Black Widow (1987)

Black Widow is a 1987 neo-noir and it probably really is a neo-noir if you define neo-noir fairly loosely.

Debra Winger is Alexandra and she’s a Fed. She’s become intrigued by two cases of older very rich men with much younger wives. The two men both died suddenly apparently from a very very rare medical condition. It’s a real medical condition but its rarity makes the coincidence seem just a little odd. The autopsies offer no indications of foul play.

It strikes Alexandra that the two wives looked rather similar. In fact, very similar.

Then another older very rich man with a much younger wife dies suddenly. There are various other odd similarities between all three cases.

Alexandra is convinced that the three wives are all the same woman and that she has now murdered three husbands. Her superior officer thinks she’s go a bee in her bonnet about nothing. The three men appeared to have died of natural causes. Alexandra has zero evidence to back up her hunch.

The audience knows that Alexandra is right. It’s the same woman, played by Theresa Russell. Her real identity is elusive. Her name might be Catherine. For the sake of convenience I’ll refer to her as Catherine.

Alexandra pursues the case obsessively.

At first it’s a hunt. Finding the mystery woman isn’t particularly difficult. She’s now in Hawaii. Alexandra does after all have all the resources of the Justice department behind her. But finding the woman doesn’t help. There is still no actual evidence. It now becomes a cat-and-mouse game. Alexandra is the cat, Catherine is the mouse. It is of course possible that the mouse has teeth, and in such cases it can become unclear as to who is hunting whom.

One criticism levelled at this movie is that the audience knows too much too early but that’s standard suspense movie technique. This is a case where the detective also knows a great deal early on. But knowing the identity of the killer is irrelevant. Alexandra has to find proof. The interest in this movie is provided by the battle of wits between Alexandra and Catherine. Catherine is a very very clever murderess. But Alexandra is a very good very determined cop.

The other major point of interest is motivation. The first murder made Catherine a very rich woman. She has more money than she could spend in a dozen lifetimes. But she keeps killing. Alexandra would like to know why.

In Hawaii some major plot twists kick in and naturally I’m not going to give any hints about them.

There are some interesting supporting players. Nicol Williamson and Dennis Hopper are very good but the only characters who matter are the two women. Debra Winger is excellent but this movie belongs to Theresa Russell. She has the more showy more ambiguous more mysterious and more interesting role and she makes the most of it.

She is very sexy in a very classy way. And she’s fascinating and charming. It’s not difficult to see how Catherine has no trouble acquiring husbands.

In my view in a story such as this it’s a mistake to over-explain things. That’s the mistake Hitchcock made in Psycho. It ended up making Norman Bates less interesting and less scary. When we’re offered detailed diagnoses they always come across as unconvincing and contrived. We already had enough clues to form our own conclusions about Norman.

Black Widow does not make that mistake. Catherine might be motivated by greed but there might be something else. On several occasions she reacts in very odd ways, offering tantalising suggestions that she’s more complicated than she appears to be. There are a number of possible motivations. It could be over-compensation for something. It could be sexual. It could be feminine competition. We get vague hints, which allows us to amuse ourselves by speculating on the basis of those shadowy hints.

What really allows Theresa Russell to display her acting chops to the full is that she is playing the role of a woman who is herself playing various roles. To snare each husband she must adopt a different persona. We cannot be sure that we ever see the real Catherine. Maybe there no longer is a real Catherine.

To make things even more interesting, Alexandra has gone undercover. So she is playing a part as well. There are so many layers of ambiguity and role-playing in this movie and it’s possible that both women have become captives of the roles they’re playing. And the dynamic between these two women is fiendishly complex and Ron Bass’s screenplay avoids the more obvious pitfalls.

What’s even better is that Catherine displays occasional signs of vulnerability and she doesn’t seem as emotionally blank as you might expect from a ruthless murderess. When Catherine cries we almost believe that her emotion is real. And it’s possible that she almost believes it herself. Maybe it is real. Maybe there is real pain there. The fact that we don’t get a detailed diagnosis makes this the most interesting aspect to the film. She’s femme fatale but a complicated one.

The part is a gift for a great actress and Theresa Russell is a great actress and she’s at the top of her game here.

Another strength of the movie is that Alexandra is not one of those female characters who could just as easily have been male. She is obsessed by this case because she knows that this is a killer that only a woman can catch, because only a woman knows what another woman is capable of.

Black Widow is a superb thriller. Very highly recommended.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars is an important movie for several reasons. The obvious one is that it was scripted by John Carpenter. Carpenter was making a name for himself as a screenwriter at that time. His directing career would soon take off as well. In a very brief period he would write the screenplay for The Eyes of Laura Mars, would write and direct the TV-movie Someone’s Watching Me and then write and direct Halloween. But The Eyes of Laura Mars was his first real experience working for a major studio on a major production.

