The Greatest Nonsense of All

What can I say about one of my favorite films of all time?

I once compelled my three best friends to accompany me to AFI’s opulent theater just outside the nation’s capital so I could see North by Northwest on the big screen. Neither the wonderful setting – all classic film lovers should go there – nor the film disappointed.

Alfred Hitchcock made better pictures, with greater depth and a more detailed examination of the human condition, for sure, but none of those Herculean efforts comes even remotely close to this outing in terms of sheer cinematic enjoyment. Put simply, this movie is like candy or whatever other guilty pleasure you enjoy: You know it is ridiculous and you probably should not be eating it, but you savor every bite because of its inherent wonderfulness.

The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, which does not stand much scrutiny, revolves around a rather juvenile case of mistaken identity that eventually leads to attempted murder and some grand chases that all eventually have something to do with international espionage. Cary Grant, whose smarmy turn as the smug Madison Avenue advertising man has rightly attracted adoration, famously quipped to Hitchcock that the film had a terrible script and he could not make heads or tails of it. Hitchcock told Grant he was unconsciously repeating his character’s lines. I leave it to the audiences to determine who is more right, but there is a sort of uncontrolled zaniness in how film rushes – almost madly – from one scene to another, until, in perhaps the film’s most famous sequence, everything slows and there is nothing but silence and the drone of an airplane for several agonizingly long minutes.

The crop duster chasing Grant might not have aged well – the crash, in particular, looks and feels a little silly – but the scene’s inherent power remains. After being hurled through the plot, Grant is finally dangled a respite that hints at some sort of resolution to his case of mistaken identity, only to be attacked and propelled back into the fray yet again. However, to assert the whole movie, like this scene itself, is completely bewildering would be a mistake. The fields surrounding Grant in the iconic scene are intentionally as grid-like as the title sequence, signifying that there is a deliberate pattern to the film, one in which almost every line is carefully constructed to edge the plot along in its general direction, which is, geographically speaking, Northwest.

At the same time, Hitchcock himself said he practiced “absurdity quite religious” when interview by Francois Truffaut, and this is never more on display than it is in this film. From almost the film’s opening scene, when Grant tells us that “In the world of advertising, there's no such thing as a lie. There's only expedient exaggeration," the film motors along, with barely a care as to how realistic its various parts are functioning. But at the heart of all its madness, as I have already suggested, there is indeed order, as many of the scenes themselves show us. The library Grant is accosted in is immaculate. Later, the wilderness he encounters his lover in is equally as ordered. From chaos, comes a kind of order, Hitchcock is showing us. And thus, his film works and it becomes believable after it has stewed in its own irreverence.  

Man and a woman in an ordered wilderness...

In addition to a reference to Grant’s travels, the title is a nod to a line in Hamlet’s rant about his own insanity, insanity that of course was concocted to shield his true motives. And herein lies another clue, as it increasingly becomes obvious everyone in the film is not what they seem. Grant is a dilettante forced to play a spy, whereas Eva Marie Saint is spy forced to play a dilettante in order to get closer to James Mason, the film’s excellent and cunning villain. Mason himself also plays several roles. He is the host of a party in a home he does not own and a culture vulture buying precious art not out of any sense of refinement, but to enable his espionage transactions. That a love between Grant and Saint emerges at the end of all this deception and role-playing is surely not a plot-twist inserted to please audiences? I rather think it's another of Hitchcock's wry commentaries on life. 

Along the way, there is a great deal of fun. Grant is pitch-perfect throughout and Saint manages to be both sensual and smart at the same time. Indeed, the knows more than our hero does for much of the picture and outmaneuvers him on her way to marrying him, a theme later repeated by Hitchcock in Rear Window. The scene between the two on the train to Chicago is also an amazing exemplar of how the scripts of yesterday were forced to dance around sex with flirtation and suggestion, both of which seem preferable to where movies have sunk to today. 

At the same time, it is also interesting to note precisely how close the film is to a Bond movie. There is a cultured villain (Mason), the scenes on train reminiscent of From Russia with Love and the showdown on Mount Rushmore feels like a Bond ending, though perhaps one with less gusto.

The cultured villain

No matter, a foot hardly is put wrong in this effort. The acting, direction and general melee of a picture all conspire together to create great enjoyment, none of which I think has abated today. The theater I saw the film in was packed and had people of all ages. From the comments I gathered after, the film was thoroughly enjoyed by all, no matter how much of it was sheer and utter cinematic nonsense…

Power, Perversion and Purpose

Where do we begin with Mr. Bond?

The success of his film franchise – some 23 movies in all – and his status as a cultural icon – one imagines people in the Amazonian rain forest know about the character’s choice of cocktail – is unmatched by anything in the history of cinema. People cheered when the lights went down in the theater where I saw the most recent Bond picture and the frustration about the financial troubles that delayed Skyfall in advance of its release were legendarily frustrating among devotees.

Exactly why the exploits of an officer in the British intelligence service, known as MI-6, should hold such sway over the popular imagination – and this is in not just Great Britain, not just the cousins in the United States or even the English-speaking countries, but of the entire world – begs examination. I propose the success of Bond is visceral (the films are a feast of effects and beautiful to behold), psychological (Bond does what we all secretly wish we could) and philosophical (Bond is a kind of Platonic Guardian of Western Civilization, whose wines and other products he clearly values and enjoys).

The Nature of Bond
In one novel, Bond is described as “certainly good-looking . . . Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold.” Add to that the word “ruthless”.

