Sight and Sound and Siren and (Lack of) Fury

So the Siren was toddling along, doing no harm, having an uncommonly busy summer but otherwise in good cheer, when all of a sudden, this happened.

The Siren was hit by a late-summer bout of what her esteemed doctor soothingly called "a virus," having gently but firmly rejected the Siren's self-diagnosis of pneumonic plague. Whatever it was, the Siren spent a week in bed and by day four she was pleading with her husband to look after Ashley, despite his irrelevant protests that neither one of us knows a soul named Ashley. Day seven, the Siren began hobbling around the house complaining that the antibiotics were giving her bizarre nightmares about Martin Amis and Marjorie Main, not in the same dream, thank goodness.

Now the Siren has emerged from convalescence to find that the merry pranksters of Sight and Sound did their ten-year thing and surveyed about 850 of their nearest and dearest regarding what's the greatest film of all time. And when the Siren roused herself to pinch some color back in her cheeks and sit up in bed and take some nourishment, this is what she found.

Now given the One and Only Rule here at the Siren's place, you might think that chagrin sent her into relapse. (To be clear, that rule remains in effect.) Perhaps you envision the Siren sweeping her arm over the BFI master list, hissing, "I never cared for you, not once! I was always makin' a fool of ya! Ya bored me stiff; I hated ya!" and lapsing into a coughing fit.

You'd be entirely wrong. Without rancor, and without sarcasm (the latter being something the Siren strives to avoid since on the Internet, as Margo Channing would put matters, "it won't play") the Siren tells you that she was delighted to see Vertigo at No. 1. As Scott Tobias of the AV Club put it on Twitter, "now people can tell me they respect Vertigo rather than love it." Hitchcock's dreamy masterpiece is the one to beat, the metaphor, the shorthand for all That Is Great in Cinema, the one some poor kid on a stranded airliner can't get anyone to watch.

And, dear Dan Callahan, the correct phrase is now "the Vertigo of bad movies." Please make a note.

The Siren's beloved Citizen Kane is an underdog! How does this not rule?

As for the rest of the list, the Siren does not wish to risk relapse by nitpicking it; with one exception (oh go on, guess) the Siren feels all these films deserve the acclaim. She tried to come up with her own list and eventually succumbed to the same feelings that overtook Peter Bogdanovich. The Siren will tell you, however, that All About Eve was gonna be on it, come hell or high water.

The individual lists are fascinating; here's one, from the mighty Dave Kehr, that the Siren particularly loves. See also those from others the Siren knows and admires: Dan Callahan, Glenn Kenny, Keith Uhlich, Vadim Rizov, Carrie Rickey, Molly Haskell. There's also, at Kim Morgan's fabulous Sunset Gun, the fabulous list of  Guy Maddin; the Siren's longtime readers will need no explanation as to which of HIS choices won her heart. And see also the non-voting list of Tony Dayoub.

That is all for now. On Sunday the Siren Family Circus is going to the Catskills for a week, a suitably retro choice for a retro kind of gal. See you in September, my dear, ever-patient readers. And try not to catch pneumonic plague.

This Is My Love (1954)

Dan Duryea dancing in a wheelchair to the strains of the "Vienna Blood" waltz is one of those deep cinematic needs you never realize you had until suddenly, it's fulfilled.

Fulfillment came from This Is My Love, an airily romantic title for a snake-mean film. Filmed in PatheColor at RKO in 1954, the Siren's DVD (taped off a British show) had yellowed like an old book, giving the proceedings an even more jaundiced feel. It could be called noir; the movie's certainly pitiless enough. There's also plenty enough sexual inhibition (mention is made of the Kinsey Report) and bourgeois fossilization for a social drama.

The credits roll over vegetation getting drenched by such a downpour that the Siren had the vague impression the movie is set on a rubber plantation, like The Letter. Nope, just a bungalow in California. Vida Dove (Linda Darnell) is at her typewriter, one tear rolling down her face as she types "...THREE WEEKS AGO..." (She writes in all caps, like Film Critic Hulk.) Then, flashback. (An interesting device because the ending all but abandons the framing and when the credits rolled, the Siren had to go back to see that the set-up wasn't something everybody forgot about mid-filming.)