The script had apparently been floating around for a while and a lot of writers aside from Carpenter were involved at some stage. Which means it may not be fair to blame Carpenter for some of the deficiencies in the script.

Irvin Kershner was offered the directing job. He was an experienced director although not perhaps a terribly distinguished one. He has the distinction of having directed the worst Bond movie of the pre-Daniel Craig era, the trainwreck that was Never Say Never Again. Would The Eyes of Laura Mars have been better with Carpenter directing? Perhaps.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is also interesting because it has a slight giallo feel.

This movie is also important because although it was made in 1978 it has very slight hints of the 80s. It’s like a proto-80s movie. In some ways it’s very 70s. New York City as a garbage dump, a world of violence, sleaze and squalor. But Laura Mars is rich and famous. Her world is a world of glamour, style, high fashion and money.

And it’s a suspense thriller with hints of the supernatural (or at least the paranormal), something you see in a few European movies of the 60s and 70s but don’t expect in a Hollywood movie.

Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a very famous very successful photographer. It appears that she works in both the worlds of fashion photography and art photography. She’s a celebrity. And she’s controversial. Her photographs depict both high fashion and savage violence.

While doing a fashion shoot she has a vision. It has happened once before. A vision of murder. On the first occasion the murder actually did take place. And now it’s happened again.

The idea of someone seeing visions of murders before they happen was far from original. It is however given a few twists here. The visions are linked to her photography. If a photographer is a voyeur then she’s a voyeur of murder, but a kind of psychic voyeur of murder.

She finds out from cop Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) that many of her earlier photographs bear uncanny similarities to police crime scene photos, photos that no-one outside the police department has seen. She may have been having these visions of future murders for quite some time without being aware of it.

What really freaks her out is that her interest in violent subject matter is a comparatively recent thing and she can’t explain why she suddenly developed this interest. It was just something that she felt compelled to do.

Laura will have further visions and there will be further murders.

Laura herself is not a suspect but it’s obvious that the murders have some kind of connection to her.

I have mixed feelings about Faye Dunaway but that may not be her fault. Apart from Chinatown she had a knack for being in movies that I really disliked. I don’t think of her as a bad actress. She’s pretty good here.

The movie does have a few definite weaknesses. The paranormal element could have been really interesting but is not developed fully. The screenplay really does have that “subjected to numerous rewrites” feel, because in fact it really did go through countless rewrites. The various thematic elements in the story, potentially interesting in themselves, just don’t quite come together as a coherent whole.

There is a clue early on that makes the identity of the killer very very obvious.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie is that the Laura Mars photographs were done by the great Helmut Newton. They’re superb. The two most successful and striking scenes are the fashion shoot scenes.

This movie has a few problems but don’t be put off by that. It’s an exceptionally interesting film that just doesn’t feel like a 1978 Hollywood movie. The giallo influence is very obvious and the world of high fashion figures in many notable gialli. The voyeurism theme is handled extremely well. I liked the way Laura is a voyeur but not just in the obvious ways (which she’s intelligent enough to be aware of) but in ways of which he’s not consciously aware. She is is some ways a passive voyeur - the images control her rather than her being in control of the images. And that’s disturbing for a photographer. Photographers manipulate reality but Laura is herself being manipulated.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is well worth seeing. Highly recommended.

Endless Night (1972)

Endless Night is a 1972 British thriller written and directed by Sidney Gilliat and with an intriguing cast headed by Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett and Britt Ekland.

Gilliat and Frank Launder had been an immensely successful writing, directing and producing team (they wrote The Lady Vanishes for Alfred Hitchcock).

The movie is based on a 1967 Agatha Christie thriller. Yes, this is an actual thriller. Agatha Christie did write several thrillers and Endless Night was the best of them. It was her last truly great book.

Mike Rogers is a rental car driver although that is just the latest in a series of jobs. Mike is a very nice young man but he’s a bit of a dreamer. Mike has a fantasy - to build his dream house overlooking the sea. He has already chosen the spot, known as Gypsy’s Acre. The land would cost a lot of money, the house would cost a fortune and Mike is penniless. It’s just a dream.

Doing a driving job on the Continent he meets the renowned architect Rudolf Santonix (Per Oscarsson). Santonix is only in early middle age but he is running out of time. He has severe health problems and may only have a few years left. Mike shows him photos of the site at Gypsy’s Acre. It becomes a kind of dream for Santonix as well. This is a site worthy of him. He could design a house for that site, a house that would be his final masterpiece. But since such a house would be immensely expensive and Mike has no money it’s just a dream.

And then Mike meets a cute American girl, Ellie Thomsen (Hayley Mills). They take a shine to each other. What Mike doesn’t know is that Ellie is one of the richest women in the world.