The literary Bond has a facial scar. He fought in the Second World War, can throw knives. He drinks too much, not because it is fashionable, but more because he has no real friends and the loneliness must be filled somehow. He clearly relishes killing, both the build-up, which is often described in sexual terms by Fleming, and the act itself. But the killing takes its toll on him and the spent feelings – again, of an almost sexual vein – pay him back at unexpected moments, so he smokes more, drinks more, or tries to find solace in a round of cards or a drive in the country. These things alleviate his inner demons temporarily, but the only real cure is glimpsed in Thunderball, which opens with burnt-out James Bond recuperating in a health spa. What Bond needs more of is more of the job, more killing, and so he goes looking for it at the spa and finds both. Only then is he "cured" and re-animated.

The literary Bond then is an aesthete, something which unfortunately comes across as humor or snobbery in the films. The literary Bond enjoys the finer things because he does not often like people and the people around him either tend to need killing by him or end up being killed by others. Bond in the novels is closed off to others and he is almost pathologically non-communicative in the books, most of which contain pages upon pages without spoke dialogue, the action being all in Bond's head. He clearly views himself as a distinct being, separated from others by the secrecy incumbent in his job as well as the fact that he is a killer who operates in an artificial – perhaps self-made – world that is beyond everyday Good and Evil.

One philosophy professor writes that Bond is incarnate of a "He Who Eats Meat Wins" mentality, a walking incarnate of the masculine ego's successful overreach into the stratosphere (Bond is many things, but he is not a failure). According to this line of thinking, which I believe is right, Bond has a strong appetite because he is concerned about life and death in way other people are not. Bond could die at any moment, just like the people he himself dispatches. So there is a voracious Epicurean in Bond. Life, which does not hold much meaning to him, is easily extinguished. So he takes pleasure when and where he can...

This Bond does not quite exist on the screen.

The film Bond is the “man every other man wants to be" and "the man every woman wants to sleep with,” as one film critic quipped. On screen, the internal fretting in Fleming’s novels, along with the depictions of doubt and personal regrets, are almost entirely jettisoned. The Fleming anti-hero is thus reborn as a hero, and his uncomfortable flaws and coping mechanisms – that is, his drinking, his nearly sociopathic womanizing and his clear enjoyment of killing – are either softened into punch lines or made positive attributes that denote glamour. It is an interesting transition and one that I believe is critical to the franchise's success. Here, too, I must emphasize that much of the ugliness and raw power of Bond the human being is absent in the films. Ego is often discussed in the film, as Bond's will to act, but in a cinematic context the ego is essentially criticized. In Casino Royale, for example, we have a Bond who must learn humility, and does. On screen, in place of a man who is almost sheer action, we have Bond the civil servant, a man Dr. No calls a "stupid little policeman," which in essence, is correct. Bond therefore is a kind of Horatio Nelson, in that he is somewhat obscene and grandiose, for sure, but still well within society’s bounds of acceptable behavior, and we as an audience are willing to forgive him his trespasses for a handful of equally compelling reasons.

Bond strangles a woman. Pure Fleming moment.

Bond as Escapism
The first reason for Bond's cinematic success is simple. The aforementioned film critic's quip was right. On some level, we – and I mean more the men than the women here – do want to be James Bond (I leave it to the women to chime in on whether they want to sleep with a man like Bond). Or rather, we want to want the things he wants, the fancy cars, dangerous women and good champagne, and we enjoy vicariously participating in his over-sized pursuit of them. We also note Bond's confidence, his acumen and his style and again view these as positive worthy of striving toward. On a puerile level, who doesn't want to be handsome, successful and living an exciting life?

So in this sense, Bond thrills with his wish-fulfillment. Bond films are not documentary or anything like reality, rather they are escapist fantasies, laced with healthy doses of hyperbolic action and over-the-top situations. Bond is never shown filling out paperwork, filing receipts or being forced to grab a lukewarm cup of tea in the MI-6 cafeteria. He literally springs from one luxurious meal to another, from one fine hotel to another, and of course, from one unobtainable – at least to mere mortals – woman to another.

Bond does this, and we get to watch him do it, because he is essentially a creature driven almost completely by his id, which is defined as "the part of the mind containing ... wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, the psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse." Most people do not get to indulge their id as much as Bond, because we have duties and responsibilities and social norms we must pay attention to in complicated social settings. Although Bond is far from brutish, his restriction of his id and its impulses is far more limited than in most people.

This is a complicated way of saying, Bond lives in the moment and likes to have fun. And often, there are no consequences – or at least not normal consequences – attached to his actions. We would go to jail, for example, if we killed people. But Bond has his famous license to kill. Which leads me to...

Sex and Death
Make no mistake, Bond films are all existential struggles – isn't the fate of the entire world always at stake in them? – and the films all intentionally make a direct correlation between sex – a creative act – and destruction. If you do not believe me, go back and re-watch the infamous title sequences from the 1960s when completely naked women frolic around the silhouettes of firearms. What is going on there is much more than a crude metaphor for pistol. For on each of his missions, Bond stares death in the face and the plot hatched by the supervillain often involves the kind of negation death is itself. Consider that in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bloefeld utilized a gaggle of nubile young women to do what? To carry a plague that would sterilize plants and animals around the world. To, in other words, negate the creative act symbolized by their sexuality – and the sex Bond has with them – with death.

A penis-shaped laser tries to cut Bond's penis off. A metaphor you could not create on your own. But Fleming did.

That the sex in Bond film's has little or no consequences only furthers the notion that on some level what Bond is at war during the films lies within himself or with existence in more general terms. How many of Bond's sexual conquests are subsequently murdered? There are no awkward morning afters in Bond's world, no talk of promises and commitments. Women are unabashedly objectified and presented as tokens of Bond's dangerous lifestyle (or were until recent films). Just as he gets a great car, he gets great women. Nobody is saying this kind of fetishism is admirable (see Pygmalion), but the desire for this does exist somewhere within us all, just as the desire to murder and be a creature of assured violence exists within us all.

