Reviews

I watched a DVD of this which is part of a Hitchcock boxed set released in 2008 (or even 2009) called THE PREMIERE COLLECTION. This DVD contains a radio dramatization from the time of the movie's release. This radio broadcast has Joseph Cotton in the Gregory Peck role and he plays it with wit and subtlety. This drove home to me my idea that Peck was a poor choice for this role. While neither he nor Joseph Cotton is an Englishman, as one would expect an English barrister to be, Cotton's radio acting here has more depth. I can believe he would become enamored of the exotic lady on trial. Peck has virtually one expression throughout, and I didn't buy, for a minute, that he couldn't help falling for his client. He did a masterful job as a lawyer in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD fifteen years later, when he played a wooden figure who's heart is in his integrity. In THE PARADINE CASE, we're supposed to believe this solemn-looking figure has a weakness. It doesn't work. Hitchcock has his moments here, of course, as he does even in lesser pictures such as this. The moment where Louis Jourdan, greeting Gregory Peck, goes into a darkened doorway, is classic Hitchcock. A figure emerges from the doorway immediately after Jourdan disappears into it. You think at first he's come back out, but the footsteps we hear and the figure we eventually see are that of a maid. It's not merely one person being mistaken for another, it's a gender switch designed to make the audience uncomfortable. That Jourdan physically resembles Peck makes the audience see them as logical candidates for the defendant's affections. (Of course, Hitch wouldn't have been able to make Joseph Cotton look like the suave Jourdan. I have no idea if he'd considered Cotton for the movie, but the fact that he was in the radio play makes me think it was a possibility.) Hitchcock does well with the icy relationship between the characters played by Charles Laughton and Ethel Barrymore. Hitchcock always has some comic relief, but these two actors provide dark comedy. Apparently, Ethel Barrymore had a speech which was cut. I don't know if Hitchcock wanted to cut it or not. He was at the mercy of Selznick, who seems to have intruded a lot in this project. Look for lots of shots with people sitting next to lamps. Think of the various lamps and that light bulb in PSYCHO and you can see Hitchcock was, as usual, developing motifs which had been in his mind a long time.

I just saw this a few hours ago. While i generally wait a few days, so as to gain perspective, before posting my comments, I thought I'd give this a whirl right away. I have rarely seen a movie so perfectly cast. Angelina Jolie understands this character and matches that character's emotions at every point. I think the casting of John Malkovich as an anti-authoritarian radio preacher is inspired. We are used to seeing him play arrogant intellectuals, and usually we side with the characters he's playing, despite their arrogance. In this he plays somebody we hope is going to be a man of justice. Very subtly, we are kept wondering if he simply wants fame, if he's manipulating people for his own grandeur, or, more to the point, whether he will stick by Jolie once he's scored his political points. The role is well-written, but, in the hands of another actor plausibility would have been difficult. Malkovich's character is at once worldly, holy and, at some level, sly. Beyond the great casting (and let me say that every main player in this movie is played with forceful realism) the best thing about THE CHANGELING is that Eastwood never trumpets the ambiguities. He accepts and expects the viewer to accept, that characters' motives may be multi-faceted. This acceptance of complexity makes the exposure of villainy all the more powerful. There is something of M in this movie. A character beyond redemption seems, at times, to see right and wrong more clearly than the more casually corrupt. But where M plays like a sort of Marxist civics lesson, THE CHANGELING is, actually, about what Emily Dickinson called the thing with feathers. That's something which goes beyond man-made constructs.