It can’t possibly work out. Penniless hire car drivers like Mike don’t marry fabulously rich heiresses. But they do get married.

That’s when the plot twists start to kick in and the atmosphere becomes increasingly foreboding, and will soon become sinister. We know something bad is going to happen but we don’t know what it will be.

There are lots of potentially sinister characters. There’s the weird old woman muttering stuff about doom. There’s Greta (Britt Ekland). She’s Ellie’s best friend and was formerly her paid companion. Everyone warns Mike about Greta. There’s Ellie’s family, and a nasty money-grubbing snobbish bunch they are. Reuben (Peter Bowles) is married to Ellie’s aunt and he’s clearly a bad ’un. There’s Ellie’s aunt Cora (Lois Maxwell) who oozes spitefulness. There’s also the family lawyer, Andrew Lippincott (George Sanders). He’s charming but he’s a lawyer and much too clever to be trustworthy.

Both Mike and Ellie are dreamers. Santonix is a dreamer. The film has a slight fairy-tale vibe (and Ellie describes herself several times as Cinderella). My feeling is that you’ll appreciate this movie more if you think of it as having a subtle fairy tale quality. Ellie is the beautiful princess. Mike is the handsome but penniless coachman who wins her heart. The house is an enchanted castle, created by the wizard Santonix. Greta is a witch (the beautiful glamorous witches are the ones you have to watch out for). She might be a good witch or a bad witch. The crazy old lady could also be a good witch or a bad witch. Reuben is the adventurer who hoped to marry the princess. Cora is the evil stepmother. Andrew Lippincott is the old king’s courtier who might want the throne himself.

I have no idea if Gilliat had any of this in mind but there is a faint whiff of unreality to this movie. A slight storybook feel. It’s a long long way from fashionable 70s gritty realism. In fact the overall feel reminds me a little of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) which also has that ambiguity, that sense of being not quite reality. This is a movie that has more of a 1940s or 1950s feel than an early 70s feel. Although it does have a slight affinity with Roddy McDowall’s extraordinary The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970).

While these people live in a futuristic modernist house there are constant evocations of the past such as Mike’s love of beautiful old things, and the fact that Ellie is a singer but she sings 18th century songs. There are also subtle little otherwordly hints - when we first see Ellie she looks like a fairy dancing in a field, there’s the way the old lady keeps just appearing from nowhere. These are very subtle hints but to me they reinforce the idea that reality might not be all it seems to be.

There’s also a subtle dream-like quality to this movie. Again it’s a very slight undermining of reality.

This is a deceptive movie. It’s much smarter and more complex than it initially appears to be but you don’t know how smart it is until the end. It was promoted as an ingenious whodunit, which it isn’t. The mystery plot is very simple, very straightforward and very obvious. The mystery plot is not the point of the movie but you don’t know that until the end.

Hywel Bennett is outstanding. There were certain roles that he just did better than anyone else could have done. This is one of those roles. Hayley Mills is very good although she has a less showy part. Britt Ekland is very good indeed. This movie is stacked with fine British character actors and they’re all good.

Endless Night is intriguing, stylish, enigmatic and clever. Highly recommended.

And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Second Woman (1950)

The Second Woman (later re-released with the title Ellen) is a 1950 United Artists release that has languished in obscurity and that’s rather unfortunate.

The opening is obviously and I would assume deliberately reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. A woman tells us that she keeps remembering a house, a house named Hilltop, now just a ruin.

There are moments that will call to mind several other notable movies of the 1940s, including other Hitchcock movies.

We get a scene with a man seemingly over come by carbon monoxide fumes from a car with its engine kept running in a garage.

A woman is told that she should leave her house immediately because she is in extreme danger.

We need to be wary of taking anything we see in this movie at face value.

Then we go into a flashback which occupies most of the movie’s running time.

Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake) meets Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) on a train. He’s charming and friendly and he seems to be trying to pick her up (and she seems to like the idea) but there’s something slightly odd about him. He seems a bit distracted, a bit moody. As if something was haunting him.

They’re both heading for the same small town.

Jeff is an architect and apparently a very successful one. He’s well-liked but people worry about him. He has never been the same since the accident in which his wife was killed. Nobody likes to talk about the accident and Jeff certainly doesn’t want to talk about it.

But Ellen has fallen head over heels in love with Jeff and there’s no way to restrain a woman’s curiosity.

Jeff invites her to look inside Hilltop, the house he designed and in which he lives. That causes some surprise to the locals - Jeff has never allowed anybody inside Hilltop.

Jess seems to be getting more distracted and disturbed. And strange things keep happening to him. His much-loved horse breaks its leg. His dog is poisoned. There is worse to come. The painting is a particular puzzle. It’s one of Jeff’s prized possessions but the colours have started to fade. Ellen is convinced there’s something very significant about this painting.

