Run Aground

The elderly parents at the center Tokyo Story return midway through the movie from an excursion to a seaside spa only to find that their daughter, Shige, who concocted the plan to send them there in the first place, is too busy to give them the time of day. Guilt-ridden by the burden they feel they’ve feels placed on their children, they decide to spend the night apart — the wife at her daughter-in-law's small apartment, the husband with an old friend named Hattori. "We're really homeless now," he says with a laugh.

Home indeed plays a starring role in Tokyo Story, director Yasujiro Ozu's placid compositions using rooms as frames, peopled by unruly family members so constantly mobile it seems they are afraid to find out what the world sounds like severed from chaos. The characters are bound by the homes, happy or not, that they've built, the camera dormant as they mill about, lingering after they’ve left — taking in the ineffable sorrow of the empty room, of routines followed and loved ones subtly, unknowingly, neglected.

The elderly couple, however, seems to have realized the value of taking a moment away from the clutter of everyday life. The charming, pudgy matriarch and rail-thin, sometimes-alcoholic patriarch are by no means perfect, but in their basic goodness and their love for each other we see something worthy of rapt attention. Even sitting on the edge of an inlet to the sea, watching the world change and deciding to return to the countryside, they are captivating. Here is some generative kindness, some luminosity: like a small gift placed gently in the palm of a hand, such a moment protects against the shoals beneath our family lives, the sharp edges that, never acknowledged, cut and sting and fade below the surface once more.

The final bit of the film takes place in the country town where the couple lives, in silent hills pursed by the patter of a riverboat — a breathtaking coda to the Tokyo portion of Tokyo Story. The mother has fallen ill and the children come to lavish her with attention. Too late, it turns out: the mother dies, and the children’s city lives return to view. Why not take the night express back to the city? Shige asks. Our hearts break — not because of her callousness but because she’s forgotten that some things, once lost, are irretrievable; not because she is eager to get back, but because she was too busy to realize that her mother’s trip to Tokyo was the last one she’d ever make.

"You Must Remember This..."

There she was, swooping down on him in that dress — you remember it, the black-and-white knockout, stitched with sex and chilly New York glamour — asking the inevitable question: “Anything else bothering you?”

When you’re a wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart and you’ve just received the cinema’s most swooning kiss, the answer is inevitable, too: “Uh-huh. Who are you?”

It was Grace Kelly, of course. In that moment she went from actress to star — all alabaster skin and perfectly coiffed hair, cutting remarks delivered with such Main Line gentility you couldn’t tell she’d drawn blood. And in the perfect thriller, no less: everything held back, deferred, repressed until it blew up in the bright light of a flashbulb.

The film was Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, about to embark on the most fruitful period of his, or any, career — within a decade he would make The Man Who Knew Too Much (again), Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds. Kelly and Stewart found a delicate blend of tough humor and soft sex that felt like the Lubitsch touch; Thelma Ritter, never funnier, lent her working-class Cassandra’s two cents of wisdom; the courtyard of the apartment complex in which L.B. Jefferies (Stewart) so voyeuristically wallowed formed a world in miniature, its details straight from Zola’s pen.

There’s not a throwaway moment in it: Wendell Corey’s police lieutenant glancing significantly at Kelly’s overnight clothes; Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn) kicking out an overeager suitor before sitting down to cry; the chilling strains of a love ballad drowning out the sounds of murder. So compact, boxed into that studio apartment at the height of a Manhattan summer, Rear Window is in fact a thousand diffuse yarns being rolled into one. The dog, the garden, the lonely woman below, the creepy man above, the photographer and his socialite girlfriend across the way — when the threads come together it’s like the reinvention of the medium, the action so distant, the protagonist, like us, so impotent, that Hitchcock needs to craft a whole new form of suspense.

What he comes up with has so many layers an entire book could be (and has been) written about it. Needless to say, it’s all about watching and being watched, seeing what’s in front of us and missing what lurks behind the neighbor’s apartment door; about the simultaneous impotence and virility of looking; about the personal and sexual transgression of the voyeur. In other words, we’re watching perhaps the best movie ever made about the cinema — that art form where we, like Jefferies, look out into the bright world from a dim room and wait for the dramatic to happen, where we watch Kelly’s ingenuity as she escapes discovery by a hair’s breadth. You remember the moment — the one with the ring and the telephone and the villain’s eyes taking you in from across the courtyard? Of course you remember it, and you always will.

