Films featuring
Bruce Dern

The Haunting

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★★★★★[/types]]

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Rule #1 in telling a good ghost story: the less you show of the ghost, the better. Robert Wise understood that in 1963, Jan de Bont ignores it in 1999.

For the first half of this new adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, the story follows the book and the original movie with reasonable fidelity, and thus for the first hour, The Haunting is reasonably effective and spooky. The ghostly manifestations are done with sound and suggestion, not ham-handed visuals. After that, however, the special effects take over and the film loses all narrative cohesion.

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Family Plot

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★★★★★[/types]]

The last Alfred Hitchcock film, 50 years after the first, showed that the director had not lost his macabre sense of humor. Family Plot may lack the taut, intricate story line of his more famous works but it succeeds well for what it attempts to be, a light comedy-thriller. It’s a fun, unassuming film, especially compared to the R-rated Frenzy and the cold-war machinations of Torn Curtain and Topaz.

My original memories of this film, from viewing it perhaps 20 years ago, told me that this film was styleless, that Hitchcock’s setbound directorial style gave it the ambiance of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week. I was wrong, perhaps due to the fact that my previous experience was with a VHS copy of the film, projected on a large screen in a college lecture hall. That sort of presentation is never going to do a film justice.

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Marnie

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★★★★★[/types]]

Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage.” With Alfred Hitchcock, you might rephrase that to “Most of the world is a soundstage.” The director had a rather agoraphobic approach to filmmaking, preferring the controlled environment of the set whenever possible. However, in a time of films like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and even the new James Bond movies, when audiences were accustomed to seeing actors performing against the backdrop of real, exotic locales, the seams of Hitchcock’s stage-bound style were beginning to show. Never was this more apparent then in his 1964 film Marnie, especially with the obvious painted backdrop behind the street where Bernice Edgars lives.

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