And as Ellen says, it just isn’t possible for anybody to have that much bad luck. There’s something sinister going on. Everything that Jeff loves dies. Dr Hartley (Morris Carnovsky) is concerned that Ellen might be in danger. That seems more and more likely.

One nice twist is that we cannot be certain that Ellen is the one in danger. Events seem to be heading inexorably towards disaster but we don’t know from which direction the danger is coming and we don’t know the motive.

There are several plausible explanations for these strange events. The movie does a pretty good job of keeping us in doubt about the actual explanation.

The plot twists are handled quite deftly. There’s some decent misdirection. Mostly it relies on an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that builds gradually but inexorably.

I loved Jeff’s cliff-top modernist house (I dislike modernist architecture for public buildings but I have a real weakness for modernist houses).

I have issues with Robert Young in his 1930s movies. He tries too hard and he’s too hyper-active. By 1950 however he had learnt to tone things down and he gives a fine subtle performance here. Betsy Drake is a likeable lively heroine.

This is a psychological thriller at times veering toward psychological horror and with some hints of the gothic. There are obvious echoes of Rebecca but also of Suspicion and Spellbound and maybe Laura.

This movie ticks just about all my boxes. I enjoyed it enormously. It deserves to be much better known. Highly recommended.

My copy of this film, which obviously had fallen into the public domain, is in one of those Mill Creek 50-movie DVD sets (in this instance their Mystery Classics set). The transfer is quite good.

Nightmare (1956)

Nightmare is a 1956 film noir written and directed by Maxwell Shane. It is based on a Cornell Woolrich novella and it’s very difficult to make a bad movie when you have a Woolrich story as your source material.

What’s interesting is that Shane’s first feature film, Fear in the Night (1946), was based on the same Cornell Woolrich novella. A decade after that film Shane decided that he could do a much better job with the material and Nightmare is certainly more ambitious and more accomplished. Nightmare would be Shane’s final feature film so his directing career began and ended with the same story.

For his 1956 remake Shane switched the scene of the action to New Orleans which was a rather good move. For some reason New Orleans had been under-used as a noir location but it’s the perfect setting for a movie with a slightly spooky mysterious vibe.

It also offered the opportunity to give the movie a more jazz-fuelled feel.

Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) is a jazz musician and he’s just had a terrible nightmare about killing a man in a strange mirrored room. In the struggle (in the nightmare) Stan rips off one of the buttons of his victim’s coat. What worries Stan is that when he wakes up he is clutching that button. He also has a key which he has never seen before. Could Stan be a murderer? But why would he have killed a man he has never seen before?

Stan decides to ask his brother-in-law Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson) for advice. Rene is a Homicide cop. Rene assures Stan that he’s just suffering from overwork. Then Rene, his wife Sue, Stan and Stan’s singer girlfriend Gina (Connie Russell) go on a picnic. Trying to avoid a downpour they are led by Stan to an empty house. Stan has never been to this house but he knows how to get there and he knows where the spare key is hidden. There’s a mirrored room in the house - the room from Stan’s dream. And that mysterious key fits the locks in that room.

Rene now figures that Stan really is a murderer and Stan figures the same thing. But there are major plot twists to come.

Stan of course has considered the possibility that he has gone crazy. There are other possibilities. The nightmare was obviously very significant.

Changes were made to the plot for the 1956 remake and both film versions differ in some ways from Woolrich’s story.

One thing that should be noted is that the poster for the movie (reproduced on the Blu-Ray cover) gives away the entire plot of the movie. I’m not going to do that but if you’re concerned about spoilers just don’t look at that disc cover!

Kevin McCarthy is excellent as the confused and worried Stan, a nice guy whose whole world is suddenly falling apart. Edward G. Robinson gives one of his kindly wise older man performances, mixed with one of his aggressive tough guy performances.

The actresses are fine but the focus here is very much on Rene and Stan and McCarthy and Robinson are both so good that the female stars inevitably get overshadowed.

This is a visually rather impressive movie. The New Orleans locations are used well. The camerawork combines with the music to give that crazy disturbing jazzy feel that the story requires. There’s a nice use of mirrors. Not just the mirrored room, but there’s another very cool mirror shot early which doesn’t advance the plot but just adds subtly to our sense of unease.

There’s a lot of Freudian stuff. It’s half-baked Freudianism, but Freud’s Freudianism was half-baked as well so it doesn’t matter. Freudian nonsense always adds some fun.

You might think I’m being persnickety about that poster but I do think it weakens the movie. The movie works better if you don’t know the answer to a couple of the key questions which cause Rene and Stan so much anguish and bewilderment, and the poster makes those answers much too obvious. Perhaps Shane really did want us to know the answers, but the way he structures the movie suggests to me that that was not the case.