American Beauty

Ethan Edwards is a "mean sumbitch," as they say, his face craggy with hatred and age --- he resembles other humans not so much as he resembles a canyon, throwing deep shadows across the landscape except at high noon. The frontier seemingly resides at the end of his chin, at the upward curve of his hat, at the point on the porch where hastily constructed civilization ceases to exist and the vast desert behind him begins.

Such is John Wayne, né Marion Morrison, all glinting sun and terrifying darkness.

Such is, as they say, America itself. But we don't remember Ethan Edwards, really, nor Ringo Kid nor even Rooster Cogburn --- we remember Wayne in The Searchers, Wayne in Stagecoach, Wayne in True Grit; characters are almost superfluous.

Wayne's performances are his alone, an extension of the persona, a jutting out of the frontier. Perhaps that gets at the heart of the matter: the frontier, as suggested by John Wayne, is the borderland where America meets itself with an eruption of violence, order lost and tenuously restored. And perhaps that's why The Searchers is often considered not only Wayne's best film, but the best Western ever made --- it draws from American iconography and darkens the emotional palette, a kind of cyan filter of our collective memory.

In the film, Ethan Edwards returns from fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He soon falls victim to a Comanche raid that leaves most of his family dead and his niece, Debbie (Lana Wood in the younger years, Natalie Wood when Debbie is older), abducted. The rage Wayne musters is startling. Though his earlier films have elements of this roiling power, they also glide along at the pace of his glorious gait, best described as walking side-saddle, or flowing with the odd sweetness in his molasses-and-sand voice.

Not so in The Searchers, where brevity becomes the soul of disgust. "Living with the Comanche," Edwards says, "ain't living." Debbie, in living with and marrying among the Comanches, isn't better off dead. To Edwards, she already is.

Here are all the American themes, stacked like Russian dolls --- unpack one and you discover another denser element of the whole. Race, xenophobia, miscegenation, war, the West, revenge, destiny --- they coil like snakes, nearly impossible to unravel without getting bitten in the process.

The Searchers has always been, for me at least, a difficult film to watch, so total is Edwards' commitment, as he searches for Debbie over the course of five years, to killing her and her abductors when he finally finds them. (And you know, if you know what American cinema and John Wayne are about at root --- that is, fulfillment of the most basic sort --- that he will find them.)

More pertinently, it seems darkly instructive that John Wayne, the one man most closely associated in the public consciousness with the history of American film, is best remembered (by me at least) not as John Stryker, the gruff-yet-tender soldier who leaves his money with a bargirl in Honolulu in Sands of Iwo Jima, nor as the gallant Capt. Brittles of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, trying to negotiate peace with the Cheyenne, but as Edwards, American darkness coagulated into human form.

The beauty of America has always been, in promise if not in practicality, its do-or-die mentality, its element of risk. I no longer think it a coincidence that we use the word "experiment" to describe our foray into democracy --- it smacks of Alexander Fleming stumbling upon penicillin, resounds with the idea that going for broke, giving up everything to forge a new, better life, is what America is all about.

But we've tended to clear the path with fire rather than ingenuity. And here I am talking not just of our treatment of Comanches but of all American Indians, of Africans and African-Americans, of Cubans and Filipinos, of Chinese and Japanese, of "Slavs" and "spics" and "kykes" and "micks" and "Dagoes."

We've always been afraid of other outsiders joining our bande à part, of coming in and stealing away with our future. That's why The Searchers, more than 50 years old, and Wayne himself, who would be 100 if he were alive today, continue to make some sense to me as a historian and film critic, if not as a person. What Wayne represents --- for he is truly larger than life, no longer solely individual but also metaphorical, symbolic --- is this beautiful and terrible past of both pioneering and xenophobic impulses.

The fear that animates The Searchers hits me more strongly than the quiet heroism of some of his other roles, perhaps, because to me America is no longer the man in the white hat, riding in on his horse to save the day. We invade; we kill and capture; we abduct.

For a man whose name is important --- Marion Morrison, for whatever reason, will never be as compelling as John Wayne, and not just because we're used to the latter --- it seems instructive that The Searchers, in its title as in its content, is a kind of response to The Birth of a Nation: born of revolution and developed through codified racism.

