Marnie. Alfred Hitchcock. 1964.

Oh! Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery in an amusing thriller.

Tippi Hedren was, of course, one of the primary victims of Hitch’s incessant sexual abuse. Hitchcock went after a number of his leading ladies really hard, but Hedren is one of the few who have gone on record about the extent of the abuse. When she wouldn’t give in, he subjected her to humiliating and dangerous bits in the movies.

ANYWAY.

Marnie’s relationship with her mother is typical of Hitch in this period: Everything is intensely Fraudian. It seems over-the-top and risibly simple now, but I remember watching this as a child and being rather impressed by it.

I can see why Hitchcock would be interested in this movie. It’s basically about a man blackmailing a woman into doing what he wants.

It’s not framed that way, of course: Connery is a “good guy” and Hedren is totally wicked, so his manipulation and capture and rape of Hedren is like totes justified, dude.

It’s really creepy.

I MEAN: IT”S ROMANTIC.

I love the way a central plot point is a guy not being able to remember a five digit safe combination that he uses multiple times a day.

The casting’s weird: Tippi Hedren’s mother looks like she’s approx. the same age are Tippi, only somebody’s scribbled wrinkles in mascara all over her face.

Is this where the dinner scene in Eraserhead came from?

Frenzy. Alfred Hitchcock. 1972.

I bought a box set of 2K blu-ray Hitchcock movies, and I was thinking of perhaps watching them chronologically. But then I started thinking that I should watch all of Hitchy’s movies… and then I looked up his filmography and he’s done … a lot .. of movies, starting in the 20s.

They’re probably all great, but it just sounded a bit exhausting, so here I am watching Frenzy, one of his last movies. And one I don’t remember at all.

So this is a British movie? Did Hitch move back to Britain in his dotage? I’ve forgotten everything I knew about his biography. I’m also surprised by barely recognising any of the actors… Hitch eschewed famous actors at this point? And it looks intensely “movies 70s”: All earth colours and hair that doesn’t move.

Hitchcock’s usual subtextual misogyny is now the text.

It’s really a pretty lighthearted thriller with a traditional plot: The coppers are after the wrong guy and he has to find the killer. But the crimes are depicted at length: The scenes¹ with psychopath raping and strangling women are difficult to reconcile with the rest of the movie (and would, frankly, be hard to take in any context).

But the contrast is efficient, I guess. Hitchcock knows what he’s doing. And what he’s doing isn’t very nice.

(That’s a Wolverine reference.)

As in any Hitchcock movie, there’s a lot of enjoyable scenes, of course. The dinner scenes are priceless, and the scene where the camera pulls back from the scene of probable murder, down the staircase and onto the cheery street is a classic, probably shown in every film school.

---

¹) There’s really only one but it feels like more.

That… looks like a fire hazard?

Le Bonheur. Agnès Varda. 1965.

Wow! Such a riot of colour!

I’ve seen less than a handful of movies by Agnès Varda, and none of them have looked even remotely like this.

The 2K restoration looks just amazing, and it was overseen by Varda herself:

This is one of those rare movies where I have no idea what it’s going to be about. There are no genre signifiers, and the while the title (“The Happiness”, no?) could be taken as a sarcastic signifier, it’s impossible to tell from the opening scenes: Perhaps this will be a movie of pure happiness?

I had a vague plan of watching all of Varda’s movies chronologically, but they’re so hard to come by (with English subtitles). This is from a five disc blu-ray set that was released a few years ago… and since Varda died some weeks ago, I somehow didn’t want to wait longer before starting to watch her movies.

The acting in this movie isn’t totally naturalistic… are some of them amateurs, perhaps?

Oh! This movie won the awards at the only film festival that matters:

two awards at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival, including the Jury Grand Prix

It’s a fascinating movie. Most of the editing is very traditional, for instance, but then *boom* she does these blink cuts that are so 60s.

Colour me flabbergasted. It’s so odd. And it all works brilliantly.

One pretty odd thing: This movie has a lot of small children who are amazing. But in a couple of the scenes you can see the children souring on the entire thing and just starting to cry their little eyes out, but Varda just drops the audio and has the adult actors add their lines on a sound stage.

It’s bizarre! Are we not supposed to notice the crying child, or are we, and that’s supposed to be like the verfremdung thing?

The blu-ray has a very funny documentary by Varda where she goes back to the village where this movie was filmed.