For the Love of Film IV: Did the Talkies Doom Norma Talmadge?

This post is my contribution to this year’s blogathon, For the Love of Film. This year the beneficiary of the blogosphere’s largess is Cupid in Quarantine (1918), which Marilyn Ferdinand calls “a one-reel Strand Comedy that tells the story of a young couple conspiring to stay together by staging a smallpox outbreak.” This may be the most eye-poppingly oddball comedy premise the Siren has ever encountered. Surely this film deserves to be saved for its daring alone.

Together with Roderick Heath of This Island Rod and today's host, Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark, we’re trying to raise $10,000 to go to the National Film Preservation Foundation to cover laboratory costs for the film’s preservation as well as a new score for the film’s web premiere. The streaming film will be available free at the NFPF website.

Today is the last day. Help the Siren help Marilyn, Rod and Sam to bring it home for the folks at the NFPF! A random drawing of donor names will determine eligibility for some nice prizes including (ahem) a signed copy of the Siren's novel, Missing Reels.

Please read, and donate! The Siren is too ladylike to name names, but she has seen crowdfunding for some mighty dubious stuff this year. THIS is a good cause, and one that will yield you tangible results: preserving a piece of film history. Traditionally, it's the small donations that add up for us. So don't be shy!

DONATE HERE, DARLINGS

The silent film the Siren watched most recently was Kiki, an absolutely delightful comedy from 1926 that starred Norma Talmadge as an inept wannabe showgirl (she can sing, but after that, the party’s over). A relaxed, funny Ronald Colman plays the showbiz impresario who's the object of her affection; Gertrude Astor is the snooty star who stands in plucky, orphaned, dead-broke Kiki's way.

It was directed by Clarence Brown, who later told Kevin Brownlow, “Norma Talmadge was the greatest pantomimist that ever drew breath. She was a natural-born comic; you could turn on a scene with her and she’d go on for five minutes without stopping or repeating herself.”

Norma Talmadge puts one over on the landlady in Kiki.

Brown knew whereof he spoke. Norma Talmadge is really, truly wonderful; fresh, natural, unaffected.

But Talmadge is the second-most famous casualty of sound, after John Gilbert. We know now that the history of Gilbert’s “white voice” (a late-1920s euphemism for effeminate) is, as Henry Ford would put it, bunk. What about Norma? Is that bunk, too?

She looks miserable, doesn't she.

The story of Norma Talmadge, and the Brooklyn patois that supposedly sank her overnight, might in fact be more famous than Gilbert -- but pseudonymously. Nowadays not that many people know that the immortal Lina Lamont is a direct parody of Talmadge’s fall. Singin’ in the Rain even goes so far as to set the character’s disastrous first try at a talking picture in 18th-century France. In 1952, there were still people around who remembered the 1930 picture, DuBarry, Woman of Passion. It was Talmadge’s last film.

The Siren adores Singin' in the Rain, but its influence on the view of silent-film history has been, let's just say, not good. It's probably just as well that the Talmadge connection has been forgotten by the general public. Lina is a superb comic creation, talentless, avaricious, with the brains of a sequin. Norma was intelligent, talented, and held in much affection by people like Anita Loos, as the Siren once wrote before.

And let’s not dwell on the great Sunset Boulevard, often claimed to be based in part on the long, reclusive retirement of Norma, during which she apparently became dependent on painkillers for crippling arthritis. Billy Wilder was always cagey about whether art had ungallantly imitated life, but sadly, the bare outline fits. (Although, as Mae Murray is reported to have said on seeing the film, “None of us floozies was that nuts.”)

Legend has it that Norma’s sister, Constance, a star in her own right, sent a telegram advising Norma to get out. There are different versions around, so the Siren will reproduce the one she likes best:

QUIT PUSHING YOUR LUCK BABY STOP
THE CRITICS CAN’T KNOCK THOSE TRUST FUNDS MAMA SET UP FOR US STOP



True or not, to this day precisely why Norma Talmadge didn’t take as a talkie star is a matter of some debate. If you want to hear her voice, you have a chance with New York Nights above. It’s an extremely interesting early talkie, with a nice turn by Lilyan Tashman. Gilbert Roland was not at the top of his acting game, but lord, he always looks good. It's a bit static, but there are gritty moments that seem to herald the Depression-oriented pre-Codes to come, and other scenes that are rooted in pure melodrama.

As for the Talmadge voice, it is pleasant, hardly a Lamontesque assault on the eardrums, and perfectly appropriate for her showgirl character. On the other hand, if you go to the 15:30 mark, and listen to Talmadge deliver the line, “Some birthday party” in an accent that sounds straight outta Flatbush, it is easy to understand why her voice came as a shock.

Gilbert Roland, Talmadge, and Arnold Kent in Woman Disputed (1927) directed by Henry King and Sam Taylor. A silent movie, it came with a much-mocked Movietone score that included a song: "Although you're refuted / Woman Disputed / I love you." For better or worse, Library of Congress print is missing the score.

Greta de Groat, a scholar whose Norma Talmadge site is absolutely splendid — a place to read about the whole of this great star’s career, and lose hours doing so — says simply that “the world was moving on, and in the excitement of discovering new favorites, the public was letting go of the old stars.” De Groat has seen DuBarry (the Siren has not) and claims that the accent so apparent in New York Nights is nowhere in evidence. Alexander Walker, in The Shattered Silents, buys into the idea that Norma’s voice doomed her, but maintains that she was nearly unique in that regard (the only other name he cites as vocally doomed is William Haines). He’s worth quoting at some length:

Just looking at the best examples of silent screen acting show how much of value was irrecoverably lost. Sound made acting more naturalistic, but also lazier. Words did the work. They diminished the mobile, finely nuanced quality of the screen mime and began the process in which the sense of people playing parts in a dexterously visible way is lost sight of a in a stylised naturalism that requires a dominant personality to make it bearable from film to film...Once they had dialogue on their lips, the silent idols suffered a grievous loss of divinity. They became more like the audiences watching them. This helps explain why the talkies altered star values so radically. What they did not do — and this needs stressing — was ruin the silent stars.

Talmadge had been planning to star in The Greeks Had a Word for Them for Samuel Goldwyn, but walked away. It was another showgirl character. Kiki, it should be noted, didn’t take with a public that loved their Norma as a dramatic heroine. Perhaps that was in the back of her mind. Her looks and talent had established her as one kind of star, and once that was the case, the fact that she might have been good in another type of role wasn’t enough to save her career. She’d been one of the most celebrated beauties in movies, but she was nearing 40, that age that knocked even Margo Channing sideways. Norma took little sis’ advice.

Norma, holding the baby, in The Lady (1925), directed by Frank Borzage. De Groat says the second reel is missing and there is deterioration on the surviving print, but it still impressed a California audience some years back.

As for why she is so little remembered today, well, she has that in common with a number of other silent stars. But Norma was especially unlucky. Norma’s films were acquired by the mysterious, litigious Raymond Rohauer, the man who controlled Buster Keaton’s legacy. (Buster, of course, was married to Norma’s sister Natalie.) Rohauer left the films to the Library of Congress, but in de Groat’s words, they had been “sorely neglected.” Some of the prints were only partially salvageable; some were all there, but damaged; still others were simply gone. It’s a story that stuck in my mind as I was writing Missing Reels.

