Blind Spot

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Henry Travers, Patricia Collinge, Hume Cronyn, Wallace Ford, Edna May Wonacott, Charles Bates, Irving Bacon, Clarence Muse, Janet Shaw, Estelle Jewell

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Expectations: Super high. I love Hitchcock.

Shadow of a Doubt opens very mysteriously as Charlie Oakley lies on a bed in a boarding house. Money is strewn about the floor, but Charlie doesn’t seem to mind. He does mind when two men come calling after him, so he quickly gives them the slip and sends a telegram to his older sister. He’s coming to stay with her family, and it’ll be a grand ol’ time! As the audience we aren’t exactly sure what’s going on and why people are looking for Charlie, and it is this constant questioning and evaluation of the situation at hand that makes Shadow of a Doubt an absolute thrill to watch.

Many thrillers place an emphasis on a ticking clock or some other overt tension, but such devices are not necessary in the hands of a master like Alfred Hitchcock. Instead, the film is set in the small town of Santa Rosa, CA (population roughly 12,600 according to the 1940 US census). Every character in the film wears a smile and goes about their business with a polite attitude. There are no villains in sight, but there are suspicions and rumblings of things being not what they seem. In lesser hands this kind of taut, yet subtle tension could have come across as boring or misguided, but Shadow of a Doubt actually ranks as one of Hitchcock’s most suspenseful films. The tension is so thick you could cut it with anything you have handy, sharp or otherwise.

Freaks (1932)

Starring Harry Earles, Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Schlitze, Josephine Joseph, Johnny Eck, Frances O’Connor, Peter Robinson, Olga Roderick, Koo Koo, Prince Randian, Elvira Snow, Jenny Lee Snow, Elizabeth Green

Directed by Tod Browning

Expectations: High.

Freaks is a weird little movie. It’s just so hard to classify. I’ve heard it most often talked about in the context of being a horror film, and in some ways it definitely fits that bill. Director Tod Browning had made the seminal classic Dracula for Universal just the previous year, so if nothing else Freaks has horror clout. But most of Freaks isn’t horrific at all, it’s a twisted love story as old as the hills. So why then has the film built up a huge cult following in the 80+ years since its release?

The simple answer is the casting. Instead of using makeup and prosthetics to achieve the circus freaks of the film, Tod Browning opted to use actual circus performers in the film’s roles. And not just as the background color, they fill out many of the major roles. This gives Freaks — even to this day — a spectacle-like quality that would otherwise be missing. The silent-era version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an interesting movie, one well-worth watching for dedicated film fans, but we all know that the hunchback is Lon Chaney in makeup and he’s not really hunchbacked. The performers in this film bring a reality to the screen that is rarely seen.

Repulsion (1965)

Starring Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Yvonne Furneaux, Patrick Wymark, Renee Houston, Valerie Taylor, James Villiers

Directed by Roman Polanski

Expectations: Moderate.

Repulsion was Roman Polanski’s first English-language film (and second film overall), and boy is it a strange one. If you were to classify it, you’d label it as a psychological thriller, but it’s a thriller so slowly paced that many will never make it past the first half of the film and into the part where that thrilling psychological horror takes hold. Although, if you’re watching this one it’s pretty safe to assume you’re “into film” and didn’t rent it randomly because “it looked good,” so it’s probably safe to assume very few are shutting this one off mid-film.

Repulsion opens with a tight close-up of an eyeball, the film’s credits drifting over its surface. As the sequence goes on, the eyeball darts from side to side, foreshadowing the paranoia that our main character Carol experiences. Carol moves through life as if she’s asleep, seemingly daydreaming and making no real connection to the world around her. She is especially repulsed by men and their advances towards her, which in her eyes are constant and neverending. This causes her an incredible amount of distress, and Polanski builds from there.

The King of Comedy (1983)

Starring Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Shelley Hack, Margo Winkler, Frederick De Cordova, Ed Herlihy, Lou Brown

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Expectations: Moderate.

The experience of watching The King of Comedy felt like looking at a shirt with a single loose thread. At first everything seems perfect, but once you notice the flaw, it’s all you can focus on. Robert De Niro’s character Rupert Pupkin is this thread personified, and as Scorsese pulls him through the film, I wondered how far he would take it. He couldn’t possibly pull the whole shirt apart, could he? The King of Comedy goes in directions I never would have expected, and this is exactly what makes it a riveting experience. It was a flop upon its initial release, but thankfully intrepid film fans have kept this one alive over the years, as it most definitely deserves to be seen.

