NEXT SCREENINGS

Showing on a glorious Technicolor 16mm print, Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' at the beautiful Mildmay Club, Newington Green, Thursday 10th October at 7pm.

THE BIRDS (1963)

The crows alight, one by one, in the schoolyard above Bodega Bay. They are summoned by the nursery rhyme sung by the children, or drawn by the green glow of Tippi Hedren's matching skirt and jacket, or maybe lured by the pungent scent of her lit cigarette. By the time she turns her head, the climbing frame is thick with them. "She combs her hair but once a year," sing the oblivious children inside their classroom. "Nickety-nackety now, now, now!"

Actually I have no idea what draws the birds and turns them bad and it seems that nobody else does either. "I don't know why," says harried Melanie Daniels (Hedren). "Wish I could say," blurts bemused Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). Everyone is confused, ruffled, on the brink of flight. Here is a film that provides no answers and no escape. Chaos reigns from top to tail.

Adapted (very loosely) from a Daphne du Maurier short story, it's the tale of a pristine city woman who comes undone in a rustic seaside town. Daniels arrives in Bodega Bay to play a prank on a smart-ass lawyer, only to have her immaculate hairdo knocked into her face by a passing gull, which serves her right and takes her down a peg or two. Before long, however, the birds are everywhere. They dive-bomb the window panes and peck at the door while the town drunk quotes Ezekiel from his perch at the bar. "It's the end of the world," he says.

When teasing out the meaning of The Birds, many critics take their lead from the hysterical woman who links the attacks to Daniels' arrival ("I think you're the cause of all of this"). This implies that the birds are a manifestation of sex, some galvanic hormonal storm that whisks sleepy Bodega Bay into a great communal lather.

Alternatively, they might be viewed as an eruption of rage. The film's first act, after all, is an uncomfortable buildup of tension (both sexual and social), an ongoing joust of loaded glances and teasing evasions. Its characters are so guarded, so gamey, so disconnected from their own emotions, that something's got to give. The moment when Daniels has her hair knocked over her eyes is the moment when the mask slips and the pressure cooker explodes. When the pie is opened, the birds begin to sing. Except that in this case they don't sing so much as scream.

The Birds is generally regarded as the last great Hitchcock movie (it was shot in 1963, when the director's reputation was at its peak). Might it also stand as the essential Hitchcock movie, the purest and most confident, a brilliant distillation of the themes that had fuelled him ever since he sent the lodger creeping to his upstairs room? Every time I watch it, I find myself more impressed with its daring, audacity and command of its material. I love the way Hitchcock juggles shrill B-movie histrionics with chill arthouse gloss. I love the formal precision of his camerawork, the deft economy of Evan Hunter's dialogue and a sense of location so sharp and assured that I feel that I've been there, stood on that jetty and made the walk around the headland.

For all that, what stirs me the most about The Birds is not what it puts in but what it leaves out. At the age of 63, Hitchcock was secure enough to dispense with the grinding gears of narrative logic. The beautiful, bruised Notorious had its plot MacGuffin in the form of its wine bottles filled with iron ore. Electrifying, insurrectionist Psycho still felt the need to wheel on a psychiatrist to explain Norman Bates to the audience. But The Birds floats free. There is no motor driving it, no music to tether it, and nothing to hold it aloft apart from that up-draft of sensual atmosphere and existential dread. Hitchcock reportedly worried at length over how to wrap things up. He eventually ditched the scripted final scene in favour of a non-resolution, an open ending – the perfect closing image that leaves the world in the balance and its mysteries all intact.(Xan Brooks, 2012)

Join us at The Castle Cinema for a spine-tingling month of iconic horror films! First, experience the psychological thriller 'Silence of the Lambs' in stunning 16mm, with screenings on Thursday, October 24th at 7:30 PM and then as part of a Halloween double bill, Thursday, October 31st at 9:00 PM. Also screening that night is George A. Romero’s 'Night of the Living Dead', also in 16mm, showing on Thursday, October 31st at 6:30 PM.

Both films will be shown on 16mm in the unique atmosphere of The Castle Cinema. 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1969)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers.]

