Reeling Backward: "Torn Curtain" (1966)

I've been making an effort the last couple of years to catch up on Alfred Hitchcock's earlier films before he came to Hollywood and experienced his heyday in the 1940s through early 1960s. But the truth is I haven't seen any of his later movies.

I'm not a big fan of "The Birds" and consider "Marnie" to be an utter embarrassment. So I have sort of unconsciously lumped all his post-"Psycho" filmography into a mental bin I dismissed as unworthy.

"Torn Curtain" isn't going to be confused with Hitch's best stuff, but I was surprised at how effective and tense it was. His 50th feature, it was fairly savaged by critics of the time, who said Hitch's style was worn out, though it did decent box office.

The mercurial, mischievous director was eager to do another spy film because of the popularity of the James Bond flicks, and he even received the biggest movie star in the world at the time, Julie Andrews, to play in it.

Truth was Hitchcock didn't want Julie Andrews or her co-star Paul Newman, preferring Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant, who paired nicely in "North by Northwest." But Grant was retired and Saint deemed not a big enough star anymore. Despite the director's reserve, Newman and Andrews make an excellent onscreen couple, playing an American nuclear scientist defecting to East Berlin and his asssistant-slash-fiance.

The movie opens with the two rollicking in bed together, missing breakfast and then lunch in favor of some extended lovemaking. The very fact that a mainstream movie showed an unmarried woman and man in bed together tells you something about how much cinematic mores had changed by 1966.

The movie has two distinct halves. In the first, Michael Armstrong (Newman) defects to the Soviet bloc with his lady love, Sarah Sherman (Andrews), tagging along uninvited. He attempted to give her the slip at a Copenhagen science conference, but she followed him on the plane and is horrified to discover that he is going behind the Iron Curtain. Their relationship is strained and in danger of shattering.

In the second, he reveals to her what we suspected all along: he's not actually a traitor betraying America's nuclear secrets to the enemy, but doing quite the opposite: trying to pick the brain of a legendary German scientist, Gustav Lindt (Ludwig Donath), for the last piece of the puzzle to building a missile defense system that would give the U.S. the advantage in the nuclear Cold War.

Their relationship blooms again, just in time to spend the last hour of the movie being chased around by the Stasi security forces. From their kiss-kiss in a park, it's all chase-chase to the end, with a little bang-bang thrown in.

Hitchcock's camera work (photography by John F. Warren) is notable for its extreme close-ups of its stars, especially when their faces are close for kissing or conversation. It's distracting at first, seeing a star from eyebrows to chin, but the smothering effect also draws us into their passion.

He also uses the same technique for what is probably the film's most famous scene: in which Armstrong and a German farmer's wife (who's secretly part of the resistance) beat, stab and wrestle his "security guide," aka shadow, to death, finally doing him in by forcing his head into an unlit gas oven.

It's an astonishing sequence of grunts, sweat and blood, the flip side -- and more overt depiction -- of Michael and Sarah's canoodling.

The thug is Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), a leering presence in a black leather jacket who prattles annoyingly about his days living in New York City, no doubt as a Soviet-sponsored spy. In a classic bit of Hitchcockian misdirection, Gromek perpetually struggles with a lighter that won't produce a flame. I figured this would prelude some fireball-related demise, though in the end it's the lack of a spark that ends him.

The movie (screenplay by Brian Moore from a story by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse) contains a rogues' gallery of interesting, colorful characters. Günter Strack plays Manfred, the well-coiffed East German scientist who recruited Michael and clearly has romantic designs on Sarah. Mort Mills is the spy chief helping them out, posing first as a farmer and then a travel agent.

David Opatoshu is Jacobi, who oversees an operation in which the underground runs a fake bus route from Leipzig to Berlin, complete with fake passengers. It runs 10 minutes ahead of the real bus, and during the trip through the countryside they're repeatedly delayed, to the point the real bus is in danger of catching up and revealing their ruse.

Leave it to Hitch to make a bus ride a nail-biter.

