, where critics like André Bazin championed its genius.

Sweet Sixteen

In 1984, a quirky comedy about a teenage girl whose family forgets her 16th birthday launched the career of one of Hollywood's most influential writer-directors. The first-time filmmaker John Hughes had honed his comic skills through a variety of jobs: ad man, editor of National Lampoon magazine, and screenwriter of National Lampoon's Class Reunion and Mr. Mom. But with Sixteen Candles he found his real milieu — the hallways of America's high schools. Hughes later earned the moniker "philosopher of adolescence" by his fellow Chicagoan Roger Ebert for the unparalleled string of teen comedies that followed Sixteen Candles. His pitch-perfect casting (Sixteen Candles launched Molly Ringwald's career), his hip, upbeat soundtracks, and his sweet-natured raunchy humor — who doesn't remember, "Can I borrow your underpants for 10 minutes?" ?— spoke to a whole generation of kids as nothing else had. In a recent Los Angeles Times article, today's reigning comic success story Judd Apatow credited Hughes with his own success: "It's pretty ridiculous to hear people talk about the movies we've been doing, with outrageous humor and sweetness all combined, as if they were an original idea. I mean, it was all there first in John Hughes' films."