Our nation is a tricky thing to discuss without feeling a little saddened by the mistakes of the past. But history is important here. If the racism of Griffith's epic suggests the darkness of the past, from slavery through to Jim Crow, then John Ford's film suggests something else entirely. The racism in The Searchers, set just three years after the Civil War and released just two years after Brown v. Board of Education is, thanks to Wayne's magnificent performance, something to focus on, to question, to feel uncomfortable about.

The Searchers is about, at root, just what the title says: spreading the searchlight across the shadows, convincing us to use our do-or-die mentality to achieve the American promise rather than hide behind our fears --- in short, to find the most open and pure frontiers we have yet to cross and extend the best parts of our experiment.

Who knows, we might discover something yet.

The Key's the Key

It all comes down to a silly little key.

Never mind Grace Kelly in a scarlet dress, her icy blond locks and clipped Philadelphia accent melting before our eyes; never mind Ray Milland's sniveling, scheming husband, all clumsy heft and cuckolded menace; never mind the telephone and the stocking and the scissors, the terrors of domestic life waiting for a "happy" London couple to unravel.

Dial M for Murder, Alfred Hitchcock's claustrophobically brilliant suspense thriller, rests on the kind of throwaway detail a lesser director would toss at us halfway through and never come to reclaim. The key is, punningly enough, the key.

Margot and Tony Wendice (Kelly and Milland) are the kind of couple that has quiet breakfasts with the paper and drinks highballs before dinner, Londoners for whom the prospect of the swinging '60s would seem distinctly uncouth. But their placid lives, enclosed in a small, plush apartment heavy with tans and browns, show the strains of claustrophobia — too many moments shared, too much privacy sacrificed.

One senses a crackling tension in the air, but it's subtly depicted (the fastidious, almost matronly Tony, for instance, constantly tidies up after his glamorous but somewhat slovenly wife). They've been living with the tension for years, it seems, and grown so used to it that it's faded into the background like the sound of a nearby highway: omnipresent but easy to forget before, in an awkward pause, it roars back to life.

Weaving together short scenes of banality with an undertone of terror, Hitchcock has a fine sense of gently neglected domesticity. In Shadow of a Doubt it was the creaking back stairs or the car idling in the garage, in Rear Window the shy neighbor across the courtyard, in Vertigo an old friend's portraiture.

He infuses his films with a silent decrepitude, a foreboding, in which daily life carries with it some prelude to disaster. Boredom, in life as in film, is the cardinal sin. Here, it's the gulf between husband and wife, the massive emotional chasm in a tiny room. By restricting the action to the Wendices' apartment, he includes us in the claustrophobia, gasping for fresh air. There's a staleness in the clean surfaces and perfectly kept surroundings; it's the mausoleum of a failed marriage.

Why the marriage has failed is easier to pinpoint: Tony's an ex-tennis pro who's lost his skill, his income and his masculinity, relying on his wife's money for survival. His obsessive cleaning has an air of housewifery, pinning him to the home while she gallivants about in beautiful gowns with a younger, more attractive man, the novelist Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). In nearly every way, he's emasculated. And divorce, because of the money, isn't a possibility. So he plans to kill her.

This isn't giving too much away; the film's narrative is deceptively simple. The film is really a chamber drama, taking place, literally, in a single chamber - like a jail cell or an execution room, the death is as much emotional as physical. Take Kelly's wardrobe, the gentle decline from stunning crimson to crummy brown: it's as though she's being absorbed by the apartment, stultified by the entire ordeal. She's so spent she takes up the coarse fabric of her unhappy life and wraps herself in it, trying to make herself disappear.

Despite the complexity of the denouement - watching the scene with the key, one almost fears the possibility of a simple plot hole that would ruin the proceedings — the real story is all Margot, with Kelly striding across the frame as if it were her natural habitat. Her Margot isn't the innocent figurine she might be in less skilled hands: she's cunning and witty and sly, embarking on an affair she knows can lead only to trouble.

A Perfect Murder, director Andrew Davis' paltry 1998 remake of Hitchcock's classic, starring Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow, is cold and sleek, like a film nerd's science project. But it illuminates the brilliance of Hitchcock's version, the idea that murder (or marriage, for that matter), is less about planning than fortitude. It's about having the strength to see it through to the last, silly little detail, opening the door to breathe the fresh air outside rather than to lock oneself in.

The problem with Tony is his inability to see life as an unkempt apartment, strewn with loose ends: Margot, for him, is just another spot to be wiped away when she's an indelible, unpredictable mark.