#25 Foreign Correspondent

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

directed by 

Alfred Hitchcock

Written by

James Hilton (dialogue)

Robert Benchley (dialogue)

Screenplay by

Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison

  

If I have a favorite director, it's Hitchcock. His movies, across the decades, are original, brilliantly put together, smart & clever, filled with amazing performances, and all, even the least ones, worth watching. I remember hearing two store clerks rave about Kubrick but dismiss Hitchcock as a mere master of gimmickry. I had to get out of that store fast. There's simply no comparison. Too many of Kubrick's movies are cold, soulless That's why I own thirteen Hitchcock (actually, more. I have a boxed set somewhere of all his early films) movies and only two Kubrick.

Foreign Correspondent, I think, often gets overlooked, coming as it does right after his first American movie, Rebecca, and that's a shame. Mechanically, it's a smashing thriller, replete with memorable set pieces, most notably the umbrella scene and the windmill. The plane crash over the ocean is pretty harrowing, too (It was designed by the brilliant William Cameron Menzies).

Joel McCrea is great fun as the American crime reporter dispatched to Europe in August 1939 to cover the looming war. He becomes entangled in a plot involving a Dutch diplomat (Albert Basserman), Nazi spies (Herbert Marshall, Eduardo Cianelli, and Edmund Gwenn), a beautiful girl (Laraine Day), and a charming (and scene-stealing) British reporter (George Sanders). Marshall and Sanders are just damn cool, uttering every one of their lines with a dryness and wryness that is just perfection.

I can't remember when I first saw this. It might have been as long ago as elementary school. Whatever, it's a movie I've always loved, for the action, for the laughs (of which there are plenty), and for it's potent recreation of a feeling of impending catastrophe as Germany edges the world toward chaos.

The movie, written by Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, with dialogue by James Hilton and Robert Benchley (who makes a fun appearance as a bored US reporter in London). Hitchcock went to London after the movie was completed just as the Battle of Britain was about to begin and quickly had a scene written and filmed reflecting the imminent bombing of London. Release a year and half before Pearl Harbor, the movie is a magnificent call to arms for America, practically demanding we come to grips with the Nazis.

verdict: a keeper of the first rank

George Sanders, Laraine Day, and Joel McCrea

#9 The Birds

The Birds (1963)

directed by

Alfred Hitchcock

 

screenplay by 

Evan Hunter

 

I saw this when I was a kid and again in college and it bored me. Watching it a few years later, a more knowing and adult person, I fell in love with this absolutely crazy and disturbing movie. Starring the stolid Rod Taylor and the somewhat icy Tippi Hedren, most people of a certain age at least have memories of crows gathering on the monkey bars and seagulls battering themselves against the phonebooth. On the surface, this movie is just another ANIMALS ATTACK thriller. Actually, it's the first of its kind, a broad type recast, most often terribly, with grizzlies, bees, frogs, and all other sorts of critters.

More than that, though, The Birds, based loosely on a story by Daphne DuMaurie, is a psychosexual drama with some Oedipal stuff and the fear of abandonment. Very basically, while the birds seem to have been preparing before the start of the film, it's only after Hedren's Melanie Daniels follows Taylor's Mitch Brenner to his hometown of Bodega Bay, that we see them attack in earnest (there is a later report that gulls almost swamped a boat a week earlier). It feels as if the awakening sexual tension between the two, coupled with his mother Lydia's fear of him leaving her, triggers the birds' attack. If you took away the birds from the film, you're still left with a slightly creepy story of the women orbiting Mitch, playing off one another for his affection and attention.

Hitchcock was one of the greatest, and he knew how things worked. He could have gotten on-screen tension from a pile of dirty laundry. I've heard the movie called slow, but what it's doing is establishing the characters and the setting, so that as the bird event begins it isn't merely scary, but unsettling. The famous sequence of the flock of crows slowly building behind Melanie is more disconcerting than the actual attack. The attack could be by any group of birds crazed for whatever reason. The slowly-building flock possesses intent and patience, clearly waiting for the children to leave the school. Other, more violent scenes work for their frenziedness, not any gore or bloodshed (though the eyeless farmer's corpse and a splayed-out woman's are both pretty graphic). The effects may be dated, but they're never not effective.

The cast is good. In addition to Hedren and Taylor, there's Jessica Tandy as Mitch's mother and Suzanne Pleshette as a past, and still smitten, lover.

I'll be upfront about it: there's no Hitchcock movie I'm going to chuck. I mean, I'm fortunate I don't own The Paradine Case or Spellbound, so I don't have to really test my resolve. But, I'd probably keep them too.

Verdict: a definite keeper

UPDATE: Since writing this, we've watched Hitchcock's Murder! (1930) and we're chucking it. The print is poor, the audio awful, and the movie's good parts don't outweigh all that.

Tippi Hedren and the crows