Is this film noir? I would say no, but it’s definitely noirish. Always bear in mind that the movie was made in 1956 when no-one had heard of film noir, so it was never intended as a film noir and there’s no sense complaining that some of what are now seen as essential noir ingredients are missing. This is an entertaining psychological crime thriller and it’s recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a very nice Blu-Ray transfer.

Le Boucher (1970)

Le Boucher (The Butcher) is a 1970 Claude Chabrol film.

Chabrol was associated with the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). He was a fanatical admirer of Hitchcock. You’ll often find him described as the French Hitchcock. Having seen half a dozen of his movies I have no idea why anyone would see him as a French Hitchcock. In the films of his that I’ve seen Chabrol’s approach does not even slightly resemble Hitchcock’s.

That’s not intended as a criticism of Chabrol. Just because he admired Hitchcock does not mean that he wanted to slavishly copy Hitchcock’s techniques. Chabrol had his own ideas on how to make movies. Whether or not you think they were good ideas is up to you, but they were his own ideas.

Hitchcock’s approach to suspense was invariably to give the audience vital information denied to the protagonist. That creates fear by making us fearful on behalf of the protagonist - we know he is in danger but he doesn’t know that.

In this movie we know only what the protagonist knows. We discover things as she discovers them.

Helen (Stéphane Audran) is the school headmistress in a small French town. At a wedding she meets the local butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne). They flirt in a tentative way. A day or so later they have dinner together. There’s obviously some attraction there, and they like each other. Helen is not the sort of woman who jumps straight into bed with a man. Popaul is not the sort of man who expects a woman to do that. He behaves like a perfect gentleman. They start to become fond of one another but they’re both taking things slowly. We slowly come to like both of them as well.

What I like is the way Chabrol focuses for so much of the movie on this slowly blossoming romance between Helen and Popaul. The unsettling elements are introduced in the background and appear to have no connection whatsoever with these two people.

We get a wonderful idyllic scene of the children playing in the schoolyard supervised by their pretty young headmistress. She obviously loves the children and they love her. This is a peaceful harmless sleepy little town.

Then we see the two black police vans pull up in the background, and the gendarmes have a police dog with them. A police dog always means something very bad - perhaps a missing child, perhaps a search for a body.

We find out, purely because one of the kids has heard this from his dad, that the dead body of a woman has been found in the woods. This has nothing to do with our two tentative lovers but we are now just a little uneasy.

The unease slowly builds as Helen discovers something that may be a clue or it may not be. We know no more about it than Helen does.

But we are getting worried. There are more murders.

There are a couple of lovely visual moments - the dripping blood scene is superbly done.

While it’s not a Hitchcock-style thriller there is an intriguing echo of Vertigo - the shots of the back of Stéphane Audran’s dead, focusing on her hair, mirroring those famous shots of Kim Novak in Vertigo. Given Chabrol’s fondness for Hitchcock it’s a certain that he added these shots as a playful reference. Chabrol liked playing cinematic games.

And Stéphane Audran is the Hitchcock Ice Blonde type, so it works.

This is very much a slow-burn thriller.

There isn’t much actual suspense, in fact hardly any. But there is a growing sense of dread. In that respect this movie perhaps functions more like a horror movie than a thriller.

Don’t think of this as a Hitchcock-style thriller. Just enjoy it as a Chabrol movie. It’s a very good Chabrol movie. Highly recommended.

The old Pathfinder DVD offers a perfectly acceptable 16:9 enhanced transfer. The availability of Chabrol’s movies in English-friendly versions has always been rather spotty.

I’ve also reviewed Chabrol’s fascinating but eccentric The Champagne Murders (1967) and the extremely interesting Innocents With Dirty Hands (1975).

Screaming Mimi (1958)

Screaming Mimi, directed by Gerd Oswald, is a 1958 crime thriller based on Fredric Brown's 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi.

The movie opens with a blonde almost getting sliced up by a guy with a knife. The guy gets shot. The blonde ends up holding the knife. Nobody thinks the blonde is anything other than an innocent victim but she has a major crack-up and ends up in a mental hospital, under the care of Dr Greenwood (Harry Townes). The blonde is Virginia Wilson (Anita Ekberg). Dr Greenwood takes a very close personal interest in her case. Very close. He tells her that as soon as she’s cured they will go away together, but she has to trust him and everything he tells her to do.

Six months later Virginia has become a successful nightclub entertainer, using the stage name Yolanda Lang. Her manager is Bill Green, who is in fact none other than Dr Greenwood.

There’s a slasher murderer (dubbed the Ripper) loose in the city and Yolanda almost becomes the latest victim. She is saved by her faithful dog Devil. He’s a mean crazy dog but he adores his mistress and he would die to save her.

Reporter Bill Sweeney (Philip Carey) gets mixed up in the case. He thinks there’s a good story here. He’s also rather taken with the glamorous Yolanda.