The reward?

Of course, along the way Bond is giving up meaningful relationships, of the possibility of, say, raising children, of having a safe and secure life. And in compensation he receives cars, slavish women, fine caviar, etc. This was Achilles choice and it is Bond's choice. It is not one many of us would make, but there is something primal and attractive about nonetheless, which both Fleming and the filmmakers understand, even if in the case of the latter it is by accident. Bond's brutal life is presented as a glorious procession in order both to tantalize us with the forbidden as well as demonstrate how satisfying and reckless the forbidden might be.

Personally, I am not sure which Bond I like best – the novel or the film version – but I am certain which Bond sells. This is another way of saying that I am certain that if more of Fleming’s Bond made it onto the screen, we would not be talking about a film franchise here of 50 years. Films are spectacles and audiences go to them for bedazzlement. They also go for affirmation. Bond gives audiences both. A Bond film is not a Bond film without almost hyperbolic action sequences (indeed, at one point the action became ridiculous in both the Roger Moore and Peirce Brosnan years). A Bond film is also not a Bond Film without what I will call Bond’s accouterments. By this I mean Bond the aesthete is transformed into a kind of showman for cars, watches, finely tailored suits and complicated drink orders, because these are all luxuries that people want and want to see. After 50 years, Bond and his preferences are now inseparable. The aesthetic eccentricity from the novels has been remade as “classiness” in an age that otherwise rejects such things.

Bond as Civil Servant
If Bond is a creature of id, confronting death and his own personal demons in a way we find entertaining, what ultimately makes him a hero? It boils down to this. As we know, the id "knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality." The id seeks only the discharge of satisfaction (think sex and guns again). And if this is all there is to James Bond, he would appear as the kind of monsters he confronts in his adventures. That he is not a monster is ultimately because Bond's desires are channeled toward the greater good. That is, the filmmakers shrewdly choose to emphasize the purpose of Bond’s existence at the expense of the power and perversion inherent in his character. The Bond in the films is a "hero" precisely because he is working to protect innocents. He is a Platonic Guardian in the purest of forms, because he is an elected elite who endures great hardship and is therefore granted great license and reward so that the Republic will continue to stand.

For Queen and Country

If Bond on-screen did not believe in the goodness of his country and his role in the stewardship of democratically-elected governments, then he would be nothing more than thrill-seeker, cashing in on his job's status to acquire and do things not available to others. But he is not. He is motivated entirely by a noble cause (the defense of freedom), unlike his adversaries. Bond's villains, while sharing much of Bond's will to act and over-sized appetites, are perverted creatures in large part because they do not have Bond's redeeming dedication to service. Fleming was careful to ensure all of his supervillains, for nothing else could stand in the way of a superhero but a supervillain, are both mentally and physically perverted creatures.

Disfigured and without restraint.

Dr. No is a prime example. A cultured and intelligent man, his mind is nonetheless twisted by feelings of rebuke and he harbors an overwhelming desire for revenge that his distorted his entire reality (notice how surreal the Bond villain lairs always are). At the same time, he is a ghost of a human being, with little or no normal emotions and missing hands. In this sense, the Bond villains are evil doppelgangers of Bond, who indeed in The Man with the Golden Gun is openly exposed to this very obvious metaphor when Scaramanga presses Bond to admit how much he enjoys killing and therefore how similar the hitman (Scaramanga) is to the intelligence officer (Bond). Bond, of course, refuses the comparison, but it should provoke audiences to thinking a bit more about the man they have chosen to elevate for half a century. He is, if nothing else, complicated and what he represents about the society that produced him and continues to revel in his exploits is no less complicated...

The Best Bonds
Everyone has a list, of course. On this one, I have avoided what I will call the contemporary Bonds and tried to stick to what I consider the “classic” era of Bonds:

1. Goldfinger (1964): Of all the Bond Films, this ranks top. It is, quite simply, all that a Bond film should be and it is the last Bond film in which the character of Bond himself is not swallowed by the scope of the action or subject to using increasingly ridiculous gadgetry (which thankfully Skyfall jettisoned). The now-established Bond tropes are all introduced here, but they are not distracting yet: We have a wronged woman seeking revenge, a sports car with gadgetry and another maniacal, cultured and somewhat charming villain (Dr. No was not charming), assisted by a bizarre henchmen (Odd Job) who kills people in a fantastic way. There is something important at stake (Fort Knox), but for Bond the battle is more personal, as it would become again when Daniel Craig took up the role. For Bond in this film, it is about beating Goldfinger at his own game rather than “saving the day.” There is also the small matter of the quintessential Bond song, sung here by Shirley Bassey. It was never surpassed, though her sophomore effort in Diamonds are Forever comes pretty damn close.

2. From Russia with Love (1963): Probably the most traditional espionage film in the series, in that this is a real spy film, with a plot that involves a code machine and a honey trap, both classic Cold War espionage devices that have real-world corollaries. The scenes in Istanbul and the chase at the film's conclusion both still stand up, even if the deranged women with the shoe in her knife does not. The opening scene is also a classic, and no doubt worked better on the original audience, who did not know there would be 20 or so more films.

3. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969): George Lazenby as Bond continues to divide, but leaving aside his uneven performance, this efforts soars with emotion as Bond meets his match in Diana Rigg’s character, falls in love and actually marries. Along the way, there are two great chases in the snow and some real emotional depth to what is clearly the most faithful adaptation of a Fleming novel. The pattern of the woman in this film being the equal of Bond became commonplace in later efforts, but it never worked as well it as does here. When Rigg skates up to help bail Bond out of trouble when he is at the skating rink, he is actually scared and out of ideas, something that does not happen anywhere else, I believe. It would have been interesting to see the filmmakers continue the thread begun in the last scene of this film with a revenge picture as a sequel, but instead we got Connery back in the rather glib Diamonds Are Forever.