So, THREE WEEKS AGO, Vida was writing a story to ESCAPE THE DREARY MONOTONY OF HER LIFE, and her brother-in-law Murray (Duryea) was wheeling around the house, calling her an old maid who never puts out. Murray is in a wheelchair because—whoops, you're never told. He was a professional dancer who had "an accident," which leaves you to imagine him tossing a partner in the air and having her land smack on his lower vertebrae. Murray began by dating Vida, but soon switched to her sister Evelyn (Faith Domergue). Now they're locked up in this dingy crate, where Vida shares a bedroom with the couple's two kids, a trim symbol of her life on the sidelines.

Evelyn and Vida wait tables at Murray's roadside restaurant, the Circle Inn. Get it? Circle Inn? drawing around you, like a noose? Almost every name in the movie is like that. Vida, meaning life, as Murray sarcastically points out to her; Evelyn, Evie, the woman who always comes first; Eddie (a wonderfully coarse, braying Hal Baylor), Vida's fiancé, a whirlpool sucking everyone into tedium. Into the restaurant Eddie brings his good-looking pal Glenn (Rick Jason). (Glen, a restful valley, see what they did there?) Glenn and Vida are immediately attracted to one another. But the inexperienced Vida can't respond normally, and her "come hither" rapidly becomes "not that hither." Glenn shifts his attentions to Evie, and for Vida, that's one too disappointment too many.

It's an unsettling, hardhearted movie that refuses to sympathize overmuch with any of the characters, trapped and pathetic though they are all. The idea of casting Darnell as a frigid spinster sounds about as apt as casting her as the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette, but it makes sense (mostly) once you are drawn in. Some men in the movie do respond the way you'd expect them to respond to Linda Darnell. Vida's fear of men is reflexive and, the movie implies in a very proto-feminist Philip Wylie sort of way, largely due to society's hypocritical view of sexuality. Darnell's wounded demeanor gives the character great resonance; her writing seems a desperate bid to make daydreams tangible. Most of her best scenes are played against Murray, the man Vida once wanted and her sister took. Now her brother-in-law is literally castrated, circling and taunting her with the things neither one of them has. She speaks to him in that creamy Darnell voice, and only a fair bit into the movie do you realize that her low-pitched rejoinders are as pointed in their way as Murray's barbs.

The meat of the movie is the relationship between these two hopeless, spent individuals, strangers to sex and therefore, we're meant to believe, to life. Evie and Glenn carry on with their good looks and their unwarped emotions, not realizing that simply being normal makes them charmed in a way that Murray and Vida will never be. Eventually, as she must, Vida unleashes a lifetime's worth of frustration and disabling rage straight into Murray's face, a speech that comes out of Darnell in heaving bursts, like a tear-gassed person gulping for air. It's as good a piece of dramatic acting as Darnell ever offered, and you feel for Vida more than in any other part of the movie. But that's just you. Dan Duryea laughs, because Dan Duryea always laughs at true anguish.

Duryea had what the French call a "tête à claques"—a face you want to hit, only with Duryea you want to use a blunt instrument. Rare are the instances from his heyday where Duryea shows up and isn't murdered by the final reel. Here it's as though some bright person said, "Let's take away Dan's gun, and his fists, and his blackmailing, and his hat, and this time, let's see if we can make the audience want him dead just so's he'll shut up." It works, of course. There was no actor who could match Duryea's drone, the sound of bad plumbing in an old building; or the way his mouth scrunches up toward his nose like a piece of dried fruit; or that rattlesnake lunge of Duryea's head and shoulders when he's ready to go full-bore sadist.

It isn't a great movie, but it picks at you like a scab. The Circle Inn is gratifyingly hideous, with bamboo-covered walls and a leaf-green valence that runs around the ceiling and even continues over the opening between the kitchen and the lunch counter, to make the tunafish sandwiches look fancier when the cook rings the bell, I guess. The furniture in the bungalow has been pushed to the walls so it looks like an ER waiting room, creating a vast empty space, the better for Duryea to roll after Darnell each time she tries to get away from his venom.

Director Stuart Heisler also has The Glass Key, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman and The Star on his resume, but the Siren only found that out after muttering "Stuart who?" and scurrying to Google. Not a huge talent, but a man with some style, although the Siren attributed the frequent shots of Darnell in her form-fitting rayon slips to the lecher running RKO at the time.

This Is My Love is the only pre-1960 movie the Siren can recall that shows a poisoned cockroach dying, close up—a good summary of the atmosphere. When Murray and Eddie play catch in the living room, the thwack-thwack of the ball hitting their hands starts to sound like time itself running down. And that glimpse of the crippled Duryea "waltzing" is unforgettable, the actor swinging his head and his chair in grotesquely precise 3/4 time.