The good news is that of her 51 films, de Groat says “31 are thought to be complete, and 11 more are preserved in part.” There are a few out on home video now, and the Siren plans to chase them down. But for Norma Talmadge ever to be a name on a level with better-known silent stars like Clara Bow, the films have to get back in circulation. And perhaps they will. De Groat also points out that since she began the site, several films, including Kiki, have come out on DVD.

As I say more than once in Missing Reels, I’m basically an optimist. When it comes to film preservation, it’s the only attitude that can keep me sane.

Here’s looking at you, Miss Talmadge. Your movies deserve a better fate.

King Vidor, The Crowd, and the Dragon

(This is a disgracefully belated entry for the Film History Blogathon. The Siren's post, on 1928, would have been part of the 1927-1938 section, hosted by Ruth at Silver Screenings. For the years 1915-1926, your hostess is Fritzi at Movies, Silently; and 1939-1950 can be found at Aurora's place, Once Upon a Screen. Please click through to those host blogs to find a plethora of wonderful, and prompt, blog entries on many aspects of film history.)

Death is a good career move, goes an old movie joke that the Siren has never found funny. It was never less true than it was for silent film, which died after a brief illness. Probably it was younger than Marilyn Monroe, although like many another cinema great, the birth date’s hard to pin down.

Some early deaths do enshrine a legend; some even elevate a talent that might have burned out. Silent film died and stayed buried. If you were still around, and your name wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, you didn’t get much time to mourn. Pull up your socks and deal, that was the only way to survive. Who knows how many faceless names in the credits were walking around, not with mike fright, but mike shock.

As is common when talking about a life cut off in its prime, the Siren starts with the wake. King Vidor, in his 1953 autobiography A Tree Is a Tree, paints a scene that’s both gallows-funny and tragic.

We had no movieola in the first days of sound, and during the editing of Hallelujah [1929] I saw a cutter literally go beserk at his inability to get the job done properly. The walls of his cutting room were lined with multitudes of shiny film cans containing the mass of sound and picture tracks. Returning from a projection room after many hours of labor he discovered that the scene was still out of synchronization and let fly with a reel against the solid wall of cans. This precipitated an avalanche of thousands of feet of loose film that engulfed the two of us. The hysterical cutter fell on the floor sobbing helplessly. I unwound him from the tangled maze and drove him home to the care of his wife. He remained in bed a week before he could again undertake the task of editing the film.

Vidor was a spiritual, contemplative person, infrequently given to flashes of temperament. But he was also worn out and, probably, worried to death. “I felt that by this mechanical advance the movies were losing a beautiful impressionistic quality that would be hard to replace in the technique of the new medium,” he wrote about having to add dialogue to a craps-game scene in Hallelujah. “In the light of experience,” he adds hastily, “I have since changed my mind, but the forced transition saddened me for quite some time.”

Who can blame him. One year before, even as sound invaded, the silents were still at their peak. That’s a fact endlessly repeated, and yet it’s one of those things that always give the Siren a jolt, like Orson Welles’ age when he made Citizen Kane, or Gone With the Wind’s inflation-adjusted gross. Look at the silents that opened in 1928. Contemplate their technical bravado, their thematic originality, their vivid acting: Street Angel. The Cameraman. The Circus. The Italian Straw Hat. Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Underground. The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Wind.

One of those 1928 films, The Crowd, is not only the Siren’s favorite silent, but one of her favorite films, period. A Tree Is a Tree goes into this film’s conception, the casting, the camerawork. Vidor quotes the rave reviews with poignant pride. The Crowd tells the story of John Sims, who’s raised to believe great things await him, and then they never arrive. John moves to Manhattan (where else for a striver?) but he never strikes it rich, never climbs the ladder at work or anywhere else. He meets a nice girl, they marry and have a family. Their joys become fewer, and the hardships harder, until a blow lands that many couldn’t recover from. John’s one act of heroism is simply deciding to carry on, a moment that only the small boy who shares it with him will ever truly appreciate.

“Daring” means a number of different things these days. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for “impenetrable,” but in American film it’s often something to do with taste. Is it cynical, is it dark, will it make Grandma stomp out to ask the theater manager if his mother knows he’s showing this filth.

The Crowd is its own kind of daring, due mostly to King Vidor, but in some measure also to Irving Thalberg. Some people say Thalberg was only and always a middlebrow purveyor of quality Oscar-bait. Vidor — who can’t be said to have idealized his producer — would not have agreed.

His movie The Big Parade was still packing cinemas, and one day the director found himself buttonholed by Thalberg and asked what his next project would be.

I really hadn’t an idea ready, but one came to me in the emergency. “Well, I suppose the average fellow walks through life and see quite a lot of drama taking place around him. Objectively life is like a battle, isn’t it?” While I groped, Thalberg was smiling.

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” he asked.

“Never thought of it before,” I confessed.

“Have you got a title.”

“Perhaps One of the Mob.”

Thalberg showed immediate enthusiasm. “That a wonderful title, One of the Mob. How long will it take you to write it?”

“Two or three days.”

“If you need any help, let me know.”

“Thanks,” I said, and we parted.

Now this is the way I believe a film should begin.

“MGM,” Thalberg once told Vidor about an idea that wasn't The Crowd, “can certainly afford a few experimental projects,” although as Erich von Stroheim would have pointed out, Thalberg’s indulgence of artists did have its limits. Accordingly Thalberg soon rejected the title One of the Mob as too suggestive of a proletarian tract, and The Crowd emerged. Vidor and Thalberg wanted a “documentary flavor,” and an unknown actor as John seemed the ideal way to get it. The search was fruitless until one day a man brushed by Vidor, a man with a face that looked familiar not because the director had seen it before, but because it was a face you could never pick out of a crowd, or a mob, or (in this case) a lot full of extras. Vidor gave the man his card and told him to call for a chance at a part. The man never called, and Vidor couldn’t remember the name. Finally the director went to the rosters of extras and lit on the words that wouldn’t stick in his brain: James Murray. The extra hadn’t called Vidor because he thought the director wasn’t serious about the job.

Vidor cast Eleanor Boardman, his wife at the time, as Mary Sims, and put her in plain clothes and minimal makeup that diminished her considerable beauty. Murray turned out to be a difficult person, fated to meet a bad end due to alcoholism and sheer cussedness. The cinematographer was Henry Sharp, who also did Duck Soup, It’s a Gift and was active through the 1930s; but this was his peak.

Fired up by what he called “directors of vision” from Europe — he names Murnau, du Pont, Lang, and Lubitsch — Vidor put everything into filming. He describes the movie’s most famous shot, where the camera scales a vast office building, sweeps through a window, and swoops over hundreds of desks, until at last it discovers John Sims, bored out of his mind.

