Heinlein in Hollywood part 3: Closing the Loop

Robert A. Heinlein is typically considered one of the grand masters of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction," that period just before World War II when the genre began to take itself seriously as literature. The Golden Age writers were typically hard nosed about realistic science within the boundaries of what was then known. Sometimes, their rigor resulted in startling predictive powers. Mostly, they resulted in complicated problems for the characters in the stories. In many ways, Heinlein was the architect of this movement. He was the most popular writer in John W. Campbell's Astounding, the primary outlet for the Golden Age writers, and his mixture of plain-spoken Americana and futurism was the template for science fiction for the next two decades. His characters may have worked in outer space, but they smoked Luckies and chased girls like everyone else. Toward the end of the 1950s the landscape of literary science fiction began to change. Social sciences began to form as much of the background of future societies as the physical sciences. Writers like Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth began to explore the effects of the future on the psychology of its characters rather than having those characters just act in response to plot. By the late fifties, a new crop of writers was waiting to upset the apple cart. Science fiction's "New Wave" was less beholden to science and more interested in literary values like character, theme, and language. Older writers, brought up on the technocratic Golden Age, either adapted or found other work. Robert Heinlein turned out to be particularly adaptable. His major novels of the 1960s are a fusion of the old and the new. The technological future is still there, but the problems are dramatically different. Heinlein's fiction turned inward.

Predestination (2014, directed by the Spierig Brothers) is the first film since Destination: Moon to approach Robert Heinlein on his own terms. It's a very different species of movie, though. The story it's based on, "...All You Zombies," is as close to the science fiction New Wave as Heinlein ever came, and this film reflects that pedigree. It's not a film that will wow you with technology or with its vision of the future. It's a dingy movie that exists as much in the past as it does in the future. Its central motivating idea--time travel--wasn't even novel in 1959, when the story was written, let alone in 2015. There are time travel stories without number these days. Instead, this is a movie about extrapolation from that idea, intent on pulling it inside out and twisting it almost to the point of breaking. Where previous films based on Heinlein have been cartoons, based only on the plots of his books and not their underlying ideas, this film dives into the core of what makes Heinlein's fiction so memorable in the first place. Perhaps, this is because it's faithful to its source material almost to a fault. Or perhaps it's because its source material isn't the rockets and warfare and aliens stuff that has attracted other filmmakers to Heinlein over the years. Instead, this is a film that dives into the interior of its characters and speculates on matters of identity and existence.

Read more below the fold >>

Heinlein In Hollywood part 2

It was perhaps inevitable that Hollywood would come calling on the Robert A. Heinlein estate in the early 1990s. The previous decade had seen filmmakers becoming interested in literary science fiction thanks to the cult success of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (a version of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and the blockbuster success of Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (based on Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). Hollywood's infatuation with Philip K. Dick continues to this very day, unabated, with recent versions of Radio Free Albemuth and a pilot for a web series based on The Man in the High Castle premiering in 2014. By the early 1990s, Hollywood began to expand their field of interest to writers like William Gibson (Johnny Mnemonic) and Isaac Asimov (Nightfall, The Bicentennial Man, I Robot), writers with caché in pop culture. Heinlein must have seemed a fertile ground for development: his books had name-recognition well beyond the occasionally insular community of science fiction fandom. Heinlein was, after all, the first science fiction writer to place a book on the New York Times bestseller list. Name recognition is an important quality for an industry that likes to sell audiences products they already know everything about. It's ironic that The Puppet Masters (1994, directed by Stuart Orme) should be the film to kick off this interest, given that it's the novel at the heart of The Brain Eaters, the last "adaptation" of the 1950s.

Read more below the fold >>

Heinlein in Hollywood

I saw a story on the internet a few months back about the demolition of Ray Bradbury's house. It sold a while ago for $1.7 million and the new owners apparently want to put something else up on the property. This makes me sad, I suppose. I grew up reading Bradbury and watching the sci fi movies of the 1950s that bear his stamp. Bradbury was fortunate in his interpreters. Films like It Came from Outer Space and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms are touched with his humanism. Commenting on the demolition of his house, a friend of mine said, "...and there shall come soft rains."

