Marnie

Whenever Alfred Hitchcock indulged his intense interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, as he did to greater and lesser degrees in many of his films, it always promised a truly bizarre experience. It's thus no surprise that Marnie, one of his strangest films, is also probably his most overtly psychological, even including the psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound, which in comparison seems positively down-to-earth. Marnie opens as though it's a conventional thriller, with a mysterious woman, seen only from behind at first, leaving the scene of a robbery where she stole $10,000 from her employer — shades of Psycho, and the woman is even named Marion, just like Janet Leigh's Marion Crane. The opening sequence of the film is masterfully orchestrated, from the first shot after the titles, a closeup on this woman's bright yellow bag, slowly pulling back to watch her walk along a train platform, to the hotel room scene where she changes her identity, removes the black dye from her hair, and is finally revealed in a closeup. This is Marnie (Tippi Hedren), and her introduction, with the sustained mystery about her identity and the intrigue of the robbery and fake IDs, is a classic Hitchcock setup.

That the film starts in such classic suspense territory only to retreat into a dark character study of tortured psychology and manipulation, might have been a surprise to the few people who bothered to show up for this flop at the time, unless of course they'd already seen Vertigo a few years earlier. Indeed, Marnie is structured, in some superficial ways, much like its spiritual predecessor in Hitch's oeuvre. In both films, the first hour or so is essentially a thriller/mystery with a man tracking and trying to understand a woman, before a pivotal change thrusts the male protagonist (Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, Sean Connery here) into an ambiguous, cold, and psychologically fraught relationship with the target of his pursuit. The differences, though, are perhaps more profound. Whereas in Vertigo Stewart's character is central to the narrative, here Connery is definitely a secondary figure, a businessman who all but forces Marnie to marry him in order to "protect" her from committing further crimes or getting in trouble for the ones she's already committed. Connery's struggle to understand Marnie is sidelined; Marnie herself is the film's center. In this sense, Marnie might be thought of as an answer to Vertigo's Madeleine, who is only ever seen voyeuristically, through the eyes of a male viewer. Marnie, though still a sex object to be possessed, is at least privileged as the center of the narrative and the film's subject; the film shows her unfiltered by her pursuer's gaze in a way that Vertigo never does.

Nevertheless, Marnie also finds Hitchcock revisiting the necrophiliac theme that underlies Vertigo's second half, here in a chilly (and chilling) scene in which the sexless Marnie finally gives in to her new husband's advances on their honeymoon. Hedren's blank-faced stare, flawless makeup, and carefully pinned hair make her look like a mannequin, a doll, as Connery embraces her and kisses her unmoving face. It's a deeply unsettling scene, with Hitchcock cutting around the immobile Marnie, shooting from odd angles that accentuate the hard lines of her face and her stasis as Connery engulfs her. The marriage's consummation is implied with a shot of Marnie's head moving backward, the camera tracking with her, followed by a shot of Connery that zooms in on his eyes. Hitch then discreetly pans away towards the window, but the lingering distastefulness of this frigid sex scene nevertheless leaves its impact.

The marriage between Connery and Hedren is fraught with these kinds of scenes, so unsettling because they so thoroughly upset the idea of what marriage should be like. At times, it seems like Hitch himself is even sympathetic to the paranoid Marnie's terror of the opposite sex and her disgust with sexual relations, and Connery's character often comes across manipulative and conniving. His marriage to Hedren, though in some ways selfless and even weirdly loving, is tainted by more than a hint of sexual blackmail, as he himself acknowledges to her, and whatever his intentions he becomes one more in a long line of men using women for sex. When Marnie exclaims, "I'm just something you've caught! You think I'm some sort of wild animal you've trapped," Connery coolly replies that she's right: "I've tracked you and caught you and by God I'm going to keep you." This predatory view of sexual relations is maintained throughout the film (up until the predictable cop-out ending), and subtly echoed in the scene where Marnie goes out on a hunt and witnesses a pack of dogs snarling and gathering around some prey.