What convinces him that there’s a great story here is the Screaming Mimi herself. The Screaming Mimi is a statuette of a half-naked terrified girl. Only a handful of these statuettes were ever made. Yolanda had one. And one was found by the body of the Ripper’s first victim. Add to this that the first victim, Lola Lake, was like Yolanda a beautiful blonde dancer and any reporter would sense that this is a story.

This is a movie that doesn’t cheat. When the solution is revealed it’s perfectly consistent with everything that has come before. The clues were there. They were subtle, but they were there.

We, the audience, know something very important that the protagonists don’t know. We know this thing, but we don’t know what it means. It could have several different entirely plausible explanations.

One difficulty for this film is that Yolanda’s act has to be super-sexy. The poster after all describes her as a stripper. But this was 1958 so she can’t possibly take her clothes off. She can’t take any of her clothes off. The problem is solved by adding some fetishism, with Yolanda dancing in shackles and chains (this is just a wild guess but there could be some symbolism here folks).

Overall this works. The movie has a subtly perverse feel which is totally consistent with the story.

What’s cool is that this is a Hollywood psychiatry movie. I just love psychiatry movies. And being the 50s you know there’ll be at least some half-baked Freudianism in there somewhere. I love these movies for the same reason I love voodoo movies - they involve a weird crazy belief system that makes no rational sense but it’s huge amounts of fun.

This one is particularly cool because right from the start we can see that the psychiatrist seems at least as crazy as his patient. And the psychiatry stuff is pleasingly loopy.

The movie’s biggest strength is Anita Ekberg’s performance which at first seems stiff but eventually you realise that Miss Ekberg knew exactly what she was doing. She nails the character perfectly. Her dance routines are a highlight as well.

There are those who are going to insist that this movie is film noir. I don’t think it is, although it has noirish touches. I think it’s more accurate to see it as an anticipation of the later giallo genre. It’s no coincidence that Dario Argento’s landmark 1970 giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is also a loose adaptation of Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi.

Screaming Mimi is a very underrated movie. Highly recommended.

Play Misty For Me (1971)

Play Misty For Me, released in 1971, was Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut. And a very impressive debut it was.

This is a stalker movie, but it’s a man being stalked by a woman. It's also a psychological thriller. Dave (Clint Eastwood) is a DJ. He plays requests. A woman keeps ringing, asking him to play Errol Garner’s Misty. She rings constantly. Then Dave sees a woman in a bar. She looks like she’d be worth picking up. He picks her up. He finds out her name is Evelyn. She’s the Misty lady. That should perhaps have been the first red flag, the fact that she’s some kind of obsessed fan should have been the first indication that maybe she can be a bit obsessive.

Dave isn’t thinking that far ahead. He just wants a simple one night stand with no complications and Evelyn assures him that that’s all she wants.

The next day she turns up on his doorstep. His nightmare has begun. There is simply no way to convince her that this was never anything but a casual hook-up. She is convinced that he’s madly in love with her. When he tries to make it clear that he has zero interest in any kind of relationship she takes it badly. Really badly. And when Evelyn takes things badly the results tend to be spectacularly messy.

Dave isn’t scared yet, just exasperated, but the terror is about to begin.

Dave has a girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills). He’s in love with Tobie. But Dave has this problem with women - he just can’t keep away from them. Dave is no Boy Scout, but on the other hand his relationship with Tobie hasn’t really reached the committed relationship stage. Tobie knows he sleeps with other women. She hasn’t really made a commitment either. It’s not like having a one night stand with Evelyn is some heinous moral crime.

Everything would be fine, except that for Evelyn it’s not a one night stand. It’s not even an affair. It’s true love, of the totally obsessive variety. As Jessica Walters puts it in an interview included as an extra, as far as Evelyn is concerned she has to have this man or she will die. Evelyn has a very tenuous grip on reality. She believes what she wants to believe and she hears what she wants to hear. She’s unstable, with the potential to go right off the rails, but Dave can’t foresee any of that.

Adrian Lyne’s 1987 Fatal Attraction is more or less a remake of Play Misty For Me. Play Misty For Me is by far the better film for a variety of reasons. Clint Eastwood is a much better director than Adrian Lyne. As an actor he’s much better cast than Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction. He’s a much more sympathetic hero and we need to be on his side. Michael Douglas could be extraordinary in the right role but playing a basically decent regular guy was not within his range.

And Jessica Walters gives a vastly better performance than Glenn Close - she manages to be both more terrifying and more sympathetic. Evelyn is a deranged psycho but Walters gives her an odd vulnerability. Her performance is both more over-the-top and at the same time more subtle and more believable. It’s a great performance.