I've been thinking about fifties sci fi lately. I recently caught Destination Moon.  I don't think I ever saw it when I was a kid, back when I was mainlining as much science fiction as I could lay my hands on. It's a film that reminds me that there's an alternate history of cinematic science fiction that never actually materialized in our world, one that's more influenced by Bradbury's great contemporary, Robert Heinlein, than by Bradbury himself. I'm reminded of this because there's a new movie based on one of Heinlein's stories out right now, and I'll get to that in a few days, but it's worth playing what-if with Heinlein. Heinlein is one of the founders of the modern genre, one who put people into the future along with the nuts and bolts of technology. In spite of this, he's a writer who always insisted on the technology being right. He was also one of the first science fiction writers to dabble in the "soft" sciences of psychology and sociology as fertile grounds for extrapolation. Much of the appeal of his work comes from his depictions of societies as much as it comes from the gee whiz technological trappings. Heinlein's powers of extrapolation were often uncanny. My favorite of his ideas that wound up coming true? There's subplot in Stranger in a Strange Land in which the fastest way to get in touch with the leader of the free world is through his wife's astrologer. That's on-point satire right there, which became a tad less funny when it came true during the Reagan administration. Heinlein is arguably the architect of every SF trope you can think of, including the ones more famously associated with Philip K. Dick (see, for instance, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" or "They"). I read a lot of Heinlein as a teenager. I have a nearly complete set of his books, though I haven't touched them since a re-read of Citizen of the Galaxy a decade ago.

Hollywood has been interested in Heinlein for decades, but the movies have never really reconciled what's best in Heinlein with what's best for movie making. Part of this is the author's preoccupation with sex and with shuffling the conventions of social and sexual morality (this has long been the stumbling block with a film version of Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein's most famous novel). Part of this is the politics behind a good deal of his work. Part of it is the irascibility of the author himself. Even when the films have materialized--and there haven't been many of them--Heinlein often barely figured in them.

Read more below the fold >>

Blogorama: 2015 edition

I'll be joining two blogathons in the next month or so. Both of them are old friends. The first one is the periodic For the Love of Film blogothon, which is a fundraiser for film preservation. This year's theme is science fiction, which will put me back in touch with my roots. The other is the annual White Elephant blogathon. I probably went easy on the recipient of my film again, this year. I just don't have the instinct for the jugular some of the other participants have.

I'll get back to documentaries and other stuff shortly.

---

I'm using Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and art and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.

Alfred's Centennial

My friend, Lokke Heiss is the programmer behind my local art house's classic film series (including the recently concluded Return to Forbidden Hollywood 3). After last night's final screening, I had the chance to discuss the Film Preservation Blogathon with him and he expressed an interest in participating. Unfortunately, Lokke doesn't have a blog, so I offered to host his thoughts on the Silent Hitchcock program he saw at the Pordone Silent Film Festival some years ago. So here's the first guest post in my blog's history:

---

In 1999, I had the opportunity while attending the Pordenone Silent Film Festival to see all of Hitchcock’s surviving films in chronological order. Here is my review of the films as I saw them—from his earliest silent to his transition to sound:

Alfred Hitchcock would have been 100 in 1999 and in celebration of his centennial the Pordenone Festival screened all his available silent films in the order they were filmed.

Hitchcock made important, albeit late, contributions to silent films before crossing into the talkies with Blackmail and in this very thorough review of ‘silent Hitchcock,’ the festival also screened films such as The Blackguard (1924, directed by Graham Cutts), where Alfred emerged as a talented assistant director. The Blackguard, partly shot in Berlin, gave Hitchcock a chance to soak up German cinema technique, including an invaluable opportunity to watch Murnau shoot Die Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh). When Hitchcock saw the finished film, he was impressed by both the moving camera and Murnau’s ability to tell the story with images rather than intertitles. Hitchcock quickly grasped the power of the moving image, and the manipulation of these graphic elements in the service of the story would soon become a trademark component in a Hitchcock film.