The Kid with the Citizen Kane Tape

Neal Gabler, an excellent film writer and historian, had (and probably is having) a dark night of the soul over at the Los Angeles Times last weekend. Gabler believes that the taste for old movies--classic or not--is dying out, and he points a trembling J'accuse! finger at millennials, with their videogame-shortened attention spans and obsession with fashion. They want a new Spider-Man movie, Daddy, because the last Spider-Man movie was ten whole years ago, and only the shiniest iToys will do.

Greg Ferrara points out, in heated fashion, that despairing over the younger generation is an armchair sport that goes back thousands of years and never gets any more interesting or insightful than "Hot enough for you?" At Indiewire, an indignant Matt Singer threw down the gauntlet to his under-30 audience, asking them to come out in comments if they watch old movies, sort of: "Is cinephilia dead? Lazarus, come forth!" He's gotten quite a response.

Still, Matt's comments thread doesn't necessarily disprove Gabler's point. It is often hard to get ordinary people--which we could very loosely define as people who do not show a lively interest in the talkies of John Gilbert--revved up over old movies.

When this topic comes up, as it does, the Siren goes back to the same story.

Some years back the Wall Street Journal ran an article about an infamous incident, when the combination of a huge snowstorm and a wildcat labor dispute left hundreds of passengers cooped up in a couple of jetliners and stranded on a runway for hours and hours. As the toilets backed up and people got restless, the flight attendants asked if anyone had a video that they could use as a distraction. One young man, just starting college, had a copy of Citizen Kane. He'd seen it in a class and had fallen in love with it. He offered up his video and the flight attendants popped it in.

Maybe five minutes went by before people started groaning. "Boring!" "This is black and white!" "Who wants to watch this?" After a little while the flight attendants took out the tape and handed it back to the owner. Most people on the flight would rather re-read their magazines and complain to each other than watch Welles' masterpiece. The young man was crushed, and said so to the WSJ reporter.

Now you could take this as a terrible story about modern taste, and on dark days the Siren does.

But you could also focus on the kid with the Citizen Kane tape. He counts, too.

Gilbert Talks: Fast Workers (1933) and Downstairs (1932)

There was nothing wrong with John Gilbert's voice.

We know that, but let's start there anyway, as even a few recent articles about The Artist, by people who should know better, reference the old story: John Gilbert, the romantic star of silents, was cursed with a voice that didn't match his masculine sex appeal, a voice that killed his career.

All you have to do to know this received film history is bogus is watch Queen Christina from 1933, the one sound effort from Gilbert still in wide circulation. He's hampered by bad hair, but he sounds fine. His speech is in the same register as that of Ronald Colman or Errol Flynn. Gilbert didn't have their nifty accents, but his slightly flat vowels aren't an irritant and could have been easily remedied. When sound came in, Mary Astor's Midwestern intonations were cured by coaching from her then-lover, John Barrymore.

Admittedly, it's hard to know much about His Glorious Night, Gilbert's first full-length talkie (the first released, that is; he made another, equally ill-fated one before that, Redemption). The Siren doesn't know a soul who's seen it, save John McElwee. He calls Gilbert's voice "more than adequate" and reminds us that the film that supposedly made Gilbert a laughingstock also turned a tidy profit. There's a tiny clip on YouTube where Gilbert does sound a bit effete, but that's mostly a function of the atrocious dialogue. In Singin' in the Rain, if you recall, it's Gene Kelly cooing "I love you, I love you, I love you"--like that Youtube clip--that gets 'em rolling in the aisles as much as Lena Lamont's henhouse screech. But Kelly's voice is no problem for the talkies; even Singin' didn't sign on for the whole myth.

Someone needs to spring His Glorious Night from whatever archival holding pen it's occupying, so we can hear for ourselves. The Siren's willing to bet that Gilbert doesn't sound bad, not even bad enough to support the old rumor that a vengeful Louis B. Mayer, who by all accounts couldn't stand Gilbert, ordered the MGM technicians to use trebles, and trebles only.

These thoughts were retrieved from the attic trunk of the Siren's mind a few weeks ago, because the bottom half of her double bill with Imogen Smith was Fast Workers from 1933, starring John Gilbert, and directed by an uncredited Tod Browning. Off screen Gilbert was miserable, drinking heavily, eking out the last of his MGM contract like a prisoner making hash marks on the wall, but you wouldn't know it. He moves with the same assurance he had in his silents.