A scene was made in New York City at the entrance of the Equitable Life Insurance building at lunch hour. The camera started its upward swing and when the screen was filled with nothing but windows, we managed an imperceptible dissolve to a scale model in the studio. The miniature was placed flat on the floor with the camera rolling horizontally over it. In the selected window was placed an enlargement of a single frame of the previously photographed interior view. As the camera moved close to the window another smooth dissolve was made to the interior scene of the immense office. The desks occupied a complete, bare stage and the illusion was accomplished by using the stage walls and floor, without constructing a special set. To move the camera down to Murray, an overhead wire trolley was rigged with a moving camera platform slung beneath it. The counterbalanced camera crane or boom had not yet been designed and built, but the results we achieved were identical with those of today.

So breathtaking is this scene that 13 years later, when Orson Welles and Gregg Toland moved a camera up a building, seemingly passed it through a skylight, and then sank it down to Dorothy Comingore drunk in a deserted club, the effect was still thrilling. It was thrilling almost 20 years after that, when Billy Wilder’s camera in The Apartment crawled up another tower to find Jack Lemmon at his desk at Consolidated Life of New York. Wilder never hesitated to credit Vidor.

Vidor, in 1953, still loved to talk about the technique behind The Crowd.

In a scene where the nervous husband paces the floor of the hospital corridor during the delivery of his first child, we wanted to give the impression that many husbands were also going through the same suspense and agony. We wanted a tremendously long hospital corridor stretching, as it seemed, to infinity. Cedric Gibbons, head of the art department at MGM, designed and constructed a corridor in forced perspective, with each receding door becoming smaller and smaller. We even considered putting midget husbands outside these miniature doors, finally decided to keep the mob of anxious husbands in the foreground of the shot.

“Midget husbands.” That’s ridiculous, but it’s also symbolic, isn’t it, of how passionate these artists were about getting every part of the movie right.

For scenes of the sidewalks of New York, we designed a pushcart perambulator carrying what appeared to be inoffensive packing boxes. Inside the hollowed-out boxes there was room for one small sized cameraman and one silent camera. We pushed this contraption from the Bowery to Times Square and no one ever detected our subterfuge.

This was precisely the kind of shot that would suddenly become problematic a short time later. The obstacles of shooting with sound were swiftly dealt with, but imagine going from a camera in a glorified baby carriage, to a camera enclosed in a soundproof booth.

John and Mary take a first date to Coney Island, that Cote d’Azur for the working stiff, happily mingling with the teeming, entertain-me masses. (Whatever happened to that spinning-plate thing, where people sit, link arms and try not to get hurled off? The world lost a great metaphor when that ride went away.) Later, when his daughter is critically injured, John stumbles out of his apartment building and into the street, pleading with the masses not to make so much noise. As the people keep streaming past him, John is admonished by a cop, in an intertitle of perfect callousness and truth: “Get inside! The world can’t stop because your baby is sick!”

But much of the film takes place in their small apartment, through the frustrations of daily life. John plays his ukelele and dreams up slogans; it is evident early on that he’s a dreamer, not an achiever. He buys his wife an umbrella (an umbrella!) as a token of affection, then can’t seem to keep himself from yelling at her when she opens it in the house. Everything in the apartment breaks, and there’s a squabble to go with each mishap. Boardman’s best moment is when she’s staring at the door after her heedless, cranky husband has slammed out, and she remembers (with zero intertitles) that she had, somehow, forgotten to tell him she’s pregnant.

And there’s the end, the unforgettable end, where John goes with his family to see a clown in a theater, and as Vidor says, “the camera moved back and up to lose him in the crowd as it had found him. In the course of the narrative he had not made a million dollars, nor committed a heinous crime, but he had managed to find joy in the face of adversity.”

King Vidor made two other films in 1928, The Patsy and the dazzling Show People, both with Marion Davies. Once Show People was done he decided that since he’d made three films set in France (The Big Parade, Bardelys the Magnificent, and La Boheme) it was time to see the country in real life. He and Eleanor Boardman met F. Scott Fitzgerald on the boat going over, and in Paris they all hung out at Fitzgerald’s apartment, watching Zelda demonstrate the steps she was learning in ballet class. Vidor met James Joyce, who refused to make eye contact in order to conceal his failing vision, and Ernest Hemingway, as that writer strode out of a bookstore with his baby son tucked under one arm.

Then, abruptly, it was time to come home.

One day as I sat alone near the Place de L’Opera, a copy of Variety arrested my attention. Emblazoned across the front page in bold type was the headline: PIX INDUSTRY GOES 100% FOR SOUND. I had been away for only two months, but during that brief period a major transition had taken place in the motion-picture industry...I knew I could no longer sit complacently at sidewalk cafes. The dragon of sound must be met head-on, and conquered.

Vidor went on to make many more good movies, some of them great. Memoirs are tricky as memories are tricky. The Siren believes the anecdote she started with, the one about trying to synchronize the sound for Hallelujah. And she has zero factual backup for what’s she about to say, so take this as the fantasy it almost certainly is. But every time she reads that story, the Siren wonders if perhaps — just perhaps — the nameless cutter was a polite fiction, and the man who threw that reel against a wall of film was King Vidor himself.

For the Love of Film III: Onward and Upward, With the Help of Fandor

The Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand and Rod Heath have joyous news for all of us who labored on the For the Love of Film III blogathon to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation: the good folks at Fandor have come through in the last reel.

For three months, from mid-November through mid-February, the three surviving reels of The White Shadow will be streamed on the NFPF website, free to all. The warmest of thanks and appreciation to the fine, dedicated folks at Fandor, for recognizing that access is a major part of film preservation, and stepping up to the challenge.

As you recall, our effort raised a total of $6,600 to create a digital copy of The White Shadow, a 1923 silent directed by Graham Cutts that is also the earliest surviving feature worked on by the great Alfred Hitchcock. It was also enough to record the score by Michael Mortilla. Fandor recently donated web hosting for the NFPF's streaming of Let There Be Light, a searing, long-unavailable John Huston documentary about post-traumatic stress suffered by World War II veterans. Fueled by the success of that endeavor, Fandor will be giving the NFPF the funds it needs to stream the presentation.

Fandor is an on-demand independent film service, long committed to providing access to the underseen and the artistically challenging. From the beginning, they've also been offering critical essays on their site; the Siren herself has written for them, as has Marilyn. Says founder Jonathan Marlow: “Fandor was created to enable audiences to experience important but difficult-to-find films. Not everyone has the ability to attend archival screenings of The White Shadow in Los Angeles, Washington or New York. We’re thrilled to collaborate with the NFPF, the Academy Film Archive, and the New Zealand Film Archive in making this fascinating discovery available to Hitchcock fans around the world.”

So, a round of applause for us all--the more than 100 bloggers who contributed their time and talent, the folks around the Web who worked hard to spread the word, and of course the wonderful, bighearted people who dug deep and gave. Once again, we did good.

For the Love of Film III: Bring Up the House Lights

Don't mind me...I'm just a little tired...


Whaddya know, the last reel rocked.

The Siren foregoes preamble to tell her patient readers, dear blogathon participants and generous, beautiful donors that our total zoomed up to $6,490 in the final stretch. That, my friends, puts us over last year's total.