4. Thunderball (1965): Sure, the underwater scenes are somewhat slow, but the rest of the film races along and Bond on several occasions faces real jeopardy. Connery is at the top of his game here, too. He is suave, provocative and full of a carefully calculated wit. The role does not bore him yet and the filmmakers are still giving him interesting things to do in his scenes that are not cliched. The outdoor shots work well, we get a great Casino scene and a villain who is creepy in a subtle and refined way.

5. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977): Surely, the best of the Roger Moore offerings? There is no real silliness in the film, aside from Jaws (who is no more or less preposterous than Odd Job) and the soundtrack’s disco-music accompaniment. Barbara Bach is amongst the best Bond girls to look at and more than a match for Moore’s casual approach to … well, everything really (does this man even run in action scenes?). The plot involves an underwater lair, stolen submarines, détente and an arch villain who wants to cleanse the world by destroying it. In case you are not following, this is essentially a remake of You Only Live Twice with a few updates. No matter, because it works. There are some good effects, some real moments of tension, excellent sets (designed in part by Stanley Kubrick) and a great conflict between Bach and Moore.

Dangerous Ideology

No doubt there are plenty of people who watch 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate today and come away thinking it little more than a period-piece, or a kind of curiosity that chronicles an opaque form of paranoia from the Cold War that seems as alien to them as the once-held belief in the divine right of kings.

However, dismissing John Frankenheimer’s calculated adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel on such grounds is a mistake. For starters, I can think of few other films where the imitation of life is as brilliantly warped and overdone – and at the same time as strangely accurate – as this one. That is, we know now that the Soviet Union and its ill-begotten allies really did believe they could brainwash people in political reeducation camps, a plot point that would seem to be cooked up by a kooky screenwriter. We also know the Central Intelligence Agency experimented on methods to both control minds and resist the mind control efforts of their enemies (the infamous MKULTRA project that included a certain compound that later gained famed as LSD). Conspricacy-laced political thrillers that have just a touch of truth may be common fair these days, but in 1962 – when the majority of Americans still trusted their government – the genre was just beginning to find its own feet.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that The Manchurian Candidate is avante garde filmmaking masquerading as a boorish crowdpleaser (and in doing so, mimicking one of its lead characters quite intentionally). The end-result is a film that may chronicle the dark and often difficult to discern Cold Way conflict better than any other effort, minus Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Only, unlike Kubrick’s dark and wickedly cynical slice of satire, Frankenheimer plays it straight and serious. Audiences today might snicker at the lengths the Chinese government undertake in the film to train and condition an assassin capable of propelling their candidate to office, but the kernel of truth within what is obviously hyperbole and artistic license is worth mentioning.

The Rosenburgs -- Guilty as Hell

There is little doubt today, thanks to FOIA disclosures and solid historical work by scholars such as Christopher Andrew, that the Soviet Union possessed agents who had thoroughly penetrated the U.S. government in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, the Soviet espionage apparatus stole what could be viewed as the ultimate secret – and in doing so, reshaped the balance of power in the entire world – when agents affiliated with the infamous Rosenburg couple ferreted out the knowledge needed build an atomic bomb. And if you can steal the power of the sun, how hard could it be to try to shape an election?

The infamous "garden party" with the old ladies

Not for nothing is there a line of dialogue about the Senator Iselin character being more dangerous to America than the Soviets themselves. Harry Truman said almost exactly the same thing about Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his public attacks on the U.S. government, a historical realism definitely reenacted by the Iselin’s character’s drunken, nonsensical allegations throughout the film about the loyalty of his fellow represenatives. The only problem is that Iselin – like the odious McCarthy before him – is correct. There is something wrong with the American government in The Manchurian Candidate, just as there was in the real life American government in the early 1950s (Chambers, Hiss, Rosenburgs et al were all very, very guilty – despite the intellectual cartwheels that attempt to prove otherwise). Condon’s brilliance is take Truman’s statement of disgust and make it into the ultimate nightmare scenario: What if McCarthy was actually an agent of influence, and in being one, campaigning in the open against traitors like himself in order to avoid discovery? 

These are the kind of visceral historical thrills the film produces, but there are others. Besides all the politics and the espionage there is a fundmentally human story, burgeoned by a pair of powerful performances. Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of Mrs. Iselin is a bone-chilling reincarnation of Shakespeare’s twisted Lady MacBeth. She is at once perfect and unsettling, outdoing the Scottish noblewoman, in that she uses and manipulates both her amenable husband and her recalcitrant son. She is all ideology and narcissism, and perhaps the most disturbing part of her portrayal is the realization that partisans such as her, partisans willing to sacrifice everything – family included – to further their aims, are real and remain among us.

Laurence Harvey’s performance as Raymond, her distinctly unlovable son and prodigal son is the film’s other standout – not Frank Sinatra’s turn as the Army Major haunted by what happened in Korea. Harvey is the picture of frustration, the boy whose overly doting mother never allowed him to become a man. When he finds love, she wrecks it. When he finds fame and success, she capitalizes on it for herself. Throughout, he wrestles with great demons, unsure of how and when to act (like another Shakespeare character). With his father dead and Sen. Iselin living in his father’s house, there is an Oedipal striving in Harvey and his outbursts. His love interest is attractive enough, but one cannot help but feel his attraction for her only grew when he learned she is the daughter of his step-father’s fiercest political rival. Becoming involved with her, means he is screwing his step-father and his mother at the same time.

