Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967)

We haven’t shown a lot of suspense thrillers during the last five years of Film Club screenings. Part of the reason is that Film Club exists to present great movies you haven’t had the opportunity to see previously. But people tend to be skeptical or reticent or just plain foot-draggy about committing to something they’re unfamiliar with. This explains why Hollywood spends so much money on promotion (sometimes a third of the entire production budget); they want to acquaint you with the product so you won’t be intimidated by it even if that means spending millions on product tie-ins at McDonald’s. Hey, if you’ve played with the toy, the movie must be great.

Film Club doesn’t have millions of dollars. We barely get Blue Sheet announcements done on time. The consequence of that is that we end up asking you to come to see movies on faith rather than a (false) sense that you know what you’re going to be seeing. And often you don’t (although if you’re reading this, you did – thank you.) We’ve learned that some genres are easier sells than others – romance, action, animation, anything with Johnny Depp. Others are more difficult, and one of those is the suspense thriller.

When we elect to show a suspense thriller that’s older, two issues pop up. First, there’s the unfamiliarity with an “older” film. If you’ll allow us a soap box moment, let us just say that it’s sad how controlled Americans are by PR, advertising, and the productization of important things like art, politics, and even religion. Everything is packaged for us. Open the New York Times Book Review and 15 books will be reviewed, the same 15 books you’ll find reviewed in other literary journals, the same 15 books you’ll see ads for in literary media. Some of those books are very good, but 25 years ago some of the books reviewed and celebrated during any given week were also good, but have been forgotten. Why? Not because they turned out later not to be good, but because the marketing machine has moved on. Old doesn’t sell; new sells. And now you buy Twilight and Jim Butcher novels instead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice novels. Those are old. No one is talking about them. And even if you did pick the old ones they might not feel the same as the newer ones.

That’s the second problem with the suspense thriller genre, the genre itself has evolved and when we look back we don’t see stories told in a familiar (there’s that word again) way, the way we’re used to. Watch Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) some time. See if you don’t laugh when Bela Lugosi slinks out of the shadows and raises his hands up, claw-like, like he’s about to play an awesome chord on an invisible piano. You can almost hear a million parodies getting ready to say “bluh, buh-luh, buh-luh; I vant to drink your bluhd!” Were people really scared by that in 1931? They certainly aren’t now.

Now we want realism. And we want blood (just like Dracula). And we want dismemberment. It shocks us to think that in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the film that started the modern slasher genre, the hockey-masked Michael Myers terrorizes and murders all those high school kids, and there isn’t a drop of blood in the movie. Carpenter was going for psychological horror.

The same is true of Henri-Georges Cluzot’s Diabolique (1955), a terrific French film about a boarding school head-mistress who murders her adulterous husband and hides his body in the murky school swimming pool, only to find it missing when the pool is drained the following spring. Psychological horror.

And the same is true of Wait Until Dark (1967), tonight’s film about a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) terrorized by three thugs who think a doll stuffed with heroin is hidden in her apartment. Although it’s directed by Terrence Young (who previously directed three of the first four James Bond films), this is Hitchcockian suspense. Does that genre still thrill? Are we still fitted with the buttons it pushes?

In the week leading up to this screening, every adult who noted that we’re showing Wait Until Dark has stopped to comment on what a great film it is, especially one scene in particular. The students we’ve chatted with, who don’t know it, are skeptical. Maybe they’re a little afraid. Because, really, the unknown is often scary. We’re more comfortable with the familiar. Maybe we should take more risks. After all, it’s only a movie.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941)

Released in 1941, Citizen Kane has a reputation as the best movie of all time. It follows the life of a man by the name of Charles Foster Kane beginning with his death, then flashing back, in a series of newsreels and interviews, to the earlier events of his life. Born in poverty Kane climbs both the economic and social ladder only to reach the top lonely and sad. The story is loosely based on the lives of William Randolph Hearst and the director of the movie, Orson Welles. Hearst was not pleased with the film. In fact, Hearst did not allow the mention of the movie in any of his papers, and he offered $800,000 for the destruction of the film and the negative. Some say that he was not dismayed by his portrayal as much as the portrayal of Marion Davies, an actress with whom Hearst had an affair and whose career he tried to promote, widely seen as represented by the character Susan Alexander in the film.

The movie gained its reputation as the best movie ever for its intense psychological thrill ride. People just enjoy watching a man as his life falls apart around him. Citizen Kane sits at the top of respected movie charts such as the American Film Institute and the British Film Institute. It got positive reviews when it debuted although it had a relatively low turn out at the box office. It was not until the 1950s that Citizen Kane came back into the spotlight.

The other reason Citizen Kane tends to appear at the top of “best” film lists, is because of Orson Welles who directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane at the age of 26. (Some of his other works are The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, Macbeth, Othello, Touch of Evil, and Chimes at Midnight.) In retrospect, Welles is thought of as something of a genius, mostly for both for his visionary filmmaking techniques and for his writing or adaptation of scripts. Citizen Kane won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1941. However, his movies failed to earn money at the box office, and as a result the studios did not respect his artistic vision. They cut large parts from his films, which angered Welles, and he eventually left Hollywood. It was not until after his death in 1985 that he and his films were really recognized.

Not everyone thinks Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time. Ray Carney, a well know film theorist, believes that the film lacks emotional depth and is full of empty metaphors, calling it “an all-American triumph of style over substance... indistinguishable from the opera production within it: attempting to conceal the banality of its performances by wrapping them in a thousand layers of acoustic and visual processing” (Wikipedia).

Perhaps it is a testament to a works innovation when one can find extreme disagreement of opinion. Is Citizen Kane as good as some critics argue? Is it really saddled by banal performances, on a par with the likes of Babes on Broadway or Men of Boys Town (oops, did we just pick two films with Mickey Rooney?), also released in 1941? Really, only you can decide whether the film is a masterpiece or a complete failure. You can’t argue with authority if you haven’t seen it, which is why the SPA Film Club is proud to show Citizen Kane.

Alec Nordin
SPA Film Club