Over the six-day course of the blogathon, we notched 208 posts (why do you think I chose that screencap?) from 112 bloggers. And, listen, in the two previous years Marilyn and the Siren were proud to note that many people wrote fine, fine pieces, ones the Siren still refers to on occasion. But this year--damn, you folks outdid yourselves. This has been excellent reading and the Siren is still wending her way through the links. She doffs her feather-trimmed fascinator to everyone involved. Y'all gave the Master nothing but the best.

So, where does that leave us in terms of streaming The White Shadow this fall? The Siren turns the microphone over to Annette Melville, the protean force behind the National Film Preservation Foundation's fundraising efforts. (Working with Annette behind the scenes has been David Wells, and a round of applause for David, too, as he's been tracking donations and just quietly being indispensable from the beginning.) Anyway, here's Annette:

There is no presentable digital copy of the film now. We have to raise sufficient money to make a digital copy, record the new score, pay the composer and musician, mix the score, and lay it down to the digital copy, in addition to the web hosting...We hope to raise these funds over the next few months...Plans are afoot but cannot be finalized until we have the all the necessary money.

In sum, what we have is not the whole megillah, but it's a darn good start. Annette says our efforts have gotten the NFPF a good part of the way--"the heavy lifting." The NFPF are deeply grateful, and in addition, "there is also an important long-term goal of planting a seed--of getting people thinking about film preservation and the value of supporting it." She's very happy, as are we all, that we've accomplished that.

We're done, and we did good. As Marilyn says, "it was an unqualified success as far as we're concerned." Back to our regularly scheduled programming here and at Ferdy on Films and This Island Rod.

The name of this here blog is, after all, Self-Styled Siren, not Widely Acknowledged Nag.

In the meantime, however, your good work is still out there, and the Siren suspects you haven't finished reading everything, either. Keep up the commenting, because a good comment warms a hard-working blogger's heart. For the posts you love, by all means, share via the social media of your choice; call your tech-challenged Aunt Mildred and read her the URL.

The donation link remains in service, now and for quite a while to come, because in the past we've gotten post-blogathon donations, and like an auteur working variations on the same theme, that could well happen again. The Siren's leaving hers up on the sidebar.

Some glad tidings of prizes for those who gave generously to the NFPF:

To Shannon Fitzpatrick goes an autographed copy of Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself. (Thanks to Mr. Ebert for donating that prize.)

Rebecca Naughten has won an autographed copy of Betty Jo Tucker’s Confessions of a Movie Addict. (Thanks, Betty, for offering that prize!)

To Peter Nellhaus goes a French Notorious poster, and I hope that poster appreciates its new owner, that's all I can say.

Aurora Bugallo gets the photo of Alfred Hitchcock and the giant telephone. (Warmest thanks to goddess Donna Hill for donating those last two prizes.)

And the Treasures DVDs from the NFPF go to Jill Blake, Thomas Bolda, Kenji Fujishima, Catherine Grant, Katherine Kehoe, and Lee Price.

Music, The End, roll credits...go hang out on a beach somewhere. We deserve it.

(One note: that screencap up top is from Sheila O'Malley, who has a magnificent post up about Cary Grant and the character of Devlin in Notorious. It was one day late for the blogathon, but you want to read it, oh boy do you.)

For the Love of Film III: Last Call at Rod's

It's the final day of our For the Love of Film III blogathon to raise funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation's efforts to stream The White Shadow. Once again, your host is Rod Heath of This Island Rod. Click over to Rod's place for all your blogathon needs; remember that he's in Australia, and his hours won't synch perfectly with the North American day.

Our total at last reckoning was $2,140, far short of the $15,000 we had hoped to raise. Two who chipped in are Kenji Fujishima of My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second and Lee Price over at 21 Eassays; both are winners of the raffle prizes donated by the NFPF, copies of the splendid set Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938, featuring two films we saved with funds from the first blogathon.

The totals so far are, to be honest, challenging the Siren's usually sunny blogging attitude. Clearly, we could use a nice twist in the last reel, and the Siren, Rod and Marilyn Ferdinand are hoping one shows up. The mighty James Wolcott of Vanity Fair has done his part, for one, and we hope you have, too. Warm thanks to everyone who has participated so far; kudos to those who have donated, we salute you. And if you can, click below and donate--it would be great to have a happy fadeout.

For the Love of Film III: Day Four, With the Siren as Your Host

UPDATE: Hello folks. As always, the Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand and the fine people at the National Film Preservation Foundation are happy with the outpouring from the blogosphere. The number of bloggers participating is higher than ever, and the quality of writing is tremendous, some of the best stuff the Siren has seen during any of the preservation blogathons.

But. And it's a big but.

We're behind, y'all. Way behind. Behind the first year, behind last year.

Now of course it's no coincidence that one could say precisely the same thing about the economy--GDP, schm-DP, it's tough out there. But (did I say that already?) there's no lower limit on what you can toss into the hat, and most of us can spare the cost of a movie ticket or a DVD. It isn't just the amount; it's the number of donors that has us a bit downcast, considering the kind of traffic and posting we've been seeing.

The Siren's got a tip jar on the sidebar that she threw up one day in an "oh what the hell" kind of mood and then never mentioned on the blog itself, not once. To her amazed delight and immense gratitude, some people have actually hit that tip jar, and it's all going to the NFPF by the end of the week. So you could also think of this as cutting out the middleman, or middlesiren. It's all gonna wind up in the same place.

So, once more, and at the risk of sounding like a donation-soliciting version of Jessie Royce Landis ("Roger, pay the two dollars"), the Siren asks you to click below, and throw a little dough at Hitchcock, and Graham Cutts, and Betty Compson, and the people like us who want to see The White Shadow.





Greetings, writers and friends to film preservation. The Siren's corner of the Web continues today as home page for our blogathon to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation, For the Love of Film.

This year, as we've been trumpeting for a good long while, our blogathon is raising money for the NFPF's efforts to stream online three reels of the once-lost, now-found 1923 silent movie, The White Shadow. This U.K. melodrama was directed by one Graham Cutts, but it has another hook: It is the first film we have that featured a major contribution from one Alfred Hitchcock. The young Hitchcock, according to his biographers, was assistant director, wrote the title cards, edited, designed the sets, decorated the sets, and just generally worked like crazy learning everything he could about how to make a film. And this training-to-make-films wheeze worked out pretty well, as you know.

The White Shadow has already been preserved and restored, and was screened by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles last fall. The Siren wasn't there, and most of you probably weren't, either. Given the level of historic interest (and artistic interest, too--the good folks at the NFPF say this one's an eyeful), that's a shame. We are in a position to do something about it, though. Our goal: to raise $15,000 so the NFPF can put The White Shadow online for three months, with a recorded score by Michael Mortilla, a man with a long history of composing splendid music for silent films.

This blogathon is about raising dough, so if you have not done so, please click the button below and DONATE NOW.




Or click on this link. The Siren is not fussy. All roads lead to the NFPF. We've been doing this for two days, and the pattern we set in the first two blogathons is holding; so far the pace is slow. But it always picks up, and that's what the Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand and Rod Heath are hoping happens now.