However, the film saves its ultimate irony and its ultimate revenge until the end. By killing his parents, Harvey becomes a real hero in place of the phony one he has been throughout the film. The irony is that it took an act of familial betrayal to get him there. “Poor Raymond,” Sinatra says, summing up a man whose entire life seems to have been burned away by the powerful flame of Lansbury’s insatiable ideology. In this, the film seems to be saying that the most dangerous people are the ones who have nothing but their principles to lose and nothing but the revolution to strive for. A person’s politics and patriotism are one thing – suborning both to some imaginary cause something else entirely. This was the inherent danger of the Cold War and its Marxist idealists. Like the religious fanatics plaguing the world today, they seemed to have no earthly cares. Ideology was everything . . . and I can think of nothing more dangerous. 

Difficult to Dislike

Like climatic battles between two titanic empires, romantic comedies are damn near run things that fail or succeed by the scantest of margins. Miscalculate the levity, make a poor casting choice or choose an inappropriate setting and any effort in this genre can easily become ridiculous, sappy, unfunny – or worst of all, irritating.

 

Thankfully, the convergence of skill and craftsmanship behind Charade make it almost impossible to dislike. The 1963 film boasts a talented cast led by Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, a delightful score and a spy game stratagem that unfolds with exactly the right mixture of playful shenanigans and baited-breath. There is nothing approaching greatness in this movie, but whoever goes looking for greatness in romantic comedies is bound to be disappointed. Fun, formatted with typical cleverness, is more what we are after – and we get to have quite a lot of fun in this semi-serious romp of a picture.

Unfortunately, I suppose some of the tongue-in-cheek that makes Charade such a hoot is lost on the contemporary viewer. Released at virtually the height of the Cold War, a time when both the local cinema and the living room television are alive with spy stories, Charade’s not-so-hidden agenda is levity in the face of overwhelming dread. That director Stanley Donen succeeds so well in satirizing the easily recognizable tropes of the spy genre and the thriller is a testament to precisely how well he understands both. Labeled the “best” Hitchcock film never made by Hitchcock, Charade’s audience is continually asked to follow a film that looks and feels like the great British master’s work right up until the punch lines materialize and burst whatever self-important bubbles were forming.

Parade of Fools.

Joel and Ethan Coen achieved something close to this in 2008’s Burn After Reading, but the Coen duet do not have Donen’s appreciation for the musical rhythms of humor. Donen, the director of the seminal Singin’ in the Rain, knows more about moving humans around the set, and as a result, set-pieces such as the funeral scene in which Hepburn watches in amazement as a parade of oddball characters parade before her eyes unfold with a dizzying feeling of frolic almost completely devoid in the Coen satire.

Hitchcock-ian?

Elsewhere, the mood remains far too light, the plot far too much what-you-see-is-what-you-get for it ever to really be mistaken for Hitchcock, but even so, there are certainly some Hitchcock-ian flourishes on display.  Chief among them, of course, is the fact that the plot revolves around the innocent bystander (Hepburn) who unwillingly becomes immersed in a complicated espionage plot – a setup Hitchcock utilized several different times, each to great effect. The other touch that made me think of Hitch comes when Grant faces down one of the film’s villains on the roof of the hotel where much of the principle action occurs. Part Rear Window, part North by Northwest, the scene unfolds in a wonderful series of lattice-like shadows cast by a neon sign. The roof’s gradual slope to death-by-falling is both obvious and suspenseful at the same time, and the choreography leading up to the inevitable is staged as masterfully as anything Hitchcock did. Other moments, such as the opening at the ski resort, are funnier when viewed from the historical aftermath of the numerous snow scenes in the James Bond franchise we have all loved and endured for more than four decades. And I doubt there is anything more perfect than the gun pointed at Hepburn in the film’s opening few shots.

Always ephemeral.

The timely murder of Hepburn’s husband saves her from agonizing about divorcing him in favor of Grant (who she meets at aforementioned ski resort). The death also launches the film’s action, as we quickly learn the husband was involved in some kind of espionage or criminality plot. What follows is a largely a comedy of errors, in which Hepburn muddles and giggles her way through several acts of spying and a few attempts on her life. Through it all, Grant is conveniently at her side, dashing and indecipherable until virtually the last frame of the film, when his true nature is finally revealed. Even more interestingly, the film takes great pains to chide Grant for being far too old for the petite and always elfin Ms. Hepburn. Grant, who turned the lead in Roman Holiday several years earlier precisely because of the age difference between the two, supposedly insisted the script contain the jokes – and they work precisely because one of Grant’s strengths has always been self-depreciation.  

Everyone involved probably made better pictures, but as a B-side to the rest of their careers, this is not too far off in sheer quality. I enjoyed this film for what it is and throughout felt a twinge of nostalgia and sadness, largely because contemporary attempts to recreate the chemistry that works so well in Charade now seems beyond Hollywood. The occasional moments of slowness – the script, I think, could have been tightened 15 minutes – does not detract from the final product’s overall punch. This is a fun movie, made by skilled people who know how to entertain audiences.

Five Classic Spy Films

To be a voyeur, to peak at a private world not your own is a fundamental part of reading a book or going to see a movie or play. As a reader or an audience member, you are, for a time, permitted to survey that which is typically hidden from you during your everyday life. The only way you can learn about actual people as much as you learn about characters in fiction is by spying on them. Perhaps this is why spies and their genre films have such a visceral pull for audiences. Add sex, lies and state secrets to the essential urge people have for observation and understanding and you have a potent mix for highly emotional drama, in which the best and worst of human nature competes for stakes that are both fantastic and accessible.

