SCREAMING SERVICE

Check out my short review of Baz Luhrmann's EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

The weekend's other big theatrical release, Scream 7...

...was not screened for critics before release, at least not in the Phoenix area. Make of that what you will. In lieu of a review, therefore, here are seven great movie screams [spoilers throughout!]:

I'm aware, of course, that any or all of these screams may have been partially or entirely the work of a clever sound designer; the first two listed below certainly are. But that's the magic of the movies, right? The point is, they're effective.

7. The Wilhelm Scream--Originally created for a scene of Sheb Wooley being attacked by an alligator in the 1951 Florida-set period adventure Distant Drums, this scream earned its moniker when it was looped, rather unconvincingly, as the scream of a "Private Wilhelm" in the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River. The shriek of shock and dismay has been used dozens if not hundreds of times thereafter, in movies ranging from the original Star Wars to Toy Story. It's particularly effective with characters falling from high places.

6. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)--Like the Wilhelm Scream, this one is also studio-generated, but unlike the Wilhelm Scream, it's not even of human origin. It's the screech of revulsion let out by a soulless pod person when they recognize, and point out to their pod brethren, an unsnatched human. Legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, a popularizer of the Wilhelm Scream, created the effect for Philip Kaufman's classic '70s-era remake of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, using the squeal of a pig. It chillingly distills the sense of being identified, and publicly denounced, for being out of sync with the masses.

5. Them!--Few who have seen the 1954 sci-fi masterpiece by Gordon Douglas about giant ants are likely to forget the moment: The catatonic little girl (Sandy Descher) found wandering in the New Mexico desert gets her memory jogged by a whiff of formic acid, and lets out a cry of horror followed by repeated screams of "Them! Them! Them!"

4. The Godfather (1972)--The scream to which I'm referring in this one comes when John Marley gets Marlon Brando's famous offer he can't refuse, waking up to the severed head of his beloved horse in bed with him. It was Marley's iconic moment onscreen; his wails somehow get across not only terror but a palpable despair, at the evil with which he's confronted, and his powerlessness against it.

3. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)--When Bette Davis sees a grinning, dripping Joseph Cotten risen from the swamp, bedecked with mud and Spanish moss, her strangled, barking screams really do sound like somebody at long last taking grateful leave of their sanity.

2. Psycho (1960)--In the shower scene of Hitchcock's 1960 classic, Janet Leigh begins the family tradition which her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis would carry on in 1978's Halloween and other films: a full-throated, full-screen scream of the highest order. But...

...I would argue the scream that Vera Miles lets out near the end of the same movie, when she at last meets Mrs. Bates face to face, is at least as good. Both are greatly abetted, of course, by the musical shrieks of Bernard Hermann's strings.

1. King Kong (1933)--Can there really be any question of first place? The very name "Fay Wray" evokes the gold standard in "scream." Not only did Wray scream the best, she probably screamed the most, from her first meeting with the title simian to his Waterloo atop the Empire State Building.

Of course I realize that this is very far from a definitive list; these are just seven that occurred to me. What obvious candidates have I forgotten? Feel free to scream at me.

SHOWERS AND BLADES

Happy Psycho Day everybody!

That's right, December 11 (at two-forty-three p.m.) is the day when, according to the opening titles, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho begins, right here in Phoenix, Arizona...

Saturday before last was, by Phoenix standards, pretty rainy. Your Humble Narrator was driving home up I-17 and listening to Reel Music, the movie music show on KBAQ...

...which was devoted that evening to scores from Hitchcock flicks. So there I was, listening to Bernard Herrmann's great theme from Psycho, with my windshield wipers keeping time, and it occurred to me that this was likely as close as I would ever get to knowing what it felt like to be Janet Leigh...

VIRAL VIDEOS

At this writing, movie theaters are closed across the Valley. But Your Humble Narrator's need to blather on about movies is wide open for business, so here, online at Phoenix Magazine, are some video recommendations from among my favorite movies...

...plus suggestions from the career of the great, recently-departed Max Von Sydow...

Also, in case anyone is interested, here are last weekend's reviews of The Hunt, First Cow...

...The Burnt Orange Heresy and the Fathom Events/TCM showing of King Kong.

Stay healthy, everybody.

NORMAN HOLIDAY

Happy Psycho Day everybody!