Obviously, the film is rich in such subtextual psychological and sociological dimensions, and in this regard Marnie is fascinating, subject to almost endless unpacking of its underlying themes. On a surface level, though, the Freudian content of the film can often be distracting. Hitchcock's dedication to Freud's theories is such that he attempts to make dramatic twists and plot points out of Freudian interpretation, much as he did in Spellbound, and it doesn't work any better here than it did there. The tracing back of Marnie's problems with men and sexual frigidness to a childhood trauma, besides being a lamentable cliché, is a remarkably shallow and surface-level application of psychology, especially for a director who in other ways, even in the same film, shows a tremendous understanding of psychological nuance. The film's second act, after the marriage, increasingly delves into this kind of pop-Freudianism, with Marnie's attacks of repressed memory indicated by a red filter flashing over the image, and Connery and Hedren engaging in endless discussions of psychology, even conducting a free-association session that turns into a predictable breakdown. The film's resolution, in which Marnie's repressed feelings and coldness are "cured" by an act of remembrance and confrontation, is a pat solution that doesn't do anything to suggest the great complexity of the human mind and its workings.

Despite these flaws, Marnie remains an oddly compelling work from Hitchcock, at least partly because its examination of warped sexual feelings is more potent than the dialogue's often glib discussion of Freudian principles will admit. If the film's ending suggests, Hollywood-style, that even a lifetime of psychological pain can be cured by the power of love, there is much else in the film to counter that love itself can be part of the problem rather than the solution. This contradictory film has a lot more going on under its surface than Freud could ever explain, and it's consequently far more interesting for what Hitchcock shows than for what he has his characters say.

Red River

Red River is a sweeping Western epic from Howard Hawks, a towering yarn spanning 14 years, with a thousand-mile cattle drive at its center. It's a Western on a grand scale, and Hawks can't always balance the story's epic dimensions with the human conflicts behind them. It's thus very uneven, with the pacing especially falling apart in the last half hour, unraveling what was up until then a very solid film. There's still a lot to love, though, in this hard-edged tale of the fearless cattle baron Dunson (John Wayne), who established his own massive ranch from very humble beginnings, through a combination of hard work and necessary violence, and just a little outright theft. He's established early on as a man willing to do virtually anything to get his way, and who always follows through once he's made up his mind. In establishing his ranch, he leaves behind the woman he loves, who is slaughtered in an Indian raid soon after he heads off, and he adopts the sole survivor, a tough young boy named Matt. Dunson and Matt (together with stalwart character actor Walter Brennan as the sidekick Groot) establish the ranch, but 14 years later the Civil War has taken his toll, and Matt (played as a young man by Montgomery Clift) has just returned from fighting in the war. With the Texas economic system shattered like all of the South, the destitute Dunson can only avoid going broke by making a last-ditch cattle drive north to Missouri to sell his herd.

This massive cattle drive, with almost ten thousand animals, is the center of the film, and this is where Hawks is most successful. In its grand-scale set pieces, with an endless sea of cows and the men driving them hard, the film evokes the grandeur and excitement of the drive in every crowded frame. Hawks fills his usual overloaded frame for once not with people but with animals. The chaotic scenes on the trail, with men and beasts working in tandem to accomplish one difficult feat after another, are masterpieces of large-scale design and action. It helps that these scenes have a Fitzcarraldo-like realism, giving the sense that there really are ten thousand cows being herded, barely under control, over treacherous territory. This is especially true of the grand crossing of the Red River, which is just plain exhilarating filmmaking.