Detective stories and the Westerns dominated the early days of film, but tension surrounding two world wars gave legs to a new kind of genre film: The spy film, which began with Fritz Lang’s Spies in 1928, came into its own during the 1930s when Alfred Hitchcock began to make a number of films concerning what many call the world’s second oldest profession. The slew of combat dramas produced by the Second World War were ill-suited for the Colder, much more difficult to understand conflict that followed in its wake. The spy film became the only vehicle to explore the complex, deadly and worldwide game between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

But for all these grand notions of chronicling an era, the best spy films have always heavily relied on depicting some aspect of the emotional drudgery that accompanies the business itself. Like politics, spying is both awful and noble at the same time. It involves lying, manipulation and exploitation. It also serves the cause of truth – and fewer holier aims exist. As such, the best spy films are the ones in which an important unknown is chased by band of flawed individuals, each trying to get the best of the other.

Sounds a lot like life, doesn’t it?  

1. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

It is not often a great novel becomes a great film, but John le Carre’s classic tome is translated near-perfectly onto the screen in this 1965 film. Richard Burton plays British spy Alec Leamas, a cynical and hardened Cold Warrior who has just seen his entire network of operatives uncovered and executed by the East German Stasi. Sent home in disgrace, Leamas is quickly recruited for one last mission, one in which he is promised revenge against the German responsible for the death of his network. Leamas agrees and allows himself to be recruited by the other side in order to sow confusion there, but unknown to both him and the audience, a larger, more sinister game is being played and Leamas is nothing more than a pawn.

Who is playing who?

Shot in black-and-white, the film oozes atmosphere and functions almost as a film noir. The famous twist at the end, along with Leamas’s resigned decision to quit trying and “come in from the cold,” are unforeseen and haunting, as is Leamas’s dark assessment of his profession and its dehumanizing elements: “What do you think spies are? They are a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands ...” Not to be missed.

2. Notorious

Hitchcock probably made more spy films than any other director. His best is 1946’s Notorious, one of his less well-known efforts. It is a beautiful picture, filmed in elegant settings with glamorous people. But set amongst this splendor is a gritty tale of espionage that captures the complicated relationship between a spy (Cary Grant) and his agent (Ingrid Bergman) better than any other film. Throughout, Grant coldly takes advantage of Bergman’s alcoholism and neuroses in order to get her to spy on an old boyfriend, a man associating with Nazis in Argentina who are up to no good.

Running an agent, cooly...

When the boyfriend (Claude Rains) proposes marriage to Bergman, Grant ignores his own feelings for her and pushes her into the arrangement, knowing it will enable her to feed him better information. The strain of a double-life – faking love and using sex to gain access to secrets – is delicately and expertly portrayed by Bergman. There are several wonderful sequences in the movie and an incredible amount of tension, but it is unabashed realism of Grant and Bergman’s partnership that stands out.

3. The Third Man

Not a straightforward spy film, but spies and espionage abound in this moody expose of post-war Vienna that explores the darkest extremes of human tendencies. Joseph Cotton plays a man who is summoned to work with a friend in the city and arrives to find him dead. Exactly what this friend did for a living and how he died are both shrouded in mystery. All of the people Cotton encounters in this distorted version of Vienna are more than what they initially seem and none of them want him to look too closely at what has happened. Beautifully filmed with a haunting soundtrack an incredible cameo by Orson Welles, this tale is chock full of seediness, intrigue and double-dealing, but we remember it ultimately for what it has to say about human nature and the lies people often tell themselves to excuse the things they do. For a full review of the film, click
here.

4. From Russia with Love

James Bond films do not depict espionage well. Bond is much too extroverted and his methods far too clumsy and action-oriented for real spooks, but not having an entry from perhaps the most famous spy in the world would make for a pretty poor list. Although it is not my favorite Bond, 1963’s From Russia with Love is certainly the best, in terms of plot and actual espionage. Free from the special effects, gadgets and spectacularly absurd antagonists that came to dominate the franchise (as well as make it so easy to parody), this outing sees 007 lured into a Cold War mission to acquire a code-machine under false pretenses.

Incredibly shapely women means it's a Bond flick...

In reality, the international terrorist group SPECTRE is dangling the machine in order to bring Bond into the open so the organization’s assassin can kill him. Along the way, 007 navigates through the nest of intrigue that is post-war Istanbul and encounters a KGB-trained honey pot sent to seduce him with the charms of her considerable body. It all ends in a delicious cat-and-mouse game between Bond and his assailant, an excellent chase scene and a frightening attack from a hag with a knife hidden in her shoe. Who could ask for more, really?

5. Where Eagles Dare

Another Richard Burton outing, this one supposedly filmed so his son could enjoy a “boy’s adventure” film about the War. As far as that goes, this 1968 effort does not disappoint. The 2 ½ hour running time sprints by, thanks to a delightful cacophony of quirky dialogue intermixed heavy doses of intrigue and machine gun fire, most of which is provided by a certain Clint Eastwood. The plot centers on a mission to rescue an American General being held captive in a mountain fortress by Nazis, but this is little more than a springboard for the whirlwind that follows.

Getting ready to kill Nazis

Given the high body count and action-oriented climax, some would call this a straight war film, but I am sticking with the spy genre. Burton’s real purpose for storming the aforementioned castle is to pull off a complex counterintelligence coup, only half of which makes sense the first time it is revealed. The end of the film sets the stage for more Burton/Eastwood sequels. My heart cries that none were made, although perhaps it is for the best. What we have here is pretty damn entertaining – and as I already suggested, it is not all lowbrow stuff, either. One of my favorite films, even if I know I should not revel in its simple complexity as much as I do. This is Indiana Jones meets James Bond and it is nearly perfect.

Life Among the Ruins

Film noir thrillers come and go, but not many seem as wonderfully bleak and overtly stylish as Carol Reed's The Third Man.

