"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.

Bringing Up Baby for Hepburn's Birthday

By Steve Evans

Bringing Up Baby (1938), our film du jour, sets the gold standard for goofy laughs sparked by effervescent leads – Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, born 109 years ago today.

The fiery Hepburn steals the show as a ditzy heiress, but more specifically portrays the kind of woman I’ve been attracted to all my life, which is to say witty, bright-eyed, fun-loving and half-crazy. Grant plays a perpetually perplexed paleontologist trying to recover a missing dinosaur bone (an "intercostal clavicle" if you must know) and instead gets caught up in misadventures with Miss Hepburn. Hijinks ensue and, yes, love can’t be far behind.

Director Howard Hawks didn’t invent the screwball comedy, but he damn-sure perfected it with this film. Peter Bogdanovich essentially remade the picture as What’s Up Doc? (1972), although Babs Streisand and Ryan O’Neal can scarcely compare to their predecessors.

Hepburn had already won her first Oscar when Bringing Up Baby was made and she’d go on to win three more. Her Academy Award-winning record still holds today. She married only once, in 1928, and slipped down to Mexico six years later to secure a quickie divorce. It’s well known that Spencer Tracy was the love of her life, though the alcoholic Tracy never divorced his wife, and he and Hepburn never lived together. For a legendary Hollywood love affair, it seems the romance was also tragic, as Hepburn described Tracy as “tortured” and she put her career on hold in the 1960s to care for him in the final five years of his life.

Fiercely independent and possessed of a wanderer’s spirit, Hepburn is widely credited as a proto-feminist before there was a word for such wonderful women. She also single-handedly popularized the wearing of pants by women in the 1930s.

Her work in Bringing Up Baby is nothing short of magical. This is unsurprising when we realize the script was written especially for her with dialog suited to her personality. Hepburn’s seemingly clueless character is such a pain in the ass it’s a testament to her charm that we love her, anyway, and root for Cary Grant to come to the same realization. Their destination may be inevitable, but the journey is absolutely hysterical. This is a great film; one of the finest comedies the cinema has given us. No babies were harmed in the making of this motion picture. Truth be told, the film features no babies in the traditional sense at all.

If life could be more like a movie, I would want to exist in this one.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2016 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.