The fast workers are construction men, blessed with well-paid jobs while unemployment's at 25%. The men relish their privilege, none more than Gunner Smith (Gilbert), whom we first see in the early morning as he's changing from evening clothes to work duds in the back seat of a car. As you watch him take off his shirt with swift precision, you know it's at least the second, possibly even the third or fourth time he's disrobed in as many hours.

Gunner ambles onto the worker's base platform high above the streets and pow, the rhythm jazzes right up. In any group of friends there's always such a creature, the easy leader, granted that unelected status by looks, charm, and above all confidence. When the guys go out for drinks, Gunner's status is even more evident. He half-sits on a barstool, marking out his next conquest and grinning that devilish grin, and his coworkers are happy just to watch him operate.

It isn't a female-friendly world, to say the least; Gunner's entire off-duty life is devoted not only to getting laid, but to making sure that his best friend Bucker Reilly (Robert Armstrong) avoids any con jobs from cheap skirts. The preventative is simple and diabolical: Gunner sleeps with Bucker's crushes himself. Problem solved. No, seriously, that's what the man believes; Gilbert plays it exactly as though he's doing his pal a favor. But then Bucker falls genuinely in love with Mary, played by Mae Clarke with a great mix of tough-tootsie grifting and fragile romantic desire. Mary has already been around the block with Gunner, you see...

Tod Browning, coming off the worst disappointment of his career with the failure of Freaks, was no happier about Fast Workers than Gilbert, and had his name taken off the picture. Probably the script wasn't a good temperamental fit; the goings-on are not so much strange as sordid. There's a definite Browning feel to the best bits, though, such as a dizzy scene on a girder that's been tampered with. The rear projection used for the street below the skyscraper is marvelous. And there's a minor subplot involving baby pigeons that would have fit just fine in Freaks.

It's a lowdown lurid little movie that would have done Warner Brothers proud, and how it landed at MGM I'll never know. Seeing MGM stamped on Fast Workers is like discovering your Sunday school teacher looks great in a swimsuit.

Now the Siren has seen Queen Christina (at least eight times, if you insist on a tally) so she knew Gilbert's voice wasn't a problem. But she'd gathered that his other talkies were, by and large, unworthy of him. On the Siren's shelves is Dark Star, Leatrice Gilbert Fountain's biography of her father, and even Fountain didn't like Fast Workers. By the time the credits rolled, the Siren was a bit worked up herself, having discovered that she couldn't have been more misinformed if she'd gone to take the waters in Casablanca. "This is one of his lousy, career-destroying talkies?" she demanded, rhetorically of course, no one was arguing with her, least of all Imogen. "This is Gilbert on the skids? What?"

Imogen highly recommended Downstairs, which Gilbert conceived and co-wrote as well as starred in--but it isn't on DVD. Damnit. (Although Fast Workers is.) A little bit of digging, and the Siren had it (gone now, alas).

Downstairs, directed by Monta Bell and set in what Lubitsch might have called Vienna, Hollywood, is a comedy of manners about the servants and their employer problem. Confession: The Siren's addicted to Downton Abbey, despite some things that bother her no end, such as when Bates, the butler, decides he must nobly protect the good name of his lordship. Thomas, the scheming footman, he's got the logical attitude: Take these ludicrously overprivileged layabouts for all you can get. If that thought has crossed your mind while watching Downton Abbey, rejoice; here's John Gilbert as Karl the chaffeur.

Karl is the anti-est of antiheros, so amoral he could take Thomas down to his shirt studs, and the movie knows it shouldn't be on his side, and yet it is. Just watch dependably stolid Paul Lukas, as Albert the butler, sternly warn Karl not to betray the lady of the house (Olga Baclanova) after she's been diddling some schmo in town. Karl can barely conceal his contempt as he agrees to maintain the family secrets. Gilbert keeps eye contact and almost imperceptibly shakes off the butler's honorable handclasp. Then, again in a tiny gesture, he wipes the bridge of his nose, as though Albert's crawled up there.

Ah, the Gilbert nose. By rights it should be as immortal as John Barrymore's, and the nose gets a major workout in Downstairs. He's peering down it at whoever he's conning, he's tilting it slightly skyward as he contemplates his next scheme. Baclanova seals her doom when she goes to meet her lover and almost shuts the door on the nose. You don't do that to the Gilbert profile. His look as he pulls back is not fury, resentment or humiliation; it's cool, deliberate vengefulness.

Karl calibrates his behavior to the desires of every mark, and they're all marks to Karl. Seducing the cook, for example, he doesn't bother with subtlety. Told he has flour on his ass ("your whatchamacallit," the cook says coyly), Karl sticks it out at her and says, "Get it off, will you?"