That's right, December 11 is the date that appears over the downtown Phoenix skyline at the beginning of the 1960 Hitchcock classic Psycho, one of my all-time favorite movies, before the camera peeks inappropriately into a window to show John Gavin and Janet Leigh sharing an afternoon tryst. The fine folks at FilmBar Phoenix, situated not far at all from the area seen in that opening shot, celebrate the auspicious occasion this evening at 7 p.m. with a showing of the film.

Check out my Phoenix Magazine column noting the event, along with my reviews of Alfonso Cuaron's superb Roma and Swimming With Men, a Britcom starring Rob Brydon.

COUNT JOHN

RIP to John Gavin, best known as Janet Leigh's poor clueless hardware man boyfriend Sam Loomis in Psycho...

...passed on at 86.

The highlight of his performance here is the shaken way he delivers the line, near the end, "Why was he...dressed like that?" Norman's cross-dressing seems to trouble Sam more than the murders.

Gavin also played the young Julius Caesar in Spartacus, had stolid leads in Imitation of Life and Midnight Lace and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and appeared in the role of Cary Grant in the 1980 TV movie Sophia Loren: Her Own Story. He reportedly came close to playing James Bond in both Diamonds are Forever (losing the part to Sean Connery) and Live and Let Die (losing the part to Roger Moore). Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, he later served as the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico under Ronald Reagan.

But...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...in 1978 I saw Gavin play the title vampire in Count Dracula in summer stock with the Kenley Players in Akron, Ohio...

...opposite Karen Lynn Gorney of Saturday Night Fever, and the great Victor Buono as Van Helsing (as I recall, Buono made the Professor an amateur magician, so he could work a bit of sleight-of-hand into the show). You may well imagine that seeing Buono, a cast member from Psycho and a stage version of Dracula (even if it was Ted Tiller's corny adaptation) all at once made this one of the highlights of my teen years.

So we'll let Gavin's version of the Count serve as this week's honoree. Notice that he's billed as "Direct From Transylvania! In Person! John Gavin as The Sensuous Count Dracula."

OCTOBERFEST

Happy October everyone!

As always, I must note that this is my favorite month of the year, partly because it’s the month when we finally get a bit of a cool-down here in Arizona, but also because it’s the month of Halloween. So in honor of Monster Month...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge the quintessential monster, the Monster, arguably the image which the word “monster” conjures up for many modern people; the Frankenstein Monster popularized by the great Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 Universal film, under the makeup of the great Jack Pierce: flat-skulled, hulking, greenish-gray skinned, with electrode bolts in his neck:

For Phoenix folk who have never seen this truly classic, haunting performance at the heart of this really fine piece of moviemaking, you can catch the Universal Frankenstein at Filmbar in Phoenix this coming Sunday at 2 p.m, where it’s part of the FilmBar Frightmare Series, a monthlong program of scary pictures: Other titles include Psycho, The Lost Boys, An American Werewolf in London and Young Frankenstein, and there’s also a Halloween-day extravaganza featuring local horror host Dr. Diabolic, Dario Argento’s Dracula and the wacky Horror Remix. October!

HUSBAND AND KNIFE

It’s possible that I’m not the best judge of Hitchcock.

It’s a movie about the making of Sir Alfred’s 1960 classic Psycho, which is, truly, one of my two or three favorite movies. It has a fine cast, including a number of extremely attractive actresses, two of them—Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel—decked out in Psycho costumes. It’s set in an elegant recreation of Hollywood swank, circa the late ‘50s.

For all of these reasons, I enjoyed it. But I don’t know that even all of them together quite make it a good movie. Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi, from a script by John J. McLaughlin based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, is fun to watch, but somehow I couldn’t quite find it convincing.

The main reason, I think, lies with the title personage. He’s played by Anthony Hopkins, padded and plastered to resemble the great man, to little avail. Powerhouse though Hopkins is, he couldn’t make me believe he was Alfred Hitchcock, or even simply forget he’s not Hitchcock, which might have been enough. It isn’t his fault—I don’t think any actor could. I haven’t seen the HBO movie The Girl, about the making of The Birds, but I hear Toby Jones doesn’t really swing it either.

