Tag Archives: Grace Kelly

High Noon [1952)

What’s the point?

Says the old lawman who refuses.

Disillusioned.

I hear you, old lawman.

What is the point?

No one here but me.

What did I do wrong?

I could have been perfect, but I wasn’t.

But we all have little High Noons.

Where we can run, or do the right thing.

There’s a lot more left to the night.

And though my heart is hurting, I have stood fast.

In my own little way.

Sure, I feel pathetic.

But in my own way, a hero.

There was an easier path for me tonight.

And last night too.

But tonight was so seductive.

Mind games.

Of right and wrong.

Here I sit.

With no one to talk to.

I’m really not sure what’s happening.

I feel like Gary Cooper at the table with the bullets.

Just me and the bullets.

I have tried really hard.

Maybe not hard enough.

But I can look back and have pride in some of what I’ve done.

When I mess up, I try to rectify the situation.

And so on and so forth…into infinity.

Dimitri Tiomkin’s strings outline the ticking clock.

What’s the point?

Sure, Grace Kelly looks nice…but a little young.

She doesn’t have that same allure she would have later.

But she does the right thing too.

In the end.

We can despise her, but when the guns start firing, she makes up for it all.

Gary Cooper.

On his wedding day.

Kind of an MS-13 trip.

When we see Lee Van Cleef at the very beginning.

And we realize he’s way down the credits.

It’s then that we know this is gonna be good.

Do the right thing.

You might sense Trump here.

Good.

Gets really complex.

At “high noon”, Kane (Cooper) will be either dead or single.

Which is why he has to dig deep.

What is it that makes him stay?

Perhaps the same thing which makes Kelly eventually turn back?

Katy Jurado is good here.

Married to Ernest Borgnine for four years.

This film is a big metaphor.

No one does a damn thing.

Because it’s too hard.

Lloyd Bridges definitely picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.

Bridges plays the quid pro quo sack of shit that tries to unnerve Gary Cooper.

Hell, Harry Morgan is even in this!

You know, Colonel Potter from MASH!

But it’s pretty much just up to Gary Cooper.

Cooper’s mannerisms would later be carried on by Kevin Costner (to name just one).

But here Cooper was all alone.

Sweating.

Sweat as a motif.

Supposed to be in New Mexico.

Would you have the courage to write a will just before your judgement hour?

That’s a lot of temerity.

Maybe this film really revolves around the uncredited role by Jack Elam.

I don’t know.

But this is a film not to be missed!!!

 

-PD

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Rear Window [1954)

Before there was Facebook, there was Rear Window.  It was (and remains) Alfred Hitchcock’s most perfect film.  In it we find “the gaze”…that phenomenon of lovers transposed to the art of memory, which is to say, cinema.

The telephoto lens of our protagonist is fitted to a camera, but he snaps no pictures during the entirety of our film.  Nor does he film what he sees onto reels to later exploit the phi phenomenon. His gaze leads directly to his mind…and the events he witnesses are recorded into his memory.

Rear Window is really a film about film–self-referential cinema.  It is no wonder that Jean-Luc Godard chose to feature images of Jimmy Stewart with the long lens in his magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma.  Rear Window is pure cinema.

The further significance is that Stewart’s character L.B. Jeffries embodies the conscience of Hollywood.  Indeed, in this case we are the ones watching the watcher (to paraphrase Juvenal).  But the essential detail is that Jeffries is making a movie in his head…and we are watching him make it.  It is documentary.  He is a news photographer who is laid up in a wheelchair during a summer heat wave because he had gotten a little too cavalier on assignment from his magazine.  But the true artist never stops working.

We enter the realm of Flaherty and the murky waters of fiction vs. reality–staged spectacle vs. actualités.  This is a film about the pure process of motion pictures.  The saving grace (other than the breathtaking Grace Kelly) is that the story is as airtight as an alibi.  Rear Window is endlessly watchable because of this marriage between the abstract (which may, in many cases, be “felt” only intuitively) and the spectacular. 

Before Facebook, there were rear windows.  After Facebook, there will remain Rear Window.

 

-PD

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To Catch A Thief [1955)

The first time I saw To Catch A Thief I was not overly impressed.  Seemed like simply a 106 minute postcard, but oh how wrong I was.  This is another Hitchcock masterpiece and, if not Vertigo-caliber, it should at least be considered in the same league as Alfred’s own excellent remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

The whole gang’s here…  Cinematography by Robert Burks, editing by George Tomasini, music by…ok, not the whole gang…but most of them.

Grace Kelly is simply stunning.  When she first kisses Cary Grant, it is almost a heart-stopping moment–bursting with elegant sexuality.  Grant, for his part, was never better for Hitchcock (outside of North by Northwest).  And if the colors of mourning (to paraphrase Godard) made Notorious (1946) a less-than-vivid depiction of Rio de Janeiro, all sins are forgiven in this VistaVision take (breathtaking) on the French Riviera.  I can’t let those poseurs at Cannes have all the fun this week 🙂  I am home studying.  This is your dossier.  And there was only one film worth seeing this year anyway:  Adieu au langage.

Brigitte Auber gives a nice performance as the snotty enfant terrible and, though she herself is a pretty sight, Grace Kelly never looked better on film than in the “fireworks and diamonds” section of our film.  Indeed, Hitch knew the power of the Kuleshov effect as well as anyone and the cinematic intercutting of this scene places him with the greats of film editing like Eisenstein (though let’s not forget Tomasini…the credited editor).

Perhaps there is no stronger tie among Hitchcock films to la Nouvelle Vague than this panoramic view dans le Midi–especially to Truffaut (considering his book on Hitchcock…though it didn’t appear till 1967).  The fact that this film contains so much spoken French (sans subtitles) makes it unique in the director’s canon.  Grace Kelly herself would marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco not but eight months after the premiere and retire from filmmaking in her new role as the Monégasque Princess Grace.

Edith Head’s costumes were never more perfectly worn than by Miss Kelly (especially the white gown against her honeyed skin in the fireworks scene).

Most of all, this film should be considered among the essential Hitchcock along with the three perfect films (Rear Window, Vertigo and North by Northwest) [not forgetting the parallel perfection of Psycho].  Most, if not all, the secrets of filmmaking are contained in the work of cinema’s Beethoven:  Alfred Hitchcock.

 

-PD

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