Warning: This review has spoilers. (Vague spoilers, but spoilers, nevertheless!) I just saw this yesterday (February 6th, 2007) at one of the best art cinemas in the world, Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York. It was the one showing of DEEP END at this theatre. It qualifies as a scarce film. I think the Cinema could have played this for a week and word of mouth would have brought people back. Anyway, it played somewhere in New York City a few months ago. Apparently, it is virtually impossible to find on DVD or even VHS. It's got really good acting. Jane Asher's great and so is John Moulder-Brown as her personal Werther, always following her around and pleading with her to drop her fiancée. I am not being ironic when I say this is similar to THE GRADUATE and HAROLD AND MAUDE. All three movies involve swimming pools inhabited by an angst-ridden young man. All of them feature a young man being talked to in condescending ways by authority figures who don't realize they are being condescending. Each one involves a desperate search for reciprocal love. Cat Stevens did music for both DEEP END and HAROLD AND MAUDE. Of course, Simon and Garfunkel nailed the movie music thing with THE GRADUATE'S soundtrack, perhaps the definitive rock soundtrack for a movie. Cat Stevens's performance of the song "But I Might Die Tonight" is different from the one on his famous album TEA FOR THE TILLERMAN. The performance of the song in the movie is almost shockingly anti-social. (I also think he may have written the song just for the movie, inasmuch as, at one point, a bureaucrat tells the young man, "Someday, if you apply yourself, you might be sitting behind this desk!" In the Cat Stevens song, the singer sings "Work hard boy/you'll find/one day you'll have a job like mine.") While it certainly was filmed while London was swinging, this is not about sexual liberation. It's about a boy trying to persuade a girl to stay in her social class. She's climbing. He is not. While she is not climbing high, it is enough to drive him mad.

***Get ready for spoilers*** I borrowed this from my local library the other day and watched it tonight. The message of this film is certainly not that if you just keep on trying, you'll succeed. The message is: If the price of success is to have everything you try to do devalued, then success is, in itself, suspect. I do not think this is an anti-American film. Its criticism of America, while valid, is not a hostile one. The viewer must remember that the main character has left Spain for the United States because he feels he's been pigeon-holed in his own country. He returns to Spain after finding that virtually everything he does to advance his career in America is blocked by willfully ignorant social climbers. Here's the big spoiler: Just as the main character locks his New York apartment door behind him for the last time, dropping the keys through the slot for his landlord to retrieve, the apartment phone rings. He misses the news that his photographs have been accepted by LIFE magazine. While we may wish he could get the news that he's finally been accepted, we are supposed to recognize that at this point, he is so exhausted by the runaround people give him that he wouldn't even care if he were told the news. This is not about a loser. This is about what happens to most people who try to succeed. It is refreshing to see something this real. I don't think the main character has reached a desperate place. It's the opposite. He's accepted a bittersweet dose of reality. This is not to say this movie is without anger. It is, indeed, an appeal to the viewer to treat his fellow human being with more understanding.

***THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS! HAVE A SPOILER!*** First of all, your enjoyment of this will be enhanced if you see GODS AND MONSTERS first, the biopic about James Whale, who directed this among others (which include FRANKENSTEIN, THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE INVISIBLE MAN and the Depression-era version of SHOWBOAT.) Or, read Christopher Bram's novel, FATHER OF FRANKENSTEIN, on which GODS AND MONSTERS is based. This will prepare you for one of most coded movies ever made. There is dialogue about the biblical Saul's love for David, there's a patriarch played by an actress with a beard glued to her face, there's a man who is MORE than happy to allow his female soul mate to fall in love with another man and there is a puritanical old lady whose hand can't help landing on the bosom of the lass she's chastising. But, far from being silly, THE OLD DARK HOUSE works on several levels. It is campy only inasmuch as the characters allow themselves to be campy. Each one of the characters, visitors or visited, has an inner life. Life in the old, dark house may seem horrible to the visitors, but, after all, they have broken the routine to which the inhabitants are accustomed. This is not so much a horror movie as a comparison of normal and abnormal. The Kino DVD has two commentary tracks. Both are well worth hearing, but the one by Gloria Stuart is especially delightful. She was in the movie and remembers it fondly. Viewers will remember her fondly from the James Cameron TITANIC, for which, at the age of 86, she was nominated for an Academy Award. Her comments are lively and full of humor.