Strangely enough, Hawks handles things more unevenly on the human scale. The cattle drive turns Dunson, increasingly desperate and all too aware of the make-or-break stakes involved, into a tyrannical madman, driving the men harder and harder with less and less rest, and brooking absolutely no dissent or grumbling. The escalating tension in the camp, culminating in Dunson's attempt to hang two men who tried to flee, leads Matt to the breaking point where he can't just follow orders anymore, and he takes over control of the cattle from Dunson with the support of all the other men. This slow ratcheting up of tension is beautifully handled, and the great performances from both Clift and Wayne do a good job of developing their complex relationship. Wayne especially is a virulent force of nature, raging and intense but with the vulnerability of a desperate man underneath it all. When Dunson is left behind, he vows to get his revenge and to kill Matt, and the look on his stone face is enough to sell that he really means it.

Unfortunately, a lot of the effort put into establishing this loving but nonetheless fierce rivalry is tremendously wasted in the film's second half, where with Wayne largely offscreen and a new romantic interest (Joanne Dru) abruptly brought in for Clift, the film falters and eventually falls apart, limping towards an unbearably weak climax that allows all the build-up and suspense to simply deflate. Before this, though, there's a fight against an Indian raiding party, which provides one last jolt of genuine thrilling action as Matt and his men protect a wagon train from an attack. Dru is introduced in the midst of this fight, as the tough and determined Tess, who takes an arrow in her shoulder and keeps talking, gently sparring with Matt, without even skipping a beat as she's hit. It's a great and memorable introduction, typically Hawksian in its pattering dialogue and feigned toughness, a scene good enough to forgive even the obligatory appearance of that most unfortunate of Hollywood tropes, the romantic interest. The goodwill generated by this scene is quickly squandered, though, in a series of unbelievable, sappy, and just plain awkward scenes that seem to have been pasted in from a totally different film. It's painfully obvious just how bad an idea this last-minute romance was, and Hawks seems to realize it as well; these scenes are so sloppy and rushed that not even the least effort is put into making them cohere with the film as a whole.

In addition to the romance, the film is also marred by the lazy and uncinematic use of on-screen titles, uncharacteristic for Hawks, who always knew how to get across his characters' inner conflicts and basic essence in dialogue and visuals alone. The texts in this film purport to be from a historical diary describing the cattle drive, and at the beginning of the film Hawks uses these handwritten inserts, superimposed over images from the drive, simply to transition between geographical locations and describe the progress. This is an understandable, though still probably unnecessary, shortcut, but as the film wears on, the texts increasingly describe the characters' internal states and spell out ideas and thoughts that would have been much better conveyed indirectly. With two strong central performances at the film's heart, it's puzzling that Hawks has no faith in the actors' ability to get across the characters' emotions, and instead resorts to telling us outright that Clift is scared, or that Wayne is enraged.

This would be bad enough, but Tess also manages to disrupt what should have been the grand finale, the inevitable showdown between Matt and Dunson. This confrontation had been hinted at since at least the one-hour mark of the film, and the continual emphasis on both men's quick-draw capabilities promised a tense and powerful showdown between them. But the showdown is quickly and almost bloodlessly defused by the domesticating power of a woman, and all the suspenseful build-up is revealed to be for naught. Instead of a taut standoff that unpacks the complex emotional entanglements between these two men, it's all brushed aside with little ceremony after a few teary-eyed words from the woman who entered the picture out of nowhere only twenty minutes earlier. The surprisingly sunny ending, seemingly coming out of nowhere, is totally at odds with everything else in the film, and it's certainly a rather drastic and unearned change in Wayne's character. If Hawks and the screenwriters had invested more effort into developing Tess, or given Dunson any meaningful screentime in the film's second half, the sudden and lighthearted ending might not have been quite so ludicrous or disappointing. As it is, Hawks betrays what could have been a powerful film with a lackluster and uneven second act, and a climax that simply doesn't exist.

Kill, Baby... Kill!/His Girl Friday/The Trouble With Harry/The Seven Year Itch

The first scene of Kill, Baby... Kill! is as powerful, visceral, and over-the-top as its title might suggest. The film opens abruptly, as though in the middle of a scene, with a woman running away from a large castle, screaming "No! No!" She runs towards the camera, which alternates between askew closeups that emphasize the terror in her eyes, and long shots that situate her fleeing form in the gloomy darkness of the castle's front lawn. The woman runs into a nearby building, then stops as though transfixed in horror by the sight of a spiked grating below her — which she soon enough leaps to her death by impaling herself on it. It's a harrowing, mesmerizing, intriguing scene, one that promises a great psychological horror film in the making.