Tamara Toumanova has a fun role as a famous aging ballerina who is repeatedly (and inadvertently) dissed by the spy contretemps. She is first miffed when she gets off her plane and sees a horde of photographers waiting, puffs herself up for a picture, only to learn they are there for Michael's defection, which the East Germans are playing up for propaganda.

Later when Michael and Sarah are on the run, they hide in the theater where she is performing. She spots him from the stage, recognizing him from his photo being splashed in every newspaper, and calls the authorities, leading to another terrifically tense scene as the couple try to think of an escape with police closing in from every side during the performance. The haughty artiste gets her own comeuppance in the end.

By far the weirdest and most indelible supporting charactger is Countess Kuchinska, a displaced Polish noblewoman played by Lila Kedrova. Ostentatiously dressed, she is desperate to emigrate to the U.S. Spotting Michael on the street, she politely blackmails them in return for her help, which they didn't actually need.

She bemoans the terrible coffee and cigarettes of the Eastern bloc, and pleads with them to be her official sponsors to emigrate in exchange for showing them to the post office where they will meet their next contact (a location they had already discovered on their own). It never seems to occur to her that two American spies would not be looked upon favorably on her visa application.

A pathetic, cloying figure, Kuchinska makes a scene wherever she goes, hurts their cause more than she helps, though in the end she proves a figure of stouter resolve than anyone imagined.

"Torn Curtain" is also notable for another, sad reason: it marked the end of the long and fruitful partnership between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Hermann. Hitch rejected Hermann's creepy, languid score and, after the latter refused to change his, ordered up a jumpier one by John Addison, dooming the relationship. I have a copy of Hermann's rejected score, and I can't imagine why Hitchcock disliked its eerie beauty.

Reportedly the studio wanted something jazzier and more modern. During their fallout, Hermann reportedly told off the director: "Look, Hitch, you can't outjump your own shadow. And you don't make pop pictures. What do you want with me? I don't write pop music."

Hitchcock, whose career was (imho) damaged by being put upon a pedestal by the French critics, who hailed him as an auteur, spent much of his last two decades worrying about being seen as old and out-of-touch. Instead of following his inner voice, he fretted about his films being derided, leading inevitably to what he feared most coming to pass.

At least, that's my working theory. I quite enjoyed "Turn Curtain" as a well-crafted bit of old school suspense. Maybe I'll need to go deeper into Hitch's last days to see if I'm right.

Reeling Backward: "Jamaica Inn" (1939)

Though it's largely a forgotten film, "Jamaica Inn" is notable for a number of reasons. It was a huge commercial (thought not critical) hit, marking the heyday of star and producer Charles Laughton, who gives a daffy, twinkly performance as an off-kilter nobleman/crime lord.

It was also the first major screen role for Maureen O'Hara, who was discovered by Laughton and signed to an exclusive contract that defined the early part of her career. She'd already made a big splash as a teenage stage star, and they would next go on to star together in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," making O'Hara an international sensation. She and Laughton enjoyed a convivial father/daughter relationship that lasted until his death in 1962.

The film was the last British production for director Alfred Hitchcock, who chafed under Laughton's lordly yoke, including demands for many retakes and closeups, and departed for Hollywood thereafter.

"Jamaica Inn" essentially marks the last time Hitch worked as a hired gun instead of the shot-caller. He reportedly deplored the final film, and many Hitchcock observers consider it his worst.

It was also the first of three times Hitchcock adapted a novel by Daphne du Maurier, the other two being "Rebecca" and "The Birds," two of his biggest successes. Though du Maurier was reportedly irked by the many changes the movie made to the book, including transforming the villain from a clergyman to a justice of the peace.

(Though that was owing to the British censors, who deemed no man of the cloth could be depicted as evil.)

Despite its low reputation, I largely enjoyed the picture. It's hauntingly beautiful, replete with gorgeous black-and-white compositions by cinematographers Bernard Knowles and Harry Stradling, including lots of slanted light and shadows that shows the influence of German Expressionism.

What to say of Laughton's performance as Sir Humphrey Pengallan? It's like a ride on a motorcycle lashed to a runaway rocket: you either strap in and go along for the trip, or you don't.