I've added a little to my review, which was originally posted on May 4th, 2006. Thank you to the 4 out of 6 people who said they found my original review helpful. You'll see my additions starting about a third of the way down: I re-read Mark Twain's novel this week, and borrowed this movie version yesterday from my public library. I have just watched it and have to say that it is one of the most thorough distortions of HUCKLEBERRY FINN ever filmed. The novel is unambiguously anti-slavery. When you read the book you are supposed to be horrified that Huck doesn't actually realize he's doing the morally right thing by helping Jim escape slavery. The movie constantly emphasizes that Huck is right to be ashamed that he's helping Jim. M-G-M was so afraid of offending the bigoted part of its audience that it turned Twain's irony upside-down. The studio dispensed with Twain's dialogue in all but the most fleeting moments and substituted tepid bits of business. Key revelations are placed way too early. There is a courtroom scene in the movie while in the book there is not even a trial. None of this was done to make it a better movie. All of it was done to make everything safe for M-G-M. Mickey Rooney as Huck and Walter Connolly as the Dauphin give stand-out performances, but the dialogue, which surely isn't Twain's for more than a millisecond, serves them poorly. Rex Ingram's performance as Jim would have been inspiring if Twain's words were left intact. Instead he's reduced to interpreting lines from a melodrama having absolutely nothing to do with the towering work of literature this movie pretends to have as its source. Finally, M-G-M is not entirely to blame for this awful distortion. The blame rests on America's profound history of racism; a history Mark Twain wanted us to confront; a history deliberately, decidedly ignored in this outrageous revision of his art. HERE'S the racism of this movie: While, near the end of the novel, Jim is put in chains because of the simple fact that he is a runaway slave, the movie justifies Jim's imprisonment by having the mob think Jim has murdered Huck. Any mob would be somewhat justified in capturing and jailing a man who is thought to have murdered a child. But in the book, the people who put Jim in chains think he is a different runaway slave. They put him in chains simply because he's been turned in for a reward. The people who have turned him in (the Duke and the Dauphin) have never known that Jim has been accused of murder. This is because the Duke and the Dauphin don't know where Huck and Jim come from. The Duke and the Dauphin want money, so they print up a false ad with a description of Jim and plaster it on billboards saying he's a runaway slave. The Duke and the Dauphin are not even certain he actually is a runaway slave. Jim is put in chains by people who have never heard that he's suspected of murder. Hollywood, afraid to remind people of what their ancestors actually did, makes the lynch mob rather sympathetic. HERE'S a distortion of Twain's book. Early in the book, Jim and Huck discover a shack which has been destroyed in a flood. There's a dead man in there. Both Jim and Huck know the body is someone who's been shot. But only Jim sees the face. He tells Huck not to look. This body is not mentioned again until the second-to-last paragraph of the entire novel, when Jim, who has just learned that he's been freed in his late owner Miss Watson's will, tells Huck that the dead man in the shack was his father. The movie, however, has Jim confess to Huck, about two scenes after the scene in which they find the body, that he didn't tell Huck at first because he didn't want Huck to stop helping him run away. Huck then gets angry at Jim and calls him a false friend for not telling him. In the novel, Jim does not say why he didn't tell Huck at first and he certainly offers no apology, as he does in the movie. Huck does not call Jim a false friend in the novel. What happens in the final paragraph (which comes just after Huck learns that the dead man was his father) is that Huck tells us that he's going to head West to avoid Aunt Sally's plan to adopt him. We are not told if he's mad at Jim for taking him down the river without telling him his father's dead. Because we know Huck had been running away from his abusive father and yet still loved him, we can assume his world was shattered when he learned his father was dead. So, what does Depression-era Hollywood do with a story which ends with its main character determined to get away from everybody he's ever known? It has him, in the last scene in the movie, promising Aunt Sally he'll be good. He's so good, in fact, that he's just persuaded her, one scene earlier, to believe him when he tells her that slavery is wrong (which he never says in the book)and that Jim should be freed. She agrees to free him, in this movie, if Huck promises to do his schoolwork and not smoke and always to wear his shoes. He promises to do all that. The scene ends cutely with Huck secretly slipping his shoes off. This is not merely a cute ending. This is an ending designed to counter Twain's other point, which is that society is deeply corrupt and forces creatures of nature, such as Huck, to live in a state of perpetual flight.