The first blogathon raised a gratifying amount of cash, enough to help the National Film Preservation Foundation repatriate and restore two silent films, The Sergeant and The Better Man. Those films were part of the more than 100 silent-era American films found in New Zealand Film Archive; so was The White Shadow. It was quite a cache. Both films are included on the NFPF Treasures 5: The West box set--with our blogathon cited in the booklet as having helped to save them, and doesn't that warm your heart. Treasures 5 is among the prizes that will be raffled at random to 10 lucky donors.

Last year, our second go-round raised money to help the Film Noir Foundation restore Cy Endfield’s 1950 film The Sound of Fury, which has a powerhouse performance by Lloyd Bridges and its own historic significance: Endfield was blacklisted, and his filmography is short. The Film Noir Foundation tells us that restoration will begin in January 2013, and the film will repremiere at NOIR CITY 12 in San Francisco in 2014. We can be proud of that one, too.

Let's do it again. As always, the Siren is delighted with the number of bloggers participating, and the very high quality of their posts. We are raising awareness in a big way, and creating an Internet resource on film preservation that will stick around for a long time.

But of course, the point is to raise money. And while donations have been present, and steady, and the good folks at the National Film Preservation Foundation are grateful for every dime, the Siren asks you to urge your readers to give, if they haven't already.

Check this post throughout the day to keep track of the blogathon posts. The Siren will be here today and tomorrow, linking away. The first two days of posts--and they're awesome--can be found over at Marilyn's place. Remember, Thursday and Friday, your affable host is Rod Heath at This Island Rod.

The Siren kicks things off with her own post, about Lifeboat. A movie about being lost and rescued seemed awfully fitting to her. You can take a look at that one, and then keep track of the many, many more.

TUESDAY, MAY 15


Kevyn Knox, at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World, rises to the poetic occasion with a composition that works in every Alfred Hitchcock title.

"My problem is that dullard Frank. He’s unethical, overbearing, and, worst of all, boring.” “Yes, but since he’s entirely too dull to be a villain, I believe we are stuck with Frank as our hero.” Lee Price at 21 Essays riffs on the collaboration between Michael Powell and Hitch during the filming of Blackmail.

Ed Howard at the wonderful Only the Cinema blog also has Blackmail on his mind: "Hitchcock is saying goodbye to the silents that nurtured his talent, and saying it with panache..."

What happens when a brilliant director films something by a playwright famed for his dialogue--and has to do it as a silent movie? Chris Edwards at Silent Volume explores what worked and didn't work when Hitchcock met Noel Coward, in Easy Virtue.

Duke Mantee at Picture Spoilers knows the Siren's heart can be reached by train, and he's attacking the silent-film angle of this year's blogathon with a lovely essay on Buster Keaton's deep love of all things railroad-related.

Two sinisterly clever. posts at Limerwrecks, the blog hosted by old Siren pal Hilary Barta, aka Surlyh (but Hilary isn't the least bit surly and never has been--there, the Siren's wanted to say that for years). The first is a lament for a bout of Vertigo, a rare non-limerick from Norm Knott/Jim Siergey. The second is our limerick of the day from Hilary, about the same film.

This is epic, and so appropriate: Chef du Cinema offers a post that links, if you click through, to not one or two, but THREE recipes suitable to eat while watching Hitchcock films. The first, in honor of The Lady Vanishes, is one that Alma Reville Hitchcock cooked for her food-loving husband: Crêpes Elizabeth. The others are Coq au Vin (no prizes for guessing the related film) and the trouty-but-good trout, in case you're traveling North by Northwest.

High-Def Digest offers an appreciation of the great Henry Fonda's one Hitch collaboration, The Wrong Man, and of the film's "stripped-down aesthetic."

"Each of the courtyard's individual apartments are a physical manifestation of Jefferies' fears of seriously committing to Fremont": Siren pal Tony Dayoub writes up his own cogent thoughts on Rear Window, at the always-good Cinema Viewfinder.

Another old friend, Operator 99 from the completely fabulous Allure, has a set of posters from the foreign release of Alfred Hitchcock films. Allure always has things you won't see anywhere else.

At Cinema Sight, contributors Wesley Lovell, Peter J. Patrick and Tripp Burton are counting down their favorite Hitchcock films. To see which films were picked as Numbers Six and Seven, click right here.

All the way from Dubai, Hind Mezaina is on her third year of doing her bit for preservation at her blog, the Culturist. Today, she's back with embedded episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with the aim of showcasing the jaw-dropping kind of people who worked on that TV show: Bette Davis, Roger Moore, Steve McQueen, Walter Matthau, William Shaner, Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Redford and Rober Duvall.

"You can also understand how one actor might take "Just do what you always do" as a compliment and sign of respect, or as an insult": The mighty Glenn Kenny deals, as only Glenn can, with the idea that Hitchcock was not a friend to actors.

Darren Mooney at the M0vie Blog is midway through a string of posts that also deal with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, here paying tribute to the episode that gained the series its first Emmy nomination: "The Case of Mr. Pelham," with Tom Ewell as an accountant convinced someone is trying to steal his identity.

At The End of Cinema, Sean Gillman goes deep into The Lodger, Hitchcock's third film as director and the one most people cite as "the first "true" Hitchcock film."

"I would be lying if I said that this post wasn’t going to be mostly hot pictures of Jo Cotten." And if that doesn't prompt you to visit Marya at Cinema Fanatic and her post on Shadow of a Doubt, nothing will.

"Family Plot is a film that seems to get tossed off with barely a nod": Donna Hill begs to differ, in a lovingly detailed post at Strictly Vintage Hollywood.

Brooksie (love that nom de blog!) at Brooksie's Silent Film Collection has a wonderful post that uses The White Shadow as a starting point to look at the theme of twins, doubles and doppelgangers in Hitchcock, and in other silent films.

A photo array of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, which may not be what you think it's going to be. From Larry Aydlette, sui generis as ever.

At Press Play, the Indiewire site devoted to video essays, Peter Labuza has an essay up demonstrating the world-wide impact of Hitchcock: Another titan, Akira Kurosawa, shows Hitch's influence in his film High and Low.

We all know about Hitchcock's love/hate relationship with special effects--but Gareth at Gareth's Movie Diary has a post about an effect that the master never used, because it was so real it might have panicked the audience. Completely fascinating, and absolutely new to the Siren.

A glimpse of the Siren's mysterious Twitter pal, The Futurist, and his Hitchcock-loving psyche.

Awesome--Andrew Hartman at the U.S. Intellectual History blog has a brief, elegant post about Hitchcock, horror and the theories of Slavoj Zizek. What's a blogathon without Zizek, I ask you?

David Cairns, whose wonderful post on Lifeboat the Siren linked in her own, offers a recap of the Hitchcock Year he ran on the indispensable Shadowplay.

Hedwig from As Cool as a Fruitstand talks about a key element of the magnificent Vertigo: the radical change in perspective that Hitch pulls off midway through.

The Siren loves this one: Eric at Dr. Film's Blog posts a list of The Top 13 Films in Need of Preservation. Just see if you don't to get hold of them somehow, too...

Scenes from the Morgue is back, with W.B. Kelso posting vintage newspaper ads for Hitchcock movies: "Gosh! No wonder they tell you to see it from the beginning! That ending is !!! Gosh!"

And, also from Mr. Kelso: What do Tom Hanks and Rear Window have in common?