The word “inimitable” is thrown around a lot in show business, but beyond the level of an easy Rich Little impression, Hitchcock really is inimitable, at least for someone of my generation. His canny on-camera self-promotion made him indelible to Boomer-era TV viewers and moviegoers. Nobody looks like that—for all the heroic efforts of the make-up folk, Hopkins looks more like late-vintage Rod Steiger than Hitchcock—nobody sounds like that, and nobody, I think, is really likely to capture that same grave drollery of manner. Hopkins gives a sometimes funny, sometimes touching portrait of a weird repressed middle-aged guy, but not of this particular weird repressed middle-aged guy.

Similarly, Hitchcock overplays its hand in dramatizing the making of Psycho. That film, as hardly anyone needs to be told, is Hitchcock’s modestly-budgeted, brilliantly-crafted California-gothic about Norman Bates, a sweet young motel manager who has an unusually close relationship with his mother—lethally close, to any strangers who encroach on it. It was adapted from a lurid little novel by Robert Bloch, which was in turn loosely based on the much grimmer real-life exploits of Wisconsin psychopath Ed Gein in 1957.

Hitchcock was slumming a bit when he took on the project, no doubt, challenging himself to make a profitable low-budget shocker, using the crew from his TV series, instead of the glamorous, romantic Technicolor thrillers he’d been turning out for the last decade or so. It’s doubtful he could have guessed he was making the movie for which he’d be best remembered.

Gervasi's film, on the other hand, tries to generate dramatic urgency by creating the sense that Psycho was a make-or-break crisis point in Hitchcock’s career. Much is made of Hitchcock’s own investment in the project, though the practical minded Mrs. H (Helen Mirren) points out that the peril to their fortune is along the lines of having to buy domestic rather than imported pate de fois gras. Gervasi and McLaughlin even resort to showing Hitchcock’s dreams haunted by the specter of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott). This feels like an overwrought reach.

So Hitchcock comes to life, mostly, in incidental episodes, and in the cast—James D’Arcy absolutely nailing the small role of Anthony Perkins, Toni Collette, ravishingly chic as Hitchcock’s right arm Peggy Robertson. Biel looks great as Vera Miles, and Johansson really did her homework as Janet Leigh, perfectly capturing Leigh’s pursed-lipped, mock-perplexed cock of the head (I did wonder, though, why Leigh and Miles ever needed to be on the set on the same day).

It could be argued, however, that Sir Alfred isn’t the the true title character of Hitchcock anyway. The film’s best element is Helen Mirren as Alma Reville Hitchcock. The good lady had been the director’s editor and screenwriter/script-doctor in the old days, and was still his most trusted adviser. In Mirren’s sharp, jumpy turn, she’s a clear-thinking, patient sort, but flustered and emotionally hungry from her husband’s neglect, and susceptible to the seductions of the screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston).

Mirren’s vibrancy turns Hitchcock, at its best, into a mild comedy about a sexually frustrated middle-aged married couple; the fact that they were responsible for Psycho becomes a secondary matter. Yet Gervasi and McLaughlin do virtually claim for Alma an uncredited hand in the Psycho screenplay. While they go quite a bit farther with this suggestion than Rebello’s book does, there can be little doubt of how much he owed her (he was always fulsome in his praise of her). If the movie does nothing more than drag Alma’s role in the Hitchcock story out of her husband’s formidable shadow, it’s served a worthwhile purpose.

SPINAL ZAP

On my honor, I don’t watch Dancing With the Stars. But a friend of mine who does told me about Ricki Lake & her partner dancing the tango to Bernard Herrmann’s great Psycho theme, & said that it was excellent. I watched it here, & he’s right, it is.

As we roll toward Halloween, yet again we turn to Turner Classic Movies to provide us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our weekly nightmare: This time it’s the title creepy-crawly of 1959’s The Tingler, a sort of big centipede-ish critter which, scientist Vincent Price discovers, attaches itself to the human backbone during moments of terror, on which emotion it feeds. Hence the tingling.

Directed by William Castle from a script by Robb White, the movie is perhaps best remembered for Castle’s notorious gimmick “Percepto”—theater seats electrically wired to produce a mild, tingler-like jolt in audience members. Unless you have a Taser & are masochistic, this effect is difficult to reproduce while watching the film now—it plays, by the way, at 9 p.m. (MST) on Monday, October 17. But even without it, The Tingler, though obviously preposterous, is bizarre & imaginative, probably my favorite of Castle’s films as director.

By the way, I recently became Facebook friends with Castle. Considering that he died in 1977, it’s enough to give you a you-know-what down your spine…