In the course of this moody 1966 giallo, director Mario Bava rarely again achieves the same visceral impact as those opening minutes, though what the film lacks in chills it makes up for in atmosphere and the dazzling, garish cinematography. The story of Bava's film is a classic ghost yarn, of a young girl who was killed and has since haunted and cursed the residents of the town in which she died. A doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) and an inspector (Pierro Lulli) arrive in the town to investigate this latest murder, to which they were alerted by the note the unfortunate woman wrote before her death. The story, obviously, is the stuff of countless other horror films, and frankly many of those others handled the scares much better. Bava, on the other hand, hardly seems to be interested in frightening his audiences so much as impressing them with the lurid quality of his visuals. The flashy camerawork is constantly calling attention to itself, with rapid zooms and pans disrupting the fluid flow of the cinematography. When the local constable (Luciano Catenacci) is first introduced, Bava brings him in with an exceedingly fast zoom onto his sinister, bald-headed countenance, accompanied by a dramatic theme on the soundtrack. The sudden emphasis suggests that this man will be tremendously important to the plot, maybe even the villain himself; the fact that he barely appears after this scene is not nearly as important as Bava's willingness to make anything and everything a matter of such visual sturm-und-drang.

In a later scene at the local cemetery, Bava again plays with such conventions of camerawork and emphasis, with a bizarre swinging zoom that focuses in, then swoops back out again, on a faraway tree stump chosen seemingly at random. Is the stump important? Or is the camera itself important, indicating the movement of something that could explain the creaking noise heard on the soundtrack? It turns out to be neither — in fact, Bava is just using this unmotivated camera movement as a distraction, and after several zooms in and out, the legs of a girl hanging down from above suddenly swing across the frame at a perpendicular angle to the movement of the camera. Once again, this moment isn't even remotely explained or returned to later, and the presumed corpse is never discovered, but it's a striking and memorable shot anyway. Bava routinely disregards the machinations of his silly plot in favor of such visual grandeur, which is inscribed into every frame of the film. The camera is constantly darting around to ascribe overblown importance to random bits of mise en scéne, like the portrait of the dead girl that Bava zooms in on, then further draws attention to the plaque underneath that lists her lifespan as 1880-1887, a fact that might've had more impact if Bava ever bothered to establish the year in which his film takes place. It doesn't really matter though, since we get that he's just making the conventional gesture towards the "spooky" fact that the little blonde girl who we've seen wandering around the screen singing eerie songs is in fact a ghost, as if we couldn't have guessed.

It's hard to take too seriously a film that puts so little stock in its own premise, but Bava clearly takes such pleasure in the lurid colors and composition of each frame that Kill, Baby... Kill! winds up being a lot of fun anyway. With its striking aesthetics and some great kitschy performances, especially from Fabienne Dali as the local witch who tries to fight the curse, this is a classic of gothic horror in spite of its silliness and lack of scares.

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His Girl Friday is a perfect screwball farce from Howard Hawks, built on a model of steadily escalating insanity, with Cary Grant orchestrating the entire maelstrom as the quick-witted and scheming newspaperman Walter Burns. This is a typically great comic performance from the always reliable Grant, who handled the fast-paced dialogue of a Hawks screwball like no other actor. Here he's playing opposite the similarly sharp Rosalind Russell as his ex-wife, the former reporter Hildy Johnson, who has returned to his life only to politely inform her ex that she's remarrying, to the slightly dopey but sincere insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Obviously, Grant isn't going to stand for this, and he immediately begins concocting as many schemes as he can think of to prevent Russell and her new fiance from leaving on the afternoon train.