Eastwood’s own performance is also excellent. Dave is no macho action hero type. He’s an easy-going rather laid-back guy. He’s totally out of his depth in this situation. And he’s frightened. He feels like a trapped animal which is pretty much what he is. It’s an effective low-key performance.

Look out for Don Siegel, who directed Eastwood in some of his most famous roles, in a small acting part as a bartender.

This being Eastwood’s first movie as a director he was given a very small budget. He wasn’t bothered by this. As far as he was concerned what mattered was that he was going to be allowed to direct it. He knew the lady (Jo Heims) who had written the original treatment and it was something he really wanted to direct. He does a very assured job.

Eastwood understands the basic technique of suspense. We, the audience, know what Evelyn is going to do next but the other characters don’t. The other characters, not just Dave but the cops as well, continually underestimate the dangers. They just don’t realise how crazy she is. The audience however knows that she really is incredibly dangerous and incredibly crazy.

One thing I love about this movie is that we get no backstory at all on Evelyn. No half-baked Freudian explanations for her behaviour, no stuff about childhood traumas. That kind of thing always ends up being unconvincing and phoney. We have to judge Evelyn entirely on what she does and says in the course of the story. I like that.

This is a good solid suspense thriller. Jessica Walters is extraordinary. Highly recommended.

Universal’s Blu-Ray looks terrific and there are some very decent extras.

The Champagne Murders (1967)

Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders was shot simultaneously in two different versions, an English-language version and a French version (released as Le scandale). Interestingly none of the main players are dubbed in either version. They all (including Anthony Perkins) spoke both French and English fluently. Naturally the more pretentious online reviewers insist that the French version is superior, even if they’ve never actually seen it!

Given Chabrol’s admiration for Hitchcock and the initial setup of this movie you might be expecting this to be a Hitchcockian suspense thriller. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not even a genuine suspense thriller, much less a Hitchcockian thriller. The plot is included more or less as an after-thought. There’s no suspense at all. This is more of a social comedy or a black comedy. A couple of years earlier Chabrol had made Blue Panther, a spy thriller which turns out not to be a spy thriller at all. It’s more of a demolition job on the spy genre and an elaborate cinematic game. This is to a large extent what Chabrol is doing to the suspense thriller genre in The Champagne Murders. Chabrol must have been immensely amused that most critics failed to get the joke.

This was Chabrol’s only Hollywood movie. It’s almost as if he wanted to make sure he would never be asked to make another movie in Hollywood.

The Champagne Murders begins with two friends, Paul (Maurice Ronet) and Christopher (Anthony Perkins), who pick up a young woman. They end up being beaten up and the young woman is murdered. Paul never really recovers his mental equilibrium and spends a long period in a mental hospital. He is released but his mental state is still a little shaky.

By this time Christopher has married into money. He has married Christine Belling (Yvonne Furneaux). Christine owns a vineyard, which had belonged to Paul’s family. In fact she owns a champagne empire and she has been offered a huge amount of money for it from two American buyers. The problem is that the business is worthless without the trade name and Paul still owns that. Christine has to persuade Paul to sell her the name. She wants Christopher’s help. If he’s a good boy and helps her she’ll buy him a yacht - a huge ocean-going yacht. Christopher likes boats.

Christopher and Paul make a business visit to Hamburg. Hamburg was at this time regarded as the sex and sin capital of Europe. While they’re there the body of a young woman, a lady of the night, is discovered.

Christine is always plotting something, and we get the feeling that often it’s for the sheer pleasure of manipulating people. She doesn’t seem to have a totally coherent objective in mind. Christopher may be doing some plotting as well. He thinks there’s something he wants but he doesn’t seem to know what it is. Paul is just increasingly confused. He thinks he may have done something terrible but he has no idea why he might have done such a thing. Paul’s grip on reality is steadily loosening.

The plot really only matters insofar as it sets up the situation Chabrol wants - a group of truly awful, fake, treacherous, manipulative people none of whom can be trusted and at least one of whom might be mad. All of them are so fake that they’re in danger of confusing their own fake personas with reality. Their personalities are not just fake but also fragmented. They lack any real sense of personal identity.

The performances are all slightly odd. This is clearly deliberate. When you look at the cast these are all very fine very experienced acting talents. If their performances are off-kilter that is obviously exactly what Chabrol wanted.

This is not a realist movie. This is one of the ways in which this film is most definitely not a Hitchcockian thriller. Hitchcock dealt with madness and obsession at times and his movies were often visually stylised but they never abandoned reality altogether. With The Champagne Murders we’re much more aware that we need to suspect that there are times when the movie may in fact have crossed the line into non-reality.

When looking at movies from other time periods it’s essential to remember that every decade has had its own distinctive cultural obsessions. The cultural obsessions of the mid-60s bear no resemblance whatsoever to the cultural obsessions of today. Trying to view a 1967 movie in terms of 2020s ideologies inevitably leads to a total misunderstanding of the movie.

