Tag: Marlene Dietrich

Stage Fright (1950) – A Movie Review

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Stage Fright is an Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jane Wyman is Eve Gill an acting student who is in love with Jonathan Cooper.  Unfortunately, Jonathan is in love with Charlotte Inwood (played by Marlene Dietrich) who unfortunately is married to a man she doesn’t love.  One day Jonathan comes to Eve and asks her for her help.  He tells her that Charlotte came to his apartment in a dress covered in blood and told him that her husband started beating her and in self-defense she killed him with a fireplace poker.  She asked Jonathan to go back to the scene of the crime to get her a clean dress.  But while he was there the maid saw him and called the police.

Jonathan asks Eve to help him hide from the police until he can figure out how to escape from the trap, he has found himself in.  Eve enlists the help of her father “Commodore Gill (played by Alistair Sim) who owns a boat that Jonathan hides on.  Meanwhile Eve goes to Charlotte’s home to see what the police are up to.  While snooping around she meets police detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding) who happens to be working on the case and she proceeds to fall in love with him.  She also manages to insinuate herself into Charlotte’s household by impersonating a relative of Charlotte’s maid and theatrical dresser.  In this role she discovers that Charlotte has no intention of disrupting her life but instead expects Jonathan to flee the country permanently.,

Meanwhile Jonathan sneaks into the theater where Charlotte is playing and confronts her.  She explains that she will not be joining him in permanent exile and he reacts by saying he has the bloody dress and he might give it to the police if he has to.

Finally, Eve and her father arrange for the police to eavesdrop on Charlotte being confronted about the bloody dress in a fake blackmail conversation with Eve.  But in the conversation Charlotte states that even though there is blood on her dress Jonathan murdered her husband in front of her.  Meanwhile Inspector Smith has captured Jonathan at Eve’s home and he has been brought to the theater for questioning.  He breaks loose and Eve helps him hide in the theater basement with her.  While this is going on Smith reveals to Eve’s father that Jonathan is actually a dangerous maniac who has killed before.

While hiding with Eve, Jonathan confesses to Eve that he did indeed murder Charlotte’s husband more or less at her instigation.  He also admits that he previously killed another man, but was cleared based on self-defense grounds.  And then he hinted that he would be executed for this new murder unless he was thought completely insane.  And the only way he could think of convincing a jury of that would be if he killed another person for no reason at all.  Now Eve sensed her personal danger and she tells Jonathan that they must escape the building before the police got down into the basement.  And as he walked through a door ahead of her, she locked it behind him and screamed to the police to capture Jonathan.  Jonathan was now on the stage and trying to escape so the police dropped the heavy fire curtain (actually a heavy metal sheet) to trap him but just as he reached the edge of the stage he tripped and the steel curtain crushed and killed him.

Great Caesar’s ghost, I’m exhausted just reciting that plot.  And I left several subplots and characters out.  There’s Charlotte’s manager that she’s having an affair with and Charlotte’s mother who is estranged from her father and Eve’s friends, one of whom is played by Hitchcock’s daughter, and on and on.  It’s a bit much.  Plus, Dietrich sings several songs and that maybe okay for her French song but the one in English wasn’t so good.  Without a doubt this movie is very odd.  I enjoyed it, maybe because of its oddity, but I tend to doubt most people are like me.  Let’s say this is for Hitchcock fans who like the theatrical.

Touch of Evil (1958) – A Movie Review

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Here’s a movie directed by and starring Orson Welles.  Makes you think of Citizen Kane?  Well, not exactly.

Charlton Heston is Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas, a Mexican prosecutor on vacation with his American wife Susie played by Janet Leigh.  As Mike and Susie are getting ready to cross the border from Mexico into Texas we watch as a bomb is planted in a car with a man and woman as passengers and in the extended opening shot the Vargases and the car wend their interweaving ways toward the border crossing from Mexico to Texas.  When the car explodes on the American side of the border and the passengers are killed Ray gets involved to represent the Mexican authorities in this cross-border incident.

Local police captain Hank Quinlan, played by Orson Welles arrives with his associate Pete Menzies to investigate the crime and almost immediately start to clash with Vargas.  Quinlan is trying to frame a Mexican local who is married to the daughter of the man killed in the car explosion.  Vargas works with the local District Attorney’s Assistant, Al Schwartz to uncover a pattern of planted evidence in several of Quinlan’s old cases.  At the same time some local Mexican criminals, the associates of Joe Grandi, are after Vargas because of a conviction he got against one of their family.  The Grandis reach out to Quinlan and he agrees to allow the Grandis to kidnap Susie.  Susie is staying at an isolated rural motel on the US side of the border which is owned by Grandi.  Grandi’s henchman terrorize her then apparently rape her and inject her with a narcotic and drag her back to town.

Meanwhile Quinlan, for no apparent reason, strangles Grandi and tries to pin the murder on Susie.  Mike Vargas goes berserk and beats up the entire Grandi gang single-handedly for attacking his wife.  Then he convinces Quinlan’s assistant Pete Menzies to wear a wire to prove that Quinlan is guilty of corruption.  But because of the hokey nature of 1950’s surveillance equipment Quinlan hears the feedback between the microphone on Menzies and the speaker Vargas is pathetically carrying around with him to remain in range of the perambulating fat police captain.  Quinlan shoots Menzies and is just about to shoot Vargas when a dying Menzies shoots Quinlan and he slowly sinks into a wastewater pond like a dying whale.

This movie seems to be Welles daring us to find something good to say about it.  I will admit that the long opening scene with the car and the Vargases is very well done and interesting both dramatically and visually but after that this whole movie is a hot mess in every way possible.

Let’s start with Charlton Heston as a Mexican.  Oh, come on!  Sure, they put some bronze-o on him and gave him a thin moustache but then it’s still Charlton Heston.  He looks like Charlton Heston; he sounds like Charlton Heston.  He even walks like Charlton Heston.  All he left out was saying, “Let my people go.”  Heston runs around the movie with great energy and reasonableness.  All the viewers are rooting for him.  All the other characters including Janet Leigh’s Susie are making his life extremely difficult.  He’s finding decades old evidence against Quinlan and beating up hundreds of Mexican gangsters and setting up and monitoring very ticklish radio-frequency surveillance equipment.  And all the time hard at work trying to look and sound Mexican while being Charlton Heston.  I’m giving Heston a solid B for effort.

Next there’s Welles.  He looks like he weighs 400 pounds.  They must have used a special lens to make him look even fatter.  It’s awful.  I can’t figure out if they’re trying to make him seem somewhat sympathetic.  If so, they failed.  He’s loathsome and repulsive.

Then there are the supporting characters.  During the rape scene at the motel, the “night manager” is played by a young Dennis Weaver who seems to be playing the role as a hick who also is some kind of psychiatric patient.  I found him more off-putting than the “Mexican biker gang” that is there to torment Susie.  But they’re weird too.  There is some kind of implication that we are seeing some subculture involving drugs and possibly lesbianism but it’s so confused and furtive that I’m not sure the actors even know what they supposed to be portraying.

And then you have a very worn looking Marlene Dietrich playing a brothel madame named Tanya who Quinlan still remembers fondly and visits for some reason.  The scene is so bizarre that it reminds me of Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles doing an homage song to Dietrich called , “I’m Tired.”  It’s like Dietrich is doing a bad impression of herself.

And finally, they made Zsa Sze Gabor a strip-club owner.  But her part was so minor that mercifully she didn’t have to pretend to act.

So, who should watch this movie?  I guess people studying film in college.  Fans of Orson Welles who want to talk about his evolution as a director.  And people who like really bad film noir.  That should do it.  You have been warned.