The film crackles with the strength of the Grant/Russell pairing, and their verbal sparring is unfailingly hilarious, as well as indicative of the underlying dynamics of their relationship and failed marriage. They originally split up because Russell was discontented with their unstable life, with the lack of any traditional lifestyle or comforts — their honeymoon was spent covering a coal mine story instead of anything more romantic. Her new husband is thus much more stable, as well as more romantic and conventional. While he tells her that "even ten minutes without you feels too long," Grant consistently disregards all propriety and even forgets to hold doors for her, letting them slam in her face behind him. Bellamy knows how to treat a lady, while Grant does not. But the script's central question is whether Russell is actually a "lady" at all, and as usual in Hawks' films, the answer is an emphatic (and ecstatic) "no." The film posits a dichotomy between the ladylike option of being a housewife, having children, and settling down, and the more vigorous and non-traditional option of continuing to have a career, working in the company of men as part of their fast-paced world. Clearly, Russell belongs in this world, and Grant's manipulations mostly center around his attempts to bring her back into the world of journalism, if only for one story, knowing that once she's gotten the taste for it again, she'll be back for good. Indeed, it's not too long before Russell is stationed at a press room phone, barking out stories and hot tips, and it's obvious that this is where she belongs, comfortable in a man's world and not playing wife to anyone, even if sometimes that's what she thinks she wants.

These sexual politics may drive the plot and its underlying themes, but it's the film's glistening comedic surfaces that really propel it forward and keep the viewer utterly rapt. In addition to the central Grant/Russell rapport, each of them gets to try their quick wits and verbal dexterity against a seemingly never-ending variety of straight men. If Grant and Russell are roaring through life at triple speed, everyone else in the picture seems to be coasting along in a lower gear, and the script takes great joy in the way this comedic duo tears into everyone around them. The dim-witted city sheriff Peter B. Hartwell (Gene Lockhart) gets a lot of this abuse, especially concerning his middle initial — "the B is for brains," Russell quips, after recounting how the sheriff allowed a murderer to escape by handing him a gun so a psychologist could watch him re-enact his crime. All the other cops and reporters on hand also get their time as the butt of these jokes, as does Bellamy as the luckless would-be hubbie who keeps winding up in jail due to Grant's hijincks. But best of all is Billy Gilbert in a hilarious cameo as a ludicrously dumb state lackey delivering an important message — his quick tongue and flawless timing are put to brilliant use as he stammers his way through a number of conversations in which he clearly has no idea what's going on.

Hawks' characteristic overlapping dialogue, everywhere present throughout this film, is also used to especially great effect in the many scenes involving telephones. In many ways, this could be called a telephone comedy, although it is not, as this might imply, a film in which the characters often talk to each other over the phone. Rather, most of the phone scenes in the film involve many people in the same room, all yelling into different phones at different unseen and mostly unknown people on the other end. Hawks handles this kind of chaos very well, and there's a particularly noteworthy scene where a bunch of reporters are returning, in dribs and drabs, to send their latest updates back to their papers. Hawks simply sets up at the end of the press room table and waits for the reporters to return, which they soon do, forming a sort of musical round of voices as they each step into the frame. One comes in, begins his report over one phone, then another fills in the space to his left and begins a different report, then another just as the first one is leaving. This babble of voices, telling different, often wildly contradictory, versions of the same story, is a recurring theme in the film, and Hawks always makes sure to carefully situate these different voices within the frame as well. In a later scene, Grant is calling his paper from a phone in the right foreground, while to the left and behind him Russell attempts to conduct a conversation with the police to locate her arrested fiance and his mother. The competing voices of the soundtrack are thus reflected in the tension of the halved frame.

This is a flawless comedy, with Hawks leading his stellar cast through a typically fast-paced, non-stop barrage of witty wordplay and comic scenarios. The dialogue crackles with energy and verve, and the performers stand up to the task in every way. The classic screwball era may well have provided some of the best comedies of all time, and His Girl Friday is one of the best of the best.