But Karl's real target is Albert's wife Anna (Virginia Bruce). He takes her to a nearby inn for a spot of seduction. Off-duty and sure of his goal, Karl rattles the dishes when he stubs out a cigarette. Legs splayed and chair tilted back, Karl looks at Anna like a cat wondering if the mouse should be the main course or saved for later, like a chocolate with coffee.

Gilbert wrote himself a complicated, nasty, but undeniably sexy part. Downstairs forces us to admit that sexy counts far more than most people like to admit. It's deliciously clear that upright Albert is hopeless in bed. If showing Anna the real facts of life were Karl's only sin, he could take the "anti" off hero. Alas, Karl really is a louse, shown by his brutal cruelty to the dimwitted, lovestruck cook. But he's also probably the one taste of good lovemaking she'll ever get. Downstairs is cynical enough to suggest maybe the cook didn't do so badly by the bargain.

Gilbert was proud of Downstairs, and it got him a few good reviews as well as the hand of Virginia Bruce, whom he married after filming. But any reprieve was temporary. Soon he was losing the lead in Red Dust to Clark Gable and seething through the making of Fast Workers.

Fountain's book tries to solve the puzzle of why her father became sound's most notorious casualty. She goes through Gilbert's feud with Mayer and the question of whether MGM deliberately sank its troublesome, expensive star. Fountain believes the story that Gilbert, left at the altar by love of his life Greta Garbo, knocked Mayer flat when the mogul quipped gallantly, "Why don't you just fuck her and forget about it?" She quotes His Glorious Night reviews and notes that no one mentions the voice; she smacks down an old yarn about Gilbert attending the premiere and leaving in shame before the lights came up. (There was no big premiere, and he was in Europe when the film came out.)

Fountain tracks the voice sniping to about 1930, when it took off in the press, whether fueled by the MGM brass, or just gossips smelling blood, she can't say. Such was the power of the legend that one of the most poignant quotes comes from Clarence Brown, who directed Gilbert in the gorgeous Flesh and the Devil: "As time went by, I'd hear occasional mentions of Jack's high piping voice, and the way audiences roared at the sound of it, and damned if I didn't find myself repeating them one day. Can you believe that? Me, of all people, repeating those stories. And I knew better, Leatrice, I knew better."

Dark Star is a touching book, a loving daughter's attempt at resurrection, and while Fountain doesn't excise Gilbert's drinking, she's reluctant to attribute much to it. But colleagues were blunt: Gilbert was an alcoholic, one who "became more argumentative and belligerent with each drink," wrote Colleen Moore. (Moore spoke from experience; her first husband was an alcoholic.) The Siren told Robert Avrech, who holds a special love for silents and early talkies, that she was writing about Gilbert. Robert wrote back:

The more I read about him the more I'm convinced that he was an emotional child, impulsive, impossibly romantic, and tragically self-destructive. Going to war against L.B. Mayer is sheer madness. I admire Downstairs tremendously. His playing against type was courageous, but certainly not what his audience wanted.

And of course his voice was fine.

History comes with hard-set myths, and more than once the Siren's hit her head on some Hollywood cement. At least the lie about Jack Gilbert's squeak is all but dead. When the Siren took to Twitter, after seeing Fast Workers, to say that Gilbert sounded good, nearly a dozen people instantly tweeted back that of course he did.

Thank goodness. The canard diminishes even Gilbert's silent performances, if new audiences look at him--so graceful, varied and heartbreakingly sincere in The Big Parade, to cite only one--and imagine the intertitles spoken in an incongruous high tenor. If the voice myth gets a stake through its heart, perhaps Gilbert's good talkies can get more attention, too, putting paid to the idea espoused by David Thomson, that "Gilbert had always been a coarse actor," and sound simply emphasized that.

Some silent stars survived to see their fame renewed. Louise Brooks wrote about Pabst for the New Yorker, Buster Keaton became a hero to cinephiles worldwide. It makes the stories of the ones who didn't live that long all the sadder. Gilbert died in 1936, his talkies already enshrined as the thing that did him in, turned him into a man who didn't sound manly.

On a now-defunct chatboard some dreamy-eyed chatter once started a thread thus: "If you could go back in time and give an artist one present--and one only--who would you pick, and what would you give the person?" The Siren answered that she'd bring Franz Schubert some penicillin. But suppose she had to go back empty-handed, and could deliver only a line. She could do a lot worse than, "Mr. Gilbert, Fast Workers is a good movie."