At Home and Amateur, notes from Dwight Swanson on Alfred Hitchcock's home movies--yes, he took them--and how they were preserved.

Doug Bonner at Boiling Sand has an elegantly written, carefully researched analysis of "Poison," an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode made just after Vertigo. The Siren has never seen it, but she now intends to search out, pronto.

Long before the Internet, the Kinematograph Year Books helped people in the British film industry check out whether someone was padding their resume. At the Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion, Joe Thompson looks at three of the yearbooks and picks out some fascinating Hitchcock-related entries.

Another great piece of research, from Sean Axmaker at MSN movies, this one on the long and convoluted saga of restoring Metropolis, that celebrated masterwork from Fritz Lang.

A nine-minute champagne commercial from Martin Scorsese--with a film-preservation angle, yet? Larry Aydlette's Tumblr has it, and as Larry reminds us, giving to film preservation would make Marty--I mean Mr. Scorsese happy.

Noel Vera of Critic After Dark has a nifty theory about why Scottie should have twigged to the plot shenanigans in Vertigo earlier than he actually did.

The Siren tweeted this link, and got more retweets than she'd ever imagined: Rhett Bartlett at Dial M for Movies collected the final frame of every Hitchcock film extant. Not content to rest on his laurels, Rhett has added an interview regarding the BFI's "Rescue the Hitchcock 9" project--their effort to restore nine of the master's silent films.

At Film Noir Blonde, Jacqueline Fitzgerald lifts a glass to the champagne cocktail that is Notorious, "one of the most beautiful films Hitch ever made."

WEDNESDAY, MAY 16


"What is to be made of Hitchcock's first film? It's hard to see the director Hitchcock would become without squinting. It's there, but it's not fully formed": Vulnavia Morbius of Krell Laboratories squints at The Pleasure Garden (1925) and detects Hitchcock just beginning to work out his vocabulary.

David Cairns gives us a video essay, on the use of hands in The 39 Steps, intended to be a companion to his essay on that great film to be included in the Criterion Blu-Ray. (The Siren plans to pounced on that one.)

At Scenes from the Morgue, W.B. Kelso favors us with newspaper ads for The Birds, featuring a decidedly non-glamourous shot of Tippi Hedren and Hitchcock looking even more impish than usual. And at Micobrew Reviews, he goes into the justly celebrated trailer for that film.

Ed Howard of Only the Cinema traces Hitchcock's "budding visual imagination and subtle sense of humor" in a typically astute post on the director's third sound film, Murder!.

"If you have a favorite actress and you want to see her stockinged legs and feet and never have and she's in a Hitchcock movie, you're in luck!" Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles says he has nothing new to say about Hitchcock, but he says that nothing with great humor and panache.

Guest blogger Joan Myers is hot on the Case of the Actress Who Is Not Nita Naldi, as she discusses The Pleasure Garden over at Strictly Vintage Hollywood.

Hilary Barta, for his part, is dissecting the master's imitators and his childhood neuroses, in witty five-anapestic form at Limerwrecks.

A master and his dogs: Alfred Hitchcock poses adorably with his terriers, both on and off-screen at Spellbound by Movies.

Peter Nelhaus comes up with an Asian thriller that makes some good use of Hitchcock's interest in how long it takes someone to die: Lady in Black.

Hind Mezaina is back, with a clip of Alfred Hitchcock on What's My Line, disguising his voice and even trotting a word or two of French, no doubt in preparation for chatting with M. Truffaut.

Also returning: Lee Price at 21 Essays, musing on the role of paintings in both Michael Powell's Age of Consent and Hitchcock's Blackmail. All this, plus more fantasy dialogue: "Your hero sounds like a very sick man to me." No kidding!

The Trouble With Harry is probably that it's a dark comedy, but Angela Petteys admits that she does, too, at Hollywood Revue.

The Futurist warms the Siren's heart by posting the trailer to probably the least heart-warming Hitchcock movie ever made.

Still counting down the Hitchcock Ten at Cinema Sight, with Numbers Five and Four from Messrs. Lovell, Patrick and Burton. A special shout-out to Mr. Burton for his No. 5!

Now this is different: KC of Classic Movies reviews The Testament of Judy Barton, a novel for all those who watched Vertigo, looked at red-headed Kim Novak and saw a hard-luck dame if ever there was one.

A film Hitchcock himself disliked, but one that prefigured Under Capricorn: Sean Gillman looks at what's worthwhile in The Manxman, at The End of Cinema.

Hooray! Rachel of The Girl With the White Parasol loves Tallulah Bankhead in general, and Lifeboat in particular, as much as the Siren does. An absolutely wonderful tribute to Bankhead's talent, beauty, and just how good she was in the movie, with oodles of screencaps.

Alfred Hitchcock, eternal bridesmaid--at least, in competition at the Oscars. Wesley Lovell looks at the whys and wherefores, at Cinema Sight.

Catching up with High-Def Digest: Josh Zyber takes advantage of a stay in San Francisco to take us on a Vertigo-inspired tour. And Aaron Peck offers a Top 10 list of Hitchcock posters. A must-click for the Marnie poster alone--all the Siren can say to that one is whoa.

Both Marilyn and the Siren love them some Tinky Weisblat, and here you can see why: a lovely meditation on the domestic longings in Shadow of a Doubt, AND a recipe for butterscotch pound cake with maple icing. At Our Grandmother's Kitchen.

Darren Mooney continues his series on Alfred Hitchcock Presents with "Back for Christmas." Includes Hitchcock's not-to-be-missed intro, which begins, as one always does for a Christmas special, "Shrunken heads are a hobby of mine."

"It’s one of Hitchcock’s best and most chilling films, and the first in which he denies his audience the cleansing catharsis of his heroine’s redemption." The fine film critic and writer Carrie Rickey joins us with a post on her favorite Hitchcock: Shadow of a Doubt. (It's the Siren's favorite too--and Hitchcock's.)

At The Frame, Jandy Stone Hardesty recounts the experience of seeing The White Shadow at AMPAS--the very experience we're blogging to bring to everybody. And she asks: " If we can still locate treasure troves like this in 2011, what else might still be out there, waiting for intrepid archivists to find it, figure out what it is, and restore it so the world can rediscover it?"

The Hitlist at MSN chips in again with a new contributor, Kate Erbland, writing about the appointment of Carl Beauchamp as Resident Scholar at the Mary Pickford Foundation, a group that itself has done good work on behalf of film history.

Former VH1 host Bobby Rivers, a lover of classic film, a very funny man and one of the best Twitter-following decisions the Siren ever made (he's @BobbyRiversTV) comes through with a loving tribute to Doris Day and her evolution in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

At Garbo Laughs, Caroline traces Alfred Hitchcock getting "comfortable in the director's chair" in his 1928 silent comedy, The Farmer's Wife. She also gives a shout-out to the awesome Screening Room at the NFPF, where movies are streamed, free.

Another glimpse of Hitchcock entries in the production annuals that film professionals used back in the day, this time from The Hollywood Reporter Production Encyclopedia; at Joe Thompson's Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion.