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While Alfred Hitchcock is an acknowledged genius of the thriller and undeniably a giant of Hollywood film, his comedic talents are still viewed, unfortunately, as somewhat secondary. Not only were his thrillers frequently padded with subtle humor and sexual innuendo, but he also made the much-maligned but utterly charming To Catch a Thief, and my personal favorite Hitchcock film, The Trouble With Harry. This quirky, totally strange comedy takes a familiar thriller subject, the dead body found mysteriously in the woods, and disarms its menace by having the people who find it — a motley assortment of cheery New England rural folks — treat its sudden appearance in their lives as a small bother at worst, a minor distraction from what really is, after all, a rather pleasant day. That these gentle souls are so unperturbed by the corpse in their woods is the film's essential joke, a single gag that's stretched out with such droll wit and total commitment to these bizarre personalities, that the film becomes absolutely irresistible.

It all starts when Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) stumbles across the body of Harry lying in the woods, and he believes that he accidentally shot him while rabbit hunting. He is mildly distressed about the possibility of going to jail, so he resolves to bury the corpse, but before he can, seemingly the whole town stumbles into the area. There's a kindly old maid (Mildred Natwick) who just politely asks him what's the trouble when she comes across him carrying the body by the legs, a bookish professor who nods and apologizes to the body when he trips over it, the lovely Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who seems outright overjoyed when she sees the dead body (because it's her husband, naturally), and the local artist Sam (John Forsythe), who decides to sketch the corpse. What ensures from this point is a subtly hilarious but outwardly deadpan farce, in which these people, for various reasons and motivations, keep burying and then digging up again the unfortunate Harry, who seems to be causing a great number of complications even after his death. This all takes place in the cheery sunlit setting of autumnal New England, which Hitch captures in a static but sumptuous visual style that makes each exterior shot look like a postcard — the film's rich orange and red hues serve as a perfect contrast to the gallows humor and casual disinterest in mortality that these characters evince.

Indeed, the film is a subtle satire of small-town life, as well as a certain provincial mentality that cares for little outside of oneself. Hitchcock both celebrates and mocks this mentality, but for the most part the film is a loving tribute to these people, who casually resist all authority — represented in the film by the bumbling local constable, who's paid by the arrest and thus makes every effort to find even the pettiest of offenses — and likewise strive to maintain their sheltered provincial existence from even good intrusions of the outside world. The struggling artist Sam is remarkably indifferent to monetary success. When he gets a chance to sell his paintings, he declares them priceless and instead of asking for money, requests that the buyer fulfill the wants of his friends: strawberries, a chemistry set, a new cash register, a shotgun and hunting outfit, a hope chest. This selfless act of kindness and bigheartedness belies the idea that these people are entirely self-centered and careless, and in this context their disregard for Harry's body takes on its proper significance.

It's a film in which death is merrily shrugged off so that life may go on for the living, and it's no coincidence that Hitchcock implicitly counterbalances death with sex. The burying of Harry becomes a mere pretext for the development of two new romantic relationships, and this burgeoning love is reflected in the film's depiction of sensual beauty in its many landscape shots. The film is also loaded with clever sexual innuendos, just barely disguised, and I will never cease to cackle with glee when Forsythe tells Gwenn: "don't you realize you'll be the first man to cross her... threshold?" Hitch was clearly having a lot of fun with this subtly naughty material, and all the actors seem to be in on the joke and having a ball as well. It's a riot, a gorgeous ode to rural autumns, and a celebration of the simple pleasures of a life in which death is just a minor mishap, easily forgotten with some tea and blueberry muffins.