Sir Humphrey is a high-living squire in the remote Cornish coast who's also the local justice of the peace, i.e. something like a cross between an Old West sheriff and judge. What nobody knows is that Sir Humphrey is also running a gang of cutthroats operating out of the titular establishment, who deliberately douse the beacon lights on the ocean cliff to lure merchant ships into crashing, making off with the cargo and murdering all the seamen.

With his mincing walk -- Laughton played waltzes in his head to get the flow just right -- juggernaut pomposity and fake caterpillar eyebrows wandering a full two inches above his real ones, Laughton's Sir Humphrey comes across as a psychedelic combination of Baron Harkonnen from "Dune" and Hannibal Lecter's swishier cousin.

Laughton himself reportedly envisioned the role as an extension of his Oscar-winning one from "The Private Life of Henry VIII" a few years earlier. As producer, he was in a position to make that vision real.

Sir Humphrey's house is an immense Versailles-like palace, with lavish banquets and a parade of noble guests. His extravagant outfits are a miracle of rotund ostentatiousness, a cornucopia of shiny buttons, double-breasted vests and dickeys, topped off in later scenes by a leering black tophat.

Sir Humphrey's schemes start to go awry with the arrival of O'Hara's Mary, a young orphan girl just arrived from Ireland. Her aunt, Patience (Marie Ney), lives at the Jamaica Inn with her brutish husband Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks), the ringleader of the "land pirates" wrecking the ships. He's secretly beholden to Sir Humphrey, who provides information about the richest passing ships from his position and social engagements.

Joss is portrayed as drunken lout, but the utterly devoted Patience has loads of... well, you get it. She sticks to him until the end (which is also her own)

Joss would like to throw Marie out on her head right away, or possibly rape her, but there are other matters to attend to. Marie witnesses Joss and his gang attempt to hang a mouthy new recruit, Jem Trehearne (Robert Newton). She cuts him down and rescues him, and then they're both on the lam.

Turns out Trehearne is really an undercover officer of the court sent to investigate the spate of shipwrecks. He and Marie take refuge at Sir Humphrey's, unaware of his involvement, leading to an inevitable showdown in which Sir Humphrey double-crosses... pretty much everybody.

Growing increasingly kooky, Sir Humphrey tries to make a getaway to France with Mary as his captive and intended sex slave. Things end with him plummeting to his death after a deliberate leap from the topmost rigging of a ship -- the high man finally brought low, aboard the same type of conveyance he targeted to fill his insatiable greed.

The only other cast member who makes any kind of deep impression is Emlyn Williams as Harry the Pedlar, Joss' suspicious number two. Young, thin as a whippet and dressed like a downmarket dandy -- always wearing a cockeyed tophat of his own -- Harry has a terrifying penchant for whistling to let his intended victims know of their fate.

In many ways, he's like a shrunk-down, funhouse mirror reflection of Sir Humphrey.

You'd definitely have to rank "Jamaica Inn" as a minor work in the Hitchcock oeuvre. But it's not nearly as bad many have regarded it, and stands as a waypoint for many important careers.

Reeling Backward: "The Lady Vanishes" (1938)

Honestly, I struggled to get through "The Lady Vanishes," which is something I never thought I'd say about an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Even toward the end of his days when his fastball had lost its snap -- "Marnie," "Torn Curtain" -- Hitch's movies always had a sense of bravura momentum, of characters and events drawn inextricably forward. The proceedings might grow self-indulgent or even silly, but the Master of Suspense always managed to keep things moving.

Not in "Lady," his second-to-last film made in the British production system before dipping oars toward Hollywood. The first hour is an absolute chore, more His Girl Friday-type of snappy romantic banter than thriller, essentially a comedy of manners lacking narrative oomph.

Things don't really get moving till the last 30 minutes when the guns come out.

I was amused by this description from Hitchcock's Wikipedia page: "a fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Bandrika." If this is fast-paced, I don't care to see Hitch's version of cinematic lollygagging.

Margaret Lockwood plays Iris Henderson, an English dilettante enjoying a snow skiing vacation with her girlfriends before heading home to be wed, an event she approaches more with resolution than eagerness. After getting knocked on the head by a dropped piece of luggage, she befriends a British governess returning home aboard the same train.