In Memoriam: Andy Griffith, 1926-2012

It's supposed to be an insult, describing a performer as a "professional [ethnicity]"--someone who, with little else to recommend him, makes a living pandering to stereotypes. Andy Griffith, born in 1926 in Mount Airy, N.C., was a lifelong professional Southerner, but he turned that into an honorable calling. As much as anything--his huge range, his astonishing career longevity--it makes him unique.

The work cycles through all the images of Southernness, good, bad, and ambiguous. He first popped onto the radar doing a hillbilly-preacher routine, "What It Was, Was Football," that remains hilarious, in large part because it's so obviously a put-on. Never trust a Southerner who's playing dumb. At most, they're probably just feeling cornered. (The Siren knew a man who, like Griffith, was from North Carolina. The guy was getting a Ph.D. from Princeton, but threatened with ejection from a nude beach for refusing to shuck his swimming trunks, he took the Mayberry accent to Defcon 1 with "Hey, c'mon y'all. I'm Baptist." He stayed, and so did his swimsuit.) The joke in "What It Was, Was Football" is also on the audience that's willing to go along with the fantasy of a redneck who doesn't understand football, even in 1953.

Later, on TV in 1955, on stage and in the 1958 movie of No Time for Sergeants, Griffith took the same basic character and again played around with whether or not you believed he's actually this clueless. A psychiatrist (James MIlhollan), assigned to analyze Griffith's Private Will Stockdale, needles him with "I think that I would rather live in the rottenest pigsty in Tennessee or Alabama than the fanciest mansion in all of Georgia. How about that?" And Griffith responds with the air of a man employing infinite tact:  "Well, sir... I think where you wanna live is your business."

In between, in 1957, Griffith had his finest 125 minutes in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, a portrait of venality so potent that people still argue over which pimple on our nation's body politic is the best latter-day analogue for Lonesome Rhodes. The Siren isn't going to have that argument (this is a tribute, not a brawl). But Rhodes is another example of a man using down-home wiles, only this time to mask megalomania. Rhodes is an empty vessel, braying about whatever's expedient; who knows what he believes, other than that life owes him, big time.

It's about what Rhodes brings out in his fans--what fellow Southerner James Agee described, in reviewing another movie, as American "nasty-nationalistic self-pitying self-congratulation." Again, that's a common Southern stereotype, but the character didn't have to be Southern. We don't produce more demagogues than other parts of the country; it just seems that way, maybe because the accent gives ours that certain je ne sais quoi. Whatever it is, wow, did Griffith have it. Griffith's so committed to the part that even his sweat looks poisonous. It's such a physical performance, pure animal cunning and predatory movement, coiled to spring one moment, stalking his territory from boundary to boundary the next. That laugh, Jesus--is there a more repulsive laugh in American cinema? Griffith's mouth swings open as though he's going to eat his enablers in one gulp.

From Griffith's final years, the Siren chiefly knows Matlock. And the Siren likes Matlock, if not as much as she loves Murder, She Wrote. For the Lansbury the Siren has impeccable company, for Matlock who knows, but the Siren got real tired, real fast of people mocking her about both shows. Listen, if you hate the basic formula and find the production values lacking or the scripts rote, fair enough. But if your disdain is based on the fact that Griffith was old and the guest stars were old and the audience was old--what's up with that? We're all gonna be old, insh'allah, as they always used to say back home in Birmingham. Many of the old people the Siren has known were and are awesomer than she will ever become. Matlock's the oldest and the smartest guy in the room. How is this not way cool? And like every TV crime fighter the Siren has ever loved, from Columbo on, Matlock banks on people underestimating him, lulled by his folksy Southern ability to seem much, much less threatening than he actually is.

The Siren, along with most cinephiles, reveres A Face in the Crowd, but for the larger public the apotheosis is The Andy Griffith Show. Reruns were the Siren's after-school routine. Cookies, milk, Andy, Barney, Opie and Aunt Bea. She didn't identify with the milieu all that much; she had relatives in small-town Alabama, but to say that Mayberry is idealized is like saying not all town drunks are as lovable as Otis. But she thought it was glorious then, and still does. She has a few favorites--like the one where Opie kills a mother bird and Andy makes him nurse the fledglings, which stays with you for the same reason The Yearling stays, because it shatters your heart to powder. The Siren can also crack up those in the know by drawling, "Not that one, Pa, that one always makes me cry."