Part spy thriller, part mystery, this 1949 film delves deeply into the ugly side of humanity among the bombed-out grandeur of post-War Vienna and concludes that people can easily become grotesque and contorted versions of themselves if they are forced to exist in a rotten enough environment.

Indeed, the symbiosis between the film’s characters and its urban setting is both powerful and confusing. At no point are we certain if the people are altering the environment with their actions or allowing the environment to dictate their behavior – or some subtle combination of the two. What is clear is that Vienna operates in this picture as a kind of canvas, on which only the worst elements of humanity can thrive and excel.

A masterpiece of black and white photography, nearly every shot in this film is composed with striking angles and acute shapes, many of which are presented in a neo-expressionist fashion that recalls the intentional geometry of classic silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, seen below here.

The result is an empty and moody Vienna, one in which everything is warped and distorted and nothing at all is anything like safe and ordinary-looking.

The city also functions as a Pandora’s Box for protagonist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who arrives fresh-faced from America in search of a job with his old friend Harry Lime. When Martins learns Lime was struck by an automobile and killed just before his arrival, he suspects foul play. That he is naïve and incapable of comprehending the actual depravity associated with Lime’s death is masterfully illustrated through Martins’s interactions with Major Calloway, the British MP who investigated the fatal accident. Calloway forthrightly tells Martins to quit nosing around the Lime case and leave Vienna: “You don't know what you're mixing in,” Calloway chides.

Clearly, Martins is the stereotypical American who is not quite ready to deal in the harsh brutalities present in the larger world. When he finally learns the truth about Lime and what he has been up to in Vienna, he is shocked at the inhumanity of it all. Calloway, who has swum in these troubled waters before, is not.

By the film's end, Martins is more like Calloway, in that he becomes a compromised character willing to trade other people in the name of a ultimate end. In this Vienna, nothing else seems possible. The only difference in the people is the end they are aiming for -- everyone is using everyone else as a means for something, and in this environment friendship and fidelity are quickly sacrificed to expediency. Anna, Lime's one-time girlfriend is the only character who remains loyal, and at the end of the picture, she is a lonely figure, doomed to be re-patriated by the Soviets. Her loyalty bought her nothing, a result which forces the audience to ask if she might have been better off joining in the game of compromises, too.

This form cynical realism is further reinforced when Orson Welles (Lime) finally appears on-screen. Absent for most of the picture, the wait for Welles is well worth it. Not only does he outshine all of his cohorts, he also delivers the most important lines in the film. The speech given on the Ferris Wheel is rightly famous as one of the most sinister pieces of dialogue ever committed to film. What it lacks in moral sentiment, it makes up for with diabolical and coldly pragmatic logic:

“Victims?” Lime says, when Martins alludes to people who suffered from Lime’s tampering with morphine. “Don't be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots (the people on the ground below them) stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Lime then lashes out against governments, claiming this is how they treat people, so why should he not do the same thing? Considering that we have seen the British and Soviets trading people like poker chips in the film (and are aware, as an audience, that the Cold War looms on the picture’s historical horizon), the argument feels powerful in its initial gusto.

What it lacks, however, is any moral consideration of perspective and intent. The black market – itself a distorted and unnatural part of capitalism – has thoroughly corrupted Lime by compelling him to limit his vision and actions to a sole actor – himself. Thus, Lime ends up alone, and after being chased through a sewer, he is killed by his oldest friend. That he becomes one of his own dots is the film's ultimate irony: The ominous and foreboding circular motion of the Ferris Wheel is complete.

However much he had it coming, Lime’s death still leaves us confused and unfulfilled, in that it feels like there is no justice or retribution present in the act (certainly Martins’ face seems confused about what the execution means). This is because the demise plays as little more than a sum to the equation Lime set in motion himself. The  confusion is simply testament to the film’s power to muddle morality, to stretch it and distort it and filter it through this post-war Vienna’s troubled prism. It is also a subtle verification to many of the uncomfortable ironies that makeup the history of civilization. Or as Lime puts it:

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Loyalty, Split Three Ways

People tend to forget that Alfred Hitchcock had a flair for spy films long before they were fashionable.

Gems such as Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Foreign Correspondent are all excellent examples of the genre, especially when set beside today’s over-sexed and gratuitously violent offerings. Unfortunately, each of the above films tends to be lost – or overlooked – among the great auteur’s better known and more psychologically powerful work. Of the aforementioned trio, the final film is perhaps the least recognized and least appreciated today.

Released in 1940, the film has an impeccable sense of time and place, in that it takes audiences in America to the final few days before war between Britain and Germany began. That the 1940 audience would watch the film just after seeing the era’s ubiquitous newsreels – most of which probably had some footage of war-torn London – was probably not lost on someone as cagey as Hitchcock. In other words, not for nothing did certain Mr. Goebbels famously label this film “propaganda.” And knowing so little about that particular genre, who am I to argue with the undisputed master of it?

Regardless of which side’s tale is told more obviously, Foreign Correspondent is at its heart a thriller whose plot likes to toy with its participants and provoke interesting responses from them. In this, we see a preview of the master of psychology that Hitchcock was to become, and a film that begins as a seemingly straightforward whodunit slowly expands into a remarkably suspenseful and unexpectedly honest study of espionage and conflicted loyalty. Along the way, we are treated to a number of delightful set-pieces, each centering on powerful and moody images.

Joel McCrea is not terribly likeable as the American journalist sent to London in 1939 to cover Europe’s decent into war, but his confused performance – sometimes the plot has him behave over-intelligently, while at other times he is boorish and stupid – is bolstered by an excellent supporting cast that includes George Sanders, Laraine Day and Herbert Marshall.