Miss Froy is described as "middle-aged," though Whitty was 73 years old when she played her, and looks every inch of prim elderly Englander. She disappears after Iris falls asleep, and to her consternation no one else onboard claims to remember seeing her. Enlisting the aid of Gilbert (Michael Redgrave, in his star-making role), a puckish musicologist with whom she had sparred at their hotel, Iris sets off on a quest to prove she's not crazy, and that Miss Froy has been abducted, or worse.

Helpfully arriving to provide illumination is a physician of dubious European origin named Dr. Hartz, played by Paul Lukas, who usually plays the good guy and appears to be wearing quite obvious makeup to accent/lengthen his eyebrows. He tells Iris her memory of Miss Froy is an injury-induced psychosis. Later, when evidence mounts to prove her existence, a doppelganger wearing the exact same clothing Iris described Miss Froy as wearing is produced.

Needless to say, this being a Hitchcock movie, the revelation of foul play is inevitable. This builds to such moments as a fistfight with a buffoonish Italian magician using his props as a backdrop, Gilbert climbing along the outside of the train from one window to the next, and a faux nun given away by her stylish high-heeled shoes.

Ostensibly, the story is about the search for Miss Froy, and to find out why seemingly everyone on the train is in on the conspiracy to discredit her existence. Really, though, it's a setup for Iris and Gilbert to fall in love, in that classic I-hate-you-until-the-moment-I-realize-you-are-the-one formula.

Sexually the film is rather frisky for its era. We see Iris and her pals in a considerably disrobed state, and Gilbert is wont to make teasing statements about their relationship, at one point marching into her room and asking which side of the bed she prefers. He even gives her a cheeky slap on the rump, though the actual moment of contact between palm and derriere happens carefully just out of frame.

Also showing up is Cecil Parker as Todhunter, a wealthy barrister who is traveling with his mistress and weighing whether a divorce would impinge his changes of obtaining a judgeship. Needless to say, he's the fellow whose spine shows yellow when the going gets tough.

Providing the comic relief are Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott, a pair of unctuous British gents whose sole purpose in life appears to be returning to England in time to catch the cricket tournament. It's a twinkly pairing, men who take such seriousness in spectacularly unimportant things, and they act as a sort of self-parody of everything English. They were so popular they would go on to appear together in three more movies.

"The Lady Vanishes" was a huge hit commercially and critically, and indeed it was the success of this film -- after a string of moribund pictures -- that convinced David O. Selznick he ought to bring Hitchcock across the pond to make American movies. For me, it remains one of his weaker efforts, a bit of light, frothy tosh on the way to grander and grimmer things.

Reeling Backward: "Rear Window" (1954)

Somebody once asked me how I choose the movies to write about in the "Reeling Backward" column. More specifically, they asked why I seemed to choose mostly obscure films most people have never heard of -- like "Panic in Year Zero" or "Yellow Sky."

"If you're going to write about a Humphrey Bogart movie, why not pick 'Casablanca' instead of 'Across the Pacific'?" went the line of questioning, or something like it.

There are essentially two reasons. One is that I started this feature largely as a way to expand my own film education. Even for a hardcore movie buff, it astonishes me how many classic films (and modern pictures) I've never seen. Seeing as one tends to see the most famous stuff first, I make it a point to reach out for movies I've never encountered. By necessity, that means casting my net farther.

But another reason is that I try to be interesting and write about my insights into a movie, hopefully with some originality and touch of wit. I see these less as reviews of old movies as essays, or even my personal movie diary.

Frankly, so many people have written volumes of prose about "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane" and other greats, I feel adding my voice to the din serves little purpose. I doubt many people would read it, and I'm modest enough about abilities to recognize that it's unlikely I could say anything really new.

But occasionally I pick a high-profile subject I'm already very familiar with just because, dang it, I really like the movie and want to spend some time re-watching and thinking about it.