At Cry of the City, cherished Siren commenter Trish has a post about why she's always loved the decidedly odd Marnie, with attention paid to Sean Connery as Mark, "required to be love interest, zoologist, detective and psychiatrist."

Oh look, even Smithsonian.com is on board! Daniel Eagan has a really wonderful post about film preservation, The White Shadow and the nature of streaming films online, with some thoughts from the NFPF's Annette Melville, who has been the guardian angel for the blogathon. There's even information about Alfred Hitchcock's canny moves with regard to the rights to his films.

Lifeboat (1944) (For the Love of Film III)

(This post is the Siren's contribution to our blogathon, For the Love of Film III, raising money for the National Film Preservation Foundation to stream The White Shadow, one of the first films worked on by a young Alfred Hitchcock. If you like the post, or indeed the Siren's work in general, she urges you to click the button below and donate as generously as possible to this cause.)


It's good to be king, and it's good to be an auteur. For one thing, if you're an acknowledged auteur, there's no need to worry that when you're dead and gone, someone will hold a blogathon for your rediscovered movie and give all the attention to your pushy assistant.

There's a small catch, though, in that if you are an auteur, you might make Lifeboat, and it won't get all the love it deserves because hey, you also made about a half-dozen towering masterpieces, and this film is merely very, very good.

Alfred Hitchcock wanted a cross-section of characters; it would be trickier to make a movie about how only the kitchen waitstaff survived a boat sinking. And so the Lifeboat people, adrift after a Nazi sub torpedoes their ship, are a motley lot. Kovac (John Hodiak) is a worker from the engine room, proudly grease-stained and loudly left-wing, like a handsome inversion of Eugene O'Neil's Hairy Ape. Alice (Mary Anderson) is a gentle, pacifist nurse; Stanley (Hume Cronyn, an iffy accent but one of his best performances) is an English merchant seaman. Joe, played by the great, ill-fated Canada Lee, is another sailor, as is Gus (second-billed William Bendix) who has a leg full of shrapnel. The industrialist Rittenhouse (Henry Hull) managed to save a single cigar before the ship went down; the shell-shocked Mrs. Higgins (Heather Angel) clings to a baby who has already drowned. And there's Constance Porter, the mink-draped journalist played by the one and only Tallulah Bankhead. The U-Boat was itself sunk in the firefight, and soon the survivors have rescued Willi (Walter Slezak), who seems to speak only German and claims to be a simple sailor like the others.

Lifeboat checks off each item on the list of Hitchcock's strengths. Suspenseful direction, to start with the obvious, in scenes such as the passengers fighting a vicious storm, only to hear the Nazi exhorting them to get it together--in the English he claimed he didn't speak. There's psychology, as the peril on the boat is at least as much from emotions and weakness as it is from the sea and privation. And there is humor, too; amidst the pounding waves comes Tallulah's indignant "You speak English!" to Slezak, as well as her expression when she tries to retrieve her suitcase and comes up with a lipstick and a comb.

When people describe Hitchcock as cold or cerebral, the Siren shakes her head. In some films, maybe, but almost never entirely, and not here. Check out the heartbreaking zoom toward Heather Angel's empty, upturned arms after her baby's corpse has been slipped into the ocean. And the first indication of Slezak's menace isn't the shot of him surreptitiously checking his compass. It's Willi's yawn after the passengers have tried to calm the grieving mother, a warning of his heartlessness that no one heeds.

Above all, Lifeboat showcases Hitchcock's timing. He insisted there be no score; there's music only at the beginning and end. Yet Lifeboat is a gloriously rhythmic movie. The boat's bobbing and the sound of the water slapping are all the emphasis needed. When it starts raining, and the half-dead occupants grab a sail to catch the water, the camera moves in on the drops spotting the canvas…and stays there after the rain stops. The amount of time we spend looking at that useless bit of damp is inexpressibly perfect. Not one extra microsecond. So many of Hitchcock's celebrated moments are big, kinetic, heart-clutching, but Lifeboat offers a different sort of genius, like the single change of angle and camera distance, as the delirious Gus imagines he's sharing a drink with his girl.

Even upon release Lifeboat didn't do so hot with critics. The Siren's beloved James Agee said the allegory was "nicely knit, extensively shaded and detailed, and often fascinating," but it wasn't as good as allegories by Shakespeare, Kafka, or Joyce. (At least not being Shakespeare is something most people get over fairly early in life.) John Steinbeck, who wrote the short story the movie was based on, was displeased with the changes and thought the film would hurt the war effort if released abroad. Bosley Crowther sputtered that Lifeboat "sold out democratic ideals and elevated the Nazi superman." By way of qualification he added that doubtless no one planned to make a movie that undermined democracy, but still. If the Nazis got hold of Lifeboat, claimed the Bos, with a few edits they could release it in their own theaters.

In fairness to Crowther (and don't we all strive for that) he was expressing exactly what the Office of War Information had said about the original script. OWI, set up by Roosevelt to advise the movie industry on how to support the war effort, understood that the passengers were stand-ins for the Allies. But OWI couldn't see why these people had to be such drips.

You can almost hear the OWI staff pouring themselves a stiff drink as they wearily compose their memos. Constance is "a selfish, predatory, amoral, international adventuress." (You say that like it's a bad thing, boys.) Kovac boasts too much of his sexual conquests and besides, he (probably) cheats at cards--were the writers suggesting Americans are lecherous and dishonest? The character of Rittenhouse underlines class differences in the States, and we don't have those, or at least, we don't talk about them in front of the neighbors. The original script had an argument over Spain that included Connie addressing the pro-Loyalist Kovac as "Tovarich" and ended with Rittenhouse observing that "a new Spain is coming." The agency succeeded in getting rid of that, although the "Tovarich" comment was moved elsewhere and Connie still gets to needle Kovac: "Oh, I get it. A fellow traveler. I thought the Comintern was dissolved."

Other OWI objections sailed past the filmmakers. The agency, staffed largely by liberals as you might have inferred, spent a fair amount of time trying to get Hollywood as a whole to dial down the racism. The manual they sent the studios politely asks, for example, that scripts refrain from describing the enemy in the Pacific as "little buck-toothed treacherous Jap[s]." Clearly OWI didn't succeed all that often, and in Lifeboat, they couldn't even strip Canada Lee's character of the nickname "Charcoal." Nor did they manage to alter the scene where the passengers give Lee a vote on Slezak's fate and he refuses to use it, although Lee's sardonic head-tilt on his line, "Do I get a vote too?" is its own kind of tell.

Credited screenwriter Jo Swerling and others did make some changes, most notably adding the scene where Willi pushes Gus over the side, a culling of the weak as brutal, and pointedly political, as anything in Hitchcock. Hitchcock achieves effects just by keeping the camera on the face of a good actor, when Willi tells the outraged passengers that Gus had to die. You can see in Slezak's eyes, so precisely you can pause the frame on a player, the exact moment when Willi realizes that he has lost his hold on these people. (Here. It's at 3:13.)

Then they turn on Willi, only the backs of the mob visible as they beat him with their fists, then Stanley grabs a piece of wood, Joe stands apart, and there's just one glimpse of the German's bloodied face before they throw him over the side. The script calls it "an orgasm of murder," and the exhaustion afterward indeed seems almost sexual, Mary Anderson arching her back and stretching out her legs. Hitchcock responds to the violence with another sinuous shot--an elegant pan down Rittenhouse to the shoe he holds, the one he picked up to hammer Willi's hands away from the side of the boat.