Read more below the fold >>

Hitchcock On the Rocks

This is part of the film preservation blogathon

My first encounter with Jamaica Inn (1939) was in Harry Medved's The 50 Worst Movies of All Time and I'll admit that it colors my memory of the film. Oh, I know that Medved and his collaborators were mostly full of crap (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia? Last Year at Marienbad? The Omen? Seriously?), but the teenage me didn't know any better, and it's hard to shake first impressions. It was years before I was able to actually see the film, though. When I finally tracked it down, it was kind of a disappointment. I mean, it's NOT particularly good, but it's not transcendentally bad, either. I was kind of hoping for transcendentally bad.

Jamaica Inn was the first of three films that Alfred Hitchcock made from Daphne Du Maurier (the other two are Rebecca and The Birds). It was also the last film Hitch made in the UK before he packed up and went to work for Selznick in Hollywood. According to the director himself, it was the most unpleasant experience he ever had behind the camera. It's significant that Jamaica Inn is one of the very few Hitchcock films in which the director does not have a cameo. This last piece of information would have been nice to have when I first saw the film, because when I was originally mainlining Hitchcock films, the director's cameos were something I searched for. You will search in vain for Alfred Hitchcock in this film. My initial impression was a kind of modest delight, given that I have fond memories of the other film that Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara made in 1939.

Read more below the fold >>

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

And the film preservation blogathon rolls on...

Alfred Hitchcock was trained as a draftsman and an engineer. His early career saw him working as a graphic designer, a skill he took with him to the movies. He began his film career in 1921 as a title designer. Over the course of the next five years, Hitch took on more and varied jobs as he moved up the pecking order at Islington Studios (subsequently Gainsbourg Pictures). He got his first chance at directing in 1922, when he was assigned Number 13, a film whose financing fell apart before Hitchcock could shoot more than a couple of scenes. Afterward, Hitchcock worked as an assistant to Director Graham Cutts, who took Hitchcock with him to Germany to make Die Prinzessin und der Geiger. While in Germany, Hitchcock observed F. W. Murnau working on The Last Laugh and probably a number of other German productions. They left an impression and Fritz Lang's influence in particular can be seen all over some of Hitchcock's early films. Cutts and Hitchcock had a falling out when Cutts refused to let Hitchcock direct The Rat (1925). As a consolation, producer Michael Balcon assigned Hitchcock to The Pleasure Garden (1925), which filmed in Munich, London, and Italy. The film had a troubled production, running afoul of customs in Italy and sitting unreleased for two years after it was finished. It wasn't released until after Hitchcock had his first great success with The Lodger. It wasn't a success.

What is to be made of Hitchcock's first film? It's hard to see the director Hitchcock would become without squinting. It's there, but it's not fully formed. The Pleasure Garden has interesting similarities to some of the director's melodramas, but there's no hint of the master of suspense.

Read more below the fold >>

Why, She Wouldn't Even Harm a Fly

This is part of the Film Preservation Blogathon. A somewhat different version of this piece originally appeared on my old web site.

The archetypal serial killer is a man named Ed Gein, a handyman from Plainfield, Wisconsin, who was a grave robber, necrophile, and cannibal. He was also a transvestite of sorts, who, unlike his most famous screen descendant, didn’t dress in mother’s clothes, he dressed in mother herself. There have been several books and an avalanche of movies based on the Gein case, and even more movies and books that have incorporated elements of Gein’s crimes. As an archetype, Gein has eclipsed Jack the Ripper during the last part of the 20th century as the prototype for the mad killer. Part of this is because of Psycho.