I got a copy of the remastered "Rear Window" well more than a year ago, but hadn't gotten around to watching it for a variety of reasons. (Mostly, a little blond boy who came into my life.) I think I know why. As a suspense film, "Rear Window" derives most of its satisfaction from the revelations of the plot. Watching it again and again fails to capture the thrill of seeing it unfold for the first time.

Especially, that fantastic moment when Raymond Burr, playing the killer, looks up into the camera (which has been acting as Jimmy Stewart's gaze) and realizes that the entirety of his nefarious activity has been closely observed. That's a once-in-a-cinematic-lifetime moment.

Even great thrillers, like "Silence of the Lambs," lose some of their appeal after their mysteries have been revealed.

"Rear Window" obtains more of its freshness than, say, "Psycho" because the plot works backwards. The identity of the killer is made known early on, and the entire story is about L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, a photographer laid up with a badly broken leg, trying to prove that a murder has even taken place. He sits at his window in his Greenwich Village apartment, staring and spying on his neighbors in the little courtyard of buildings.

I won't talk too much about the voyeurism that is a central motif in Alfred Hitchcock's movies, and is brought to the fore here. It was one of the New Wave guys, film critics who became filmmakers, who pointed out that the view of the neighbors is like a movie screen, and Jeff takes the place of the audience, playing peeping tom so we won't feel bad about doing so.

I will say that the studio set built for this picture is simply a marvel, a canvas of windows and the human carnival partially glimpsed through them. Only a sliver of the city street is visible through an alley, making the courtyard seem like a quiet oasis removed from the bustle and danger of New York City.

Except, of course, there's plenty of foul play going on here. Lars Thorwald (Burr), a costume jewelry salesman, offs his invalid wife and -- Jeff later determines -- cuts her up into pieces and carries them out of the apartment in his sample case.

Jeff spends most of the movies trying to make the case to his detective friend Doyle (Wendell Corey). He quickly makes converts of his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) and girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly). They soon become his conscripts, hunting down evidence and even -- in perhaps the film's most memorable sequence -- Lisa sneaking into Thorwald's apartment while he's away.

Little comment is made upon the movie's title (which did not come from the short story upon which John Michael Hayes based the screenplay, "It Had to Be Murder" by Cornell Woolrich). Jeff, in a heated argument with Stella about the propriety of using binoculars and a telephoto lens to spy on his neighbors, says "I'm not much on rear-window ethics."

This could have two meanings. The most common understanding is that it's not right to watch people unobserved, since people behave differently when they're interacting with society and quite another when they're in private. How many of us would like to have our intimate daily doings, even the most innocent ones, broadcast for others' eyes?

But another meaning is that things seen through the rear window of a car are by definition things that are behind us, and therefore in our past. My take on Jeff's dialogue is that he's in the midst of doing what he must, and he will consider the morality of it later on. He's also talking about his lifestyle, which is a freewheeling cycle of exotic assignments and dangerous thrills, and that he prefers to live in the moment. He'll worry about today, tomorrow.

This is in contrast to the carefully-ordered life of Lisa, and the source of the tension in their relationship.

Either way, "Rear Window" has remained an enduring classic because it's not just a clever potboiler, but a nagging and probing film that raises uncomfortable truths about how people behave toward one another ... especially when we think no one's looking.

3.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Dial M for Murder"

It's usually not too hard to discern a film that was adapted from a stage play. There's an economy of cast and settings that indicates a necessity for limiting each. Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder" has both: There are only five significant roles, and almost the entirety of the action takes place inside a single apartment, and nearly all of that in one room.

Hitchcock did a few stage-to-screen jobs ("Rope," "I Confess!"), often sandwiched in between bigger projects with multiple locations. In the same year, 1954, he also directed "Rear Window," which is similar to "Dial M" in the way the same setting can be exploited in different ways. By the mid- to -late 1950s, Hitchcock's films tended to be veritable travel pictures like "North by Northwest" and "Vertigo."

Ray Milland is the star, though it's remembered today for being one of Grace Kelly's first major film roles. (Most people have forgotten she got her start primarily as a television actress.) The period of 1954-55 was a fertile period for Hitchcock and Kelly, as she would also be featured in "Rear Window" and "To Catch A Thief." By 1956 she was done with the movies, trading her status as Hollywood princess to become a real-life one.