But here the Siren is going to describe the episode she loves best, without relying on anything more than her memory. Aunt Bea's birthday is coming up, and she yearns for a lace-trimmed bed-jacket she saw in a store window. Andy, however, has decided that what Aunt Bea really needs is a big set of preserve jars. He has them gift-wrapped and presents them to Aunt Bea, who's convinced she's getting the bed-jacket. She rips off the paper, already exclaiming in anticipation, "Oh it's beautiful, it's the most..." And she sees the jars, and stammers, "beautiful preserve jars I've ever..." She dissolves into tears, and hastens from the room.

Here's what the Siren remembers most: Not Frances Bavier's face, but Griffith's, watching her, dumbfounded. He loves this old woman so dearly, and he can't believe how badly he's hurt her. But then, in the Siren's memory, she sees his expression start to alter, as he already ponders how to set it right. Andy Griffith could make you believe that Southerners were bumpkins, that they were corrupt, that they were deadly and wily and brilliant, and he could make you believe that the primary quality of being Southern was loving kindness.

(Above photo from the indispensable If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.)

In Memoriam: Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012

Last year, my friend Lee Tsiantis took me to have tea with Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris in their home. It was a beautiful afternoon, of which I will tell one thing only: At one point, I mentioned John Ford.

I will cherish my memory of the way Sarris' face lit up at the very sound of that name for the rest of my life.

Andrew Sarris, from the Partisan Review, No. 3, 1972--an issue dedicated to art, culture and conservatism. I found the journal second-hand a few years ago, and saved it for this passage alone.

As a film historian and working film critic, I find most contemporary articles on film to be reactionary and philistinish not so much because of ideological influences, but rather because of the lack of sympathetic insight and dedicated scholarship. When I read a piece on any subject, and especially on film, I do not ask myself if the writer is swinging to the right or the left, but rather if he is writing out of a genuine commitment to his subject...For myself, I remain wedded to the notion of narrative cinema, and that is a view that is regarded as very conservative in some quarters and quarterlies. I do not argue this view on the basis of a unified field theory for all the arts, but merely on the single level of cinematic expression, a unique amalgam of the objective (the camera) and the subjective (the mind behind the camera). And in no other art is the lure of pastness so vivid and compelling. No matter. Only the most naive radicalism insists that we forsake the past in order to claim the future. And only the most strident journalism demands immortal masterpieces every season.

Anecdote of the Week: Blondell Crazy

Alas, the Siren has been up to her step-ins in work and has consequently been missing you all terribly. Since April, she's been doing some freelance film reviewing for (drum roll) the New York Post. The Post's Website is a strange and wonderful thing, but you should be able to access most of her efforts here. Last week's review of Bel Ami, in which Robert Pattinson and his cheekbones attempted to erase memories of George Sanders and his can-can, may be of particular interest. So anyway, between that and the blogathon and the usual demands of life chez Siren, opportunities to dig into a nice big post have been thin on the ground.

The Siren did manage, however, to spend a wonderful afternoon watching pre-Codes with Imogen Sara Smith, an extravagantly talented writer whose reverence for pre-Codes, noir and the art of classic-film acting should endear her to everyone who's ever visited this blog. Imogen has a book out now, called In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, available from McFarland here. The Siren recommends it highly and plans to write more of it anon. Meanwhile, you can read Imogen's ode to the Pre-Code era at Bright Lights Film Journal.

One movie we watched was Blondie Johnson, starring Joan Blondell, everyone's favorite Depression blonde (right? right?). Imogen billed it as "the ultimate Blondell" and she's probably on the money. It's a blast watching Blondell go from desperate poverty to running a con-artist syndicate, even if you never do really believe Chester Morris would get past first base with this gum-snapping goddess.

Naturally this is all leading up to a story, one the Siren believes to be as trustworthy as the World Almanac, but like all good yarns, you can take it or leave it, toots.



Years ago the Siren worked for a venerable man (Will would have snorted and said, "Honey, I'm fuckin' old") who'd had as fascinating a life as you can imagine. One of his many incarnations was as a stage manager for a series of regional and summer-stock theaters in the early to mid-1950s. Through his productions rolled many a faded star, some trying to duck the blacklist, some trading on the last vestiges of a marquee name, and some of them just troupers who couldn't imagine not working.

To that last group belonged Joan Blondell. At that point in her career, Will said her off-screen persona had become very like the one she had on screen; whether the difference had ever been huge, he couldn't say. He adored her, naturally. Decades after he'd met Blondell, he still chuckled at the memory of her at a hotel-room party, shoes off and fully dressed, holding court on the bed with her then-paramour.