There were maybe two dozen people in the audience who were over 16 years old. The rest were kids, the kind you expect at a Saturday afternoon kiddie matinee. This was in a typical neighborhood theater, and the kids started filing in 15 minutes early to get good seats up front. The name of the movie was “The Night of the Living Dead.”

I went to see it because it’s been a long time since I saw my last horror movie. I vaguely remember some stuff from the 1950s, like “Creature from the Black Lagoon” or “Attack of the Crab Monsters.” They were usually lousy, but it was fun to see them.

But that was 10 years ago. Since then, there’s been a lot of talk about violence in the movies, and it seemed about time to see another horror film. The audience for horror movies is mostly drawn from children and adolescents. They usually play in drive-in or neighborhood theaters, and by tradition they’re the most frankly violent kind of films. “Night of the Living Dead” seemed like a reasonable choice; it was selected by the National Association of Theater Owners as “exploitation picture of the month.”

Well, the kids came early, as I said. There were a few parents, but mostly just the kids, dumped in front of the theater for the Saturday matinee (admission 40 cents). A lot of kids were racing up the aisles on urgent missions, and other kids were climbing over the backs of seats, and you’d see a gang of kids passing a box of popcorn back and forth. Occasionally some kid would get whacked by his big sister because he wouldn’t shut up.

There was a cheer when the lights went down. The opening scene was set in a cemetery (lots of delighted shrieks from the kids), where a teen-age couple are placing a wreath on a grave. Suddenly a ghoul appears and attacks the boy and the girl flees to a nearby farmhouse. The ghoul looked suitably decayed, with all sorts of bloody scars on his face, and he walked in the official ghoul shuffle. More screams from the kids. Screaming is part of the fun, you’ll remember.

Inside the farmhouse, the girl discovers a young Negro who fights off the ghouls and starts to board up the house. Then it develops that five other people are hidden in the basement: Another teen-age couple, and a husband, wife and daughter. The daughter has been bitten by a ghoul and is unconscious.

The ghouls march on the farmhouse again, and the Negro sets a chair on fire and pushes it off the porch, and the ghouls fall back moaning. Then there’s an argument among the people inside the farmhouse. Should they stay upstairs or go into the basement? This was pretty dull stuff, and a lot of kids were dispatched to the lobby for more popcorn.

Then things picked up. A television set is discovered, and the news commentator reports that an epidemic of mass murder is underway. The recently dead, he says, are coming back to life in funeral parlors, morgues and cemeteries. Apparently some sort of unearthly radiation is involved (some sort of unearthly radiation is nearly always involved, seems like). The ghouls attack the living because they need to eat live flesh.

The people inside the farmhouse decide to escape before they’re eaten, as who wouldn’t, and they make a plan. The young kid will drive the truck to the gas pump, and the Negro will hold off the ghouls with a blazing torch until the truck’s tank is filled. The kids’ girlfriend insists on coming along. When they get to the pump, the ghouls start advancing and the torch accidentally sets the truck on fire. The Negro escapes, but the truck blows up and incinerates the teen-age couple.

At this point, the mood of the audience seemed to change. Horror movies were fun, sure, but this was pretty strong stuff. There wasn’t a lot of screaming anymore; the place was pretty quiet. When the fire died down, the ghouls approached the truck and ripped apart the bodies and ate them. One ghoul ate a shoulder joint with great delight, occasionally stopping to wipe his face. Another ghoul dug into a nice mess of intestines.

Back inside the farmhouse, the little girl dies and turns into a ghoul. She advances on her mother. The mother tries to talk to her, but the girl takes a trowel and stabs her mother in the chest a couple of dozen times. On TV, the sheriff advises citizens to set the ghouls on fire: “They’ll go right up.” The Negro has to kill the little girl-ghoul, and then her father. The ghouls break into the house and he barricades himself in the basement.