Milland plays Tony Wendice, a recently retired tennis pro who relies on his wife Margot (Kelly) for money. A clever, erudite fellow who enjoys his creature comforts, Tony wouldn't mind so much except that Margot has been cheating on him with Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), an American mystery novelist. After a year away, Mark has returned to England to claim Margot permanently, and Tony is out to do away with her and get his inheritance while he can.

The plot is a labyrinthine twist of clues and plots and intrigue. The short version is that Tony blackmails a wayward old school chum, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) into strangling Margot while he and Mark are at a stag party. Thus his rival for his wife's affection will provide his alibi.

As Mark cautions about constructing the perfect crime in real life versus fiction, things go horribly awry. Margot fights off Swann and kills him with her knitting shears.

The second half of the movie concerns Tony having to adjust his plot on the fly, managing to plant evidence to make it seem as if Margot intentionally killed Swann because he was blackmailing her with evidence of her affair with Mark.

It has a lot to do with missing love letters and the presence or absence of latch keys. I suppose it works well enough for a stage potboiler, but for the more verite demands of cinema, it seems like a whole lot of flimsy evidence upon which to indict a murderer.

John Williams has a nice role as Chief Inspector Hubbard, the crafty detective who subtly stalks Tony's web of lies and manipulations. I loved the moment where he begs for more credit to be given to veteran policemen like himself to overcome the work of "a gifted amateur" like Tony.

It's a typical Hitchcockian thriller, as he slowly stirs the pot of brewing suspense. I do have to say the biggest weakness of the film is the character of Mark Halliday, who spends 9/10ths of the movie as a naive patsy, and suddenly manages to come up with enough brilliant deductions in the final sequence to put Sherlock Holmes to shame.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Notorious"

In many ways, "Notorious" is the most quintessentially Hitchcock film.

The voyeurism that marked Alfred Hitchcock's movies is in clear evidence, with the many extreme close-ups and tracking shots, which were highly unusual in 1946 American cinema. There's one shot of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman embracing, and the camera slowly rotates around their heads -- a trick Hitchcock would use again, for example in his masterpiece "Vertigo." The overall effect in this movie is of following a subject, or being followed. Since it's a movie about espionage, it gives the audiences an unsettled, borderline paranoid mood.

There's also the classic use of the MacGuffin -- an object or other plot device that is used to drive the story, but which remains ill-defined or whose importance is never really made clear. It doesn't really matter what it is, in other words, only that everyone wants it. Hitchcock's films were replete with microfilm or sinister powders or such things that had the main character being chased around nilly-willy. In "Notorious" the MacGuffin is bottles of wines that turn out to contain a mysterious black sand.

And the misogyny that was often part and parcel of Hitchcock's work was never stronger than in "Notorious." Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, a German-American playgirl who is used as a Mata Hari by intelligence agent Devlin (Grant) to infiltrate a Nazi cel in Rio De Janeiro. Devlin, who recruits her after her father is convicted as a traitor, is at first repulsed by her constant boozing and loose morals. But he eventually falls for, only to learn that his assignment is to use Alicia as bait to lure out Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), one of the Nazi co-conspirators.

Grant's performance is particularly icy and cruel, as opposed to his usual cocksure charm. At one point he admits that he's always been afraid of girls -- something feminist film theorists have had a field day with.

There's one great scene where Alicia is meeting with Devlin at a horse race to update him on her snooping, and she playfully tells him, "You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates" -- a not-at-all subtle indication that she has slept with him. The look that comes over Grant's face, one of anger and humiliation, quickly sours into an image of pure contempt.

Devlin's associates (the redoubtable Louis Calhern plays Devlin's boss) also speak contemptuously of Alicia, even though she's supplying them with invaluable intelligence about their enemies, because she's using sex to get what she wants. It goes without saying that these gentlemen would not be so quick to disparage one of their own employing the same tactics. When Alicia agrees to marry Sebastian to further the ruse, they view it only as an opportunity for them to dig up dirt on their foes.