According to Will, Blondell enjoyed a post-rehearsal nightcap with cast, crew, whoever, it didn't matter. He said (and isn't this precisely what you want to hear?) that Joan Blondell didn't have a snobbish bone in her body.

What she did have was a gift for improv, which Will discovered one night when Blondell, out with a group that was all male and rowdier than usual, slipped on the floor, went straight down—and stayed down in a heap, apparently out for the count.

Her rather woozy drinking crew crowded round for a second, debating. Had she hit her head? A concussed star was no joke, but neither did they want "Hooched-Up Joan Blondell Passes Out in Saloon" as tomorrow's headline in the East Nowheresville Gazette, there to be picked up by the wire services. Someone went to the bar to get a glass of water, which took a minute as it wasn't what they were used to serving, and the bartender may have needed directions to the tap.

And while the water was being fetched, Will, who was kneeling closest to Blondell, saw one enormous blue eye fly open to half mast, and shut almost before he was sure what he'd seen.

So when the glass was raised to Blondell's lips, and she snatched it and said cheerfully, "What took you so long?", Will was the only one who didn't jump two feet.

The Siren believes this story; don't you?

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.

Anecdote of the Week: "I think Nathanael West was a creep."

Two excerpts from Eve's Hollywood, billed as "a confessional L.A. novel by Eve Babitz." James Wolcott wrote about Babitz not too long ago and the Siren, fascinated, managed to borrow a copy of the out-of-print and damn-near-unavailable book from a trusting and generous friend.

This little post is for that friend, and for Kim Morgan, who loves Los Angeles and who makes the Siren want to love it. And after reading this book, the Siren's smitten with Eve Babitz, too. The woman is a natural writer--unforced, unfussy, funny as hell.

First, a picnic by the L.A. River. Los Angeles has a river? wondered the Siren, as she read. Well, of sorts...

Vera Stravinsky once told me that in 1937 she went on a picnic, in a few limousines, that Paulette Goddard had prepared ("because she was quite a gourmet..." Vera said). On the picnic was the Stravinskys, Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell and the Huxleys. They got into the cars to drive to a likely spot, but there were no likely spots and they drove and drove. There had been a drought and everything was dry, there was no grass and so finally they spotted the measly L.A. "River" and decided to spread their blanket on its ridiculous banks and make the best of it. The "L.A. River" is a trickle that only looks slightly like a river if there's been a downpour for three months but even then it doesn't look like a river. Anyway, they spread out the food, the champagne, the caviar, the pate and everything and sat on the banks of the "river" beneath a bridge over which cars were going.

"Hey!"

They looked up and there was a motorcycle cop with his fists on his hips, looking cross.

"Yes?" Bertrand Russell stood up to inquire.

There was a sign that said people were not allowed to picnic by the "river."

The cop pointed to the sign and looked at Russell and then said, "Can't you read?"...

The cop only relented when he recognized Garbo.

The Siren is quoting this next bit because first of all, the Siren loves people who love their cities. Second, the Siren likes Nathanael West--and despite that, this made her laugh and laugh and laugh. Especially the kicker.

"Nathanael West is the best writer about Hollywood there ever was."

"No, he isn't."

The first speaker is someone from Chicago, the second is me, born in Hollywood. People from the East all like Nathanael West because he shows them it's not all blue skies and pink sunsets, so they don't have to worry: It's shallow, corrupt and ugly.

I think Nathanael West was a creep. Assuring his friends back at Dartmouth that even though he'd gone to Hollywood, he had not gone Hollywood. It's a little apologia for coming to the Coast for the money and having a winter where you didn't have to put tons of clothes on just to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a beer. And so people from New York and Chicago say, "Nathanael West is the best writer about Hollywood there ever was."

All the things that Nathanael West noticed are here. The old people dying, the ennui, the architecture and fat screenplay writers who think it's a tragedy when they can't get laid by the 14-year-old doxette in Gower Gulch, the same 14-year-old who'll ball the cowboys any old time. But if there had been someone, say, who wrote a book about New York, a nice, precise, short little novel in which New York was only described as ugly, horrendous and finally damned and that was the book everyone from elsewhere decided was the "best book about New York there ever was," people who grew up knowing why New York was beautiful would finally, right before dessert, throw their sherry across the table and yell, "I'll pick you up in a taxi, honey, and take you for a fucking guided tour, you blind jerk."

The Siren's been under the weather, but she'll be back to her old, erratic self in no time.

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.