The book on which Psycho was based was written before the details of the Gein case came to light. Its author, Robert Bloch, had a knack for getting inside the minds of criminals and psychopaths and during the 1950s, he wrote a series of pulp crime novels that are among the best of their types. The roots of Norman Bates and his terrible mother can be seen in novels like The Scarf (with its dynamite first paragraph: “Fetish? You name it. All I know is, I’ve had to have it with me.”), The Dead Beat, and The Firebug. Bloch built his story around the broadest details of the Gein case, knowing nothing of its particular details. The idea of a monster lurking in a mundane setting appealed to him, and it is this aspect that probably most appealed to Hitchcock. It is entirely likely that, like Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs, Bloch would have been rescued from the obscurity of the pulp fiction ghetto by later literary academics who are more broadly receptive to popular fiction. The process was already in process by the time Bloch wrote Psycho. The Scarf had already been filmed, as had a number of his short stories (adapted for, among other productions, Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the Lights Out radio show). This, of course, is no guarantee of a literary reputation, but it’s evidence that Bloch was already on the cultural radar screen. Psycho changed all of that. It was a shortcut to the cultural mass mind. Bloch would forever after be known as “the author of Psycho.” Ironically, when the rights to Psycho were purchased by Alfred Hitchcock, Bloch was very much of two minds about the project. On the one hand, it was a LOT of money compared to the rates Bloch was earning in the pulp market, but on the other hand, it meant that he would have to continue to live with Psycho, and this was difficult for Bloch. By the time the movie was made, the details of the Gein case had been made public, and Bloch was greatly disturbed that he had been able to so closely approximate the specific psychopathology of the man who was the most notorious monster of the day. It seemed more than coincidental, and Bloch wondered what it was in him that enabled him to imagine such a ghastly worldview.

Of course, that insight is part of the brilliance of Psycho, a brilliance that makes the book worthwhile in itself beyond its role as the progenitor of Hitchcock’s movie. There are plenty of critics who will tell you that Psycho is one of those rare movies that improves upon its source material, but I’m not one of them. There is a raw power to Bloch’s novel that the movie approximates, but does not match. But then again, the movie has pleasures all its own. Although the book and the movie are significantly different, Hitchcock never shied away from giving Bloch’s novel the share of credit it deserves. But Hitchcock elaborated on the novel in ways that were unique to his own worldview.

Read more below the fold >>

Under Capricorn Revisited

Under Capricorn (1949) occupies a pivotal position in the career of Alfred Hitchcock. After completing his contract with David O. Selznick, the director formed his own production company. Selznick was, famously, as much of a control freak as Hitchcock and their partnership was not a happy one. Forming his own production company gave Hitchcock the freedom to do as he liked. The first film Hitchcock produced for his new Transatlantic Pictures company was the highly experimental Rope, in which the film is constructed to appear as a single long take. It was also Hitchcock's first film in color. In spite of this, Rope is an archetypal Hitchcock film: it's a suspense film, laced with themes of guilt and psychosexual derangement. On the surface, Under Capricorn appears to be very far from Hitchcock's signature idiom. It's a costume drama, for one. It's not particularly suspenseful for another. But that's not to say that it's out of character. Under Capricorn hearkens back to Hitchcock as the maker of melodramas in the 1930s. Additionally, it borrows a number of elements from Rebecca, as if the director were making the film as a rebuke to Selznick's meddling in that film. Finally, it revisits Rope's long-take aesthetic, this time without the conceit of splicing them into a single, uninterrupted shot. Unfortunately for the director, it was the wrong project at the wrong time. Audiences, expecting a thriller from Hitchcock, didn't get one and stayed away. Additionally, this film appeared just as the scandal of star Ingrid Bergman's affair with Roberto Rossellini became public, and the actress herself became box office poison. While Rope had been merely unsuccessful at the box office, Under Capricorn was an outright fiasco. According to the director, it was such a huge bomb that its financial backers repossessed the film, which perhaps explains why it has always been among the director's least seen pictures. But maybe not only that. Although the French have always thought Under Capricorn was a legitimately great film, that opinion is not generally shared. It's a regular candidate for "worst Hitchcock movie." I've even seen it on lists of "the worst movie ever made," which is, frankly, unearned. After Under Capricorn, Hitchcock went back to making thrillers. His next two films were in black and white and refined what we think of as a Hitchcock film. And he placed a premium on the entertainment value of his films. He became a populist filmmaker. The experimental filmmaker of his Transatlantic films wouldn't resurface again for another decade.

I need to pause for a minute to mention something of my own relationship with Under Capricorn. I originally saw the film on cable when I was a teenager. I think it was on American Movie Classics during the Bob Dorian years, but I don't remember. What I do remember is being bored out of my mind by it. I haven't seen the movie again since then, but it has always been one of the movies I point to as an example of a great director making a really bad movie. But, as I've mentioned in some of my other recent writing, I no longer trust the opinions of my younger self, because that kid is SO not me anymore and in many, many things, I was an idiot. Ah, youth. Anyway, when the prospect of writing a week's worth of posts about Hitchcock as part of the blogathon presented itself, I knew that Under Capricorn was something I wanted to revisit.