Sanders portrayal of British journalist Scott Ffolliot is especially impressive. The ease with which he takes to the double-dealing of the great game of spying had me believing he was a British intelligence officer, but alas, that twist is one too many for this film’s somewhat muddled but generally rather clever script.

McCrea falls in love with Day’s character, but unbeknownst to either of them, her father – played to chilling perfection by Marshall – is actually behind much of the cloak and dagger the pair get mixed up in after they witness the assassination of a prominent European diplomat. It all ends with a plane crash that still looks good 60-odd years later after some earnest soul-searching from the cast about where their loyalties lie.

Marshall proclaims his treachery has been in the service of his birthplace, while his disappointed daughter affirms she will remain loyal to her father even though she is repelled by his cause. As journalists, McCrea and Sanders remain dedicated scribes who serve “truth.” Thus, we have national, familial and ideological loyalties all on display. That everyone in the film has, at some point, lied or misrepresented themselves – even McCrea is forced by his paper to adopt a ridiculous pseudonym for his news reports – may seem like cheap relativism, but it actually is a pretty honest look at how espionage harnesses immoral acts – lying, stealing and manipulation – to foster moral ends.

The only disappointing addendum one must add is that the journalists in the film are never forced to face any serious moral challenges about their loyalty the way the other characters are. Dedication to the concept of truth seems to remove all the difficulty the others confront. McCrea begins the film as a news hound and ends as a news hound, and the importance of the journalist’s dedication seems to be elevated above all other commitments.

While I have no problem believing that dedication to an absolute concept like truth is somewhat more worthy than dedication to a country or blood relation – if only because these require compromises – I am not sure the film makes that case as strongly as it believes it has. Even so, Foreign Correspondent stands tall as good, old-fashioned thriller and deserves a great deal more attention from audiences today.

Condor Fails to Fly High Enough

Sometimes, it is difficult to watch classic films and recognize what made them classic. Other times, it is just impossible. The distance from the release date is too great, the world too different.

Three Days of the Condor, a Sidney Pollack film starring Robert Redford is routinely referred to as a classic spy thriller – or, at the very least, a pretty good example of the conspiracy-driven films that bubbled up in the mid to late 1970s. The problem is these kinds of films do not affect contemporary film-goers the way they did their original audiences: It is no longer shocking, for example, to learn that the government lies and sometimes does things it should not (see All the President’s Men).

For my money, films like Three Days of the Condor work better as indicators of an era – examples of mindsets and of attitudes, etc. – than as pieces of timeless drama. That is not to say the constituent parts of this film are not any good. The direction and acting here are superb and the film should work – and therefore age – better than it does. Exactly why it falters rests on the not-so-subtle message I believe the filmmakers wanted to impart to audiences.

When we first meet Redford, a man well known for his off-screen messaging, he is a CIA open source analyst in New York who scours books written in foreign languages looking for patterns or ideas. It is not exactly exciting stuff, until he goes to get lunch one day and comes back to find all of his colleagues dead. When he calls Langley to try to figure out what happened, Langley sends someone to kill him. Redford then adopts the tried and true movie and television-mantra of trust no one and stay on the move until you figure out just what the heck is happening (the Jason Bourne franchise did precisely this for three films).

Along the way, Redford picks up Faye Dunaway, the woman destined by the script to find his newfound vulnerability strangely enduring. It would be unfair to criticize Dunaway for this. She brings real emotive power to her scenes, even if nearly all of them are completely unnecessary to the plot. Her performance manages to grab hold of just the right amount of denial and acceptance in her interactions with Redford – and she can also be funny, such as when she jokes about being a “spy fucker,” a line I took as a sharp jab at the arm-candy that is ever-present in other spy films.

That line, however, is about irreverent as the film gets.

The majority of the time is spent in an earnest game of dodge-the-assassin. And the buildup concerning the mystery about what Redford knows, why his colleagues were killed and exactly who it is who may be trying to kill him – maybe there is a CIA within the CIA, he muses – is all done with serious and skillful vigor. Unfortunately, the tension inherent in these questions never really goes anywhere. Worse, we never can feel like Redford is in any danger. He is unquestionably the cleverest person on the screen, and despite being an analyst who read books for a living, he manages to sidestep all of the deadly operatives sent after him.

Whatever promise the film contains evaporates in the final 15 minutes, wherein instead of the revelatory finale we have been building toward, we are given a rather prosaic confession in a mahogany study – and can anyone really say for certain what the confessed “plot” really was? – and the film’s hitherto lethal antagonist gives up his aggression toward Redford, thanks to a new financial arrangement with CIA that the film’s creators probably reckoned was both original and disturbingly amoral. They are completely wrong on the first account, but closer on the second. The assassin’s steely description his dedication to a code of non-allegiance that rests entirely on caring only for his own professional exactitude as a killer is indeed chilling.

But it is Redford’s code we are supposed to care about, and so far as I can tell, he really does not have one. His transformation from the type of man who would join the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 60s or early 70s (the climax of Vietnam anyone?) to someone who would go to the New York Times to expose Agency wrongdoing does not feel legitimate.

The phony transformation is perhaps most clear when Redford, who almost appears to have quit acting in the final scenes of the film and inserted his actual personality and politics into the picture, loudly voices his disdain for the Agency by calling its employees “you people” – a sophomoric rebuke that conveniently forgets, of course, that his character is indeed one of those “people,” too.

Pollack and Redford would both go on to make better films that said more interesting things in less obvious ways. But even if we set aside the obvious politicking, the film struggles to work within its own genre, thanks to a few too many unbelievable scenes, a bizarre and unnecessary love story and a plot that never really fulfills its promise. A fair criticism, which I believe can almost be said about any 70s genre picture, is that Three Days of the Condor is essentially a terrific B-movie elevated by an A-list cast.