Monthly Archives: March 2025

Mar 23 2025

1930 – Murder!

1930 – Murder!

A British mystery movie, directed by a young Alfred Hitchcock. It was written by him and his wife Alma Reville and Walter Mycroft. It stats Herbert Marshall as Sir John Menier, Norah Baring as Diana Baring and Edward Chapman as Ted Markham. It’s based on the 1928 novel Enter Sir John by Clemence Dane and Helen de Guerry Simpson. A watched it with ads for free on Plex.

Finding a movie for 1930 turned out to be difficult. I had already seen All Quiet on the Western Front and The Blue Angel, so those easy pickings were gone. I tried very hard to find Morocco, but couldn’t lest I shelled out 16 Euros for a DVD (nah!). I had no desire for yet another F.W. Murnau movie in City Girl about living on the farm in Minnesota. Sigh…

And then I saw the BKR video about Alfred Hitchcock’s Hair Obsession, which I really liked. But what I liked most, is the accompanying podcast No Noise podcast which was about Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife and a tremendous influence on him and especially his early movies when he was still in Britain. Highly recommend it, and this one is free for everybody, though supporting Izzy is always a good idea! In the podcast Dr. Josephine Botting, Curator at the BFI National Archive goes into the history how Alma started as a cutter (editor basically), meeting Hitchcock and then sort of becoming the person that would tidy up his films, mostly through writing. This went on for a long time right up until and including Rebecca, after which she focussed mostly on the children. So I got curious, how do British Hitchcock movies look like, how did this woman influence the weird genius that this man would become? So many successes and fortunes of men in the 20th century were heavily carried and influenced by their wives (often willingly in the shadows), I wanted to honor that.

The plot of “Murder!” is about an theater actress Diana Baring being accused of the murder of a fellow actress with a poker. In the jury there is Sir John (who happens to have hired Diana into his theater company – uh, conflict of interest?), who has doubts about Diana’s guilt, but is persuaded by the rest of the jury to convict. Later, haunted by his conscience, he goes on to investigate whether Diana was really guilty – playing detective with help of his stage manager Ted Markham.

This is my first talkie movie and ooooh boy, it is bad in that sense. It was supposedly first filmed as a silent film and later half talked over, half filmed again. And then there are scenes where nothing of this sort is done – it’s just… silent, no ambient sound, nothing. Similarly, the cuts are jarring, the film quality is horrendous at times. And don’t get me started on the editing, a 2 second close up on a clock, then 2 seconds on some meal, then the scene starts. One notices how filmmakers still had to learn to not use the cue cards to narrate a story. Sometimes it’s that janky shots quickly one to the other, sometimes a huge exposition dump. Add in to that the unevenness of the sound editing; there’s a radio programme at full blast when Sir John is talking to his butler about his motives for investigating this murder, or a baby screaming at full volume when he immerses himself into the lives of the actors.

But worst of all, is that it drags. Pity, because there are some real hidden gems in there, like the shadow play or a trapezium scene that is at the core of suspense. Or even some forced things, which are typical Hitchcock style over story, but which work so well — like the improbable, but very funny interrogation scene during a theater play. It could’ve been so great, had it had a competent editor. And so this week I was left disappointed, both that greats do really need to grow into greatness sometimes, but also that even if there was any of Alma’s influence in this movie, it sadly probably wasn’t very good. Still, I am glad I saw this movie, yet another style from the Russian, German, American and French that I have reviewed so far and one that I recognize in British films even many years later.

Mar 9 2025

1929 – Pandora’s Box

1929 – Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box)

A classic Weimar era silent movie, directed by G.W Pabst. It stars Louise Brooks in its titular role as Lulu , Fritz Kortner as Dr. Schön and Francis Lederer as Alwa Schön. It is based on Frank Wedekin’s plays “Erdgeist” (1895) and the follow-up “Die Büchse der Pandora” (1904). The film explores the tragic that the natural seductiveness of Lulu brings to herself and everybody to succumbs to her allures. I saw it at filmfriend, the German library service for free (you have to enter your local library card).

Last Sunday Anora won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 2024. Well deserved, in my opinion, though I haven’t seen many of the other movies that were favored to win. What I liked was the realistic depiction of the crashing down of the “fairy tale”. Ani is firmly grounded in reality, but even then for just a second the lure of the possibility to obtaining respectability is so great… maybe, just maybe. It was all masterfully done by Mickey Madison, who wholeheartedly deserved that Oscar – the constant battle in her head of “am I gonna get mine?” and “it’s gonna work out, Vanya loves me!” and in the end “that dipshit… really hurt me”. Yes, sex workers know how society sees them, but it still hurts to be shown that with such contempt.

Also in this movie Lulu – a masterful Louise Brooks – is constantly reminded that all she is ever good for, is to seduce. Men and women alike, by the way, the movie has a whole lesbian subplot. The movie starts with a visit by her former pimp Schigolch (sorry, later it gets revealed that in may be her dad, but the way he acts throughout the movie, I’m going with pimp). She doesn’t need him anymore, she already has found her sponsor, ahem boyfriend Dr. Schön, an older man and a rich publisher. But Dr. Schön actually wants to shed her, gain some respectability, marry the daughter of the minister of the interior. And that constant push and pull between the entrancement that Lulu has on other people and the way that she brings them sorrow is the main plot of the movie. It is a tragedy throughout the movie. Nobody that crosses paths with Lulu is made whole, many end up dead or living in complete poverty. But nobody is completely innocent either, they act out of self-interest going over dead bodies to get money, love or escape the police.

The story is quite convoluted, the settings very varied – a theater production company, a wedding party, a courtroom, a confined train escaping the law, a gambling ship, a squalid room under the roof in London. It wouldn’t have worked without its main protagonist, who wholeheartedly encapsulates the myth of Greek mythology Pandora’s Box: opening the box brings misfortune, but the box also holds hope! Is the hope of love that Lulu offers along with evils that her status and her non-moralistic candor bring, a benefit or a curse? How ironic then that the movie star herself ended up in poverty, noting that “the only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me.”

In modern culture, the box has become “a can of worms” or a “slippery slope”. It’s often a warning against unbridled optimism, that while the hope that comes with the act is understandable, there is often a hidden evil or tragedy when you go in blind. This week’s Pandora’s Box for me has been AI in science. I heard two presentations on it, one was even on the ethics of the use of AI in science, yet at the end there were a lot of shrugs and “well, if we’re careful…”. Working on a white paper this week, I was amazed that a woman spoke up and declared that if even a sentence of the paper was written with an LLM, we should take her name off the paper. I am distancing myself from that box even more after this week, some of the things may bring hope, but its allure may damn me into a sequence of evils and tragedies I’d rather not go through.