Read more below the fold >>

Alfred Hitchcock and A Life With Movies

The Film Preservation Blogathon is right around the corner. This year's model is centered on Alfred Hitchcock, and proceeds raised during the blogathon will go to restore The White Shadow, a film Hitchcock himself didn't direct, but one on which he learned his craft by doing a bunch of other things. It's been a while since I watched much Hitchcock, but he's a director who is central to my love of movies. I suspect that I'm not alone in that.

I was introduced to Hitchcock by my mother. Her favorite movie was Notorious. My mother had excellent taste, though she wasn't a film buff by any stretch of the imagination. She couldn't have named any other film director. She knew who Hitchcock was, though, both because she had seen him on television and because he put himself into the trailers for his late films. Hitch was as much a star as the actors on the screen. She even knew that Hitch had cameos in all of his films, and could usually spot him. None of that is germane to Notorious, though. She loved it because she loved Cary Grant and because she thought it was the most romantic film she had ever seen. Notorious, it turns out, was to play another role in my life, though. It's one of the first films I can remember decoding: in particular, the scene near the beginning when Devlin convinces Alicia to work for him. Before agreeing, she's in shadows. When she says yes, she moves out into the light. Mind you, this scene is famous--Hitchcock wore his technique on his sleeve, it should be noted, never disguising it--but for the 13 year old me, figuring out that there was more at work on screen than just text and dialogue was a kind of epiphany and figuring it out without benefit of a film class or a book describing what I was seeing was one of the stepping stones toward a lifelong infatuation with film.

Read more below the fold >>

Blogorama Part V

So the annual film preservation blogathon is coming around again, and this time it has a Hitchcockian theme. The proceeds this year will fund the streaming (for free, no less) of several silent films rediscovered and restored within the last several years. Face it, if you don't live near a film industry hub, you have little or no chance of seeing these films otherwise. One of the films in question is The White Shadow, the first film with substantial contributions from Alfred Hitchcock. He didn't direct it, but he did damn near everything else. And, damn it! I for one want to see it!

The blogathon is being hosted once again by Ferdy on Film and the Self-Styled Siren. Marilyn's partner in crime, Rod Heath, is striking out on his own for this and will also be hosting at his new This Island Rod blog. There's also a wonderful array of banners this year, so many, I had a hard time choosing one for this post. Fortunately, Vertigo has been on my mind because it's been on my iTunes. Finally, for the luvva Pete, "like" the Facebook page! Every "like" helps the cause.

This is kind of serendipity for me. I've never written much about Hitchcock. I started blogging after I was "over" my Hitchcock phase. This is an opportunity to get back in touch with the things that corrupted me in the first place. This will be fun. Hopefully, any bloggers who are reading along will join the fun. Or just open the ol' checkbook. Or do both! Did I mention the prizes? There will apparently be prizes. As if a Hitchcock film you've never had the opportunity to see wasn't enough. P'shaw.

For the Love of Film (Noir)

The Film Preservation blogathon is coming up in a couple of weeks, so expect things to turn cynical and dark around here for the month. I'm probably going to blog way beyond the boundaries of the blogathon because I LOVE film noir. I thought about posting a noir film every day of February, and I may still do that. Meanwhile, here's a trailer for the event.

Your hostesses for this are The Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Film, two blogs you should be following anyway. The trailer I've posted here was put together by Greg Ferrara over at Cinema Styles. Oh, and this blogathon is a fundraiser. The organizers are trying to round up the scratch to restore The Sound of Fury, a noir film from 1950 starring Lloyd Bridges (I haven't seen it, unfortunately, but it's a remake of Fritz Lang's Fury, so I have an idea of what it's about). Donations to The Film Noir Foundation are tax deductible, so consider opening your pocketbook.

Blogorama Part II

It's a season for blogathons, it seems. Here's another one that hits the sweet spot of my cinematic appetites. I'm ALL over this one. Plus, it's for a good cause. Film preservation is important. The Self-Styled Siren has the details.