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Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch has, seemingly, an airtight premise: take a dumpy middle-aged married man (Tom Ewell), send his wife and kids away for the summer, and put the stunningly gorgeous Marilyn Monroe upstairs from him as a constant source of temptation. The results should be both hilarious and sizzling, by all rights, and they are, at least whenever Monroe herself is onscreen. But for too much of the film, she's not, and large portions of the film focus solely on Ewell, whose paranoid fantasies, neuroses, and wild flights of imagination are mildly amusing at times, but more often just tedious and clunky. The film opens with an equally unamusing vignette with some Indians providing an old-time parallel to the main story, and a painfully unfunny narrator who thankfully disappears early in the film. Ewell spends much of the film by himself, talking incessantly despite the fact that no one else is around, and the film never adequately explains why this man feels the need to narrate every little thing he does, other than to keep some dialogue moving. It's also a mystery why, given Monroe's breathless and hilarious performance as the sweetly naïve and ditzy girl upstairs, and the surprisingly great chemistry between her and Ewell, the film keeps her offscreen for so long.

However, whenever she's around, the film sparkles and sizzles in exactly the way it should. Her introduction is a fabulous half-hour scene in which Ewell, tortured by guilt but nevertheless taking advantage of his wife's absence, invites her to his apartment for drinks. Monroe's character, unnamed and archetypically called just "The Girl," is indeed like an elemental force of nature that blows into Ewell's life with little regard for conventionality or ordinary social relations. Monroe's character is deliriously unmindful of her own sexuality, thinking nothing of appearing naked on her balcony or blithely announcing that she keeps her panties in the freezer during the summer. Her every move and utterance seems calculated to attract attention — as, indeed, the real Marilyn probably constructed her breathless, carefree persona — but her character is simply doing and saying whatever comes into her airy head. "Do you drink?" Ewell asks her at one point. "Oh yeah, like a fish," she burbles, but then is unable to come up with an acceptable drink and finally asks for a "big, tall" martini. Her character is pure Id, a wonderfully ludicrous male fantasy congealed on the screen in all her vivid reality. Ewell's character is given to wild daydreaming and fantasies, but he's incapable of dreaming up anything crazier than the real Marilyn as she appears here. In his imagination, she's pretty much just like she actually is in both his reality and the reality outside the picture, a reality that's acknowledged towards the end when Ewell yells out, "What blonde? Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe!"

This line is indicative of just how much the film is actually about the mystique of Marilyn, rather than about any character played by her. Marilyn's character here is sexual desire, abstracted and idealized — she's not a particular instance of the sex goddess but the Ur-goddess, the libidinal being on whom all others are based. In her raw simplicity and bubbly good humor, she's the spirit of pure, innocent sensuality and desire. As long as she's onscreen, The Seven Year Itch is a comic gem, but in the long stretches when she's nowhere to be found, it's a dull and awkward bore where even the jokes fall flat. Maybe that's part of the point, though — Ewell's character is a boring slob, a nobody, animated and brought to life only in relation to the radiant brilliance of Monroe, who burns bright but too briefly in this film as in life.

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is a crisp, smart, economical legal thriller that is perhaps more than a little predictable in the machinations of its plot, but it makes up for its small bows to genre conventions in other areas. Most notably, the film is first and foremost a study of its title character, with George Clooney giving a great performance as a high-powered lawyer whose specialty is "fixing" delicate and difficult problems for his company's wealthy business clients. He's growing weary of his job, though, and the constant pressure — not to mention the realization that he's on the wrong "side" morally — are beginning to take a toll on him. He's also a compulsive gambler, he's divorced and has a young son who he obviously loves and admires, and he's got an accumulation of debts after a failed business deal with his alcoholic brother. Clooney truly inhabits this downtrodden role, playing a man worn out by his life but not necessarily devoid of energy yet.