Claude Rains had one of those truly magnificent film careers, nearly always as a supporting man (he was nominated for the Oscar four times, including this film, never winning) but occasionally in the lead. His portrayal of Sebastian is most interesting -- he is never shown committing an overtly evil act, even after he discovers Alicia's role as a spy. He and his iron maiden of a mother begin to slowly poison her, but it's the old lady who actually does the deed. Sebastian is shown as a decent guy who just happens to be working with his fellow Nazis. He also seems to truly love Alicia -- they previously had a fling years ago, which was what helped make Alicia the perfect mole.

It's interesting to think what it would be like to remake this movie from the perspective of the Claude Rains character, with an overbearing mother and a mysterious stranger who keeps showing up in an attempt to steal your wife away.

Leopoldine Konstantin plays Sebastian's mother, in a memorable performance. Since Sebastian is seen as such a nice guy, even something of a wuss, she represents the most villainous figure in the film.

One of my favorite games is spotting mother-son cinematic pairings in which the actors portraying them are actually about the same age. Claude Rains was 57 when this film came out, while Konstantin was but three years older. There's one scene where they're interacting in a close two-shot (i.e., both their heads are visible in the frame) and you can see how smooth and unlined her face is, compared to Rains' elegant but craggy features.

3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "Spellbound"

I found another Alfred Hitchcock movie I don't like.

Few, if any, Hollywood directors were as productive and consistently good as Hitchcock. From the time he started making pictures in the U.S. in 1935 until his last big hit in 1964, he directed 37 films, while starting up an important television franchise, too. It's simply astonishing how many classics came out of that three-decade period: "Psycho," "North by Northwest," "Vertigo," "To Catch a Thief," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Lifeboat," "Notorious," "Strangers on a Train," "Rear Window" -- it goes on and on.

But Hitch also made some clunkers, although a lot of people are reluctant to admit it. I never cared for "The Birds," which its silly plot about killer pigeons, and "Marnie" is absolutely laughable.

I'd never seen "Spellbound," which is considered to be one of his major works, until recently. And it was a real let-down.

There's the approach to psychoanalysis that's absurdly simplistic -- all you have to do is get the patient to remember their repressed memories, and voila! No more crazy.

Add to that the cliche of a man and woman meeting and immediately falling in love. Especially Ingrid Bergman as a cold, calculating psychiatrist who's willing to pitch her entire career and go on the lam with a man she's only just met, while he was posing as the new head of the clinic where she works. Turns out he's an impostor with amnesia who believes he killed the doctor he replaced.

So, here are the facts:

1. He's nuts. And maybe a murderer.
   
2. In the course of 24 hours, she falls in love with him enough to ignore point #1.
3. They run away together, her theory being to cure him before the police capture them.

Not exactly brainiac behavior, and her character is supposed to be super-smart.

Also, "Spellbound" contains bar none the worst fake skiing scene in cinematic history. They're careening down a mountain together, going really really fast. The long shots of the stunt doubles look like they're going down a 45-degree grade at least 30 mph. But in the close-ups, their bodies stay perfectly smooth, never jostling up and down or side to side. They look like two people standing on an escalator.

I've never gone in for a lot of feminist film theory, but I have to say the much-touted misogyny of Hitchcock is on full display here. Every single male character makes some kind of cutting remark about Ingrid Bergman in particular and the female gender in general. "There's nothing I can't stand more than a smug woman!" "Women make the best psychoanalysts ... until they fall in love. Then they make the best patients!" "Listen to yourself, it's baby talk!"

Obviously he got a lot better, but in one of his first film roles, Gregory Peck is just cringe-worthy. I lost count of the number of times he swooned. I think Peck prepared for this role by practicing to faint without hurting himself. Then he comes out of his spell, flashes a big smile and pours on the showbiz charm. Granted, the character is supposed to be crazy, but did he have to be so smarmy?

Hitchcock is deified more than just about any other American film director, and deservedly so. But let's not blind ourselves to the fact that amidst all those great films, he made some flicks like "Spellbound" that are worthy of ridicule.