"No, I did not borrow Laura's Mercedes"

By Steve Evans

Alfred Hitchcock’s immortal classic North by Northwest premiered 59 years ago today. I first saw the picture on television in the ancient pre-Internet year of 1982 and was instantly smitten. Time has done nothing to diminish my love for this film, still my favorite out of some 15,000 movies I’ve seen in a lifelong affair with the cinema. North by Northwest is close to a perfect film. It delivers everything I want in a movie and does it with class. It’s thrilling and comical and elegant, delightfully sophisticated and often darkly cynical, with some of the best writing you’ll ever encounter in a film. The set pieces build in excitement and preposterousness in equal measure, but I never care because I get swept up in the pure joy of it all with every viewing. The early James Bond films owe a stylistic debt to this picture, though it is far better than any of them.

Cary Grant taught me how a gentleman should dress, how to light a lady’s cigarette, mix a proper Gibson cocktail, deliver droll & smartass remarks, run from biplanes and scramble across the actual faces of national monuments while saving the love of your life in a literal cliffhanger ending. The final shot of Cary and Eva Marie Saint embracing, with a smash-cut to their train roaring into a tunnel, is an amusing bit of impudence to conclude a film that is so damn good I usually want to spin it again from the beginning, right then and there, soon as I finish clapping.

I wrote a 30-page paper about the film in graduate school. I’ve owned two videotape copies, a DVD and a Blu-ray. A digital copy of the complete film exists on my phone, tablet and laptop. I’ve visited many of the locations where it was filmed. I have a photo of Eva with her autograph tucked away in the case of my DVD copy.

The common question to this sort of blathering enthusiasm is “What the hell is wrong with you, Steve?” There’s really no satisfactory answer except that I love the movies, especially this one. The very best films take us on an exhilarating ride through experiences many people can only dream of. We fly in the darkness, cheer our heroes, fear for their lives, exalt in the bewitching power of story and eventually come cruising down, down, down, rolling across the runway, returning at last to the seats we never left. And that’s enough.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Can't Cure Insomnia With Psychomania

By Steve Evans

Stayed up way too late last night laffing at the great guilty pleasure that is Psychomania (1973). This movie is a riot -- an occult, horror-thriller biker flick starring Malcolm McDowell lookalike Nicky Henson in a role not dissimilar to McDowell’s in A Clockwork Orange, made two years earlier. I saw Psychomania decades ago on late-night teevee and was delighted to catch it again. The film only improves with age. Filmed at Shepperton, it has a Hammer Studios vibe, solid stunts and not-bad special effects.

Briefly, Henson and his rude biker gang commit suicide in novel ways, then use black magic to come roaring back to life on their motorcycles, terrorizing the English countryside as the living dead. Featuring an amazing wacka-wacka guitar soundtrack by a band called Frog. You can’t make up this stuff; I dare you even to try.

The great British character actor George Sanders (who co-starred in two Academy Award Best Picture winners, Rebecca and All About Eve, and won an Oscar himself for the latter) was nearing the end of his career when he appeared in this film. Sanders committed suicide shortly after Psychomania was made. Sadly, he did not come roaring back on a motorcycle.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.