This is the directorial debut for screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote the scripts for the Jason Bourne trilogy as well as The Devil's Advocate and Dolores Claiborne. But Michael Clayton is certainly his strongest script so far; the dialogue is sharp and always believable, benefiting tremendously from a uniformly great cast, and the twists and turns of the plot keep the suspense elevated. The film is constructed as a loop, opening with a scene where Clayton leaves a card game to fix a problem with a client who committed a hit-and-run accident. He deals with it, then drives away, noticeably exhausted and aggravated, and stops by the side of the road to stretch his legs and admire three horses standing on a hill. While Clayton stands in front of the horses, Gilroy composes a shot from behind the animals, facing Clayton, with his car parked by the side of the road over his shoulder, conspicuously framed into the shot — a moment later, it becomes apparent why when the vehicle erupts into a fireball. The film then jumps back to four days earlier in a fade-to-white, and the remainder of the narrative catches things back up to this point.

It's easy to dismiss this kind of non-chronological structuring as pure gimmickry, a cheap trick with no purpose, but Gilroy actually handles it beautifully. On one level, yes, the structure serves to enhance suspense, to create a sense of mystery so that the film is essentially answering the question of who tried to kill Clayton and why. But the second time this sequence is replayed, towards the end of the film when the chronology has led back up to it, it has acquired a new significance and new meanings to its details and to the psychology of Clayton. The first time we see these things happening, we're watching for plot, for events, trying to understand what's happening; the second time, it's Clayton we're trying to understand, and the events here are important not in themselves but in relation to his character and persona. The experience of reviewing the opening events towards the end of the film is a process of fitting together Clayton's personality, contemplating the changes he's undergone in the course of the film and what these events might mean to him. What had seemed mere surface, basic plotting, at the beginning of the film, becomes laden with psychological meanings. This slow process of boring into Clayton's character is even reflected structurally in the film's opening and closing shots. The first shots of the film are all empty, nearly devoid of life — the first few minutes of the film consist of a montage of images from within the law firm, late at night, while Wilkinson rants in voiceover. The meaning of his monologue, his disgust with his profession and the way he's wasted his life, is not yet clear, but the empty rooms and corridors speak volumes about the loneliness and distance of these characters. The final shot of the film is a sustained closeup on Clooney's face, after he's definitively redeemed himself, stepped back over to the "right" side of the moral boundary. The film's trajectory is thus from an empty room with no people in it to a closeup on a human face — it's a movement from corporate distance to individualistic humanism.

Although Clooney is the film's center, he's counterbalanced by equally strong performances from Tom Wilkinson as Arthur Edens, a lawyer defending a chemical giant for the harm caused by one of their insecticides, and Tilda Swinton as the chemical company's chief lawyer. Edens precipitates the film's plot when he has a psychotic incident in a deposition room, stripping off his clothes and ranting incomprehensibly. His degenerating mental state, ironically, helps him to see things more clearly, and he realizes that he is definitively on the wrong side in this case, that by defending the chemical company he is helping them get away with murder for the deaths and cancers they've caused. His quixotic efforts to build a case against the company instead of for them lead to the violence and high-level cover-ups that make up the film's thriller plot. Swinton is his opposite number, in some ways equally pressured and weighed down by her job, but nevertheless committed to keeping things under control at any cost. Her performance is stellar, perfectly capturing her character's uncertainty and the in-over-her-head feeling she suffers at nearly every moment. Gilroy nails her character in several scenes in which he juxtaposes her interviews and speeches to the press and investors with her earlier preparations for these public appearances. What seems relaxed and spontaneous in public is revealed as carefully rehearsed, with each word carefully chosen, right down to the seeming hesitations and fumbling for a word that inject some humanity into the proceedings. Her character is a true corporate drone, and even her human touches are faked, that is until she is forced to confront the taking of a human life — then, Gilroy shows her sweating, the armpits of her blouse stained, one human touch that even she can't fake.

It's this attention to detail, this intelligent characterization and visual storytelling, that elevates Michael Clayton above its genre origins and makes it such a worthwhile film. As the plot weaves its predictable way towards an inevitable but highly satisfying conclusion, the only conclusion possible without resorting to nihilism, the script slowly digs its way into these characters, not only Clooney's, but also Wilkinson and Swinton. The result is a briskly paced thriller that never sacrifices character for plot.