As good as it is, though, it’s not a film for everyone. The comedy that runs throughout the film is dark and uncomfortable; the type of stuff that you feel bad for laughing at. What makes the comedy so uncomfortable is that Rupert Pupkin is such a sad character at his heart. He’s likeable to a point because De Niro’s inherent charm goes a long way, but with each passing scene Pupkin pushes this boundary further and further towards the edge, daring you to keep following him. He is a fascinating character; a king in his own mind, Pupkin just has to convince everyone else of it.

Giant (1956)

Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Jane Withers, Chill Wills, Mercedes McCambridge, Dennis Hopper, Sal Mineo, Rod Taylor, Judith Evelyn, Earl Holliman, Robert Nichols

Directed by George Stevens

Expectations: Low.

Giant is a Texas-themed soap opera about a cattle rancher named Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) who marries a Virginian girl named Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) while he’s in town buying a horse from Leslie’s father. When they return as husband and wife to Bick’s ranch Reata, Leslie doesn’t quite fit in with all the Texas bigots. This, surprisingly, becomes an overarching theme of the film, but you’ve gotta sit through a whole lot of Texas-sized movie before it ever pays off. And — spoiler alert — even that payoff is less satisfying than I’d have liked it to be. In a film this long (201 minutes!), is it too much to ask that we actually build toward something worth waiting for? I guess if I was a hard-hearted racist jerk, it’d take almost 3½ hours to get me to understand why the film ends as it does, but I was already on-board right from the get-go.

What’s strange about the length of Giant is that it’s an epic unconcerned with being epic. There are moments when it slips into epic mode, but for the most part it’s a fairly straightforward chronicle of 30–40 years in the Benedict family’s lives. So why is it as long as it is? The answer lies within the familial relationships of the Benedict family. Allowed extra space to breathe, Giant presents more nuanced and layered relationships than are usually seen in films — especially one from the ’50s. But even with its extended length, it still feels like it’s breezing through the years and could have easily been longer if it wanted to be.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Starring Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Robert Romanus, Brian Backer, Phoebe Cates, Ray Walston, Scott Thomson, Vincent Schiavelli, Amanda Wyss, D.W. Brown, Forest Whitaker, Kelli Maroney

Directed by Amy Heckerling

Expectations: Moderate.

It could just be my age, but Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a transcendent experience. It would seem that anyone who lived through the ’80s would have already seen this one, but I was too young to catch it initially, and my parents were just about 30 when this came out, so they were perhaps too old for its charms. In any case, I never saw it growing up, and I’ve always kind of indirectly avoided it because of its reputation. I figured there was no way for it to live up to the hype, similar to my experience watching Valley Girl for the first time a couple of years ago.

But lo and behold, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a film with strength enough to withstand the test of time. What sets it apart from other high school movies, a genre I generally don’t care one way or the other for, is that it is timeless yet also expertly evocative of the time it was made. I was born in 1981, so I don’t remember the early ’80s, but even still the film dredged up all kinds of nostalgic thoughts and feelings of my youth. But you can’t simply hang four stars on nostalgia alone, and that’s where the timeless part comes in.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari] (1920)

Starring Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Rudolf Lettinger

Directed by Robert Wiene

Expectations: Very high. I’ve seen pieces of this many times.

The film begins with an older, visibly shaken man telling a younger man about how the spirits all around have driven him out of his home. A wide-eyed women dressed in a flowing white gown emerges in the background and slowly walks up to and past the men without stopping or looking their way. My first thought was that this was a ghost, a representation of what the older man was talking about. But then the younger man says, “That is my fiancee. What she and I have lived through is stranger still than what you have lived through…” So this girl with the blank stare isn’t a ghost, huh? Oh… well, I guess we’re in for a wild story then!

And it’s a story that doesn’t disappoint. That’s not to say everyone will naturally gravitate towards this one, but if you’re at all interested in the foundation of the horror genre or classic film in general, this is a must see. As one of the premiere examples of the German Expressionist film movement, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari holds many wonderful delights, most notably in its set design. Instead of looking normal, everything is skewed and distorted. I don’t know what the traditional interpretation of this is, but my take on it is that because our main character is telling us his story — one of unforgettable peril and terror — his memories of it aren’t exactly perfect. Or maybe we’re seeing the story by venturing inside his head and living inside his fractured memories. Or, better yet, perhaps we’re seeing the story through the imagination of the older man who’s hearing it, creating the visuals in his head from the twisted details given to him by our main character. Whatever it is or was supposed to be, the sets create a fantasy landscape that continues to inspire and influence filmmakers today.