The next scene takes place the next morning. The sheriff’s deputies are conducting a mopping-up operation, shooting ghouls and burning them. They approach the farmhouse. The sheriff looks casually into the charred wreck of the car, sees what’s left of the two bodies, and says: “Somebody had himself a cook-out.” Inside the house, the Negro hears help coming and looks out the window. He is shot through the forehead by the deputies. “That’s one more for the bonfire,” the sheriff says. End of movie.

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up — and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed.

It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.

I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt.

Censorship isn’t the answer to something like this. Censorship is never the answer. For that matter, “Night of the Living Dead” was passed for general audiences by the Chicago Police Censor Board. Since it had no nudity in it, it was all right for kids, I guess. This is another example, and there have been a lot of them, of the incompetence and stupidity of the censorship system that Chicago stubbornly maintains under political patronage.

Censorship is not the answer. But I would be ashamed to make a civil libertarian argument defending the “right” of those little girls and boys to see a film which left a lot of them stunned with terror. In a case like this, I’d want to know what the parents were thinking of when they dumped the kids in front of the theater to see a film titled “Night of the Living Dead.”

The new Code of Self Regulation, recently adopted by the Motion Picture Assn. of American, would presumably restrict a film like this one to mature audiences. But “Night of the Living Dead” was produced before the MPAA code went into effect, so exhibitors technically weren’t required to keep the kids out.

I supposed the idea was to make a fast buck before movies like this are off-limits to children. Maybe that’s why “Night of the Living Dead” was scheduled for the lucrative holiday season, when the kids are on vacation. Maybe that’s it, but I don’t know how I could explain it to the kids who left the theater with tears in their eyes. (R, Ebert 1969).

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

A fundamental difference between “The Silence of the Lambs” and its sequel, “Hannibal,” is that the former is frightening, involving and disturbing, while the latter is merely disturbing. It is easy enough to construct a geek show if you start with a cannibal. The secret of “Silence” is that it doesn’t start with the cannibal–it arrives at him, through the eyes and minds of a young woman. “Silence of the Lambs” is the story of Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster, and the story follows her without substantial interruption. Dr. Hannibal Lecter lurks at the heart of the story, a malevolent but somehow likable presence–likable because he likes Clarice, and helps her. But Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins, is the sideshow, and Clarice is in the center ring.

The popularity of Jonathan Demme’s movie is likely to last as long as there is a market for being scared. Like “Nosferatu,” “Psycho” and “Halloween,” it illustrates that the best thrillers don’t age. Fear is a universal emotion and a timeless one. But “Silence of the Lambs” is not merely a thrill show. It is also about two of the most memorable characters in movie history, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, and their strange, strained relationship (“people will say we’re in love,” Lecter cackles).

They share so much. Both are ostracized by the worlds they want to inhabit–Lecter, by the human race because he is a serial killer and a cannibal, and Clarice, by the law enforcement profession because she is a woman. Both feel powerless–Lecter because he is locked in a maximum security prison (and bound and gagged like King Kong when he is moved), and Clarice because she is surrounded by men who tower over her and fondle her with their eyes. Both use their powers of persuasion to escape from their traps–Lecter is able to rid himself of the pest in the next cell by talking him into choking on his own tongue, and Clarice is able to persuade Lecter to aid her in the search for the serial killer named Buffalo Bill. And both share similar childhood wounds. Lecter is touched when he learns that Clarice lost both her parents at an early age, was shipped off to relatives, was essentially an unloved orphan. And Lecter himself was a victim of child abuse (on the DVD commentary track, Demme says he regrets not underlining this more).

These parallel themes are mirrored by patterns in the visual strategy. Note that both Lecter in his prison cell and Buffalo Bill in his basement are arrived at by Starling after descending several flights of stairs and passing through several doors; they live in underworlds. Note the way the movie always seems to be looking at Clarice: The point-of-view camera takes the place of the scrutinizing men in her life, and when she enters dangerous spaces, it is there waiting for her instead of following her in. Note the consistent use of red, white and blue: not only in the FBI scenes, but also in the flag draped over the car in the storage shed, other flags in Bill’s lair and even the graduation cake at the end (where the U.S. eagle in the frosting is a ghastly reminder of the way Lecter pinned a security guard spread-eagled to the walls of his cage).

