GoldbergBlog

Quick Cuts – 4/13/10

Foreign Correspondant: As I was watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondant, I couldn’t help but wonder why it wasn’t one of his more acclaimed films.  Joel McCrea is a charming protagonist who manages to play naivety without coming off like a simpleton and the film has a nice balance of humor and suspense.  Then came the third act and I understood why it’s not among Hitchcock’s better known films.  The movie completely falls apart in the third act as McCrea just becomes a lovestruck fool and the film switches to ffollliott (stupid name, but great character and great performance from George Sanders).  The the film has a dramatic plane crash as a big set piece that feels completely out of place and unlike other great Hitchock set pieces, it doesn’t have us rooting for a character in outsized circumstances.  It’s just a catastropic event.  The film then ends with a ra-ra message for the United States and we see that it’s a plea for the U.S. to get into the war (Foreign Correspondant was released in 1940 when war was already underway in Europe but the U.S. wouldn’t join until after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941). I wouldn’t say it’s a bad movie, but it’s certainly a disappointing one after the strength of the first two acts.

Nosferatu: Silent films can sometimes come off cheesy because of the way they were shot and the limitations of the technology of the time.  That is no fault of the film and it’s unfair to criticize them for those reasons.  Nosferatu is a pretty good silent film.  It’s not scary, but it does manage to be creepy, which is impressive considering the times.  The diary of the narrator and the manifest of the ship’s captain are highly effective at conveying the threat and power of Nosferatu (memorably portrayed by Max Schreck).

However, when it’s not being creepy, it’s goofy.  The character Hutter is so dopey that you kind of want him to get destroyed when he happily proclaims to his wife, “I’m going to the land of thieves and ghosts!”

But where I couldn’t stop cracking up is when we see Nosferatu lugging around his own coffin.  We see him do all this cool telekinetic stuff like remove the lid from his own coffin and rise straight up out of the coffin.  But when he gets off the ship, he carries it around under his arm and just walks around the city with it.  This has nothing to do with the movie being made in 1922.  It has everything to do with a supernatural creature carrying around his own coffin under his arm like it was a gigantic suitcase.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a movie worth seeing.  The use of shadow and lighting is terrific and Schreck is unforgettable, so much so that his performance inspired the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire with Willem Dafoe as Schreck who in the film turns out to be an actual vampire that director F.W. Murnau (played by John Malkovich) has to wrangle so he can finish his film even though Schreck is eating his cast and crew.

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