Nomadic Existence: In Memoriam, Farley Granger, 1925-2011; Deanna Durbin

From this week's issue of Nomad Wide Screen, an excerpt from my tribute to the late Farley Granger, consisting of a look at the two films he made with Alfred Hitchcock: the sublime Strangers on a Train and the severely underrated Rope.

Rope...is a lot better than it’s usually given credit for being. Rather than being just stagey, it plays a long game with the very notion of staginess, as the camera forces the audience to look at things they might not even notice as a play progressed in a theater. In one extraordinary instance, the lens stays trained on the maid who’s tidying up the chest that unbeknownst to her holds the dead body. The camera watches her clear the dishes from this macabre buffet table, blow out the candles, take away the tablecloth and prepare, perhaps, to open the chest, while just out of sight range, we hear the others discussing the dead man’s whereabouts.

The movie is based on the Leopold and Loeb case, in which two young men in Chicago murdered a 14-year-old boy to demonstrate their intellectual superiority via a "perfect crime." Granger, who at age 22 had already embarked on what would be a lifelong pursuit of both men and women, had no such hesitation. He later said he always considered himself a working actor, not a star; Granger didn’t fear the homoerotic subtext of either of the films he did for Hitchcock.

Rope posits a classic case of criminal folie à deux, with Brandon (John Dall) as the more dominant partner, but it’s far too simple to see Phillip (Granger) as a mere pawn, and that isn’t the way Granger plays it. After all, it is Phillip who is strangling their friend in the opening sequence, not Brandon. 
Sure, Phillip is weak, but weak is never synonymous with powerless. Instead, Phillip uses his weakness to get what he really wants, which is to get caught.



That desire is there in his curt “Don’t” when Brandon tries to switch on the light after the murder. And it’s even more apparent when amateur psychic Constance Collier, when asked how Phillip’s piano concert will go, tells him “these hands will bring you great fame” — Phillip’s expression is not one of fear, but rather remorse. The steadily rising hysteria of Phillip’s behavior is such that he’d have to be an idiot not to know that he’s giving the game away, and Phillip is no idiot. He is working toward his goal, using the weak person’s tools of manipulation and provocation.



Viewed this way, Granger’s most famous moment in the movie – when James Stewart’s ex-headmaster questions Granger and his more domineering partner in crime – takes on a whole different aspect. Granger isn’t just playing abject fear, he’s also playing regret and self-loathing. “Who’s the cat, and who’s the mouse?” he asks; in terms of who’s really manipulating the conversation, and ensuring that Stewart will become even more suspicious, the cat could well be Granger himself. When Granger completely cracks at the end and threatens Dall with a gun, he plays the action with less agitation, not more — he’s coming closer to his desire at last.

From the March 23 edition, my appreciation of Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls and Lady on a Train:

She was about 15 when Three Smart Girls came out, and her years in girlish roles were already numbered. She made the transition to adult roles — albeit winsome, charming adult roles — without much trouble, receiving her first screen kiss from Robert Stack in First Love in 1939. By the time she made Lady on a Train, in 1945, she had already tried, and failed, to turn around her image with Robert Siodmak’s Christmas Holiday (1944), a fervidly sexed-up noir in which she played a barely disguised prostitute and sang a dirgelike version of “Always.” Despite the film’s success, Universal immediately returned to the old formulas, and by most accounts it was then that Durbin lost whatever interest in Hollywood she’d ever had.

Lady on a Train, however, is a highly engaging movie. Usually described as a whodunit, it’s actually more of a farce, the presence of Edward Everett Horton being a huge tip-off. Durbin plays Nikki Collins, a San Francisco heiress who witnesses a murder as her train pulls into Grand Central. With logic common to Durbin plots, Nikki drafts her favorite mystery author (David Bruce) to help her track down the killer. It is the sort of movie where a single conk on the head knocks a man out cold, only to have him revive minutes later, perfectly able to say something funny. Dan Duryea gets to chase Durbin in a menacing fashion, and Ralph Bellamy shows up to fail at getting the girl. (Bellamy also gets a line toward the end that’s as clear an incest implication as I’ve heard in any movie from that era, and that was, I must say, unexpected.)

...Particularly interesting, albeit deeply strange, is the scene where she sings “Silent Night” on the telephone (the movie is set at Christmas). She lays down on the bed, her hair fanning out on the covers, and croons into the telephone, her expression and the lighting and framing no less romantic than Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never Know” on the phone in Hello, Frisco, Hello. The strangeness, however, isn’t so much that it’s a hymn; it’s that she’s singing to her father.