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Joe Vitus
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:12 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Thanks, Pam!

Pandora's Box
unquestionably belongs on my top-ten list, but I had forgotten all about it.

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ehle64
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:38 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 7149 Location: NYC; US&A
Where's Pam?

lady_w -- I think it's Different From The Others. I have it at home but haven't watched it, yet.

Fox Movie Classics shows their catalogue of films, mostly in LBX and always commercial-free.

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Marilyn
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:48 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 8210 Location: Skokie (not a bad movie, btw)
I think he meant Trish.

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lady wakasa
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 4:04 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 5911 Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
ehle64 wrote:
Where's Pam?

lady_w -- I think it's Different From The Others. I have it at home but haven't watched it, yet.


Tu es right, Different From the Others.
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Joe Vitus
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 4:32 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Yes, I meant Trish. What made me type Pam?

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Marilyn
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 4:49 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 8210 Location: Skokie (not a bad movie, btw)
Your food wasn't sticking?

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Joe Vitus
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2005 8:25 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
You're jokes are scaring me lately. And Halloween is over.

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Marilyn
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 2:08 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 8210 Location: Skokie (not a bad movie, btw)
Be careful what you wish for. I was literally chomping at the bit to see The Lodger. Oh my, I guess my expectations were too high. The film, while interesting in some respects (seeing a whole lotta Ivor Novello, the beginnings of Hitchcock's blonde obsession, a precursor to the Psycho shower scene), was a lot more transparent and overwrought that I was expecting. Daisy's boyfriend, especially, made Al Pacino's scenery chewing look like British high tea. The film did keep me guessing about whether the lodger was the killer or not, and had an interesting climax. But it also showed the Hitchcock flaw of not knowing when to end a picture. It dragged its tail along for a goodly time after the exciting mob scene, and for no apparent reason.

The film won enormous praise in its time. It's still winning that kind of praise. It's not as good as they say.

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censored-03
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 2:48 am Reply with quote
Joined: 24 May 2004 Posts: 3058 Location: Gotham, Big Apple, The Naked City
Most people are familiar with the The Lodger from the 40's w/ Laird Creager (sp), but there is another one from the 1930's I've seen with Ivor Novello once again taking the role of the "possible" ripper. You think Hitchcock's version sux ? Yow, Novello should have stopped with silents. This version is just plain awful.

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tirebiter
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 3:36 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4011 Location: not far away
The novel, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, is pretty good. Fun to read after you've seen what Hitchcock did with it.

Per the assigned viewing for this week, I remember the thrill of seeing The Great Train Robbery a million years ago, knowing its historical significance. The camera... MOVES! Shock and astonishment!
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tirebiter
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 3:42 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4011 Location: not far away
(nota bene: the novel The Lodger is available in its entirety online at www.gutenberg.org)
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Joe Vitus
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 7:54 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Marilyn,

Would you explain the scene that is a precurser to Psycho? Nice review, by the way.

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Marilyn
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 9:35 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 8210 Location: Skokie (not a bad movie, btw)
There is a scene in which Daisy prepares a bath. We watch her start to disrobe, turn on the water, with the steam obscuring her as she removes all her clothes. We watch the lodger agitate in his room. Daisy is happily washing her arms. Two shots of her feet and the bathtub drain are intercut with the lodger's nervous movements, as he finally decides to move toward the bathroom and try the door knob.

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Marilyn
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 11:10 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 8210 Location: Skokie (not a bad movie, btw)
This is really interesting, from a rather creative appraisal of Hitchcock in Senses of Cinema [CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE LODGER]:

A key passage [of the novel of The Lodger] speculates how the serial killer known as The Avenger “comprises in his own person the peculiarities of Jekyll and Hyde”. In the film a remarkable flashback evidently based on this passage purports to clear the Lodger of killing his virginal sister at her coming-out ball but actually shows that he was best situated to kill her. In other words, this likely “lying flashback” precedes the one in Stage Fright by a quarter of a century. If it has gone relatively unnoticed, that's because Hitchcock, instructed by his producers that Novello mustn't be a murderer, obligingly added a giant ambiguity, or red herring, late in the film. And it seems that few audiences and critics could credit the 1920s Hitchcock with the aplomb, à la Wilde, to create a likeable if neurotic young man who is actually a mad killer! Distracted by a claim of the film's police to have caught the real killer – rather than an imitator, of which Jack the Ripper had several – they have ended up dutifully assuming the Lodger's innocence.

Well, Hitchcock effectively re-made The Lodger for American audiences as Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Again the police were shown to be confused, concluding that a suspect who was killed when he ran from them into an aeroplane propellor must have been the Merry Widow Murderer. But audiences this time weren't left in doubt: the killer was actually the dandyish character called Uncle Charlie, smoothly played by Joseph Cotten!

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lady wakasa
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 11:22 am Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 5911 Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
Marilyn wrote:
The film won enormous praise in its time. It's still winning that kind of praise. It's not as good as they say.


I don't think it's so much that The Lodger is a good film (there are better Hitchcock silents) as it's good a lot of easily identifiably Hitchcock elements in it. At the time, they were original and easy to single out; today, which all the subsequent Hitchcock work, they form a clear roadmap to where Hitchcock would later go.

My bit of sacrilege: I don't think Chinatown is all that great for the same reason - I saw it relatively recently, and so many movies have done the same thing since that it's not "original" anymore.

Blackmail, his eleventh film, is better than The Lodger, his fifth (I'm taking imdb with a grain of salt, here) - and the Hitchcock appearance in that is funnier, to boot.
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