You also have to bear in mind the intellectual climate of the 60s. Marxism, Freudianism, absurdism and existentialism were major intellectual currents at that time. They might not have directly influenced every film-maker but they were part of the atmosphere that intellectuals breathed. You can see traces of most of these intellectual currents in this movie.

There was much more consciousness of class. The protagonists of this movie very definitely belong to the decadent bourgeoisie. I don’t think Chabrol had any overt political axe to grind in this film, but in 1967 people would certainly have noticed the bourgeois milieu in which it takes place. Bored amoral rich people who have everything but still manage to be miserable.

Most modern critics still insist on seeing this movie as Chabrol attempting to do Hitchcock and failing. But while he admired Hitchcock he wasn’t trying to emulate Hitch here. Online reviews also insist on seeing this as a whodunit. At the end you do find out the murderer’s identity, which in a whodunit would be a satisfying conclusion. In this film it just raises more perplexing questions. The neat whodunit solution isn’t the point at all. The really interesting questions are left without neat tidy answers. If you’re looking for a conventional suspense thriller you’ll find this movie exasperating. It doesn’t obey any of the rules of the genre.

If you accept that Chabrol is teasing and toying with the viewer and if you enjoying cinematic game-playing you’ll have a much better time with The Champagne Murders. It’s still an oddball movie but it’s fascinating in its own way. The more you think about it after you’ve watched it the more fascinating it becomes. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray looks lovely and includes an audio commentary.

Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977)

Looking for Mr Goodbar was mildly controversial at the time of its release in 1977. It’s certainly sleazy enough and violent enough to make its X certificate understandable.

It was written and directed by Richard Brooks, based on Judith Rossner’s novel. Brooks has taken a fascinating story idea (a woman drawn by masochistic impulses into dangerous sexual games) and turned it into a meandering over-long utterly conventional morality play. The message of the movie is that bad girls get what they deserve. A bad girl being a woman who dares to flout the established conventional moral rules.

Diane Keaton plays Theresa. She teaches deaf children. On the surface she is a paragon of virtue but she lives a double life, cruising sleazy bars and picking up loser men.

This fascination with casual sex begins when she’s still in college and she has an affair with a married professor. He unceremoniously dumps her after he’s had his fun so she decides to devote herself to the pursuit of pleasure.

Of course it’s all her father’s fault. He’s a devout Catholic. He thinks his daughter is a whore and the spawn of Satan.

There’s an entirely pointless sub-plot involving Theresa’s crazy sister Katherine (played by Tuesday Weld chewing every piece of scenery she can get her hands on). In fact there are lots of pointless sub-plots. What might have been a tense 90 minute film becomes a bloated 136 minute mess.

Theresa gets involved with a social worker who annoys her by wanting a serious relationship. She also gets involved with a hyper-active nutter named Tony (played by Richard Gere chewing every piece of scenery he can get his hands on). Theresa becomes a hooker although she seems to be motivated more by an urge to revenge herself on Dead Old Dad than by money.

Theresa gets into some awkward situations but she just doesn’t learn.

According to this movie there was not a single decent sane human being in the United States in 1977. Every character in the movie is exaggerated to the point of parody.

There are intermittent brief fantasy sequences which are presumably intended to give us a glimpse inside Theresa’s mind. These sequences are an unnecessary distraction.

The acting on the whole veers between hysteria and extreme hysteria.

The one exception, and the movie’s one redeeming feature, is Diane Keaton. There’s nothing she can do about the weak script but she does manage to make Theresa reasonably believable. Theresa is confused and out of control and Keaton gets this across very effectively but she is also able to infuse the character with a certain degree of humour.

Generally speaking I despise the use of the term camp to describe movies but it’s about the only adequate way to describe this one. It’s camp in the truest sense - a movie that tries to take itself absurdly seriously but in fact cannot be taken the least bit seriously.

There’s also some half-baked Freudianism.

This movie manages to be incredibly heavy-handed and confused at the same time. The message seems to be that women should forget about sex and just settle down and get married and learn to be good girls. Otherwise very bad things will happen to them.

Looking for Mr Goodbar has its good points. It is at least an attempt to deal with sexual subject matter openly and in a grown-up way even if it’s an attempt that mostly misfires. The ending is technically bold and striking.

And Diane Keaton’s performance is undeniably impressive.

Looking for Mr Goodbar is mostly a missed opportunity. It is fascinating in its own way and perhaps worth a look as an example of a 70s movie that really gets down and dirty.

This movie has a reputation for being difficult to track down. There was in fact a DVD release which is still obtainable. It’s letterboxed but as far as I’m concerned that’s OK. At least it’s not pan-and-scanned. And there are certain aspects of this movie that make it very doubtful that it will ever get a Blu-Ray release.