The movie’s soundtrack also carries themes all the way through. There are exhalations and sighs at many points, as when the cocoon of the gypsy moth is taken from the throat of Bill’s first victim. Much heavy breathing. There are subterranean rumblings and faraway cries and laments, almost too low to be heard, at critical points. There is the sound of a heart monitor. Howard Shore’s mournful music sets a funereal tone. When the soundtrack wants to create terror, as when Clarice is in Bill’s basement, it mixes her frightened panting with the sound of Bill’s heavy breathing and the screams of the captive girl–and then adds the dog’s frenzied barking, which psychologically works at a deeper level than everything else. Then it adds those green goggles so he can see her in the dark.

Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins won Oscars for best actress and actor (the movie also won for best picture, for Demme’s direction and Ted Talley’s screenplay, and was nominated for editing and sound). It is remarkable that the Academy would remember, let alone single out, a film released 13 months before the Oscarcast; it usually votes for films that are still in theaters, or new on video. But “Silence” was so clearly one of a kind that it could not be ignored.

Hopkins’ performance has much less screen time than Foster’s, but made an indelible impression on audiences. His “entrance” is unforgettable. After Clarice descends those stairs and passes through those doors and gates (which all squeak), the camera shows her POV as she first sees Lecter in his cell. He is so . . . still. Standing erect, at relaxed attention, in his prison jump suit, he looks like a waxwork of himself. On her next visit, he is erect, and then very slightly recoils, and then opens his mouth, and I at least was made to think of a cobra. His approach to Lecter’s personality (Hopkins says on his commentary track) was inspired by HAL 9000 in “2001”: He is a dispassionate, brilliant machine, superb at logic, deficient in emotions.

Foster’s Clarice is not only an orphan but a disadvantaged backwoods girl who has worked hard to get where she is, and has less self-confidence than she pretends. Noticing the nail polish on one of Bills’ victims, she guesses that the girl is from “town,” a word used only by someone who is not. Her bravest moment may come when she orders the gawking sheriff’s deputies out of the room at the funeral home (“Listen here now!”).

One key to the film’s appeal is that audiences like Hannibal Lecter. That’s partly because he likes Starling, and we sense he would not hurt her. It’s also because he is helping her search for Buffalo Bill, and save the imprisoned girl. But it may also be because Hopkins, in a still, sly way, brings such wit and style to the character. He may be a cannibal, but as a dinner party guest he would give value for money (if he didn’t eat you). He does not bore, he likes to amuse, he has his standards, and he is the smartest person in the movie.

He bears comparison, indeed, with such other movie monsters as Nosferatu, Frankenstein (especially in “Bride of Frankenstein”), King Kong and Norman Bates. They have two things in common: They behave according to their natures, and they are misunderstood. Nothing that these monsters do is “evil” in any conventional moral sense, because they lack any moral sense. They are hard-wired to do what they do. They have no choice. In the areas where they do have choice, they try to do the right thing (Nosferatu is the exception in that he never has a choice). Kong wants to rescue Fay Wray, Norman Bates wants to make pleasant chit-chat and do his mother’s bidding, and Dr. Lecter helps Clarice because she does not insult his intelligence, and she arouses his affection.

All of these qualities might not be enough to assure the longevity of “Silence” if it were not also truly frightening (“Hannibal” is not frightening, and for all of its box-office success it will have a limited shelf life). “Silence” is frightening first in the buildup and introduction of Hannibal Lecter. Second in the discovery and extraction of the cocoon in the throat. Third in the scene where the cops await the arrival of the elevator from the upper floors. Fourth in the intercutting between the exteriors of the wrong house in Calumet City and the interiors of the right one in Belvedere, Ohio. Fifth in the extended sequence inside Buffalo Bill’s house, where Ted Levine creates a genuinely loathsome psychopath (notice the timing as Starling sizes him up and reads the situation before she shouts “Freeze!”). We are frightened both because of the film’s clever manipulation of story and image, and for better reasons–we like Clarice, identify with her and fear for her. Just like Lecter. (R, Ebert 1991)

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