The Siren's regard for this movie dates all the way back to her pre-teen years and her first encounter with Tallulah Bankhead's memoirs. Bankhead, an Alabama gal like the Siren herself, may not have been the ideal role model, but she sure was educational: "I was a hedonist before I knew what hedonism was," she wrote, as the Siren reached for her dictionary. Lifeboat gave Bankhead her one movie role that lives on in the public memory. She was proud that she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, even pointing it out in the caption to Lifeboat still she included in her autobiography.

Bankhead, as the Siren recalls, didn't write up the most notorious story from the Lifeboat set. The boat was floating in a huge tank on the Fox lot, and as she scrambled around, the persistently panty-free star was flashing the entire cast and crew. It was all fun and games until a reporter from a ladies' magazine came to visit, caught a better view of Bankhead than she had bargained for and nearly had an aneurysm. The head of Fox publicity (so it is said) went to tell Hitchcock that he needed to, er, put a lid on Tallulah and the director mused out loud: "In a case like this it's hard to tell where the responsibility lies. You might consider that this is a matter for the wardrobe department, or perhaps for the makeup people--or perhaps it's a matter for hairdressing." Thus endeth the Case of the Missing Underpinnings.

She came down with pneumonia after weeks of being doused with water, but still they got along well, Tallulah and Hitch. He called her "Baghead," she called him "Bitchcock" and when the movie was released he described her as having given a "Bancock" performance. You get the feeling that they could have gone on like that forever--Cockbank? Headcock?--and it's a pity they never worked together again. In the fantasy cinema in the Siren's head, she likes to give Bankhead a cameo as the nun who materializes at the end of Vertigo. You have to admit, Tallulah in full wimple would be enough to startle anyone into falling off a bell tower. Lifeboat is all we've got from these two, though. And there is no actress, living or dead, whom the Siren would rather see volunteering her diamond bracelet as a fishing lure, no voice the Siren would rather hear utter the line, "I can recommend the bait. I bit on it myself."

Despite her partiality for her Alabama paisano, the Siren assures you that she has no similar soft spot for movies that coddle fascists. Pace Crowther, Lifeboat does nothing of the sort. The Nazi's advantage comes not from being some Wagnerian demigod, but from being a sociopath--he has water and energy pills, and he shares neither with the desperate people who pulled him out of the water. Willi's preternatural calm, his courage, are disturbing but necessary. Dramatically necessary, because otherwise we can't comprehend why seven people would, first unknowingly and then with sullen resignation, permit Willi to escort them to a German boat and the certain fate of a concentration camp. And it's vital to the allegory, because the governments in Europe and America had done the same thing by appeasing Hitler throughout the 1930s. Lifeboat doesn't try to pretty that up.

But neither is Lifeboat straight-up propaganda, as it's sometimes read nowadays. It was released in January of 1944, when the Allies' demand of unconditional surrender no longer seemed like a pipe dream. The German supply ship heaves into sight, only to be shelled by one of our own vessels. And the citizens of the lifeboat, in the closing moments, find themselves hauling in another German, a young sailor who echoes Willi: "Danke schoen." Rittenhouse, who moments before had wondered, "what are you going to do with people like that," now has an answer: "Exterminate him! Exterminate them all!" The weak, vacillating Ritt, easily the least sympathetic of the lot, is overruled. But his question remains, asked by Stanley after the sailor pulls a gun on the rescuers: "What are you gonna do with people like that?" Kovac responds, "I dunno. I was thinking of Mrs. Higgins and her baby. And Gus." Now that the end is in sight, the people on the boat, and by extension the Allies, don't want to lose their humanity. Connie answers in closeup: "Well. Maybe they can answer that." Hitchcock ends on Tallulah, surrounded by debris, the lives in the boat safe for now as the costs mount around them.

(Material on the making of Lifeboat is from Hollywood Goes to War by Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, and The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto. The Siren also recommends David Cairns on Lifeboat, right here.)

For the Love of Film III: Day One

Starting a Hitchcock-themed blogathon on Mother's Day is the kind of joke Hitchcock might have appreciated, and so here we are. It's Day One of our blogathon to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation and its efforts to stream the three rediscovered reels of The White Shadow from 1923, directed by Graham Cutts and the earliest surviving film that Alfred Hitchcock had a major part in creating.

Click over, please, to goddess Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films for all your blogathon link needs. Then click through to the posts by all the wonderful, dedicated writers who are urging you to donate. And above all, throw a little something in the kitty, please. Every donation counts, every donation is eligible for raffle prizes, and every donation is deeply appreciated.



Digging around for Hitchcock anecdotes is like trying to find just the right cup of sand at the beach; the problem is that the supply is inexhaustible. Nevertheless, to start us off, the Siren is offering a few here.

The eyes should be far apart, the face oval or round rather than long, and the way the hair grows round the forehead is important. The features must not be too decided, and the screen demands a certain animation and sparkle of movement, which is the opposite of self-consciousness.

--Alfred Hitchcock's "rough-and-ready rules" for screen beauty, circa 1935, quoted in The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

He took the trouble to study his actors quite apart from what they were playing, and so he was able to bring hidden things out from them. He always realized how nervous I was and used to wait for the silence before 'action' and then tell a naughty, sometimes shocking story that either galvanized me into action or collapsed me into giggles; either way it removed the tension.

--Ann Todd, The Eighth Veil

We already had one little argument about my entrance and I got my way. I know I always can with him but I dislike the argument.

--Ingrid Bergman writes a letter to a friend from the set of Under Capricorn, quoted in My Story

If any other director asked an actor to put down a teacup, it would be only that. But with Hitch it was done for a reason. If an actor was strumming his fingers it wasn't just an idle strumming, it had a beat, a musical pattern to it--it was like a sound refrain.

--Teresa Wright, quoted in Spoto

There was one small scene, however, that continued to trouble our conscientious star, and no amount of waffle on our part could convince him that he had its proper significance within his sights. This was where, as an American scientist in East Berlin for reasons I need not go into, he has a meeting with Julie Andrews who has to place a package into his hands, for reasons I no longer remember. Newman's problem, as he agonized it to Hitchcock during the camera rehearsal, was on the lines of: 'Hitch, it seems to me I have a situation here with Julie, I have a situation with the package, I have a situation with being in East Berlin and I have a situation with the problem of our being observed. Now how should I be relating in this scene?' HItchcock, having listened courteously, delivered his judgment in his measured, plummy accents: 'Well, Mr. Newman, I'll tell you exactly what I have in mind here. Miss Andrews will come down the stairs with the package, d'you see, when you, if you'll be so good, will glance just a little to the right of camera to take in her arrival; whereupon my audience will say, "Hulloh! What's this fellow looking at?" And then I'll cut away, d'you see, and show them what you're looking at.'

--Keith Waterhouse discusses Torn Curtain, for which he did some uncredited rewrites with Willis Hall; in Streets Ahead: Life After City Lights.